Stepped on Opponent's Mind Flower

[AkiraLe]

Playing on Soyuz difficulty, normal size map, working toward contact victory, I realized an opponent was 50% through trans victory. As I'd won a trans victory the night before I knew this meant she was building mind flower, but her units were all a generation ahead of mine, so like maybe 5 or 6 levels?

So I put what relatively fast moving military I could and barrelled everything while DoWd into her mind flower. She killed every unit I sent, but one of my cars appeared to have killed the mind flower. It drove into the tile with the flower and the flower disappeared. I did end up winning, but I'm wondering if people know or not, did I slow her victory progress doing that? Did it reduce production on the flower, did it reset production on the flower, or was it just cosmetic and doing that had zero effect on the victory progress?

 

[legalizefreedom]

I have done this before, but it doesn't tell you anything about what happens. I'm not positive, but I think this acts like an auto-pillage to kill the mindflower.
It's difficult to tell if you don't have vision in the area. Also since it is the AI, it's difficult to tell whether it's entirely killed and they just start building right back or if you just halt its construction. I want to say it's the latter.
Either way, this definitely sets them back.

If you wanted to test it, you could let them do it to you and see what the message says. Seems like this happened to me in one of my first games, but it's been so long I don't recall.