Conditions for a military defeat?

Hello,

I'm looking for clarification on what is considered a militaristic defeat? Multiple times now, my friends and I have been gplaying multiplayer and have had inconsistencies with this. For instance, one time we were playing against each other, and I lost all my planets and everything except for a non-colonizing capital ship, and I had not been defeated yet (I still had control of the capital ship). In this same game however, one of my friends had been defeated while still having control of two planets at the time. I can't remember more specifics because this game took place a while ago.

But today, we just finished a game 4v4 against AI. The first AI, will killed everything visible (planets and troops) except for a couple of envoys, and he wasn't defeated. I can't be sure that he didn't have any units elsewhere, but he was not moving them around if he did (never saw them phase jumping) and he definitely didn't have any planets. Later, when we were killing the second AI, we again wiped out all of his planets, but he was still not defeated. Then, we killed his titan and him and the first AI were both defeated at the exact same time. What??? The third AI was defeated while still having 4 planets including his capital, but this occured right after we killed a starbase with auxillary government. (I went and checked with scouts and confirmed he still owned these other planets however). And then for the forth AI, we took 2 of his planets and suddenly got military victory.

This all just seems so inconsistent from my point of view, and was hoping someone could explain it to me. There is probably (hopefully) a simple explanation for all this and I'm misreading things due to coincidental timing.

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GoaFan77

Join Date 10/2008

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When Sins was first released, the military defeat was quite simple. If you don't control any planets you lose.

Over the many expansions, other things were added. First, the AI was given the ability to surrender when it is losing. Just how it decides when to surrender is not very clear; sometimes you'll still have to conquer all their planets and sometimes you'll just start winning when it decides to give up. But it does happen, so if an AI loses with no other victory conditions active and still has planets, this is probably what happened.

The other major change was with Rebellion, which I suspect occurred in at least one of your games. One of the factions, Vasari Loyalists, focuses on semi-nomadic gameplay and is designed to be able to function without controlling planets if need be. As such, they have access to a tech that means you must destroy their titan, capitalships, and starbases before they'll be killed by a military defeat.

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Alright, thank you, I was not aware that the AI were able to surrender, so that may be the cause of most of the confusion.

The losing while still having planets was more of a surprise than the not losing after losing all planets, because I'm familiar with the tech that keeps players alive with their titans and such.

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