I don't understand how defeat works

I lost for seemingly no reason at all.

I was playing my first single player game in GalCiv3, I had four A.I. allies and eleven A.I. enemies. by turn 285 I'd spent over 16 hours on the game, and I had first place in influence, population, research, construction, and number of colonies as well as fourth place in military power. I noticed something strange that would occasionally happen where a popup would say "Such and such civilization has been defeated" and then the next turn all of their colonies, ships, and starbases would belong to another civilization. I couldn't figure out what was going on. I tried attacking the capital planet of an enemy civilization, but all that happened was I got that planet and another planet became their capital, so that' not how defeat works. Then I tried just building a bunch of culture starbases all around an enemy, but I annexed two planets and then nothing else happened, so that's not how defeat works. Then, very suddenly, the Slyne were defeated by my allies and the next turn, a cutscene played showing planets being destroyed and I was informed that I was defeated. I could not continue to play, and the deta and graphs the game gave me didn't inform me of what the hell happened.

So my question is simple: How does defeat work in GalCiv3?

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The victory conditions available to you are also available to your opponents. If any of them achieve victory before you do, you lose.

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Interesting... But that still doesn't explain how the A.I. civilizations or I lost. Their entire populations vanished in a single turn and were replaced by those of my allies. Plus,when the Slyne fell, there was only one other civilization remaining that wasn't part of my alliance, and they held the most military power and nothing else.

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When civs get to the end of their line, they often surrender and gift their remaining assets to one of their buddies (which can sometimes even be you). You can disable surrenders in the options menu if that bothers you.

the game is very opaque about why you lossed. This is a known issue.

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aerez4546

Join Date 05/2007

+54

Yeah it would be nice if the game told you WHO won the game and what kind of victory they achieved. But if it helps you feel a little better I can give you some possible scenarios as to how you lost, based upon the information you have provided.

1) One of your allies achieved and Alliance Victory. You said that there was one faction left that you were not allied with. It is possible that one of your allies had allied with all the other factions plus that ONE guy that was not allied with you.

2) One of the factions achieved an Ascension Victory. This one can be sneaky because there is no easy to see ranking showing who has the most Ascension points on all the the normal power ranking menus. There is a menu from the govern screen where you can see a graph showing how many Ascension points each faction has, but it is kind of a hidden away chart many people probably haven't noticed.

3) One of the factions achieved a Research Victory. I believe your "research score" ranking is determined by your total number of research points generated. It is very possible that you can research many more techs than any other race, but if somebody makes a bee line straight down the research victory tech lines (ignoring other "fluff" techs) they can beat you to a Research Victory.

4) Influence Victory. When factions start surrendering, it can make all of the stats for the absorbing faction start to skyrocket. If all those factions you saw surrendering were being absorbed mostly by one other faction, then that absorbing factions influence, research, and all other "measurable" stats would start going up rapidly.

5) Turn limit victory. If you left the option enabled that ends the game after a certain number of turns, then one of the factions that had been absorbing those surrendering factions could have skyrocketed their total score up quite a bit right before the game hit it's max number of turns allowed.

Those are some of the ways the AI could have ended up winning. My hunch is that you got beaten by the Conquest/Alliance victory condition, since you said that you noticed a lot of factions surrendering and there was only one faction left that you had not allied with.

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