But seriously, what are the victory conditions? I can't tell.

There needs to be a decisive point, not just 'kill all their shit' because that's just busy work. The game is over but I still have to jump around killing units. Please take the 'busy work' out of this game. It's annoying.

Actually, if they have a colony frig they stay in the game, I know this because I had an ally who lost all his planets but had a colony frig, and even though I left him a few empty planets (including one he had a bunch of structures he owned orbiting), he wouldn't colonize anything with them and therefore was useless.

I am glad that, unlike Civ 4, there is no option for a race to continue if all of its colonies are destroyed. It would be even more tedious if you had to chase down every last little scout, especially if you had a human player microing that scout to prolong the game.

I once scuttled all my planets and stayed in the game fine as long as I had colony frigates. This was SP though.

In team games, its not over untill its over. Just because your not doing so good doesn't mean that your allies aren't. Generaly I'll refer to the one guy getting ganged up on as the "Decoy." I don't think that comebacks are impossible in Sins, its more of just that the games take so long there is no huge push where you blow the enemy back across the map and send him crawling to his corner of the map; like in Company of Heroes. Comebacks are just going to be slower as you slowly begin getting the counter to the enemies fleet and killing ships quicker than you lose them.

Are the teams locked?

If they are not locked... kill your friend, he may be the last obstacle between you and total victory.

Welcome to the war.

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Adding victory conditions would mean that not every MP game is as open-ended.

Some things that show up in other 4X game as win conditions:

-Galactic Conquest.
-Specific score.
-Highest score after a specified amount of turns/time.
-Exceeding the next best score in x,y, and/or z by a certain percentage.
-First to research a specified number of techs.
-Keeping the galaxy at peace for a specified number of years.
-Victory conditions can't take effect until a certain amount of turns/time has passed.

Also, varying victory conditions would create a variety of different strategies and style of play. Things such as exceeding in certain techs verses colonizing the enemy homeworld would create widely different strategies. Finding and protecting enough worlds to host as many research stations would be vastly different than amassing a fleet to assault/defend a single homeworld (you know when it came to *that* fight, it would be a total meat grinder).

Plus, you should be able to mix and match conditions that are compatible. You have to achieve a certain score *and* have x-amount of techs to win--obviously, if you commit to wholesale genocide that should be enough to always win.

And, of course, you should always have the option of no victory conditions.

i was playing sins and i was doing fine had a massive fleet and like a bazilion planets and a big chunk of the map in my culture then all of a sudden i got the message "  DIPLOMATIC DEFEAT " ive been looking through the manual but i cant find a list of victory conditions can somebody help me out???

cause that one pissed me off something aweful id been on that one game for like 4 hours

I just want to clarify that it does NOT take forever to play Sins in online multiplayer.  How is that?  Because unlike a single player game where you might play against 9 AIs and have to knock out each one, in multiplayer you will probably play locked team games where you have on ally for every opponent, meaning that you only have to kill one opponent yourself.  Also, when the players on the losing team see the writing on the wall, they almost always say "good games" and then quit or surrender, and the game ends when each of them have quit, allowing you to avoid having to suffer through a boring mop-up job.  So, your average 5v5 only lasts about 1.5 hours.