OK, I'm a GalCiv noob.  I just played my first game of GalCiv2 (ultimate).

Basically I was just taking my turns with nothing much going on... I was trying to grind through some tech when suddenly I got "DEFEATED" blah blah, our spys report that The Terran Alliance disappeared and the ascension crystals are depleted or something blah blah.

Problem is I AM the terran alliance. ???????

What happened?  Is it possible a rouge planet of humans (with a different name) would cause this defeat and have it still listed as my race even though they call themselves something else???

If it helps I'll take you through my game a little.  I was playing on the easiest setting since I needed to learn how to play the game and figure stuff out since I haven't played a game like this since Master of Orion 2 when that was released.

I first researched the ascension crystals and had a victory on that.. I then loaded a save before my win and destroyed my star bases so I had an ascension score of 997/1000.  Over the course of probably 100+ more turns I focused this time on research and trying to build up my military for conquest.  Then BOOM defeat.  I then reloaded a save before that and ensured all the crystals had no bases on them.  About 7 turns later (like before) defeated again.

So at this time point I'm stuck with starting over... but I'd rather not since I've put a couple weeks into this game and would really like to finish researching.

any thoughts on this???