We ended up settling on having players lose 20% of their Neptunium whenever they lose control of a mine. That means they’re far from out of the race, but it’s a temporary knock down that might be enough to allow someone else to reach the goal first. That introduced a bit more of the brawl into a race game and keeps things more tense and interesting until the very end.
Personally, I don't feel like this goal has totally been fully met. I actually feel like the 20% penalty has the opposite effect of encouraging turtling and penalizing aggressive actions.
Why? Because the loss also applies to flip-flopping/fighting over a mine and can absolutely devastate someone's Np total if they end up in a back-and-forth skirmish over a mine.
There is very little reason to take the risk of trying to take someone else's mine later in the game if it means there is a chance you will lose 20% of your own total in the process. Good example from the last game I played is that I was trying to close out the game (and ended up winning) but someone had timed a counter-attack I was making to acquire a 4th mine before I could respond. I easily had the ability to get it back again, but in the mean time I would have taken the 20% hit. This lead to me just gifting my entire attack force to him in order to avoid the swapping of ownership. It was worth it for me to gift him 60-odd guys rather than set my progress back 2 days.
Even if I was in second place, trying to take another contender's mine at the last second might set them back, but it also has just as much likelihood of setting me back a few hours later before I can gain any real advantage from it. The only real hope in that scenario is to talk someone who has little to lose into making some major attack on my enemy, since they don't care if they end up losing 20% of their Np total from being unable to defend a mine in enemy territory.
In the future, I will probably always end up turtling late-game because there is simply no reason to risk the setback. I don't feel like this meets the stated goal of making things tense and interesting. While it is true that the threat of loss from a major attack makes the ending a little tense, if all contenders are doing is turtling and hoping a non-contender makes some aggressive move, the final few days aren't actually very interesting for the contending players themselves.
I wonder if simply pausing Np production would be enough of a penalty to allow catch-up without running the risk of massive loss on the order of days. You can already try to whittle away their outpost count to lower their production, and I really feel the 20% penalty has some major negative effects on taking players out of the game if they end up in the wrong situation.
