This is how I see solution to this kind problem:
- something monitors player's simulation speed
- if it drops below 0.9 for more than 5 seconds(we allow short lags) player gets a message across his screen:
"Warning! It seems your PC is running slow and you can'y play this game"
with a countdown of 60 seconds, game pause should pause counter too
- if problem was not solved for this time he get automatically resigns from this game
- his units are being transferred to the most exp. player, nobody lags anymore, all are happy, except the lagger(still better than making 10 players suffer).
As a result we get:
- fair problem solution, we punish laggers and help players with good PCs, meanwhile we give laggers time to fix their PC and warn them about the problem
- we save player's time from doing unnecessary !votekick
- game runs much smoother and new players won't be crying "wtf is going on, I have top PC and this game reminds me about chess, I'm leaving away"