I have won an alliance victory after wiping out all Empires, and outgrowing the Kingdoms on Ridiculous, but think it is pretty much impossible to do so on Insane.  I've also won a Master Quest victory in .914. 

The thing is, in both cases, I could have easily conquered the remaining nations.  You can't really achieve the other victory conditions, at least on the top difficulties, unless you have already conquered a bunch of people, or at least are able to do so.

It would be so sweet if differing victory paths supported different play styles.  I remember someone complaining that his 4x game was more like a 3x.  Civ5 touches on that when you have to choose early on whether to expand (ruling out a social victory) or not (making defense and diplomacy more important than military build-up), and FE has the potential to implement this nicely.  Interested more in the exploring aspect of the game?  Then funnel resources into the master quest victory and have that be incompatible with conquest/expansion (your military would have to defend against interlopers while your ruler hunted for the keys to ultimate power).  Diversifying research would probably be key, as much as having different inhibitors built into certain play styles.  But I cannot blame the devs for not wanting to further balance-test those victory paths against each other (with how many other complicated factors must be balanced).

This effort would make the gameplay more replayable, though--maybe we should revisit these kinds of design considerations once the critical balance is in for things like pioneers/outposts.  Until then, I'm trying to focus on simple fixes.

I want to buy the game but I can't [e digicons]:'([/e] . First have to see a garentee from Stardock that this game will not be affiliated with steam. As soon as I have that, they get my money.