Hmm, after a season and a half with this change active, I'm increasingly starting to feel like turning off the free Deity starting techs has introduced a lot of variance into the competition. We keep seeing civs fail to research Mysticism/The Wheel/crucial early military techs and then ending up severely hamstrung due in large part to that one decision, and I can think of a number of games, both this season and last season, where this played a pretty major role in the outcome.
I'm not sure what to think about that; on the one hand, clearly this is the AI's own fault for being dumb and I'm not super sympathetic to compensating them for their dumbness, but, on the other, it seems really difficult to predict which AIs will do this in a given game, and the impact is large enough that it might be significantly reducing the skill cap of the picking contest. I wonder if our sample size is approaching the point where we can start to discern patterns with respect to which AIs tend to do this? Stalin's habitual aversion to Mysticism seems to be a reasonable enough case study; his championship game last year was torpedoed by this, and I wonder if the community as a whole (myself included) might be overrating him a bit due to this issue.
I'm not sure what to think about that; on the one hand, clearly this is the AI's own fault for being dumb and I'm not super sympathetic to compensating them for their dumbness, but, on the other, it seems really difficult to predict which AIs will do this in a given game, and the impact is large enough that it might be significantly reducing the skill cap of the picking contest. I wonder if our sample size is approaching the point where we can start to discern patterns with respect to which AIs tend to do this? Stalin's habitual aversion to Mysticism seems to be a reasonable enough case study; his championship game last year was torpedoed by this, and I wonder if the community as a whole (myself included) might be overrating him a bit due to this issue.