Nanogrid: Build Hubs?

I'm pretty zonked, so this will be more of a brain dump for me to expound upon later.

Current issues:
1. Too easy for a player to call themselves off to the point of no one being able to ever get to them.

2. I am not happy with the current attack system. It is ineligant and crude, but I don't have anything better so i'll stick with it for now. It is definitely on the short list of needing some serious brain storming. I have even pondered bringing in dice roll based attacks, but i'm not sure if i want that much randomness in THIS game.

3. Feels too one dimensional to me. I don't really like the end condition and how the last couple turns seem to play out in a slow bleeding way until one person barely out produces everyone else. I feel like the game is currently a good foundation that needs something built on top of it.

What i've done to work on these issues tonight:

1. New winning condition idea formulated: First player to construct three Nano-hubs wins. A Hub is instantly created when a player has a die of their color in all three dice locations on a single hex tile. They then pull a glass bead from their player sheet and place it on the center of the tile.

2. These glass beads will restrict how deep a player can go into their tech paths. So by placing them on the board it will allow a player to access the higher value skill upgrades due to that location bieng freed up.

3. Maybe when an opponent breaks one of these sets of three dice, the hub is de activated and returns to the corresponding players sheet? I want to make this very lucrative to the attacker...maybe they get a full second turn if they pull this off?

4. Pulled out 5 of the 9 patterns due to them bieng problamatic to the new end game solution. Built 5 new ones that are slightly more conducive to making connections, yet made sure that no tile has all three locations actually connected. Hopefully this will make walling off somewhat harder, playtesting will hopefully tell me more.

None of these have been tested at all yet, hopefully will be soon.