I need some Euro history

I recently did a complete overhaul on City of Lycans. It is now a lot more Euro than it was before. Ultimately this is for the best since I cut play time in half and the game is much simpler to understand now.

But that isn't what this is about. In my game, when you want to attack another player, you commit a number of your minions, and the defender does the same. I want these minions to be unavailable for the rest of the round. That means someone else could come along and attack you while your defenses are down. Now, I want to encourage people to keep minions back for defensive purposes, even if it's just 1 per player. I want to do this by saying that if you get attacked and you have no minions left for defense, you lose a point while the attacker gains what he would have gained for beating you, like normal.

But even though I have some AT in this game, it's a Euro at heart. I fear that taking points away would make Euro-lovers scream and cry.

Long story short... is there precedence for a Euro to punish players in this manner, and if so, how was it received by the community at large?

In Ra if you don't buy any Civilization tiles you lose -5 points and if you have the fewest Pharoah tiles you lose -2 points.

In TIGRIS & EUPHRATES, they have to commit tiles for offense/defense, and while they get refreshed, there is no assurance they get back the tiles they tossed in support. So, they might have had a battle that committed them heavily in blue, say, and won, but it's very likely they are pretty wiped out of blue tiles for any follow-up fights.

You lose points for not feeding in many games (such as Stone Age). Similar idea.

CharlesT's comment is most salient here - it's about reserving "workers" and in your game, it's about reserving "workers" as well. In Stone Age, it's mitigated because you can trade wood for sheep, so to speak, in order to avoid the penalty, but if you overextend egregiously and can't feed your people, you lose 10 points. Most of my games score around 200, so it's 2.5% of the total estimated final score per infraction.

Agricola will ding you points if you have to resort to begging. I know that there are viable ways to win in Stone Age with a starvation strategy, but I don't know if there's a similar one in Agricola.

For the record, you're focus grouping at Fortress Ameritrash. Grounds for a beat-down.

Don't worry about history. There's plenty of games where you go back points, make your game work as it wants to and your audience will find you.

S.

The purpose of the Euro design semi-hemi-principle of avoiding negative points is so that the game always moves towards an ending, if the victory conditions are that you cross a VP threshold. Think of Settlers, and think of how some complain that breaking that rule in Cities & Knights makes for a much longer game.

If the ending is not a VP threshold but a VP count-'em-up, then negative VPs are fine. Also, in your case, the total gained VPs is always increasing, because when a player loses a VP, someone else is gaining multiple VP, so even with a threshold end condition you're still moving toward the ending.