Abstract mechanic idea for resolving conflicts.

I need a fast determinist mechanic, that requires few components, that would allow me to resolve influence/intimidation conflicts.

I had an abstract idea which I am not sure that would fit with the theme or that would have an interesting strategy so I'll explain it briefly and as what you think.

The mechanic use cubes, to visualize it, you should use a group of cubes. I'll represent cube colors with letters: R, G, B and Y.

The cubes are placed in a line. At the beginning of the game it could start like this

RGBY

The players can pay resources to add cubes at the beginning or at the end of the line which could give something like this if a red and blue cube is added at the beginning or the end of the line:

RRGBYB

Now in order to use these cubes, you need to have more cubes than an adjacent color. For example, at the beginning of the line, there is 2 red and 1 green cube. Since red has more cube, he can sacrifice red cube up to the number of green cube to destroy the green cube. The chain will result like this:

RBYB

When a player does this, he is allowed to conquer automatically a city without casualties. So in this case the red player would be able to conquer a green city.

Now this can get nasty, because you can do chained attack. If we take the result above, a blue player could add a second cube so that it becomes

RBYBB

He kill the yellow cube which becomes

RBB

And then kill the red cub which becomes

B

There is also other situation where some cubes are not reachable. For example

RBBYGRBY

Here the green cube can hardly be destroyed because it is protected from both side and it will take time before players can dig in.

Now I was wondering:

Is there strategy in a mechanic like this?

Should players be allowed to feed the line from both sides, or only from 1 side or be able to feed directly in the line.

Would there be interest to only add 1 cube if you know it could get eaten easily. There is this situation where you can be adjacent on the line but not on the map.

What about different amount of players? A 5 player game will have much more cubes and it would be much harder to destroy cubes than in a 3 player game. So it might not be balanced with the amount of players.

Generally, I want player to buy cube to protect them selves, but having no cube in the line is a better protection. Unless I add a rule where no cube would mean free conquest. So I am not sure if spending more on cubes is actually a good thing.

Maybe there could be a different strategy between spreading your cubes in different groups or grouping them all together. But that would only be possible if I allow sliding in cubes between cubes.

Thank you for any comments.