Gold

In the last few minutes, it is free

Each world publishes its own price table for finishing an order early, and on every world we have measured the smallest band — an order with under five minutes left — is priced at nothing. Not reduced. Nothing.

By hand that is unclaimable: you would have to watch the last five minutes of every build, every recruit and every research, all day. A bot already awake for the queue can take all of them, and Grepobot schedules its next look for the exact second the window opens. It reads your world's table rather than assuming ours, and for a long time this sat behind an opt-in nobody had set, so it never fired once.

More time left costs more

The price is the cheapest band that still covers the wait, which is the opposite of the intuition that a nearly-finished order is the expensive one. An order past the largest band costs the maximum rather than being unbuyable.

Paid finishes are decisions, and they are off

Spending real gold is scored against gold as the scarce resource, so it competes with everything else gold could buy rather than firing on a threshold. It is also off unless you turn it on: gold is a hard constraint rather than a heavy penalty, because a penalty is something a large enough payoff eventually buys through.