Well, a couple things.

First, just knowing it’s possible actually helped a lot! That moderated our chase to empty out the victory point cards, and believe it or not that had a major impact. So more of the game became about territory rather than chasing VP tokens. That was surprisingly important.

Second, there’s an Improvement card called Reserve Army that I hadn’t seen before. That had a major impact on play. Not that that comes up every time of course. But between knowing about the endgame and the presence of that card, we had it wrapped up with a clear winner in under 90 minutes.