So 20 years ago, I created a very detailed fantasy campaign setting as my senior honors project in college. I got away with that because I did a lot of research into medieval agriculture and demographics and then worked out the impact of magic on those numbers, so that I know how many people are in the world, how long people would live, how many cities the world could reasonably support, and so on.
With all this done, there's no way of getting around the fact that some people in this world will eventually accumulate whole lot of character points. About 1 in 250 people will eventually be able to accumulate 250 CP. Sure, a lot of them have spent a lot of points on Followers and Bases, but there are still a considerable number of VERY high-powered people around. For example, the home city of the campaign (population 40,000) has half a dozen people with 500+ points. At that level, opponents are overwhelming no matter how you approach them--for example, my 600-point mob boss is not primarily combat-oriented, but he could still wipe the floor with my entire party even if they caught him without any of his bodyguards or henchmen around. I'm curious if anyone else has run a game where the world is filled with potential opponents that are way beyond the capacity of the party to deal with, and what that looked like.