That's precisely why I accepted Pizza's offer of a draw; from a gaming perspective, Military had already won.

But from a roleplaying perspective... well, we'd removed the influence of the temples from the Senate, since the peace-laden preaching of their faction is detrimental to the war effort of the military; we had to remove the bureaucracy, since the army was tired of being wrapped up in red tape and limited in their actions; the Populists, well I'd like to think they joined the armed forces or simply returned to their lives in the fields and mines.

I would have gladly allied with the Populists fully had they not been acting against me and forcing my hand; indeed, the entire reason that I had spurned Pizza's offers was because I believed that I'd already come to a prior agreement with Romanic/Diamondeye and thus wanted to honour that instead. As far as I'm concerned, Populists and Military could have easily had this outcome instead, as was suggested by Romanic, but that couldn't be the case once Populists turned around and decided to attack me. :3

Ultimately, the Mercantile faction was left in the Senate because they could always be relied upon for procuring the equipment or raw materials required for a successful military and for the fact that, of all the factions that might rise up against the military, the fat cat merchants were the ones I deemed least likely to. :P

The only reason that my own roleplaying tapered off was because the game was entering a tedious stage for a while, whereby Military-Civic and Religious/Mercantile-Populists were consistently trading votes with little progress; I ended up simply posting my votes and that was all, which was disappointing but it's simply the course that the game ended up steering towards.