Whenever I want to fight an enemy, I spend way more time trying to find a reasonable opponent than actually spent fighting. If I find an opponent that isn't 1k+ they are on cool down, because all the high skill lions have already picked out all the low targets. I think the neighbors that surround your territory should be within -/+ 100 skill of your lion, as well as -/+ 2 levels. This will make it less aggravating to try and combat, as well as more challenging for higher level/skill lions instead of being surrounded by low level/skill lions.

So if I were to have an example using my king, all the surroundings territories would be between levels 7-11, and skills 211-411. I think that there would be plenty of options to choose from. I think the main issue would be the higher levels and skills, but already there is a cap on the levels you can attack, and I'm sure the leaderboards level 128 lion already has trouble finding opponents.

Perhaps once you hit level 20, the skill difference becomes something like -/+ 1000 difference?

A scaling level/skill difference might help all lower and higher level/skill lions find appropriate opponents.