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Eauxps I. Fourgott · October 28th, 2024, 06:13

Delayed the Game 7 results due to a lot of other AH content coming out late last week. Ready for the teaser now, though. Game 7 was the game of two Russias as they ended up as the only nations remaining on the map after a particularly dramatic game. Full writeup: https://sullla.com/Civ4/survivor7.html

Map:

Teaser:

Full results posted probably tomorrow.

Eauxps I. Fourgott

Game 7

Sometimes when running these alternate histories, I come across games that are really open in terms of outcomes. There may be a most likely narrative, but the map can also branch out in almost any direction and almost any leader can be viable if things line up right.

This map was more or less the opposite.

It was a very closed setup, where there wasn’t a lot of room for things to deviate from the norm, only a few leaders had any shot of winning, and all six occupied pretty distinct tiers of competition. This was a heavily imbalanced map in terms of available land for each leader; half the competitors could almost never get out more than six cities during the landgrab, while the other half would almost always found several more. This translated to dismal performances for the three squeezed leaders, who had no way out in front and were punching bags in game after game, while the other three were the ones actually competing for the win every time. This was also a very violent map, with wars coming early and often (every game had at least 11 wars declared) and a full 75% of games ending in Domination. There were no true alliegances in this game, each leader was more than capable of getting in a fight with virtually anybody else, and so this furthered the disadvantage for the central leaders, who would get forced into a fight against somebody with more cities. As a result, they got beat up on again and again.

The actual competitors on this map were Catherine, Saladin, and a surprising Charlemagne. Cathy and Charlemagne tended to be more boom-or-bust on this map, often getting knocked out of contention entirely when they didn’t win, while Saladin was better at staying out of the way and thus cleaned up most of the second-place finishes when he wasn’t winning. Among the bottom-feeders, Victoria performed the best with a handful of second place finishes thanks to having the least exposed position. Stalin’s second-place finish in the real game was proven a complete fluke as he could never advance, but he could at least survive a handful of times and got a few kills. He was far more viable than Gandhi, who was completely annihiliated over and over again and never stood any sort of a chance on this map.

Who actually came out on top tended to largely depend on how the war declarations shook out; in particular, who was lucky enough to get to choose his or her battles rather than getting attacked by the others. In general, low “wars declared on” counts tend to correspond to success in AI Survivor, which makes a lot of sense, as the attacker often has somewhat of an advantage at the start of a war, so being attacked a lot tends to result in getting weakened. Not getting attacked avoids both this and costly dogpiles. But out of every alternate history I’ve run so far, this one had the strongest such correlation, with the winners facing an average of only 4/5 of a war declared on them per game! No matter how strong the leader, if he or she was getting attacked a lot, it was bad news. Getting left alone for long enough to grow an insurmountable lead was often the winning strategy, and if that wasn’t, then conquering another strong contender while avoiding a backstab was.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Catherine of Russia
Wars declared: 73
Wars declared upon: 45
Survival percentage: 80%
Finishes: 9 firsts, 3 seconds (51 points)
Kills: 20
Overall score: 71 points

Cathy was the most likely leader to win on this map and narrowly eked out the highest score as a result. She was gifted the best spot on the map, with tons of room to expand and the much weaker Stalin as her only close neighbor; she was under no threat in the early game. Thus, by Turn 100 or so she would pretty much always be one of the top leaders on the scoreboard; even in games where she expanded poorly, she’d still end up with more cities than most of the rest of the field, just because she had so much empty space that the others couldn’t get to. She was also able grow her cities quite big and sustain a good tech rate with her terrain, and thus in most games took the role of the leader to beat. If nobody did anything to stop her for long enough, she would become unstoppable and run over the rest of the field, just like she did in the real game. And I do mean run over: all but one of her wins were Domination results. Once Cathy got the advantage, she’d continue pressing it until she had won.

Of course, she also didn’t win in half of the games. These were contests where Cathy was either beaten back, outscaled by a particularly strong Saladin/Charlemagne game, or both. I don’t think she did anything especially different in most of them; circumstances just lined up against her. Oftentimes these games would involve her getting slowly beaten back over multiple wars, either against a single strong foe or being dogpiled by several foes. What pretty much never happened, though, was an irrelevant Cathy game. She was always a strong contender up until the point where things went south militarily; her position on the map was too good for her to not be.

These games were also an excellent illustration of how Cathy’s aggressive personality makes her a very “feast or famine”-type leader. She almost never stopped fighting; whether strong or weak, she’d get in more conflicts, declaring more wars than any other leader, and this either made her dominant or else knocked her out of contention. She only scored two second-place finishes from strong positions; her other nine non-wins (including her third second-place finish) all saw her either completely eliminated or in the process of getting conquered when the game ended. Cathy’s survival rate looks good, but it’s inflated a bit by three different games where she had a single city remaining in the very corner of the map when Domination was triggered – in other words, it would’ve been akin to Charlemagne’s had she not had such an obscene amount of territory available.

While the starting techs and Apostolic Palace might have given her a somewhat different set of specific outcomes in this series than she would’ve had under the modern ruleset, I still think this game offered an excellent look at the overall Cathy dynamic. While her traits and somewhat lower aggression make her more viable than the really crazy warmongers, she still shares an overall dynamic with them of being likely to either snowball and snowball hard, or else flame out somewhere along the way. It doesn’t necessarily make her the most effective AI Survivor leader, but it does ensure that she’s usually not boring in her games. This happened to be a map where it was easier for her to snowball, and so she proved that her AI Survivor career’s strong start was no accident.

Saladin of Arabia
Wars declared: 54
Wars declared upon: 38
Survival percentage: 80%
Finishes: 6 firsts, 10 seconds (50 points)
Kills: 18
Overall score: 68 points

Sal finished the alternate histories basically even with Cathy, as the map’s most consistent leader. While he was less likely to win outright than his Russian rival, he was more likely to advance to the playoffs; indeed, he was only eliminated four times across the set, and secured a top-two slot in every single other game. That’s consistency! Saladin was the runaway favorite for second place on this map, to the point where the easiest way for someone else to secure that position was for him to outright win the game instead. His elimination in the real game was thus a very unlikely result, caused by him being unlucky enough to be attacked by a runaway Cathy while Vicky and Stalin both hung around for longer than usual. He suffered a similar elimination at Cathy’s hands only once in the alternate histories, with his other three deaths coming as a result of dogpiles. Even in all but one of those games, though, he was a strong contender before suffering the fatal attacks; he was in a very good position on this map.

Saladin had a generous amount of space to expand into on this map, rivaled by only Cathy in this regard; indeed, they tended to be the main competitors for the land in the far northeast of the map. Thanks to only having a southern border, possessing a middling peaceweight, and not being too aggressive, Sal was also able to avoid the troublesome fights that a weaker version of Cathy would inevitably get mixed up in, allowing him to skate by even when he wasn’t the strongest AI on the map. Cathy and Charlemagne would come to blows at some point in most games, leaving Sal as one of the top two leaders by default, and when one moved into a winning position, he usually had good enough relations to not declare any suicidal wars. His refusal to declare war at Pleased probably helped his overall consistency here, possibly costing him a win or two but also getting him some runner-up spots where he otherwise would have been eliminated. (It’s also noticable that three of the five Spaceship wins in this set came from Sal, with Cathy and Charlemagne each only recording one.) That’s not to say that he didn’t fight, though; he declared his fair share of wars, though most were against the weaker leaders on the map, who could almost never put him in real danger. Sal was positioned well for this and chose his battles wisely in many games.

Saladin seemed more like a “second place” leader than a true contender for the win for most of this set of alternate histories, right up until he won four out of the last five games to prove himself as much of a contender as Charlemagne. Looking at his wins, I don’t think they speak to especially better play than he exhibited in his other games; they just were games where things happened to line up right for him, getting the right conquests or having his rivals play weak enough games for him to edge out in front. Overall, this set of games should be taken with a grain of salt when evaluating Sal’s overall merits, both because of modern AI Survivor’s differences and because he had such a good position in this game. With that said, to me it also reinforced the impression that I already had of him: a solid leader who generally plays decently, but not amazingly, frequently more in the middle but able to slip in front when the others mess up. If nothing else, he certainly was unlucky to have made as poor of an early impression as he did.

Charlemagne of Holy Rome
Wars declared: 63
Was declared upon: 51
Survival percentage: 65%
Finishes: 5 firsts, 3 seconds (31 points)
Kills: 18
Overall score: 49 points

Burger King surprised me by serving as a real contender on this map; when I played through the first replay, I certainly had not been expecting to see him win by Domination! Yet he did, and cashed in with four more dominant wins across the set to boot. Charlemagne had a decent position on this map, not as spacious as Cathy’s or Sal’s, but still giving him more room than most of the field, and he leveraged his Imperialistic trait well to usually expand to a solid city count. With this land base, plus some generally successful fighting against the weaker three leaders (all of whom he bordered), he was able to make himself a major power in many games, and sometimes he ended up successfully challenging Cathy to become the map’s top dog. And he did need Cathy to falter in order to win, as there was essentially no way for him to outscale her otherwise. A single match saw him randomly tech like a monster to pull out to a winning position while Saladin and Stalin dealt with her, but his other four wins all saw him attack and at least weaken her at some point. With Cathy out of the way, there was a real opening for Charlemagne to come out on top, and he played legitimately well in these games, all of which were won from a dominant position. Even his one Spaceship win could have easily been Domination had he been a bit more aggressive; the only thing stopping him was his own inaction.

With that being said, Charlemagne was definitely weaker on this map than Cathy and Sal. Like Cathy, he tended to be fairly boom-or-bust; he was able to secure three solid second-place finishes and a couple more third-place finishes, but fully half of his games saw him dead or dying at the end. He fought Cathy in most games, which frequently resulted in him getting knocked down when he didn’t win outright; Vicky or Saladin could also deal with him when he wasn’t as strong. He wasn’t able to avoid conflict in quite the same way as Saladin, and so wasn’t able to consistently perform in the same way, and with a weaker starting position (and less aggressive personality) than Cathy, he wasn’t able to boom as often as her, leaving him as the clear tertiary leader in this field. Some games saw Charlemagne never quite grow really strong, as he expanded a bit less and thus was left behind Cathy and Sal; other times he had a position with good potential, but failed to exploit it effectively. Charlemagne had more clear failures than the other two in these games, signing peace when he had the advantage, failing to press a potential advantage for too long and allowing Cathy to spiral out of control, or making silly tech decisions. One game saw him in a strong position, but ignore Rifling and then Assembly Line for ages to lose an otherwise winnable set of wars. One of his victories came after an impressive performance where he consistently beat and ultimately conquered Cathy despite being an era behind in modern military tech – but what wasn’t so impressive was that he’d earlier beaten her to both rifles and infantry, only to avoid attacking her while he held that advantage and waiting until she’d matched it. While some of Charlemagne’s failures were out of his control, there were also some clear missed opportunities here that showed flaws in his AI personality.

Now, the biggest reason that Burger King’s performance in these alternate histories came as a surprise was that there had been no hint of it in the real Game 7! He was weak and irrelevant in that game, probably moreso than in any of the replays (I certainly never saw him losing a city to Gandhi while running these). From looking at the original writeup, it seems that he didn’t expand so well in that game and was pressed harder than normal by both Vicky and Stalin, resulting in him having a similar overall strength to the lesser leaders and thus never being able to grow to a strong position, eventually getting overrun. What we should have seen to form our initial impressions of him as an AI Survivor player was, most likely, a decently strong leader who was in third place or so until getting dogpiled by Cathy and Stalin. Still, that would hardly have been a super-impressive opening in its own right, and it doesn’t feel like Charlemagne was shafted too much. He’s more recently seemed to establish himself as a mid-tier leader for this competition’s purposes, and I think the results of these alternate histories bear that out.

Victoria of England
Wars declared: 43
Wars declared upon: 52
Survival percentage: 30%
Finishes: 0 firsts, 4 seconds (8 points)
Kills: 3
Overall score: 11 points

Victoria was the best of the three hopeless leaders on this map. Her start was too cramped for success here, with her almost never being able to squeeze out more than six cities despite being Imperialistic, and even with Financial, six cities wasn’t enough to keep up with the big dogs. However, her start was at least on the edge of the continent, leaving her more out of the way than Stalin and Gandhi, and thus able to occassionally survive in a solid position. Vicky was never in any position to compete for a win, but she did manage to backdoor a couple of second-place positions in rare scenarios when two of the big dogs were knocked out, and really earn a couple more by militarily overpowering a weaker Saladin or Charlemagne as the other two big dogs fought a duel to the death. This was in no way a common occurrence, and she more frequently performed similarly to in the real Game 7, surviving in a weaker position for a while until getting knocked down somewhere along the road to Domination. However, when things broke the right way, she could at least sneak into a playoff spot, and that was more than Stalin or Gandhi could say.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about Vicky’s run in these games was that she didn’t have any reliable allies. Frequent clashes with Saladin were to be expected, but she also often joined the dogpiles on Gandhi and sparred with Charlemagne. She did found her own religion later on in a number of these games, which may have contributed, but I think her willingness to declare war at Pleased was also coming into play here – albeit not in a way that helped her much. Beyond that, there’s not too much to note. She did tend to research Rifling at a reasonable date, but wasn’t strong enough for the Redcoats to make much of a difference. Overall, this set of games didn’t say much about Vicky, since her performance was more a matter of her starting location. Her broader poor performance in AI Survivor remains a mystery, but at least it’s a clear case for this game: she didn’t have room to succeed.

Stalin of Russia
Wars declared: 63
Wars declared upon: 36
Survival percentage: 30%
Finishes: 0 firsts, 0 seconds (0 points)
Kills: 4
Overall score: 4 points

I’ve come across a couple of leaders in these alternate histories whose playoff finishes weren’t terribly likely outcomes, but Stalin is the first total fluke result I’ve encountered. He wasn’t able to replicate his second-place finish even once across the alternate histories; I think he came reasonably close once or twice, but that was it. Stalin had a bad position in this game, cramped with leaders filling in the space all around him, and stuck in the middle of the continent with potential enemies all around. He almost never founded more than five cities and was usually in last place at the end of the landgrab. Like warmongers will do, he did try and fight to escape his position, tying for the second-most wars declared on the map, but he wasn’t strong enough to actually accomplish anything that way. Eventually he’d pick the wrong fight, or get attacked by a stronger rival, and get overrun – or occassionally skate through the whole game, but not in a remotely competitive position. Stalin was also the only leader besides Gandhi who was remotely likely to be First to Die, suffering that result four different times. (Interestingly, all four of those games saw somebody besides Cathy ultimately win. Coincidence, or did she need him to draw some heat?) One common thread I noticed in these games was that Stalin was often one of the first leaders to attack Gandhi, but this usually resulted in him stalemating because he had attacked too early, weakening Gandhi for other leaders while himself gaining no spoils from the war. Even with easy access to a total sitting duck, Stalin didn’t have any way to get an edge; a few random kills were the best he could muster.

So what was different about the actual game? Well, for one thing, Stalin clearly got lucky even before comparing it to the alternate histories, miraculously surviving multiple wars that had turned against him (and getting half of his empire liberated back to him at one point), then seeing Cathy decide to knock out everybody besides him. (The latter, at least, was replicated a few times in the alternate histories, and not a ridiculous result.) Then, when actually drawing comparisions, Stalin profited from the dogpiles of both Gandhi and Charlemagne more in the real game than he did in the alternate histories, taking unusual amounts of territory off of them – I don’t think I ever saw him end up with more than half of India in an alternate history! This gave him an unsually large territory base, with which he could hold off Victoria while Cathy rolled through the rest of the map, taking second place by virtue of everybody else being dead. It was a pretty lucky result even when taken in isolation, and was proven here to be completely unsustainable. As I write this before he’s played in Season 8, Stalin has attracted a lot of doubt recently, with even his successful seasons now thought to be, perhaps, lucky results. In that light it’s interesting to see that his first success, modest though it was, was in reality a fluke. I don’t think that this performance can really tell us much about Stalin as an AI leader, though – anybody would have struggled from this position.

Gandhi of India
Wars declared: 1
Wars declared upon: 75
Survival percentage: 0%
Finishes: 0 firsts, 0 seconds (0 points)
Kills: 0
Overall score: 0 points

Gandhi’s position in this game was akin to Stalin’s, but with the added “bonus” that everybody hated him. He could almost never found more than five cities before running out of space, and then was attacked relentlessly from that point on without getting a chance to make anything of his position. Gandhi was usually at war by Turn 75, and almost never went back to peace again before getting eliminated; a ritual dogpile of Gandhi started most games, and on average he was attacked about once every 37 turns! Even Charlemagne and Victoria regularly joined the fun, as Gandhi had no dependable allies. As a result, he was the runaway favorite for First to Die, suffering that fate 14 different times, including in ten of the last eleven games I ran – ouch! Gandhi didn’t score any points and didn’t come close to scoring any points – I think I saw him capture one or two cities in the entire set. There was no path to even minor successes for him. His best performances were in Game 9, where he survived the first set of wars and was in a strong second-place position before getting dogpiled anyway in the next set; and in Game 18, which stalled out without major wars for over 200 turns, Gandhi playing a decent game in the middle of the pack until eventually a leading Saladin attacked and killed him. That was it, though, and ultimately those performances only amount to “survived without doing much and later got killed” – not exactly impressive. I think that Gandhi is one of the worst leaders to be stuck in a central starting position; not only is he generally fairly weak in military, but his super-high peaceweight makes him a dogpile magnet, so it’s very hard for him to get the breathing room to actually make something of his position. At any rate, that was certainly the case here. For all the opening round success Gandhi has seen across AI Survivor history, his very first map was a real stinker.

Conclusion
Many of the patterns in the real Game 7 matched up well with the alternate histories. Cathy and Gandhi were the favorites to win and die first, respectively; Domination was overwhelmingly the most likely victory type; Stalin was often weak and bullied early on; Vicky was generally a lower-tier leader bumped off later in the game; and Saladin often had a strong position. The real oddity was Stalin’s second place finish, which proved to be an extreme outlier result, way above his normal performance on this map. As a result of that, neither Saladin nor Charlemagne was able to advance to what would have been a promising playoff position, and instead they had to wait four and two more seasons, respectively, to actually become playoff leaders for the first time. Saladin was particularly unlucky to miss the playoffs, while Charlemagne’s strength on this map was totally missing, resulting in him being undersold as a leader. After a couple of alternate histories for games that largely went “according to plan”, it was interesting here to see a very likely result missed and a very unlikely result hit in the real game.

xist10 · October 29th, 2024, 08:04

0% survival is rare - I think this is the case in some other AH, but I'm not sure.

What I find interesting is that you can see very clearly here how important the map actually is.
From the current ranking, Gandhi and Stalin are actually favourites on this map.

But both never advanced in the alternate histories - and I think, for Gandhi this would even be the case, if you play run than 20 games.

Eauxps I. Fourgott · November 1st, 2024, 06:18

Another (approaching) weekend, another teaser. This time for the very long Game 8, which after many twists and turns ended with a Mao/Cyrus ticket. Full writeup: https://sullla.com/Civ4/survivor8.html

The map:

The teaser:

I'm posting this a day early but full results ought to be posted on Monday as usual.

Eauxps I. Fourgott

Game 8

It was not without some trepidation that I approached this set of alternate histories. The original Game 8 had been memorable, but very long, and especially after a rather straightforward set from Game 7, I thought I might be in for a lengthy, relatively boring set that could become a massive slog to get through.

My fears proved unfounded, as Game 8 turned out to be one of my favorite sets to go through in the entire opening round! Like the original game, it proved to be a wild and unpredictable set, with all sorts of ways that the map could play out. I got a taste of what I was in for when six different leaders finished in the top two during the first three replays, and it wasn’t until my ninth time through that I finally got a winner/second place pairing that I’d seen before. Some of the replays were relatively straightforward, but there were plenty of surprises and weird turns to keep it interesting, and uncertainty over the final standings lasted all the way up until the final game.

As wild as the replays could get, though, I don’t think any of them approached the actual game that Sullla originally wrote up. After all, that game featured a leading Hannibal getting AP’d out in the early modern era, many cross-map crusades, a game length nearly 50 turns longer than the longest alternate history, and a Diplomatic victory that barely cut the game short before inter-turn processing would have made the difference between Asoka winning or getting eliminated. But perhaps the most unusual aspect of the original game was the fact that Mao won! This never happened again in the alternate histories; instead, Mao routinely performed poorly and was one of only two leaders (along with Wang Kon) who didn’t have much of a chance. His performance in the real Game 8 outscored his combined total across all 20 alternate games – talk about an outlier! It was a crazy result befitting this generally crazy map.

So if Mao wasn’t a contender in the alternate histories, what was the expected dynamic of this map? Well, there’s no clear answer to that, as five different leaders all had roughly similar odds of finding success and advancing to the playoffs, in the 35-45% range. There were certainly some patterns that emerged over the set and some leaders were clearly stronger than others, but there were no sure bets here. Even survival was a bit of a crapshoot, with nobody dying more than 65% of the time but only two leaders making it through a majority of the games alive. The overall pattern, though, was that of the five western leaders duking it out for supremacy while Wang and Asoka hung out and teched with small empires in their eastern enclave. Over time and a number of wars, some combination of Cyrus, Hannibal, Churchill, or Bismarck would gain some territory and become major forces in the west, and eventually one of them would reach runaway status and finish the game as the clear winner – close finishes were rare on this map, even when more than one leader had become strong. Most often there would still be two strong leaders in the west at the end of the game, with the lesser one finishing in second place, but at other times there was only one true dominant leader and Asoka slipped into second place instead – or, in rare cases, get ahead and won himself.

Thanks to the large pool and long, twisting continent that played host to this game, it tended to be have rather long matches. I never got anything as ridiculously long as the real game, the but average length was close to 350 turns here, with no games finishing before Turn 300. It also tended to have fairly warlike games; again, nothing as extreme as the real game, but only a single alternate playthrough had a war counter in the single digits. It wasn’t as high here as in some games, though, indicating more conquests fought to their conclusions. Spaceship was unsurprisingly the dominant victory type, but Domination was surprisingly viable given the map’s size, showing up in 25% of the results. Diplomatic was expectedly a rare outcome, but not ridiculous here, showing up twice more in addition to the real result. The real dud in terms of victory condition was Cultural; only a single game ended this way and I don’t think the culture slider was run a single time across the entire set. This was the wrong group of leaders for that one.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Bismarck of Germany
Wars declared: 66
Wars declared upon: 45
Survival percentage: 85%
Total finishes: 7 firsts, 2 seconds (39 points)
Total kills: 23
Overall score: 62 points

Bismarck finished this set with the highest score by a good margin, and this felt like it accurately reflected his status as the strongest overall leader on the map even if he wasn’t as dominant as most #1 leaders. He was the most likely leader both to advance and to win outright, scored the most kills by a good margin (and indeed had one of the highest kill totals in the entire opening round), and was himself killed off only three times in the entire set. Bismarck benefited from one of the strongest starting positions on this map: it was rather spacious and allowed him to usually peacefully expand to one of the largest sizes in the early game, and his geopolitical position was also strong, giving him good conquest opportunities but little danger. Bis fought a lot in these games, being attacked the third-most times in addition to declaring the most wars himself, but between his strong empire and military tech focus, he was often up to the challenge. His most dangerous rivals were Cyrus and Hannibal, but they were way over to the west where they would be kept busy in the early game. Instead, Bis most frequently clashed with Mao early on, and he was basically always as strong as China if not stronger. He would also tussle with Asoka or Wang less frequently but no less successfully; their small size prevented them from posing any kind of threat to him whatsoever and they often were friendly neighbors that left him with a secure eastern flank.

As a result of this setup, Bis was one of the most consistent contenders on the map, and would usually be competing for a top two spot well into the game even on the occassions where he wasn’t ultimately successful. He was generally able to stay competitive in economy as well as territory; part of this was due to his larger territory base from conquests, but there were also games where he didn’t do any early conquering and still did just fine economically. His military tech focus seemed to help him as much as anything on this map, as he didn’t fall too far behind economically but was nearly always up with the frontrunners in military tech, if not ahead of them, thereby fueling his conquest machine. Bis also felt like something of a “lite” warmonger on this map; not as insane as the crazies, but usually continuing to fight and fight, usually either pressing his advantage to victory or else falling out of contention. He won four of this map’s five Domination victories, and was on the way there in two of his other wins; only one of his victories saw an entirely peaceful conclusion.

The flip side of this was that Bis did rely on snowballing to really pull ahead, and tended to fall more than just a tiny bit behind when he couldn’t pull it off. This was the case in many of his less successful outings, where he just couldn’t pull ahead in the same way, either due to less success on his part or a particularly strong performance from someone else. Sometimes he would still survive these in decent shape (only twice, though, was he still strong enough to finish in second), other times he’d be in the process of getting rolled up when the game ended; there were several games where he barely survived, including one amusing one where a captured Indian city, surrounded by intact Indian culture, formed a barrier between him and a Hannibal and Mao who had otherwise conquered him. As for his three actual eliminations, these game from games where he expanded relatively poorly, never really got out in front, and later on (but not before then) got conquered by some combination of the three low peaceweight leaders. As it turned out, the real Game 8 was one of these worst-case scenarios; normally, Bis was significantly stronger than in his real debut. Overall, this set supported the idea of Bis being a somewhat competent leader who can sometimes capitalize on a fairly strong position, but far from the best player out there. He didn’t totally bungle this and overall showed his military chops here, but I think other leaders could have done better with the same setup.

Hannibal of Carthage
Wars declared: 52
Wars declared upon: 23
Survival percentage: 40%
Total finishes: 6 firsts, 1 second (32 points)
Total kills: 11
Overall score: 43 points

Hannibal was the other leader who was relatively likely to win on this map, although his overall performance was a lot less consistent than Bismarck’s. Along with Bis, he had one of the best starts on the map, with good space to expand and a favorable diplomatic situation – Cyrus to the north was very easy to turn into a safe ally, and Churchill to the south was diplomatically unpopular. In Hannibal’s good games, he would convert this favorable start into a real advantage by the midgame, forging a good-sized empire thanks in part to land taken from one of his neighbors, usually Churchill. From there, his Financial trait would kick in and allow him to pull out to an unstoppable tech lead. This type of game gave him six wins and one close second place finish, and taken alone made him look pretty impressive. It was also the trajectory he followed in the real game, right up until AP madness made everything fall apart.

However, the rest of the time, Hannibal was a total dud on this map. Actually he had quite a strange trajectory through the replays, winning two of the first four games for a strong start, then surging into second place overall with three wins in a row at the end… but in the middle, he won only one of the other 13 games, and looked like a complete featherweight the rest of the time. There’s no neat way to explain his failures on this map, except that he simply was playing bad games of Civilization IV. His expansion was routinely poor, with him usually struggling to get out to more than six cities despite his ample land; sometimes this was because he went to war too early and got distracted, but at other times he simply stopped, ceding the rest of the land on the western peninsula to Cyrus. This usually left him a bit too weak to really compete, and he couldn’t gain any ground by going to war, either. He usually fought early wars against Churchill, but in many games he couldn’t make much progress, or even lost ground to the English. Wars with Cyrus were more rare, but were almost always bad news for him, and even when he and Cyrus worked together to grind Churchill down, it was often Cyrus who was getting the majority of the cities and pulling ahead. The result was a bunch of games where Hannibal either got knocked out early (he was First to Die five different times, with Churchill involved in all of those eliminations), or else survived the first round of wars but wasn’t strong enough to stay competitive, eventually getting knocked out down the road by Cyrus or Churchill or Bismarck. He also couldn’t stay out of trouble and only survived two of the games that he didn’t win; it was a real feast or famine performance.

There were also some downright bizarre games from Hannibal. One saw him in strong competition for a top two spot, only to fall into horrible starvation during the Industrial era, reaching a point where something like 70% of his cities were size 1 and unhealthy! That dropped him from viability to an easy enough foe for Bismarck to dispatch. Another saw him attack Cyrus very early, gain the advantage and quickly knock him down to just three cities, seemingly set up for a dominant snowball. But then he stalled out for ages trying to conquer those last three cities, allowing Churchill time to kill Mao, backstab him, and completely conquer him without ever having finished off the Persians. There was another game where he was in good position until Cyrus, who was Pleased towards him and in the process of sending his army across the world, randomly declared war on him instead for no clear reason, and of course his real Game 8 result where Asoka got him AP’d out of the game. Overall, this was a bit of an odd performance by Hannibal that left me unsure what to think of him. He was legitimately strong in some games but very disappointing in others, and I don’t know how much of this should be attributed to his AI personality.

Cyrus of Persia
Wars declared: 53
Wars declared upon: 22
Survival percentage: 75%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 5 seconds (20 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 36 points

Cyrus was one of this map’s most consistent performers, frequently playing at a solid level while rarely excelling. His starting position was both spacious and sheltered, on the edge of the map and only bordering a Hannibal who could easily become a war-proof friend. Hannibal further frequently failed to expand as well as he might, allowing Cyrus (with the help of his Imperialistic trait) to get a large number of cities, and he proved good at developing what he got to become one of the major powers in game after game. Before conquests started to take place, he was usually one of the strongest leaders.

Where things got a little mixed was when the conquering began. Cyrus sometimes did well at this to maintain a strong position; usually this was when he participated in a dogpile of Churchill and got good spoils. While wars with Hannibal were fairly rare, they also tended to go in Cyrus’s favor, and there were multiple games where he helped dogpile Hannibal early to grow strong. Other times, though, he didn’t fight enough or didn’t get a good portion of the spoils, and those tended to be the cases where he fell further behind and out of contention, later if not sooner. (Cyrus never died early and came close only once – he was still alive at Turn 220 in each and every game!) Cyrus was not the strongest techer on this map and relied more on his superior production and food capabilities to stay competitive. This often worked well (and he did rack up the second-most kills on the map), but if he couldn’t manage any decent conquests, somebody else would eventually outscale him. Even when Cyrus did remain strong throughout the game, it was hard for him to pull completely out in front and win, as he only managed this twice. The more common sight was for him to finish in second place or lower, a solid competitor but ultimately a second-rate one. I think the lack of many convenient conquest opportunities hampered him here, as he tended to be unwilling to fight Hannibal or Mao after the early game, leaving only Churchill as a good target, and that wasn’t enough to compete with the snowballs that other leaders could more easily execute.

The other notable aspect to Cyrus’s performance in these games was that he regularly engaged in cross-map crusades against Wang Kon. In general this sort of long-distance war wasn’t terribly common on this map, the real game being something of an outlier in that regard, but the specific matchup of Cyrus vs. Wang was a regular part of these games, whatever the reason may be. (Perhaps because their capitals were relatively close going westward over the ocean?) Cyrus was invariably stronger than Wang and these attacks went reasonably well; sometimes he’d stall out due to losing Open Borders with Bismarck, or something else silly like that, but often he was able to successfully conquer Korea to bolster his case for a top-two position; indeed, this helped him stay on top in one of his two wins.

Overall, Cyrus had one of the most typical performances in the real Game 8; a contender all the way through, but eventually outscaled by someone else and ultimately finishing in second place, was absolutely a realistic outcome for him. I think these alternate histories painted him as another mid-tier leader; decently capable and delivering reasonably well from a solid start, but clearly not the best economic leader and thus not performing as well as some others might have. This game seemed to have a lot of such mid-tier leaders, and I wonder if that’s the main reason why it proved as entertaining as it did.

Churchill of England
Wars declared: 18
Wars declared upon: 60
Survival percentage: 40%
Total finishes: 3 firsts, 4 seconds (23 points)
Total kills: 11
Overall score: 34 points

Along with Hannibal, Churchill was the other big feast-or-famine leader on this map. For starters, he was the odds-on favorite for First to Die, his result in the real game being duplicated an additional nine times here. This wasn’t a case of Churchill being a weakling; rather, he simply was stuck in a very bad diplomatic situation. He started between Hannibal and Mao, both of whom were predisposed to dislike him, and he was also the closest likely war target for Cyrus. As a result, he would often face multi-front wars, or multiple wars in quick succession, and it was hard to keep up with all of that pressure. Churchill tended to expand fairly well and could fight well one-on-one; early wars with just Hannibal or just Mao went well, as he could almost always hold his aggressor off and often start taking cities from them. But once Cyrus piled in as well, he was up against impossible odds. There was frequently nothing he could have feasibly done to avoid his fate.

But to Churchill’s credit, when he wasn’t dogpiled and eliminated early, he was usually a strong competitor, clocking in with a top two finish in 7 out of 11 such games. The difference here usually wasn’t that he wasn’t fighting early wars against his neighbors – it was that he was winning them. If he wasn’t eliminated first, it was often because he was turning the tables and helping Mao or Hannibal to suffer that fate instead, and that left him with one of the game’s larger empires, clearly one of the major powers. By the time he reached this point, Bismarck was usually the only other leader who stood a chance of threatening him, and that translated to Churchill finishing behind Bis in second place four times, as well as winning three games of his own when he performed particularly well. (Bis and Churchill’s identical peaceweight resulted in them fighting each other only very rarely.) All but one of his kills were scored during these games as well. Churchill often was a slightly sub-par techer in the midgame, with one of the worst GNPs, but he was able to stay reasonably competitive for long enough that his territorial advantage could make up the difference.

There was only a small handful of games where Churchill neither died first nor finished in the top two; these were unusual results where his early wars stalemated, with somebody else on the map getting picked off first without Churchill gaining any advantage from it. This resulted in him either getting eliminated later down the road, or in a single case surviving in third place. Overall, this was a pretty good performance by Churchill given the circumstances, but when evaluating his merits as an AI should be taken with a grain of salt. I am guessing that Churchill benefited a good deal here from the bonus Deity starting techs that are no longer given out in modern seasons of AI Survivor; they didn’t immediately unlock any resources at his capital, but they no doubt sped up his overall growth curve by a decent amount, a big deal for a leader who’s generally been observed to be a particularly slow starter. If Churchill was given this map under the current ruleset, he may well have been routinely weaker and unable to put up as good of a fight in his early wars – a reason I like to use the original conditions, since we found out that he did in fact have solid odds of advancing as it was! But regardless of any extra benefit he got, Churchill did show once again here that he’s a good military AI in games where he’s able to get well-established and not dogpiled. It was a game all about fighting for him, and he handed it capably even though there were more than a few games where that simply wasn’t enough.

Asoka of India
Wars declared: 21
Wars declared upon: 35
Survival percentage: 50%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 6 seconds (22 points)
Total kills: 1
Overall score: 23 points

Asoka was the final viable leader on this map, but played a completely different series of games from the other four. Out west, it was all about the conflicts and wars, the advantage going to whomever could carve out a strong territory base in any given game. By contrast, Asoka was content to sit on just his initial six or so cities, instead clearly playing the best economic game (relative to city count, at least) of the bunch and routinely putting himself in a solid position that way. Asoka always dominated the early game culturally (helped by founding one of the opening religions in virtually every game) and would often be way out in front in terms of score at Turn 75. Even once the other leaders’ cities and scores started growing to put him behind in that regard, he would often maintain the GNP and tech lead for long periods of time, getting a lot of value out of the limited land he did have and playing the peaceful builder game quite well. Sometimes it was as late as the early modern era before his foes with 20+ cities caught up in tech with his six city empire! This strong tech and well-developed cities left him in position to slip into second place in games where only one western leader was very strong, and he translated that into the best second-place rate and the second-best top-two rate on the map.

However, Asoka performed very poorly on the military front. Admittedly this was partially just because he didn’t fight a whole lot of wars, but even when he did fight, he could have trouble accomplishing much (including stopping his enemies from conquering him) thanks to his small production base and failure to emphasize units. Asoka only managed a single kill across the entire set of 20 games, and most of his invasions went nowhere. Admittedly he couldn’t have accomplished too much, since he was so limited in city count as a result of his cramped starting position, but he certainly didn’t take much advantage of dogpiles, or usually make much headway against the similarly small Wang. There were also several games where he was attacked by a foe who had inferior military tech but made up for it with sheer numbers, as Asoka either couldn’t compete with the much bigger production base or simply failed to build enough units, only building useful units in three out of six cities at a time or something like that. Asoka rarely survived when he wasn’t finishing in the top two, with Bismarck or Cyrus usually responsible for his demise; his military weakness compared to Bismarck in particular fueled a good number of German victories. Then again, perhaps this was how he had to play; he was too small to effectively snowball, and so greater focus on military might have only sunk his economic efforts as well.

Asoka managed only two wins in this set of games, both coming on rare occassions where he was actually able to gain territory: once from a solo conquest of Wang (his only kill), and once from dogpiling Mao in a game that stalemated for over 200 turns, thus allowing him to maintain his economic lead for longer than usual. There were also a good number of games, much like the real Game 8, where it looked like he could have easily won a Cultural victory had he turned on the slider and pursued it in earnest, but I don’t believe he used the slider even a single time in all of these sets. I guess Spiritual/Organized is the wrong trait combo for the AI to pursue that victory condition? (Update as I edit this for posting: Or the behind-the-scenes rolls at map generation left it as a non-option.) In any case, Asoka won a single sliderless Cultural victory in game 15, where his culture machine was stronger than normal and he was in pole position for the space race anyway, and that was it. This ended up as a decent performance that shows that Asoka is at least a solid economic leader, but I think he could have done better had his AI not had that particular foible. A leader that primarily emphasizes culture is going to have a harder time winning the game if he never pursues the Cultural victory in earnest.

Mao Zedong of China
Wars declared: 34
Wars declared upon: 60
Survival percentage: 35%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 2 seconds (4 points)
Total kills: 3
Overall score: 7 points

The actual winner of Game 8 turned out to have been extremely lucky. Not only was Mao unable to score as high as in his original game in a single alternate history, he was unable to do so in all of them put together, and had the map’s lowest survival rate to boot! Mao was quite weak in these games and often little more than a punching bag. I don’t think his available land was particularly to blame – the quality of his landgrab varied from game to game, but he had the ability to get a strong territory base to work with – he just couldn’t perform effectively with it. His diplomatic situation didn’t help either, as he was attacked fully as often as Churchill. He often fought with his neighbors Churchill and Bismarck, and usually it was them getting the better of him, not the other way around, even when he was fighting them one on one. Even in scenarios where he was helping to dogpile Churchill, it wasn’t unusual to see him completely stall out trying to take a single city, while Cyrus and/or Hannibal scooped up the rest, leaving Mao little stronger at the end of the conquest. He was also attacked semi-frequently by Asoka and Wang Kon, who by themselves were little more than nuisances, but together with somebody else could help spell his doom. Wars with Cyrus or Hannibal were more rare, but no more helpful to the Chinese. Whatever the reason, Mao was never able to get the upper hand over any of his rivals, and that resulted in him falling behind in game after game.

So why did it go so well for him in the real game? After reading through the original writeup, it seems to have just been a perfect storm that went his way. For starters, Churchill and Bismarck both played at about their weakest level in the real game, minimizing their threat to Mao; he also never fought Bis until the lategame, which was a rare result. Mao himself was able to get a landgrab at the top end of possibilities, and then further benefited from the game stalemating for the first 200 turns or so; he wasn’t pulling out in front during that time, but nobody else was either, leaving him still in contention. His ability to conquer Churchill was unusual but caused by, again, Churchill being weaker than normal (and also softened up by a war with Hannibal immediately prior). Then he got lucky enough to get the best spoils off of the dogpiles of both Bismarck and Hannibal, getting more cities through the sheer randomness that comes into play in these scenarios, and eventually pulling into the lead that way. But keep in mind that he still would almost certainly have finished second to Hannibal, instead, had not the wacky (and never-repeated) total AP dogpile of Carthage taken place; that event both removed his biggest competitor, and allowed him to grow strongest by getting as many Carthaganian cities as he did. All three of Mao’s kills in the real game were scored during dogpiles, where the credit could just as easily have gone to somebody else, and do note that it took Mao over 430 turns to win in this game – and only that fast because of the UN cutting the game short! It truly took the wackiest of wacky outcomes on this chaotic map for Mao to come out on top.

In the end, then, Mao would suffer one of two fates. The more common outcome was for him to get ground down and eliminated somewhere along the way, usually by Bismarck. This could happen earlier in the game, as he was First to Die five times and suffered several more early eliminations, or it might come near the end. In other games, Mao was able to avoid dire conflict and make it through to the end. Sometimes this was as a totally irrelevant civ, but there were a few games where he was in legitimate contention for second place, and he managed to snag two such finishes in the end. He was never in contention for the win past the midgame, though, and his lack of kills is an accurate reflection of his poor military track record. Ultimately, however, I wouldn’t place too much stock in this result when evaluating Mao as an AI Survivor player, other than the fact that it supports the idea that he’s below the top tier of competition. He may well have been hurt by proxy here from the other leaders getting the free Deity techs, especially his neighbors Churchill and Bis, and in any case, the alternate histories from later seasons have shown him to be a capable enough leader. These results do clearly show that he “shouldn’t” have made nearly as good of a first impression as he did, though, and given that as of this writing this game is Mao’s only career win, it’s safe to say that he’s generally a more second-place kind of leader, not one of the best in the competition.

Wang Kon of Korea
Wars declared: 30
Wars declared upon: 30
Survival percentage: 45%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 0 seconds (0 points)
Total kills: 1
Overall score: 1 point

Wang had a similarly cramped position to Asoka’s on this map, but none of his ability to make the best of it. His location was perhaps even more cramped, and in any case he didn’t have the same strong cultural game as Asoka, preventing him from gaining the early lead or same strong economy as India. Instead, he would run out of space to expand at five or six cities, and remain there for the rest of the game until he was either picked off (generally by Cyrus or Bismarck) or the game ended with him well out of reach of a playoff spot. There was no path to success here for Wang; he couldn’t even make reliable military progress against Asoka, much less the leaders who had a bigger military focus and more cities. Sometimes he would capture a Chinese city or two, but that was about it, and was nowhere near enough to make him competitive. Wang never even came close to a top-two finish, as there were too many other leaders and too much other land on the map for even a second-place backdoor to be in the cards. He got a last hit once during a dogpile of Mao, would sometimes be the tech leader in the midgame before betting outscaled by other leaders, and that was about it. I don’t think Wang is a particularly effective AI in the first place, and he had a poor setup here. Not much else to his story.

Conclusion
The alternate histories decisively showed that in some aspects, the real Game 8 had been highly unusual. Mao never came close to repeating his victory, and the victory date and number of wars were also significantly higher than in any of the repeated games. We also saw an unusually weak performance from the map’s typically strongest leader, Bis showing very little of the success he enjoyed in these games. At least some aspects were normal; Cyrus was one of the best picks for second place, Churchill was the favorite for First to Die, and Asoka and Wang also played fairly typical games from their positions. Interestingly enough, even though Bismarck was the most likely winner and Asoka the most likely runner-up, they only accomplished this together in a single game. The actual most likely ticket to advance was Bismarck in first and Churchill in second, which occurred in a mere 20% of the replays. This really was a wild map, and although the writeup itself has been a bit of a chore to type out, overall it’s probably my favorite of the fourteen alternate histories that I’ve completed so far.

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With the entire Season One opening round of alternate histories complete, a look back at the overall results is in order. Who deserved to be remembered as the strong leaders of the inaugural season? Who just got lucky? Who just got UNlucky and flew under the radar for a while as a result?
In the end, of the leaders who advanced to the playoffs, the most “deserving” – AKA the ones for whom this was confirmed as the expected result via the alternate histories – turned out to be Brennus, Mansa Musa, Boudica, Huayna Capac, Augustus Caesar, Lincoln, Elizabeth, Pericles, and Catherine – half the entire playoff field. Rather a mix there between respected leaders and those who’ve accomplished little since Season One; if nothing else, it shows that starting locations do matter quite a bit! The mildly lucky playoff leaders, those with decent but ultimately lesser chances to advance, were Suryavarman, Justinian, Alexander, Suleiman, and Cyrus. This is an overall more successful and respected set of names, I feel, perhaps partially indicating that these are mostly stronger leaders who didn’t have such great positions. Finally, the two REALLY lucky leaders who made the playoffs when they had no business doing so were Stalin and Mao, interestingly both seeded leaders as of this writing. The last two playoff slots, of course, were filled with leaders from the Wildcard, and since I can’t really make and run a map for those who “should” have made it to this game without going completely into fantasy land, it’s harder to assess exactly how lucky Zara and Qin were. We’ll only get to see that with respect to the actual Wildcard field. (Addendum at editing time: That didn’t stop Thrasybulos! We’ll see how his Season 1 experiment turns out.)

On the flip side, there were a number of leaders who, according to alternate histories, were the most likely from their fields to advance to the playoffs, but in the real thing didn’t fare so well. Zara was one, but he did make the playoffs anyway via Wildcard. Peter and Asoka were two more who made the Wildcard but couldn’t advance from there, and then Isabella, Shaka, Bismarck, and especially Saladin all got totally raw deals as they were eliminated completely! This is a pretty mixed group of leaders and I don’t think there’s any broader conclusions to be drawn from it.

As for the Wildcard pool – what exactly makes a leader that should have been in the Wildcard? There’s not a clear answer for that, but for the sake of having a metric to analyze I’ll put in that bucket any leader who survived in at least half of all games, but was not one of the two most likely to advance to the playoffs. Using that metric, then, the “correct” Wildcard leaders for this season would have been Suryavarman, Napoleon, Justinian, Willem, Qin, Gilgamesh, Genghis, Washington, Julius Caesar, Darius, Frederick, Charlemagne, and Cyrus. That would have been quite a big game! You can see on this list three leaders who upgraded and made the playoffs outright as well as five more who were in the real Wildcard game; the really unlucky ones by this metric were Napoleon, Willem, Gilgamesh, Julius, and Charlemagne. On the other hand, every leader in the actual Wildcard game made either this list or the “should have been in playoffs” list – nobody scammed an unlikely Wildcard spot in the real season! Stalin and Mao (and to a lesser extent Alex and Suleiman) really were the only two super-lucky leaders from the opening round.

Magic Science · November 8th, 2024, 04:03

Thanks for another alternate history.

(November 4th, 2024, 18:12)Eauxps I. Fourgott Wrote: I guess Spiritual/Organized is the wrong trait combo for the AI to pursue that victory condition? (Update as I edit this for posting: Or the behind-the-scenes rolls at map generation left it as a non-option.)

Wait, what do you mean? Is there a randomized "Culture slider weight", or something like that?

(November 4th, 2024, 18:12)Eauxps I. Fourgott Wrote: We’ll only get to see that with respect to the actual Wildcard field. (Addendum at editing time: That didn’t stop Thrasybulos! We’ll see how his Season 1 experiment turns out.)

Is there another alternate history thing? Can you link it?

Eauxps I. Fourgott · November 12th, 2024, 19:19

(November 8th, 2024, 04:03)Magic Science Wrote:
(November 4th, 2024, 18:12)Eauxps I. Fourgott Wrote: I guess Spiritual/Organized is the wrong trait combo for the AI to pursue that victory condition? (Update as I edit this for posting: Or the behind-the-scenes rolls at map generation left it as a non-option.)
Wait, what do you mean? Is there a randomized "Culture slider weight", or something like that?

I don't know the exact details, but I do know that there are one or more rolls at map generation that affect how hard an AI is pursuing Culture, at least right off the bat.

Quote:
(November 4th, 2024, 18:12)Eauxps I. Fourgott Wrote: We’ll only get to see that with respect to the actual Wildcard field. (Addendum at editing time: That didn’t stop Thrasybulos! We’ll see how his Season 1 experiment turns out.)
Is there another alternate history thing? Can you link it?

Yes, over at CivFanatics: https://forums.civfanatics.com/forums/ci...sions.144/

Eauxps I. Fourgott

Went ahead and posted my last few writeups that I have saved up at CivFanatics. And with me rapidly heading into AI Survivor/Alternate History burnout, I think the timing was good. I'll get them up here as well, and then it's just a matter of when I feel like finishing my set for Playoff 3.

Wildcard

The biggest takeaway from this set of alternate histories was that I’m very glad that this competition is normally run on standard sized maps. The jumbo-sized Wildcard map ended up being rather less enjoyable to run, for multiple reasons. The biggest one, and one that I think Sullla has mentioned before, is performance! With the size of the map and the number of units eventually running around on it, the late turns could take quite a while to chew through, especially in games where mostly aggressive leaders prospered. Normally I sit and simply watch through the games as they’re replaying, but in this set I ended up starting to find other things to do while the autoplay slowly churned on, paying less attention at times. Many wars also ended up feeling like they took ages to play out, and it wasn’t always clear whether they were particularly ineffecient, or roughly the same in turns but longer in real-world time. I was certainly left looking forward to going back to a smaller map for the playoffs!

But I also think that the larger map affected the game dynamics, and not necessarily for the better. Because of all the available land on the map, all but one of the game’s leaders were able to reliably expand to a pretty strong size, 8 to 10 solid cities if not more, and this seemed to make for a more static set of games. Because everybody was strong, it was harder to make inroads via conquest; even a successful early strike to take one or two cities often wouldn’t be enough to be decisive, and instead conquests relied on dogpiles, or the attacker possessing sufficiently greater strength to keep making gains in an extended conflict. (The best illustration of this comes in the elimination dates – other than Asoka, who was considerably squeezed compared to everybody else, there were exactly THREE eliminations in the entire set that came before Turn 200!) As a result, the military path was very unreliable here. It was hard to get a good snowball going, rather than getting bogged down and dragged back in conflict, and a strong economic performance was usually the path to a victory instead. What land could be easily gained (in other words, mostly via peaceful settling) and how much destructive war could be avoided tended to be the deciding factors in this match, with successful warring having less of a place than it does in normal AI Survivor matches. In particular, Domination victory was essentially impossible on this map, as it would have required totally absorbing about four other strong nations’ worth of territory, possibly more, and there was just no way that could happen. These larger maps are too much of a nerf to warmongers, I think. This setup worked fine for a single, isolated game, but it was distinctly less enjoyable than normal maps for the alternate histories, and I think would really impact the competition’s quality if expanded to fill a full season.

This dynamic can especially be seen in the defining result of these alternate histories, the dominant performance of Zara Yacob. It quickly became clear in these replays that Zara had the best starting position on the map by a good margin, and so long as he didn’t get tangled in any early wars to stunt his growth, this resulted in him being strong enough that, on this static map, nobody else could snowball ahead of him. Time and time again, Zara would quickly pull into runaway status and go on to win an early space victory, and for a while it made for a rather boring set. On the flip side, the map was badly imbalanced against Asoka, who found himself with far less room to expand (and a much worse diplomatic situation) than anybody else. Asoka was the runaway favorite for First to Die and the only leader to never make the playoffs, as he simply couldn’t grow to the size needed to compete with everybody else, and to boot was frequently attacked before he would have reached that point.

Things were a lot less clear in between these two extremes, though. It appeared that after Zara, there were no clear favorites, but instead almost everybody had pretty equivalent chances to move on. This ended up manifesting itself in an amazingly consistent series of results: FIVE DIFFERENT LEADERS scored the exact same set of finishes, a single win and three second place finishes. Two different pairs even scored the same number of kills! Darius also picked up three second place finishes, lacking only the win to match everybody else. While to some extent this extreme matching of results was simply a quirk of the sample size and how it worked out, I do think it accurately reflects the fact that nobody was inherently much stronger or weaker on this map in terms of moving on. Different leaders might end up on top depending on the circumstances, but other than Zara, there wasn’t anybody who had a particularly strong chance. Basically, the story of this map was that Zara was going to ride a spaceship into the playoffs, and after that it was mostly up to the luck of how the map played out to decide who would be joining him.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Zara Yacob of Ethiopia
Wars declared: 52
Wars declared upon: 24
Survival percentage: 90%
Total finishes: 15 firsts, 2 seconds (79 points)
Total kills: 20
Overall score: 99 points

Zara was the unquestioned king of this map, winning a full 75% of games and only failing to place a mere three times across the set. He also collected the most kills and was only a single point away from breaking 100 points – as is, he scored higher than any leader in Season One’s opening round. When replaying this map, it quickly became obvious that Zara had the best positioning. He occupied a lonely peninsula with a generous amount of space, allowing him to expand to a good size with minimal effort, and his land was very green, allowing him to become very rich indeed once it was properly developed. A lot was buried in jungle at the start of the game, but that didn’t matter too much here; he usually wasn’t bothered while he worked on it, and didn’t need to snowball ahead with an early conquest, so he could take his time to hack it out, improve it, and unlock its full potential. From that point he was off and running, with a lot of very big cities propelling him to the front of the scoreboard in game after game, and usually nobody was able or willing to do anything to stop him until he had cashed in with his spaceship victory. (He also randomly turned on the culture slider and won that way a single time; not sure what was different there.)

Another big part of Zara’s success came from his geopolitical situation. As mentioned, he was able to avoid early wars, thanks to his neighbors: Asoka, who was no threat and usually getting dogpiled; Darius, who was often inert and would more often go after Genghis Khan when he did start fights; and Genghis Khan, who was highly aggressive but almost always attacked Asoka or Darius before Zara. Zara’s middling peaceweight was a huge asset here, ensuring that everybody had other targets that they were more anxious to pursue and allowing him to avoid a lot of inopportune fights; in other words, I’m not sure anybody else could have performed quite the same from this spot, simply because they would have been plunged into more fighting. Usually, by the time Zara WOULD get attacked, he had already grown strong enough to be the winner of that fight. His proximity to Asoka also came in handy sometimes, as he was not unwilling to dogpile the Indian target and several times captured some extra cities easily, leveraging them to particularly dominant wins. Zara thus had a perfect storm: his land was good enough to allow him to do the best job of peaceful building, he was out-of-the-way enough to avoid early fights and thus get the chance to build, and the broader map dynamics prevented anybody else from snowballing ahead of him by conquest.

So what about his bad games? How could things go wrong for Zara? The answer is simple: early warfare. All five of Zara’s non-winning games shared a common event of Zara getting embroiled in an early war against Genghis or Darius, and while this only resulted in Zara getting immediately crippled in a single game, they did set him back a peg and prevent him from jumping out in front in the same way, leaving him vulnerable to either be taken down later or edged out for the actual win. Now, there also were some games where Zara fought an early war but went on to win anyway, so this wasn’t a death sentence, but it was the one way that he could get edged out. In two of these results, Zara was able to stay competitive for the entire game and only barely lost, taking a second-place position for his troubles, but there were in fact two games where he remained weaker and was eventually conquered by Genghis Khan – interestingly, both games in which Zara was the one to plunge himself into war. A third game saw Genghis conquer Zara’s entire core at a fairly early date, only to stay at war with him for the rest of the game as Zara hid out in a former barb city locked away behind Persian culture. In other words, had he not gotten lucky with that barb city, he would have shockingly been First to Die on a map where half the field never experienced that fate. Genghis was in general the biggest threat to Zara, the only leader who seemed capable of actually conquering his lands. There were several other games where he took a swing at Ethiopia as well, only to have his aggression shut down via the Apostolic Palace, which Zara often seemed to control. Zara really played like a slimy villain in these particular games, repeatedly kicking Genghis back with the AP until he’d grown a tech edge and was able to beat up on Mongolia himself. It was yet another advantage that made his run on this map possible.

It’s funny how streaks of games work out for the alternate histories. Over the first 13 replays, Zara had a stranglehold on this game, winning twelve games outright and in position to potentially win a thirteenth before he was beaten by a random Diplomatic victory. He seemed completely unstoppable. Suddenly, though, in the last seven games, his performance became much more shaky, as he found himself stuck in early war in game after game, resulting in him winning much narrower victories or not winning at all. He still scored higher than anybody else during this stretch, but it was much less dominant. Still, on the whole, this was an extremely strong performance, and it’s clearly no accident that Zara’s comeback run in Season 1 got off to the start that it did. While I’m still not convinced about his overall effectiveness as an AI, he was gifted a fanastic setup for this particular game and proved competent enough to take advantage of it. We’ll see just how impressive he looks in his last two alternate histories for this season, but at least his first win was very much the “proper” outcome.

Peter of Russia
Wars declared: 72
Wars declared upon: 32
Survival percentage: 85%
Total finishes: 1 first, 3 seconds (11 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 27 points

Two different leaders tied for the second place position with the exact same results, but we’ll discuss Peter first. He ended up being the most consistent survivor after Zara, only kicking the bucket in three separate games even if he wasn’t actually advancing most of the time. This was thanks to his out-of-the-way position in the corner of the map, combined with a low peaceweight that ensured that his neighbors would usually attack others instead of him; Peter benefited from one of the lowest invasion rates on the map and it was considerably lower before he got AP’d multiple times in the final game. Peter was usually able to settle a good amount of land from his corner position, and this would often put him in the mix and at least in contention for a top two spot. However, this land wasn’t the highest quality, making it quite possible for others to outscale him along the way, and Peter seemed to struggle quite a bit with tech in this game, frequently one of the trailers in that regard.

Peter was one of the bigger movers in this game, though, resulting in his relatively high score. He was aggressive as his personality would suggest, frequently launching wars all over (a minimum of two per game!) and picking up some extra land, or at least ruining someone’s day, that way. He would most often attack one of the high peaceweights, Asoka or Darius or Washington, but it also wasn’t unusual for him to attack his neighbor Qin and sink his game if the two practiced different religions. Peter wasn’t able to really snowball this way, but he could at least stay in the conversation and picked up at least one kill credit in the majority of games. He was an important figure on the map, even if one who rarely actually came out on top. Peter’s sole win on this map came from a rare game where Zara was stymied early and eventually eliminated; Peter got an especially good landgrab in that game thanks to Genghis warring instead of expanding (a pattern that repeated in many of these games but was especially prominent this time) and more or less coasted to victory after the early game, scoring two kills as he bolstered his lead. His second-place finishes weren’t terribly different from his non-placing games, just contests where he happened to wind up with a better score than anybody else (except Zara) after doing some fighting. As for his eliminations, two of these came when he suffered from a general dogpile, and the third was a solo conquest by Washington when Peter went for the Willem gambit and got slowly ground down by rifle-based forces. Outside of these rare circumstances, though, Peter was making it through this game alive, and on the whole was one of its most consistent performers.

Genghis Khan of Mongolia
Wars declared: 81
Wars declared upon: 40
Survival percentage: 50%
Total finishes: 1 first, 3 seconds (11 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 27 points

If these alternate histories actually dictated who moved on and I had to break this game’s massive tie based on whom I felt most “deserved” it, I probably would have picked Genghis. He was routinely one of the most important players on the map, and managed to tie for second place despite the map setup being inherently stacked against him – not bad! Genghis was, of course, all about going on the warpath in this game, and he was able to do this with reasonable success given the conditions he had to face. It did help, of course, that he himself was given a generous portion of land to settle in, allowing him to build a solid core that would allow him to keep churning out soldier after soldier and remain relevant in tech through about the Renaissance era, plenty of time for him to make his impact. Genghis almost always went after Asoka extremely early in these games, sometimes to his own detriment as he would still have a ton of available land to settle and ended up ceding some to his neighbors. On the other hand, he was usually able to take at least one Indian city in his initial strike, crippling Asoka, and would usually get at least a couple more through his persistence as the game ground on. These weren’t efficient conquests, mind, but this was a pretty reliable way for him to pick up extra cities. After that, his large number of cities and single-minded focus on military made him a serious threat wherever he would choose to strike.

Of course, this still failed to work out for Genghis plenty of times. While he was generally successful at avoiding dogpiles or otherwise getting knocked out in the early game, this could become more of a problem for him later; there were also a decent number of games where he just ended up smaller, not settling enough or seeing much success against Asoka and thus out of contention. His later conquests also had a hard time getting started, again due to the dynamics of this map where everybody was fairly strong and thus would take a ton of effort to break. Even when he was stronger and contending for a top two spot, though, there was a giant obstacle in his way: Zara. Zara would always be outscaling him economically, was too close to completely ignore, and there were a good number of games where this culminated in a lategame showdown that Zara would decisively win due to his tech edge and comparable size. Genghis was unable to snowball into runaway status before this could happen; indeed he was unable to fully snowball at all on this map, and so would eventually fall too far behind in most games. With that being said, it’s not like Genghis always ignored this threat before it was too late: sometimes he did, but there were also quite a few games where he attacked Zara in the midgame, the Khan at his strongest… only to be shut down by the Apostolic Palace. Zara would repeatedly use the AP to keep the Khan out of his territory until it was too late and he’d pulled ahead, and thus ruined Genghis’s game on multiple occassions. I really felt bad for Genghis in these games, as he legitimately played well and did what he needed to do, only to get screwed over anyway; Game 17 was especially bad in this regard, as Zara repeatedly backstabbed Genghis, only to use the AP to avoid retribution, and Genghis was locked out of the playoffs despite beating the odds for a successful game of conquests.

This rivalry with Zara extended to Genghis’s successful top-two finishes as well. There was a single game where he was able to work with Zara and come in second place that way, but Genghis’s other three playoff finishes came from the only three games where Zara did not advance. Genghis at least played a role in knocking Zara off his pedestal in each of these games, and as a result was strong enough (and lacked a lethal enough enemy) to finally move on himself. Genghis’s win in these games came from a highly unusual match, where he actually attacked Zara right out of the gate and successfully conquered his entire core, only to find Zara’s last city blocked by closed Persian borders. Genghis remained at war with Zara for the entire game, and thus had to settle down and build his economy instead, and by doing this (and taking the juicy Ethiopian lands) he was able to win decisively by space, in a game where nobody died! Yep, that’s right, Genghis Khan’s only win saw zero eliminations. Overall, this was a good performance by Genghis, who was a key figure in most matches and quite possibly the second-strongest AI on this map – but frequently knocked out of contention by the strongest AI. On the few occassions where he could get the better of his rival, he advanced to the playoffs. Otherwise, it was going to be a futile fight for him, but he at least made for a better show than many of his peers.

Frederick of Germany
Wars declared: 36
Wars declared upon: 17
Survival percentage: 75%
Total finishes: 1 first, 3 seconds (11 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 15 points

There was again a total tie for fourth place, so I’ll again start by discussing the more consistently surviving leader of the pair. Freddy had a dream position from which to sit back and build in this game, on a lonely peninsula with Darius as his only neighbor. Darius was rarely interested in attacking him (their fight from the real game was repeated a couple of times here, but not often) and so Fred got to play his favorite game by just keeping to himself and teching merrily along. While his less-than-top-tier land meant that he usually couldn’t compete with Zara from this position, his peaceful game was successful in frequently placing him as one of the tech leaders for most of the game. It wasn’t uncommon at all for Fred to be the first to unlock infantry and the like, only falling behind at the very end of the tech tree. This allowed him to easily survive without advancing in over half of all games, and for Fred that was probably living his best life.

To his credit, Fred also wasn’t totally inert in these games, declaring at least one war in 90% of games and averaging nearly two per game. He wasn’t terribly aggressive and often lacked the killer instinct to properly leverage his tech advantage, but at least he was trying. Fred often was undercut in these wars by his own poor decision-making, though. He routinely failed to train enough units to leverage his advantage, building Research in half his cities while at war and stuff like that, and further would often find his civ collapsing into horrible starvation after he beelined all of the production-based Industrial techs and the unhealthiness that came with them. Still, with his sheltered position, he rarely faced serious enough attacks for this to completely eliminate him. All four of Fred’s top-two finishes came from games where he successfully captured some territory from Genghis or Peter, the additional cities allowing him to move into second place on the scoreboard or actually become competitive for the space win. Game 14, in particular, was an impressive win where Fred became the only leader on this map to successfully edge out a stronger version of Zara. Zara had been slowed down a bit by early war, true, but he was still otherwise one of the strongest leaders on the map, and Fred was able to narrowly edge him out in a dramatic space race, one where he brilliantly beelined Computers and the Internet and gained multiple endgame techs for free as a result. Of course, most of the time Fred couldn’t rise to this level of competitiveness, and he only managed four scattered kills across the entire set of replays. His five deaths all came in similar fashion, getting run over in the lategame by militarily stronger leaders. This wasn’t exactly a super-impressive outing by Fred – but it was at least adequate, and better than his opening round showing. He was just as likely as anybody else (aside from Zara) to move forward from this map, and this time was at least a legitimate competitor.

Qin Shi Huang of China
Wars declared: 49
Wars declared upon: 51
Survival percentage: 60%
Total finishes: 1 first, 3 seconds (11 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 15 points

When I started running through this set, Qin looked like the clear second-best leader, taking the runner-up spot in three of the first six contests. He had the land for this too, as like Zara, he started near the equator and had lots of green land to eventually develop, allowing him to pull ahead as his cities grew to huge sizes. He even came very close to beating Zara out in a space race in game 6, and it seems like when the game simply came down to everybody building up their starting land, Qin had an edge over the rest of the field. He certainly did when it came to his win in game 18, where Zara was crippled early and Qin mostly just built up on his initial ten or so cities while everybody else fought, eventually becoming a tech runaway and winning easily by space.

However, Qin completely dropped off after those first six games, and other than his one win and three scattered kills, accomplished nothing in the last fourteen replays. Qin’s problems seemed to stem from unproductive fighting. He was next-door neighbors with Washington, and their opposite peaceweights pushed them into conflict in almost every game. However, they were fairly evenly matched, Washington tending to have a higher city count and greater military focus to counter Qin’s better cities. Their fights usually ended up as stalemates, one or both of the two sometimes taking a single city, but not much more, and as a result both tended to fall behind and out of contention for a top two spot. Qin’s fairly central position was also vulnerable to attacks from others, which would further set him back as what he really wanted was to build in peace (after brushing away the Americans). Peter in particular was a wildcard here, as he would sometimes be Qin’s best bud and help him knock out Washington, but at other times would turn and attack him instead, sinking his chances. Qin’s eliminations in these games came from either dogpile scenarios or lategame conflicts with Zara to the east; otherwise he was strong enough to resist a solo conquest even when he was disadvantaged. But it frequently was enough to tank his chances of moving on.

Qin also had the most suspect expansion of the non-Asoka leaders. He usually got a good landgrab, but his space was a bit more tight and there were one or two matches where he simply was too small to compete effectively. I believe he was also the only leader in these games to suffer the ignominy of having a city captured by Asoka; this happened several different times, including in 1-on-1 conflicts, and illustrated his lack of military heft. Overall, though, Qin was decent on this map and no less deserving of his playoff spot than any of his peers would have been. He simply was lucky enough to have the real game go his way.

Washington of America
Wars declared: 35
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival percentage: 60%
Total finishes: 1 first, 3 seconds (11 points)
Total kills: 1
Overall score: 12 points

Washington was Qin’s eternal rival in these games; he had a more isolated position than Qin, stuck in the very northwest of the pangaea, but this was counterbalanced by Washington being the peaceweight outcast in this part of the world. Washington himself had room for a decent number of cities, but their quality wasn’t too high and he was virtually never a frontrunner. He tended to do better at teching military than Qin, but even fielding rifles against more obsolete Chinese forces rarely resulted in him getting a real edge. Instead, if their stalemate was ever broken, it was as the result of a dogpile against one or the other. Washington could also get in trouble with Peter and Genghis, and this was usually enough to sink his chances, with all eight of his eliminations coming from a dogpile by some combination of these three leaders. On the flip side, most of the times he came out on top, it was because Qin was dogpiled instead; Washington ground him down mostly solo once or twice, but that was it. While they weren’t necessarily fated to knock each other out, with both surviving to the finish together a handful of times, it still was a clear case of there not being enough room for the two of them. They only both died in a single match, as otherwise the survivor gained enough ground to be viable for the rest of the game.

Outside of his rivalry with Qin, Washington didn’t play a major role in these games. He wasn’t that competitive in tech, and his corner position kept him out of most global affairs, leaving him fairly irrelevant most of the time. His best performances came when he was able to get the better of Qin and eventually knock him out of the running, then fight Peter and get the better of him as well; this was the pattern in three of his four top-two finishes, including his win, a random Diplomatic result that came when he was otherwise in third place. I mean, it wasn’t a total fluke, since he did have enough population to quality for the election and successfully pulled in support from Darius and Fred, but it was still a bit out of left field, and he was going to be locked out of the playoffs if it hadn’t happened. Other than that, Washington found himself in second place at the end of one more game where he hadn’t done anything particularly impressive, and that was about it; despite his many wars with Qin, he only scored a solitary kill across the entire set. It wasn’t a very impressive performance and there was nothing here to shed new light on Washington as an AI Survivor contender.

Darius I of Persia
Wars declared: 23
Wars declared upon: 83
Survival percentage: 30%
Total finshes: 0 firsts, 3 seconds (6 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 10 points

I had high expectations for Darius entering this map, as he had a good amount of land to expand into and was the only Financial leader on the board. He failed utterly, though, as one of only two leaders to not win any alternate games, and had a significantly higher elimination rate than anybody else except for Asoka. It wasn’t his land or traits that stopped Darius from performing well; he did indeed have plenty of land available, expanding very strongly in some of the replays. He did have odd settling patterns in others, settling mostly to the north and south and leaving plenty of land to the side for Fred and Genghis to fill in, but still, he was no runt. How did it all go wrong?

The answer: war. Darius was invaded a gigantic number of times across these games, an average of over four per game, and while some of this was caused by Apostolic Palace shenanigans (especially in game 4, where he officially suffered fourteen war declarations), he still had the highest invasion rate even with these results discounted – higher even than Asoka! He fought in a similar number of total wars to other leaders like Peter and Qin, but in Darius’s case, they were usually forced upon him when he wasn’t ready for them, and there was no way for him to keep up with Zara in tech when this was happening. A prime example of Darius losing his chance to win through no fault of his own came in game 11, where he actually took the early lead over Zara… only to get dogpiled by Peter and Genghis, forced to turn all his resources to fighting for his life while Zara got to merrily tech along in peace. Darius’s high peaceweight made him the favorite target of the aggressive leaders, especially the neighboring Genghis, once Asoka was off the map, and this killed his chances time and time again. It shouldn’t all be a pity party for Darius, either, as his own fighting was not particularly impressive. He’d make bold plays at times, attacking Zara early or backstabbing Genghis, but these attacks never did much of anything to improve Darius’s position; early war with Zara could result in the Ethiopian titan getting toppled, but only for somebody besides Darius to take his place. Darius only managed to score kills in three different replays, each time as a result of later dogpiles, not early conquest. His snowball chances were nonexistent, and the fighting he always did meant that his starting land wasn’t enough to carry him. Most of the time, he eventually got worn down and killed from all his warring, and he was one of only three leaders on this map who was ever First to Die, suffering that fate three times.

The overall result was another disappointing performance from the King of Disappointment himself. There was real potential here too, as well; Darius did establish himself as the leader with the best chance of competing with Zara on an economic level, running quite even with him in several games despite inferior land, but eventually beaten back because his diplomatic situation was so much worse. And then, in one game, the two were engaged in a close space race which I slightly favored Darius to win… only for Washington to abruptly end the game with a Diplomatic victory and lock Darius out. It was a rough go and I would suspect Darius’s actual chances of winning the game were similar to those of the other non-Zara leaders, but he was the one who couldn’t get it done in this actual set, and clearly had the roughest time of the bunch in any case. Darius is such a fascinating leader for AI Survivor because he’s equally capable of dominating the field and of playing with utter incompetence; this turned out to be one of his dud maps, and primarily highlighted the diplomatic weakness which serves as a natural counter to many of the game’s best economic leaders.

Asoka of India
Wars declared: 9
Wars declared upon: 63
Survival percentage: 20%
Total finishes: 0 first places, 0 second places (0 points)
Total kills: 0
Overall score: 0 points

This map had one clear winner, a bunch of leaders clustered in the middle, and one clear loser, and Asoka occupied the last category. He was completely screwed, stuck with a central starting position that was close to all of the leaders farthest away from him on the peaceweight scale, and with limited room to expand, to boot. Asoka was the only leader who didn’t seem to have his own pocket of land to settle a strong core with, and in most games couldn’t get out to more than five or six cities, leaving him completely without hope of competing. It didn’t help that he often was forced to stop at five or six cities because he was already coming under attack; Genghis Khan launched very early wars against him in almost every game, immediately crippling the Indians and leaving them as a sitting duck. Peter, Qin, and Zara all were happy enough to take a swing at him from time to time as well. Asoka mounted spirited defenses in some of these games, even stalemating Zara for a while on one occasion and taking a city from Qin in several different games, but ultimately the weight of numbers against him meant that he was doomed sooner rather than later. Asoka was first to die an amazing fourteen different times, more than anybody else in the opening round except for fellow Indian Gandhi. He was also the only easy elimination on this map. How much so? The other seven leaders combined were only eliminated before Turn 200 three different times across the twenty replays. Asoka alone suffered this fate twelve times. Ouch!

Even on the rare occassions where he was not attacked immediately, Asoka didn’t have much hope on this map. His position was still squeezed; I only saw him expand to more than six or seven cities on one occasion, and even then he was just more or less running even with the rest of the pack until suffering a midgame three-way dogpile. He was smaller than everybody else and wasn’t able to pull ahead in tech the same way he could in Game 8, not with the type of territory that some of these leaders had. Asoka put up a spirited effort, surprisingly willing to attack others when he hadn’t been totally crippled, but again his base of land was simply too small for him to accomplish anything. I think he might have gotten as many as two cities from Qin in one game but that was it; he certainly never came close to scoring points for either a kill or a second place finish. He managed to survive to the finish four times, but never as an important leader. Ultimately Asoka was simply cursed with an impossible starting position, and his own high peaceweight and lack of early militarism coupled perfectly with it to make him the runaway favorite for First to Die. He really should have turned on the slider in Game 8 when he had the chance!

Conclusion
The alternate histories showed clearly that the actual Wildcard Game had held to its expected course in all of the major categories. Zara was going to win by space, Asoka was going to die first, and the game would have a lot of wars but not last for too many turns, all of which took place in the actual game as well. (The actual number of wars actually matched the average from the alternate histories (when rounded) exactly!) Qin coming in second was neither “correct” nor “incorrect”; there really was no true favorite for this position, and this result was as reasonable as any. The Wildcard game format remains unique in AI Survivor and unlike that of any other games in a season, and after running these I can say conclusively that this is for the best. Giant games are fun as a one-off but not so much as a general standard of play. Anyway, I’ve gotten some unusual results in the rest of Season One’s opening round, but this was one game where the overall picture was very clear-cut and matched the real thing. We’ll see if the rest of the playoff round follows the same pattern or gets back to craziness.

Eauxps I. Fourgott

Playoff One

This map was virtually the opposite of the Wildcard map that I had run immediately prior. The continent that the leaders shared was much, MUCH smaller than in the Wildcard; the 8-10 cities that made a standard-sized empire on that map were at the upper end of what leaders could peacefully expand to here, with most being consigned to something like 5-8 cities instead. The map tended to fill up quickly and then become violent; all six leaders here are at least fairly competent fighters (they combined for 122 kills in the opening round’s alternate histories!) and they found themselves locked into quite the struggle to move on to the championship. In direct contrast to the Wildcard, where Domination was impossible and worthwhile conquests were rare, here it was virtually necessary to conquer one or more neighbors to snowball ahead and remain in contention. Over half of the games were won by Domination, and the majority of the remainder were also won from a clearly dominant position; there were only a couple of close space races and a single game where Huayna Capac won by Culture without any major conquests, and otherwise the name of the game was to snowball. That resulted in a fairly dangerous map but also one where everybody had at least some chance; everybody was First to Die at least once, nobody survived more than 70% of matches, and all but Suryavarman were able to secure at least one win. Every leader who made it here was capable and none was completely locked out of the finals from the start.

With that said, this was most definitely an imbalanced map, and while everybody had a chance, they emphatically did not have equal chances. The defining feature for the balance of power here was the west of the continent; in his initial writeup, Sullla commented, “I thought that this was maybe slightly in favor of Catherine and Justinian because there was a bit more land in the west,” and this proved to be quite the understatement. There was a lot more land in the west, which resulted in Catherine and Justinian being massively advantaged; they were each able to easily get out to 8-10 cities and were thus guaranteed to be major players in virtually every replay. They were by far the most successful leaders in the alternate histories, taking over two-thirds of the finish points and nearly that proportion of the kill points across the set. They won sixteen out of twenty games between the two of them, with any other winner proving to be an unusual result, and there was only a single match where neither of the two advanced to the Championship. Both were strong, and the only reason why they didn’t both advance more often is because they often got in fights that resulted in one being knocked out; it was possible for the two to collaborate and advance, but more often one would take out the other en route to the win. There just wasn’t a whole lot that the rest of the field could do to take out two sizable leaders with military focus; dogpiles were hard with them on the edge of the map, and it was hard to snowball ahead when they had the opportunity to do so as well. As a result, the other four leaders were largely left fighting for scraps.

In the center, Augustus and Cyrus had a moderate amount of land available to settle, and the ability to use the Imperialistic trait to make the most of it; this allowed them to sometimes be strong contenders and occassionally snowball. However, their central positions were also much more dangerous than those of their western counterparts, leading to them being the two most-invaded leaders on the map and frequently knocked out of contention as a result, sometimes even in the lategame when they had otherwise played well. Cyrus was able to perform more consistently, thanks to usually executing a better landgrab, being more likely to conquer his way to a solid position, and having a lower peaceweight that made dogpiles a bit less likely, while Augustus was surprisingly the most likely of the lesser four leaders to outright win, but on the other hand was the only leader to never come in second place.

Finally, Huayna Capac and Suryavarman in the east were pretty screwed by this setup; five or six cities was usually the most they could found and this wasn’t enough to compete very effectively. Neither had any good conquest options, and even in the rare cases where they were able to take some land and grow larger, they weren’t able to turn this into a proper snowball, leading to them generally being also-rans that offered some nice extra land for one of the western leaders to conquer down the road. Huayna was able to find decent success from riding Cathy’s coattails to a series of second place finishes, as well as snagging a single Cultural victory, while Sury’s second place in the real game was proven to be a lucky result, a high-water mark that he only matched a few times here.

Because of the smaller map and propensity towards snowballs, this ended up being a fairly quick game most of the time. Only three replays lasted as late as Turn 330, with even the peaceful victory conditions coming in early most of the time. A majority of replays had right about ten wars, although this could jump all over the place from game to game, going as low as 6 in one replay and as high as 23 in another. Still, the overall dynamic was one of fast, conflict-filled games where one AI would get the advantage and then snowball to victory. The term that came to mind for me was “deathmatch” and it was an especially refreshing change of pace after the slog that was the Wildcard game.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Justinian I of Byzantium
Wars declared: 47
Wars declared upon: 36
Survival percentage: 70%
Total finishes: 9 firsts, 1 second (47 points)
Total kills: 22
Overall score: 69 points

I think our top two leaders for this map were basically equivalent in overall strength; indeed, only three kill credits separate the two in the final tally. Justinian got the honor of “winning” yet another set of alternate histories, though, as he was the most likely to win outright and bagged slightly more kills, in addition to narrowly holding the best survival rate. There’s an argument to be made that he thus had the more impressive performance, as his starting position didn’t seem to be quite as good as Catherine’s; he started closer to the coast for less secure backlines, and Augustus settled directly towards him more than Cyrus did towards Cathy (due to Caesar’s first two preferred city sites both lying in the direction of Byzantium), resulting in Justinian’s expansion not being quite as consistent. He wasn’t helped at all by the consistent decision to send his starting settler northwest to the coast, completely wasting the usual holy city culture. Still, it was tough for him to get less than 8 cities or so even in a worst-case scenario, which left him still well ahead of most of the pack, and he was able to capitalize on this advantage as often as not. Justin was frequently the top economic leader on this map thanks to his size and balanced research preferences, and these two advantages went hand in hand to make him a very dangerous customer indeed. The map dynamics here were also perfect for cataphracts, which gave him a decisive edge in many a midgame war; there were multiple contests where he seemed to be in a tough spot, only to tech Guilds just in time and use his unique unit to permanently gain the edge over Catherine.

Justin’s successful games in this set tended to follow a pattern of strong starts followed by conquests at some point in the midgame to cement his lead. Every single one of his wins involved moving ahead through conquest at some point; he grabbed a few victories through peaceful conditions, but not through totally peaceful games. Again, Justin’s starts were pretty variable on this map, and when he started really well that was usually a good sign. One replay in particular saw him get an especially good landgrab and become a tech runaway even before taking any territory; it was more common, though, for the additional territory to play an important role in boosting him to the top of the heap. Justinian’s best conquest opportunity on this map was Augustus, who tended to be smaller and right on the border, although he fought with just about everybody at one point or another (although I think Cyrus notably less than the others). There were plenty of games where he marched east and annexed the Inca or Khmer empires for some easy gains – I think this was actually more common than expanding through Rome – and even a couple where he chose to fight Cathy and knocked her out at a relatively early date to establish himself as the winner. Justin had several avenues that he could take to improve his position and that can’t have done anything but help his performance here.

On the not-so-great side, though, Justinian had trouble advancing when he wasn’t at the top of the heap, taking only a single second place (which came from a tight finish with Augustus) and only ending with his empire largely intact on a couple more occassions. Most of the time, though, he was crippled or eliminated by the end of games he didn’t win; this was primarily because bad Justinian games were almost always good Cathy games, and she tended to go after him in these contests rather than letting him off the hook. I think this is largely a result of Cathy’s more backstabby personality; she had a chance of making friends with him when he was the stronger leader, letting her come in second place to him four times, but when she was the stronger one, she’d just knock him out instead regardless of their previous relations. As for why Justinian failed to win these games, there were some where he was dogpiled out of contention, but more often he simply failed to snowball ahead, watching somebody else do it instead and grow stronger than him until he couldn’t do anything about it. Despite his high aggression score (I’m honestly shocked to look and see that he has a higher aggression than Cathy), there were often stretches where Justinian was content to simply sit back and build, even when it wasn’t necessarily the best course of action. It did seem like he let his chance to win some more games slip away here, especially in some of the Cathy wins where he didn’t do anything, directly or indirectly, to counter her growth. Still, while this wasn’t an utterly dominant performance, it was a strong one and Justinian convincingly backed up his win from the real game. While this particular map isn’t very valuable for drawing broader conclusions since it was so stacked in his favor, it certainly doesn’t do anything to hurt his reputation as one of AI Survivor’s best.

Catherine of Russia
Wars declared: 65
Wars declared upon: 21
Survival percentage: 65%
Total finishes: 7 firsts, 6 seconds (47 points)
Total kills: 19
Overall score: 66 points

Cathy was right with Justinian at the top of the heap for this map, and was the most consistent leader in advancing to the Championship; while she did suffer seven eliminations, she scored a top two finish in all thirteen other games. In that respect, her real result, surviving but not advancing, was extremely unusual. For Cathy, the story was much the same as that of her opening round game: she had much more land to expand into than most of the field, so even when her own expansion was fairly slow (which was a fair amount of the time), she’d still have enough secure backlines to grow to one of the largest sizes and be locked in as one of the key players. Her land quality also seemed to be quite good, which let her grow her core cities to large sizes as well; it definitely seemed to be better than Justinian’s, for example. In Cathy’s successful games, she’d follow this up by pulling ahead in the midgame, either peacefully while everybody else stagnated or through conquest, until she’d reached a game-winning position. Any of the others was fair game for Cathy, and she contributed to the demise of all of them at various points during the replays. I was genuinely surprised to find that her aggression rating is below 7/10 and one of the lowest from this field, because she declared the most wars on this map by a large margin and very much played a warmonger’s game, taking five of her seven wins by Domination. I really don’t know how that works out – how her aggression can be that low yet her play such aggressive sets of games in both AHs from this season. It’s a mystery, at least for now.

As for the games where she didn’t win, most followed a similar pattern, Cathy still in a solid position, but failing to actually pull into the lead. I don’t think that she had problems with inaction in these games; she still tried to carve out a strong position for herself, just with less success. These games could end in one of two ways: half the time, she’d be able to stay out of trouble, not getting in a scuffle with the dominant leader and thus getting by in second place. This was a less feast-or-famine situation for her than her opener; Justinian and Cyrus’s relatively friendly presences helped her to sometimes avoid the same problems she’d had on that map. On the other hand, the other half of her non-winning games did see her eventually get in a fight with a stronger foe, usually Justinian or Augustus – a fight that could be started either by her or her opponent, but in any case would ultimately end with her elimination. In the end, this set suggested that Cathy had roughly equal odds for any of these three outcomes – a win, second place, or elimination – to take place, and she happened to end up with the worst of those outcomes in the real game (with the slight difference that she held on without being fully knocked out in the real thing). So while she was somewhat unlucky in that her failure to move on had a likelihood below 50%, this was hardly a ridiculous result. Overall, it was a strong performance by Cathy, who had an impressive Season 1, if one where she benefited from two very strong starting positions.

Huayna Capac of the Inca
Wars declared: 29
Wars declared upon: 42
Survival percentage: 45%
Total finishes: 1 first, 6 seconds (17 points)
Total kills: 5
Overall score: 22 points

Just like Justinian and Cathy were at a very similar level for this game, I don’t think there’s a whole lot separating the bottom four leaders, all of whom were generally also-rans who had little chance of winning the game. Huayna ended up scoring the best, however, as the most likely lesser leader to advance out of this match. The reason for most of his success was very simple: he was the farthest leader away from Cathy, and thus in the best position to ride her coattails to second place. All but one of Huayna’s second-place finishes came behind Catherine, and five of her seven wins had him as the runner-up; it was a natural pairing. (By contrast, no single leader came in second behind Justinian more than four times on this map; he didn’t have such a clear #2.) Now, mind, most of these second-place finishes weren’t especially impressive. I described it as riding Cathy’s coattails and that was what most of Huayna’s runner-up results felt like, with him only genuinely competitive for the win in two of them… and these runner-up games were Huayna’s GOOD ones! Far more often, he was simply an irrelevant also-ran on this map.

As simple as the reason for Huayna’s success was, the reason for his more frequent lack of success was perhaps even simpler: he didn’t have enough space. Huayna was badly cramped on this map even though he normally had early holy city culture working in his favor; five or six cities was the most he could lay down in his tight corner of the map in almost every game, and that wasn’t enough to accomplish much of anything. The military situation was hopeless for him; not only is Huayna perhaps the least militaristic of this field of leaders, but four of the other five leaders were reliably stronger than he was, so the best he could hope for was to vulture a couple of cities in a dogpile. Suryavarman was the only leader close to Huayna’s own level, and sometimes weaker, but Huayna very rarely capitalized on this even when he clearly could have conquered the Khmer and benefited as a result. He did pull off a solo conquest of Sury in a couple of games, but only a couple. Huayna had slightly better prospects on the economic front, and there were a few games in which nobody else pulled ahead and he was able to hold the tech lead for an extended period of time. However, this was the exception rather than the rule, as he’d usually be eclipsed by a rival who had many more cities, and even when he did have the tech lead, his small empire size prevented him from leveraging it. He couldn’t beat out a much larger nation to the spaceship, and his production was too low to win wars on his own even when he did have a military tech edge. He made a couple of game efforts, coming tantalizingly close to beating Cathy to space – notably, these were games where he had conquered Suryavarman – but he was never quite able to actually pull it off.

Things did line up for Huayna a single time, though, to secure his third place position in the scoring. In Game 19, he was able to form a religious coalition and lead in tech for roughly the first 175 turns of the game, gaining a whole bunch of holy cities in the process, and with the friendly environment he’d made, he was able to turn on the culture slider nice and early and win that way. Note, though, that he was otherwise well behind Cathy in this game, and came very close to disaster as Justinian nearly conquered his third city to end the bid. Overall, this was a very weak performance, especially given Huayna’s excellent track record. I think it really goes to show just how screwed the leaders given those eastern positions were: if even the top talent in the competition can barely scrape out a single win, you know that position is a dud.

Cyrus of Persia
Wars declared: 29
Wars declared upon: 54
Survival percentage: 45%
Total finishes: 1 first, 4 seconds (13 points)
Total kills: 7
Overall score: 20 points

Cyrus was a reasonably effective performer on this map, if one with clear weaknesses. He occupied one of the two central positions on this map, which left him with a chance, and was probably the overall strongest of the four eastern leaders – but he was still a far cry from the two westerners. Part of Cyrus’s strength in the east came from the fact that he was usually able to expand better than his rivals there; while he had the most variable patterns of expansion and sometimes ended up quite small, in other games he put the Imperalistic trait to good use and stuck in a bunch of cities to be the clear third-biggest nation on the map after the landgrab. Like everybody else on this map, Cyrus then fought a lot, and he was able to do so fairly effectively against the smaller nations on the map. His better games saw him taking land from Augustus, Huayna, and/or Sury to assume one of the game’s stronger positions, like what happened in the real game but without the later dogpile. His one win in particular saw him backstabbed by Sury during an early war with Augustus, only to turn the war around, conquer both, and take the lead, later consolidating it by conquering Justinian as well. I found Cyrus to be fairly impressive on the whole in these games, seemingly overperforming from a position that wasn’t that great.

However, he had his share of problems on this map which kept him from lasting success most of the time. The biggest issue was his central position; in this conflict-laden map, that was a real liability, as he was attacked more times than anybody else except for Augustus. Cyrus lost quite a few games here by getting generally dogpiled, or backstabbed while he was busy attacking somebody else; it wasn’t that common for him to be left alone to wrap up a conquest. It could even still be a curse in the lategame; multiple games ended with him in a second-place position and Suryavarman in third, only to get cut down in an endgame war by virtue of being closer to the winner, letting Sury backdoor second place instead. Cyrus was also the map’s weakest economic leader – he had the least emphasis on culture of anybody here, leading to his borders often being squeezed later in the game (especially by Cathy), and had no particular strength in teching. It’s telling that even in his only victory, it was Cathy who had the tech lead instead, with Cyrus prevailing only through sheer force of numbers. Speaking of Cathy, she was also a major thorn in Cyrus’s side, as they fought plenty of times and Cathy was simply stronger due to her better starting position. It was difficult for Cyrus to accomplish much against her at all, and she was responsible for plenty of his losses. Lastly, there were the games where he was simply ineffective: not settling enough, or stagnating in a poorly-chosen early war. In particular, he had a habit of attacking Augustus quite early in these games, and while that sometimes was helpful (early gains against Rome did fuel his win), there were other games where they simply stalemated and Cyrus dragged himself down.

Overall I think Cyrus did a solid job of managing a tough position; it was a reasonable success given that the deck was stacked against him. I feel like Cyrus is a clear second-string leader in the competition, a decent performer who lacks the economic skill to contend for the win most of the time, and while he didn’t perform quite up to that level here, I think the overall dynamic was still there.

Augustus Caesar of Rome
Wars declared: 22
Wars declared upon: 61
Survival percentage: 30%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 0 seconds (10 points)
Total kills: 5
Overall score: 15 points

I had expected Augustus to be total dead meat entering this set, as the only high peaceweight leader in a field of warmongers, but this was surprisingly not the case. Augustus wasn’t exactly popular here – he did in fact get invaded more than anybody else, thanks to the combination of peaceweight and his central position – but he also wasn’t dead on arrival and did have a decent chance of making some friends here. The hidden warmonger respect modifier surely helped here, and I’m guessing Justinian must have rolled high on his peaceweight when I loaded this map in Worldbuilder, because he would be Pleased towards Augustus at +0 relations! I saw Cyrus similarly Pleased towards Augustus at rather low relations, and this ability to make real friends saved Caesar’s hide on some occasions. Especially since Justinian was otherwise his most dangerous neighbor, being on the same side as him was a major advantage! So Augustus’s diplomatic position turned out to be just difficult, not hopeless.

In fact, not only was Augustus not completely screwed on this map, he was even able to win – twice! I was pretty flabbergasted when Game 3 ended in an Augustus Domination victory, and then he pulled it off again with a Spaceship win in Game 8. Both of these were legitimate successes, starting with Augustus moving into a strong position by partaking in an early dogpile; he then went on to snowball militarily in the first and develop an unstoppable tech lead in the second. These were impressive performances that showed that Augustus was as capable of competing as the rest of this field. He also nearly won a third game in the final replay, in position to win a space race before falling to a late 2v1, and none of the other eastern leaders came that close to winning even a second game, so I think that Augustus was legitimately the third-most likely leader to win on this map, as crazy as that sounds.

On the other hand, Augustus was considerably less impressive in the rest of the replays. In the seventeen games that he did not win or almost win, he scored only a single point from a random kill, and otherwise came up empty – he was the only leader out of this group to never come in second place, and tied for the fewest total kills. There were a number of different reasons that could cause him to perform poorly: for one, his expansion was inconsistent, but often not that great, especially considering that he’s Imperialistic. While he didn’t have as much space available as the western leaders, he did have a decent amount, but often only expanded to six or so cities; Cyrus thoroughly outdid him in this regard. That could lead to Augustus never really getting off the ground to become a strong leader. While Augustus was not entirely screwed by his peaceweight, he also was in a legitimately bad position, still one of the most likely targets for war due to his higher-than-the-others peaceweight and central position; there were many games where he was crippled or outright eliminated early due to early dogpiles, and he was the favorite for First to Die (although only by a little). Cyrus was especially likely to attack him early and keep him from building any momentum, and it wasn’t uncommon for Augustus to repeat his stunt from the real game and found his own religion to dig his own hole in that regard. Then there were some games where Augustus did have a stronger start and successfully conquered some territory in the midgame, only to do the peaceful builder thing and sit back without leveraging his position in any way, later getting surpassed and often conquered by others. That could have possibly worked if he had been able to tech out in front, but most of the time, he didn’t have the economic strength and so just floundered.

This game gave me mixed feelings on Augustus. On the one hand, I was highly impressed that he was able to win multiple times, and he did feel like a legitimate part of this lineup – he wasn’t just some joker stuck with a bunch of actual players, he was a real contender himself. On the other hand, a lot of his performances were thoroughly unimpressive and it was clear that his losses weren’t all due to circumstances beyond his control. I suppose that probably indicates what has been the case across later seasons of AI Survivor – he’s a middle-of-the-road leader, not great but not terrible. At any rate, he’s one of the better high peaceweight leaders to be stuck in a hostile map. He won’t necessarily be dead meat in the same way someone like Gandhi will.

Suryavarman II of the Khmer
Wars declared: 49
Wars declared upon: 27
Survival percentage: 25%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 3 seconds (6 points)
Total kills: 6
Overall score: 12 points

Sury was ineffective on this map; in addition to him not winning (or coming that close to winning) a single replay, his second-place finish from the real game was shown to be quite an unlikely result. Indeed, it’s quite impressively bad that despite having the second-lowest number of defensive wars in the set and a relatively sheltered corner position, Sury still had a worse survival rate than both Cyrus and Augustus who were stuck in the center! Sury’s problem was simple here: he was too cramped. Most of the time he only had enough space for 4-5 cities. Sometimes he could get a couple more, but not many, and he was always one of the game’s lesser powers. Ultimately, that proved to be an especially bad situation for Suryavarman; I believe at this point that he really relies on getting a strong start and snowballing to be an effective competitor, and otherwise is not very good at the game. In this situation where he had no leverage to start a snowball, that left him perpetually at the “not very good” level, and he struggled to deliver accordingly.

Like other warmongers, Sury did try to fight his way out of his position, but for whatever reason (perhaps because there was nobody particularly better to pick on), he wasn’t able to do so with the same success as Genghis or Toku in their opening round AHs. Certainly a big part of the problem was that he had no good targets: he was roughly even with Huayna in his good games, and definitively below the level of everybody else. Thus his only hope was to vulture some cities in a dogpile, and that was both an unreliable method and one that still left other leaders stronger than him. Even dogpiles weren’t too reliable for him; he frequently would backstab Cyrus while the Persian king was off fighting somewhere else, only for Cyrus to turn the tables and start taking Khmer cities anyway – that’s how weak Sury was here. There were only two or three games in this set where Suryavarman was able to take a signficant amount of cities and get close to the lead… and those games all ended with Justinian or Cyrus beating up on him anyway and knocking him right back down. He was totally unable to get an edge on this map.

Sury never came close to winning, and he didn’t even get any particularly deserving second-place finishes either. All three of his runner-up finishes came when he’d been in third place late in the game, and the winner took out the actual second-strongest leader, leaving only Sury to fill the void. He at least contributed to the ouster of that rival once, but the other two times, he didn’t even accomplish that – he just hid in his corner while Justinian brutalized Cyrus, and moved on that way. Overall, then, it was a very weak performance from a weak position, and between his lackluster results in Game 1’s AHs and this result here, he was very lucky to have made it into the first championship. We’ll see how he does in those alternate histories soon enough.

[Image: Chart-3.png]

Conclusion

For the most part, the alternate histories showed that the real game was a pretty typical outcome for this map. Justinian and Augustus were the most likely choices for winner and first to die – although each had one or more close competitors for that spot – and more often than not, a quick exit for his neighbor was the first step in a win for Justin. The Domination finish, game length, and number of wars all were also absolutely typical. The only oddity of this game was Suryavarman’s second-place finish, which, while not the most rare result, was definitely the high-water mark for the Khmer leader and less likely than several different alternatives. Catherine failing to move on was also a relatively uncommon result, though as I mentioned in her section, really she just rolled the worst of the three roughly-even odds outcomes that she had available. One other thing that was corroborated was the idea that this was a particularly strong field of leaders; there were no true duds here and I’d guess that each leader in this field would fall about in the middle of the effectiveness scale at worst. That led to an exciting set of games, even with an imbalanced map. Next up, the return of the highest-scoring leader in the opening round, Mansa Musa! With another nice sheltered position, can he run the table on the AHs for his playoff game as well?

Eauxps I. Fourgott

Playoff Two

Coming into this set, I expected a straightforward group of games that would confirm that the real result had been typical, and that Mansa and Liz would clean up this map.

Then I started the set off with three straight games where the low peaceweights dominated, and thought that the real result had been a major outlier.

Then I played through the entire set, by the end of which it was clear that the real answer lay between those two extremes.

In the end, there were three different types of games that this map could play host to. The most common type, and the one seen in the real game, was the Mansa cultural game. Mansa turned out to be a total beast at culture on this map, usually assembling an engine that could hand him a victory by Turn 300, so in a sense this map boiled down to whether the others could beat the clock or not – and in a bunch of games, they couldn’t. Whoever was stronger or weaker in each particular iteration, the important thing was that they were not bringing the game to a conclusion or doing anything about Mansa until he had hit terminal velocity and couldn’t be stopped from winning. (There were no near misses here, no games where Mansa just barely pulled it off or got a city captured right before the end. He either was way ahead or not that close, with one sort-of exception that we’ll get to later.) This was largely due to perhaps the most significant overall dynamic of this map: a failure to conquer effectively. Mao and Alexander ended the set with decent if not great kill totals, and the rest couldn’t manage more than a smattering. This map barely managed two eliminations per game despite having plenty of conflict, and there were a lot of inconclusive wars or partial conquests that were left uncompleted. This group just lacked the killer instinct – Alex was the only particularly warmongery leader on the map, and his willingness to call off one war to pursue a different target halted the progress of quite a few conquests on its own. Thus in many games, it just took too long for the first leader to be eliminated and others to get strong, which gave Mansa in his out-of-the-way corner all the time he needed to pull ahead. There were even two separate games in this set where NOBODY died, both of which resulted in wins for Mansa. So the more or less “default” outcome turned out to be the one where Mansa ended the game by Turn 300; it took one or more other leaders doing something to knock him out or outpace him to get a different result. Within that constraint there were a lot of different ways the games could go, with all five other leaders finishing second behind Mansa at least once, but his cultural menace remained a constant.

When Mansa wasn’t winning, it was usually because the low peaceweights dominated the map. This was the other major way that the game could go, with the three peaceniks getting picked off one after the other until it was just Mao, Qin, and Alex fighting it out for the win. These guys had one major advantage over the high peaceweights: they were capable of working together. Mansa, Liz, and Lincoln pretty much never came to each other’s aid, always just content to sit back and do their own thing. The low peaceweights certainly did this some of the time as well, and they could also get in fights with each other (thanks especially to Alex being among their number), but there were also some games where they did cooperate to kill off Lincoln and Elizabeth fast enough that Mansa was still vulnerable, after which he’d inevitably be next. Now, there were also games where they worked together but still weren’t able to pull it off, taking so long that Mansa won anyway, but this could at least sometimes work out, leaving them as the last three leaders on the map and free to take the top two spots in some order; Mao was the strongest overall of the three and the most likely to win in this scenario, but any of the three could do it. Note though that this outcome required the high peaceweights to be gotten completely out of the way: of the seven games won by a low peaceweight leader, Liz and Lincoln died in every single one, while Mansa survived by the skin of his teeth a single time as the game ended before he could be finished off. If the high peaceweights were surviving, that paved the way for Mansa to win, so any good result for the low peaceweights required their elimination. For the most part, the rule for this map was that the low peaceweights had to eliminate someone before Turn 200 to win. All seven of their victories saw this take place, while all but a couple of the Mansa victories saw all three peaceniks survive until that point.

Finally, there was a third small set of these games: the Elizabeth victories. These go in a category of their own because each of her three wins had at least some weirdness to it; there didn’t seem to be a true pattern to her success, and instead she got lucky a few times. One of these victories was otherwise a standard Mansa win, but cut short unexpectedly when she won via the UN. The other two both relied on AP dogpiles that went in her favor and paved the way for her to be more dominant than usual. They are, essentially, the anomalies in an otherwise binary map.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Mansa Musa of Mali
Wars declared: 26
Wars declared upon: 19
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 10 firsts, 2 seconds (54 points)
Total kills: 3
Overall score: 57 points

Mansa once again graded out as the top leader on the map, but it was a far less impressive performance than his opening round game. There he dominated in all facets, frequently going out there and scoring lategame conquests as the uncontested strongest leader on the map. Here he tended to simply hide away in his corner and do his econ thing while fighting as little as possible, even in the lategame. On his opening map, Mansa was usually well in front on the scoreboard in the games that he won, but here there was at least one leader with a bigger, overall stronger empire than his in more than half of his winning games – economy and culture were the only things he was doing better. Basically, this was a dream scenario for Mansa to just sit back and tech and culture, out of the way and with the even higher peaceweight Lincoln and Liz to serve as meat shields. He only fought in 45 total wars in these games, while all three low peaceweights fought in at least 90 – he really was playing a completely different game from them!

But as we might expect from him, Mansa did do an excellent job at playing the cultural and economic game. This field was especially a great one for him to go nuts on the cultural stuff: he founded one of the opening religions in every single game, and went on to found at least five of them almost every time, stacking up a bunch of Holy Cities and potential cultural buildings. In fact, due to the lack of religious focus from the rest of this field, in 40% of replays, Mansa was able to land the fabled Hydra – founding all three of the game’s early religions! I don’t think I’ve seen that once on any other map but he did it eight separate times here, and in four of those games he went on to found all seven religions himself. As a result, he invariably had a strong cultural engine and would flip on the slider when he made it to the lategame, winning shortly thereafter. These were fast wins, too: all ten of Mansa’s wins were by culture, and only a single one went beyond Turn 300 – his real effort was unusually slow in that regard. I even saw two games where he won by culture on Turn 253 and Turn 251 – absolutely ridiculous. In addition to culture, Mansa was a monster in tech as usual. He pulled ahead from an early date in most games and never looked back; even Elizabeth couldn’t keep up with him most of the time, sometimes despite having more cities, and the others were nowhere close. This helped seal some of Mansa’s wins, as he’d be fielding infantry just as his first rivals were bringing rifles onto the scene, and have tanks to guarantee his safety by the time he turned on the slider; if he was left alone too long, his military tech was simply too good to be stopped. His usual path was to tech up to Mass Media and build all of those cultural wonders, then get to Plastics at a nice early date and turn on the slider there. There were some variations, but this path worked well as it both maximized his culture output and guaranteed military safety. If he was left in peace long enough to reach that point, there was little that could be done to stop him.

However, Mansa wasn’t very impressive in any other regard. His expansion varied in these games and sometimes was really quite good; those games tended to be his easier wins. Other times, though, he lagged, with his tech and cultural attempt noticeably slowed down as a result. He also was virtually useless on the battlefield, with a mere three kills and probably less than a war declared per game of his own volition (he was brought into a bunch of AP dogpiles). Mansa was entirely uninterested in joining the fight against the low peaceweights and would simply sit back and watch Lincoln and Liz deal with them alone; sometimes this worked as they bought him enough time to make the culture victory a reality, but at other times his isolation cost him dearly as he found Greek or Chinese armies marching at his gates before he was able to pull ahead, with lethal results. Little as he cared for his allies, he wasn’t able to stand alone if they were both stamped out. (The allies were an excellent shield, though; Mansa was only attacked three times in the thirteen games where Liz and/or Lincoln survived. Every single other attack came from the games where they both died and the low peaceweights dominated.) Even on the occassions where Mansa did get up and attack somebody, it rarely worked that well; he usually could get no further than a stalemate, unable to advance his position through conquest. There was a string of three games in the middle where he took his advanced military and conquered some land in the lategame, once he was already far enough ahead, and these games provided all three of his kills. Aside from those, though, he was irrelevant as a military leader.

In the end, Mansa was quite boom-or-bust on this map, as he almost always would either win or get eliminated. The only exceptions were the one low peaceweight game where he was on death’s door when saved by the bell, and the three Elizabeth wins: two were games where she narrowly beat out his Cultural attempt, and the last was the sole true irrelevant-but-not-dying game, where Mansa was stuck on six cities the entire game and about 70 turns behind Liz’s cultural bid. Overall, this was obviously a decent performance given Mansa won half the games, but we saw definite weaknesses, in the form of his military irrelevance and refusal to be a team player. It was a good reminder that even AI Survivor’s top ranked leader (as of this writing) is far from infallible – but he did very much deserve his first championship appearance.

Mao Zedong of China
Wars declared: 56
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 80%
Total finishes: 4 firsts, 5 seconds (30 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 46 points

Mao was perhaps the strongest overall leader on the map; he wasn’t able to match Mansa’s insane culture and tech output, but he was often strong in terms of production/food/power, was the most likely leader to win when the low peaceweights came out on top, the second-most likely overall to advance, scored the most kills, and died the least. While the starting positions on this map were reasonably balanced, I think Mao’s might have been the best overall, with good backlines and high quality land. He was almost always able to expand to one of the bigger city counts, and when he developed his land properly could do quite well economically to become one of the top leaders in many games. He further was often able to better his position by taking at least some cities from a rival, usually Lincoln (whom he fought in virtually every game) and sometimes from Alex as well. While in most cases this still wasn’t enough to be competitive with Mansa and Liz in tech, Mao was usually the foremost of their rivals by the midgame. Even in the games where he didn’t fare so well, Mao often did an excellent job of defending and was a tough nut to crack. He battled his way back into a top-two position in one game despite losing multiple core cities, and overall was very difficult to finish off; aside from one unusual result where he suffered an early AP dogpile, he only was eliminated three times in this set, each time in the lategame.

Mao’s winning games relied on him conquering some extra territory off of Lincoln early on. This was by no means a guarantee of ultimate success, but in most cases, when he was able to do this and then get some time to build up, he’d be the strongest nation on the map; in three games, this led to him easily being in position to win after the high peaceweights had been dispatched. (His fourth win came from an otherwise second-place position when he was able to sneak out a Diplomatic victory.) On the other hand, the other half of the time that the low peaceweights came out on top, Qin or Alex was able to keep up with or eclipse his own growth; while Mao was solid here, he wasn’t consistently on top. Still, he only missed the top two in one of the low peaceweight games, and came in second place in more Mansa games than either Alex or Qin. Mao’s non-winning games ran the whole gauntlet, from games where he lost ground early on and was a weakling the entire game, to games where he was leading for a long time until hitting an unfortunate war declaration or two, to games in the middle where he was strong but not exceptionally so.

Mao’s less-warmongery personality for a low peaceweight was also on display in these games. He was more willing than most to take the time to build up his economy and did a better job in that regard than either of his compatriots. On the other hand, his non-military research preferences left him vulnerable to skipping Rifling for long periods of time, which resulted in his elimination at least once. Despite being less aggressive than the likes of Alex, though, Mao was still perfectly willing to get his hands dirty when he needed to, declaring the second-most wars on the map. He was at least partially responsible for the majority of Mansa’s eliminations; he wasn’t totally ignoring the Malinese threat and made a reasonable effort to deal with it, although the distance between them made it hard to accomplish anything unless Mao had already grown stronger by other means. Overall, this was another solid but unspectacular performance by the chairman, and a nice reversal after he’d been so disappointing in the set from Game 8. Mao is no top-tier leader but he’s more capable than a lot of others.

Alexander of Greece
Wars declared: 69
Wars declared upon: 23
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 1 first, 5 seconds (15 points)
Total kills: 14
Overall score: 29 points

The next three leaders were all roughly even in overall effectiveness, with Alex ending up with the best score, thanks to being the only leader besides Mao who racked up a respectable kill total. Alex performed as you would expect from him, going on the warpath early and often and pretty much never stopping. There were only four games in the entire set where he declared less than three wars on his own, and he was attacked less than once a game on average (AP shenanigans aside) in large part because he was usually the one to start any potential conflict! On this map, this strategy turned out to be decently if not resoundingly successful, and Alex ended up being the most interesting (and often the most important) leader on the map, often swinging the results for other leaders based on whom he chose to attack at what times. The real result of Alex attacking Mao first turned out to not be the most likely outcome, as instead he usually starting by taking a swing at Lincoln; this was a major reason for Lincoln’s rough performance, and there were good odds that this would turn out to be the first step to a successful low peaceweight game. Alex also went across the map to attack Liz a decent number of times, and again this often played a crucial part in the purging of the peaceniks. He didn’t fight Mansa much in general since they were on opposite ends of the map, but once Lincoln and Liz were out of the picture, Alex could and did do his part to make sure that Mansa went as well, contributing to as many of his eliminations as Mao did despite his distance. On the flip side, though, Alex was not fully committed to the cause of Team Evil, and was quite willing to attack Mao and Qin as well even when there were peaceniks still on the board. He had varying success against them at different times, but of course this was not a recipe for the low peaceweights as a unit to succeed, and in particular any game where he went after them first ended in a Mansa victory. An Alex attack at the wrong time could spell doom for any leader, and he could flip on a dime; there were multiple games where he started a 2v1 war on one side, only to sign peace and attack his supposed ally. He was the single biggest swing player on the map and had a major impact as a result.

As far as bringing him personal success, though, this wasn’t a very consistent performance. Alex was able to win a single game, coming out on top of a scuffle with Mao once the peaceniks had been disposed of, but aside from that performance, he never ended up at the top of the heap, somebody else always doing better. Alex’s remote position made it a bit difficult for him to gain enough conquests to take the actual lead, and his teching was horrid, by far the worst of any leader in this field. He sometimes made up for it with numbers and determination, or military beelines, or his rivals’ own failures to research military tech, but sometimes he was simply left in a position where he couldn’t win any more battles. Alex’s early settling was also inconsistent; he had a fairly large peninsula and could sometimes settle a strong core as a result, but other times he went off to war too early, leaving himself smaller than he could have been with empty land still around him. Alex’s performances thus ended up all over the spectrum, from games where he never quite got going to games where he conquered the better part of one or more rivals, proving himself a legitimate player and finishing in second place as a result. One noteworthy aspect of this performance, though, was his surprisingly low elimination rate, as he advanced in as many games as he was completely knocked out in. This was a result of his sheltered position at the end of the continent; nobody had very easy access to him except for Mao, and the closest rival in that regard, Lincoln, was never left alone for long enough to deal with Alex. As a result, except for an unusual Elizabeth Domination game, Alex wouldn’t die unless Mao came after him, with or without assistance. (On the flip side, there were also multiple games where Alex swooped in and knocked out Mao.) Thus his First to Die result in the real game was quite unlucky, with him only suffering this fate two additional times in the alternate histories.

Overall, I’d describe this performance as “surprisingly competitive”. Once again, I didn’t expect a lot from Alex given his starting position, and once again he exceeded my expectations, although not to the same degree as in Game 3. It just goes to show that you can never count out a warmonger with a strong start – while that’s much more rare in the modern era with the free starting techs removed, it still happens from time to time, and even if that warmonger’s chances of winning the game aren’t terribly high, they can still prove to be extremely important to the game’s outcome. In the end, Alex got a somewhat lucky result to reach the playoffs in Season 1, which was then counterbalanced and then some as he placed on the bottom of his spectrum of possibilities in the playoffs. Still, there were far less impressive leaders this season, and if nothing else Alex was certainly entertaining to watch in these replays.

Elizabeth of England
Wars declared: 24
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 60%
Total finishes: 3 firsts, 4 seconds (23 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 27 points

Elizabeth played a completely different set of games from Alexander, yet in the end was just about as successful (albeit with way fewer kill points). Liz avoided fighting as much as possible, with less than one non-AP war declaration per game on average, and instead sought to tech and build up her civ. But while she was often fairly good at this, it usually wasn’t enough to deal with the competition she had to face. On one side, she had three low peaceweights who wanted nothing more than to knock her out of the game, and were able to do so a decent amount of the time. On the other side, she had Mansa, who was almost invariably even better at building and teching than she was and would win by culture long before she could approach any victory condition herself. Only when the stars aligned, in a manner that couldn’t consistently be replicated, was she able to come out victorious.

As has been mentioned before, in the low peaceweight games, Liz would inevitably be ganged up on and eliminated at some point. While this was largely a simple case of the weight of numbers working against her, Liz’s own fighting was not terribly impressive in these games, either. Even in one-on-one fights, she would fairly often lose cities, even though she had more to start with or was fighting an Alexander who had insanely long supply lines, and she very rarely took significant territory from her rivals on her own. She also was rather spotty in terms of researching Rifling in a timely manner; it didn’t matter too much on this map, thanks to her strong overall research and her rivals’ propensity to similarly ignore the tech, but there were certainly some games here where she was overwhelmed shortly before unlocking the redcoats that had the potential to turn the tide. In any event, Liz’s elimination was a prerequisite to the low peaceweights emerging from this map victorious, so naturally she didn’t prosper at all in those games; not that she deserved to, as she was always happy to leave Lincoln out to dry and never made any effort to stop her natural enemies from getting the upper hand. On the other hand, she almost always at least made it out of the Mansa games alive, only getting eliminated in a single one of his ten victories. The two fought some of the time (Mansa seemed to be roughly as likely to attack her as he was to attack a lower peaceweight), but were generally ineffective at attacking each other; only in the games where the low peaceweights dogpiled Liz was this an important point. When Mansa was doing well, he would just sit back and do his culture thing, allowing Liz to play out her own game. She saw varying success in these games, but ultimately was the most likely leader to finish second to Mansa, gaining that result four times in games where the low peaceweights were entirely unsuccessful and her plan of peaceful development paid off, sometimes supplemented by a few wartime gains. Her actual result was thus reasonable, if not overwhelmingly likely.

As I mentioned earlier, all three of Elizabeth’s wins came from unusual circumstances: in one she won a Diplomatic victory from a third-place position; in another she managed to out-culture a smaller-than-normal Mansa, with the biggest swing in her favor coming when Qin was AP’d and she culturally assimilated much of the spoils; and in the third and most impressive, she gained the most from an early AP dogpile of Mao, then went on to wipe out Qin and Alex as well, barely hitting Domination before Mansa would have won yet another Cultural victory. Since none of these wins came from ordinary game patterns, though, I have to conclude that Liz’s actual chances of winning the game were minimal. The setup of this map meant that Mansa was almost assuredly going to win if he wasn’t killed first, and Liz was in the way of his getting killed, so she was left without much hope in that regard. Overall this was a bit of a disappointing result after her dominant opening round performance, but it could have gone much worse. She wasn’t as ‘worthy’ of making the championship from this point of view as Justinian and Mansa were, but she was also no Suryavarman, and we’ve had far more troll-tastic Championship leaders over the years.

Qin Shi Huang of China
Wars declared: 49
Wars declared upon: 41
Survival rate: 65%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 3 seconds (16 points)
Total kills: 7
Overall score: 23 points

Qin was the final of the three “mid” leaders on this map, and the least interesting as well as the least successful. For the most part, there wasn’t a lot in the way of specific patterns to his games here. His expansion was variable, often fairly good but sometimes overly slow, resulting in him being weaker. He fought with Elizabeth a lot, with variable results, and also was attacked by Alex with some frequency; on the other hand, he didn’t fight with Lincoln all that much, as they each tended to be busy with their rivals on the opposite sides. Qin tended to do an average job of building his economy and an average job of fighting; in both cases not terrible, but not particularly good. He was well outpaced economically by Mansa and Liz, and wasn’t able to consistently see the same success on the battlefield as Mao and Alex. As a result, he ended up being the master of none, leaving him with a bunch of thoroughly mediocre performances. A couple of times, he was strong enough overall to finish in second place, but it was far more common for him to simply fall short with a 0-point performance, with or without an actual elimination.

Qin’s central starting position ended up as a mixed bag in these games. On the one hand, it offered strong potential for settling a lot of land, as well as putting him in the best position to easily profit from the demise of any of the three high peaceweights; indeed, this is how he was able to pull ahead in both of his wins, low peaceweight success stories where Qin got a strong portion of the spoils to pull in front. (He was in a winning position in a third game as well, to be fair, only to be pre-empted by a UN vote that declared Mao the winner instead.) On the other hand, it also allowed anyone and everyone to come after him; all five other leaders played a part in multiple of his seven eliminations. I feel like I should be able to note more about Qin here, but as it is I can’t think of anything else interesting to write down. Practically everything about his performance was unremarkably average. He was essentially the tagalong kid to the low peaceweights; he did legitimately help with their successes, but next to the imposing presence of Mao and entertaining antics of Alex, he clearly fell short. Not a set of games that reflected particularly well on him in any way.

Lincoln of America
Wars declared: 16
Wars declared upon: 63
Survival rate: 35%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 1 second (2 points)
Total kills: 0
Overall score: 2 points

Lincoln was the runt of this map; not only was he the only leader without a chance of winning, he was also the only leader who didn’t survive in more than half of the games! His position on this map was unenviable in every way. While the starting land itself wasn’t terrible, I do think it was the weakest overall position on the map, and more to the point, he was stuck among a bunch of leaders who would hate his guts. Qin often left him alone to focus on Elizabeth, but that still left Lincoln with Alex and Mao to deal with, and I don’t think there was a single game where he wasn’t in a fight with one or both of them by Turn 100. Lincoln thus ended up as the sacrificial lamb for Mansa: if he could hold out well against his attackers, it was usually enough to ensure that Mansa (or Liz) would eventually emerge victorious, while if he fell quickly, a low peaceweight win became far more likely. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Mansa and Liz didn’t seem very appreciative of his role, and pretty much never came to his aid; he was stuck dealing with his attackers by himself, except for the occassions where Alex and Mao went at each other’s throats instead. Even in the games where his wars didn’t equal an early exit, they still left Lincoln without a hope of victory; he was almost never able to improve his position, leaving him too weak to climb back up to a strong position militarily and far, far behind the game leaders in tech. Look at it this way: every other leader on this map had at least two games where they were never attacked at all. This happened to Mansa ten times! But not only did Lincoln not have any of those games, he didn’t have a single game where he was attacked less than twice. It was impossible to properly prosper under these conditions.

Even on the rare occassions when Lincoln started to get the upper hand over a foe, he didn’t seem able to convert it into actual points. Often this was simply because somebody else would take a swing at him before he was able to finish what he was doing, but eventually this turned into an absurd Charlie Brown-esque spiral where the points were constantly swept away from him at the last moment. For example, in Game 2, Lincoln had taken multiple cities from Mao and was in the process of conquering Alex, only to have his progress halted by a Qin backstab before Mao used the AP to force his cities back over. Game 12 saw him prosper off an early dogpile of Qin, only to later be rolled over by a technologically advanced Mansa. In Game 20, he got the last hit on Qin’s core in a dogpile… only for Qin to have a random ex-barb city elsewhere that allowed Alex to take the kill credit instead. In Game 17, Lincoln entirely knocked out Mao, only to see Alex declare war at the last second and snipe the kill credit, and later was locked out of a top-two position, despite being in second place in score, as the third-place Liz won via the UN (granted, he did bring that one on himself by voting for her). Only a single time was Lincoln able to score, in an odd no-deaths Game 15 where everybody else stagnated and his pattern of peaceful development thus carried him to a second-place finish. Overall, though, while Lincoln was certainly somewhat unlucky in these replays, he also just had a really bad setup and was almost always a non-contender, through no real fault of his own. It turned out that his performance in the real game was near the top of the spectrum of possible outcomes.

Conclusion

In the end, the real Playoff Game 2 was pretty typical. While Mao and Alex were just as likely as Liz to take the runner-up spot on the whole, the specific combination of Mansa in first place and Liz in second was indeed the most likely Championship ticket, and Mansa winning an early Cultural victory was absolutely the expected result. (The weird part was it taking all the way to Turn 320 in the real game.) The most unusual aspect of the real game was Alexander’s early exit, an ignominious fate for a leader who was able to score in half of the replays, and this in turn resulted in the real game having less wars than average. Lincoln surviving to the end was also fairly unusual, though by no means an unreasonable result. The central question of this map was if the low peaceweights could work together to take out the peaceniks in time, and Alex’s early attack on Mao in the real game assured that the answer would be “no”. We are now two for two as far as the actual winner matching the expected winner in these playoff games; will Zara dominate again in Playoff three and make it a clean sweep? We’ll find out soon enough!

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