Hello,

I just played a fun little game of sins with the computer.  One thing I was wondering about is the mercy rule, or, to put it another way, the win condition.

Normally after I am beating the computer pretty badly, the game will end with a victory for me.  My lead has to be pretty epic to trigger the win.

But the game I played tonight got me thinking that I don't understand the exact rules of the endgame.  Gaia Crescent, me and a normal computer.  As I have been for the last couple of times I've played, I was whooping the computer badly.  (It's almost time for me to move up to hard.)  But this time the win condition did not trigger.

Instead, I had to kill every last object owned by the computer.  I'm not certain that this is the case; maybe I only had to kill every planet.  Whatever the case, it took a long time because I had two capital ships and no siege frigates -- I had been concentrating on building my Missle Armada of Doom.  I figured that I would kill the computer so quickly that I would trigger the victory condition without needing to siege every planet down.

By the time I had killed most or all of the enemy ships, I had about three planets left to go.  So I started killing their homeworld with my caps and began building siege frigates since I was basically rolling in money.  (This was about 1:35 into the game.)  There was barely any resistance.  How could there be?  Occasionally they'd send a cap in, but I had so much power by this point that even a capital ship would melt away in less than 20 seconds.  Still, no mercy rule.

Eventually I had to kill all their planets to finally win.  It took another twenty or thirty minutes since my siege frigates had to travel from across the map (and maybe I only started building them after I finished off the enemy terran planet.  6000 health with only 2 caps assaulting . . . ugh).

When I looked at the graphs toward the end I was amazed.  By 1:35 into the game I had 15x the income in credits, and 8x the income in both resources.  I had 10x as many resources in the bank, had done a ton more research, and had an army more than twice the size of the enemy's.  I'm all for the benefit of the doubt, but there are some defecits you simply cannot come back from.  At this point, the game should have handed me the win.

So what _is_ the victory condition in this game?  Sometimes it seems like I don't have to kill all their planets, but this time I did.  What's going on?