Yah, I made a post about this in the Tech Support forum. Warlord is the only victory condition where the requirements change depending how many players there are. On the whole, if people defend their homeworlds destroying 12 stars will be FAR easier to do than killing a bunch of homeworlds, and the trader victory is all but impossible as far as I can tell, especially on a small server (such as Atargatis which only has 31 players).