I've recently given MOO2 a second chance and have become much more fond of it, but there are still some things I'd like to change about my experience. The biggest issue from my perspective is the way you win the game. After an indeterminate number of turns a galactic council decides to convene without warning and elect a galactic leader - to me there couldn't be a more disappointing outcome to such a game, spending hundreds of turns researching advanced technology and building a thriving empire only to have the galaxy handed over to you if you win. I did win, and I quit the game immediately. I felt cheated, like there was no real reward for playing. I didn't even get the chance to use my death spores... I doubt any galactic conflict is complete without biological warfare.

So to get to the point, I couldn't think of a worse ending to the game and I'm looking for a way to disable this feature or delay it exponentially so that I can take my time and conquer various systems my own way. If anyone has advice about how to achieve this, whether through modding or a game feature I overlooked, it would be much appreciated, thanks.

You can abstain/vote against yourself if you feel confident you'd get enough votes to win. Just be careful not to let someone else get elected (then again, you can do that and then reject the elected ruler, but that unifies all your enemies into a single empire which is usually bad)

It isn't a random event. As explained in the manual, it occurs once a certain % of systems have been colonized because territorial pressures are liable to hit a critical level before long and electing a leader is seen as better than everyone going at one another with their Death Spores for lack of room to expand.

If you're in a leading position and don't want to win via the diplomatic route, go ahead and abstain. Barring very unlikely combinations, this will prevent a victory. Bear in mind that the only other options are complete extermination of every other empire or the Antaran homeworld assault, with the latter unavailable if Antaran Attacks are turned off during setup.

What's the voting based off, I have a theory it's population but someone can probably correct me.

The number of votes each member gets is based on population and it is the two largest empires that get put forward for election.

So essentially, abstaining when in a position to win the vote will allow the game to continue to said extermination of the other races? If that's the case that should work exactly like what I was hoping for. Many thanks to everyone who contributed for your input.

Yes. It's theoretically possible that in a 7 or 8 player game you could still win when abstaining (if every empire is almost perfectly matched in population and every one of the non-nominated races votes for you), but in practice it's extremely unlikely that this would ever happen.

To be a bit more precise here to be elected leader in the council vote someone needs 2/3's of all votes. So if there is 15 votes total winner would need 10. Therefore if you had at least 6 votes to cast and abstained no one could win.

Also I think for odd numbers like say 13 total votes, a winner would need 9 votes as it gets rounded up.

I agree with you that the Vote is the suckiest way to win. Best is actually conquering Antares after you have annihalated all but 1 opponent and reduced him to 1 planet barely surviving mwahahahahaha.

If you mind so late game, best would be capture of Antares and also all other planets, what is possible to do.