Just thought that on a server not involving all the races that it might be possible to try something. Suppose we took one of the unplayed races shiplist and inserted minor powers in it (or perhaps more than 1 unplayed race) we set it to be hostile to both sides, or in the case 2 races were used it might only be hostile to 1 side with another race hostile to the other.
Now add no mandatories in neutral space and you have a map where certain "neutral" areas could require mandatory missions and others not. Do you bull your way through a hostile unaligned local power or do you move around them? Certain map areas could thus be made more friendly to one side while other areas to the other, as the Alliance can move though the biased neutral power on one side of the map and the Coalition has the same situation on the other side.
Like I said this is just a brainstorm that occured to me about 2 minutes ago and was wondering what others thought of it.