Civ 4 has a rarely used option to enable permanent alliances in games. If the option is on, it allows you to enter a permanent alliance with another civ after your research Fascism. Permanent alliance means that you pool together your research and have coordinated foreign policy.
I was thinking recently that allowing this option in MP games can have some beneficial effects.
1) It would add some intrigue and complexity to games which have one dominant leader as other civs would be able to challenge the leader by banding together.
2) It would give underdogs something to play for: even if you can't win a game outright, you still have an option to win as a member of a winning alliance.
3) Diplomacy, especially cultivation of long-term relationships, becomes a bit more important.
4) Relative value of solo-victory and victory as an alliance member is entirely subjective and unknown to other players. It can generate more varied and unpredictable individual strategies as you do not know for sure, whether your opponents would try to win by themselves or go into an alliance.
Some drawbacks:
1) Permanent alliances can lead to sudden and disappointing endings of otherwise competitive games. Imagine, for a example, a scenario where we have three leaders and two of them go into an alliance with each other.
2) We probably will have to allow full diplo between alliance members as otherwise playing as an alliance would be incredibly awkward. I can see how some players might dislike it.
3) I do not remember whether there is an option to leave a permanent alliance. There might be drawbacks both if there is one and if there is not.
Thoughts? Does anyone want to play a game with permanent alliances?

In retrospect, having a table of contents for the individual writeups is a good idea. Much easier to sift around the chatter that way!

Game 1
Game 2
Game 3
Game 4
Game 5
Game 6
Game 7
Game 8
Wildcard
Playoff 1
Playoff 2

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Yes, you read that right. I'm seriously posting alternate histories from a series of games that's now ten years old.

Why? I think I initially started looking into this and running these games with the idea of applying what we now know about analyzing the AI Survivor maps to the less carefully-balanced early maps, and seeing how well I could predict their trends. After a while of running them, though, that kind of fell by the wayside, as I found that I just really enjoy running and writing up the alternate histories, seeing the story of each map gradually unfold, and so started doing it more for its own sake.

As for why I'm posting them - well, I enjoy reading any alternate histories and seeing the deeper story behind each map, so now I want to give anybody else who feels similarly the chance to do so for these games. I've been waffling for a while on whether to actually post what I've written or not, but now in the pre-Season 8 hype seems like a great time to do it, so I'm taking the plunge.

(Why here instead of having Sullla post them on his site? He told me that he doesn't think that AHs for a season this old are valuable enough to be worth the considerable effort to convert into HTML, but that I can go ahead and post them myself.)

Making these has not been a particularly fast process. It took me a couple of years to complete the first one, and after that I've done others at a rate that would extrapolate out to 3-4 games per year. But I have completed AHs for half the opening round, and so I will post all of those over the next month - planning on one per week. I'm also very much planning to finish out the entire season eventually (working on Game 5 right now), and will plan to share future games as I complete them.

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So, first up is Game 1, the very first installment of AI Survivor. The most notable feature of the real game was a dominant performance by current Pool One leader Suryavarman. If you want to read the original writeup, it's here: https://sullla.com/Civ4/survivor1.html

And here's a screenshot I took of the original map (had to provide a link since I don't know how to embed pictures):
https://ibb.co/FwXLf72

Note that unlike Myth and Amicalola's AHs of early seasons, I did not change any settings from the original game for these - the AP is still in effect, as are the free Deity starting techs. This does mean that results from these should be taken with more of a grain of salt when used to consider how leaders might perform in the future, but on the other hand means that these are a more accurate reflections of the "true" dynamics of the original games. I think it's worth it.

Before posting the entire results, I'm going to copy Myth and Amicalola by providing a teaser. Here's the final results chart with the six leaders' names removed:
https://ibb.co/MCbNZzK

I've leave this for a few days and folks can have fun trying to guess which leader goes with which statline. We can find out how right everybody was when the full results are posted (I'm thinking Thursday for that).

Until then!

I will need a sub for the aforementioned games for May 8 and May 9.

For pb 74 all you really need to do is log in and end turn. I will put detailed instructions together for pb75 in my thread soon ish

Civ4 AI Survivor Season Eight: The Palau Arch-AI-Pelago



Introduction

After anothe annual break, the calendar has turned to 2024 and it's time to launch another season of Civ4 AI Survivor! This will be the eighth time in all that we're embarked on this venture. Back in Season One, I was still figuring out the format and running everything via forums posts at Realms Beyond. It was a bit of a rough process even if it was still fun. For Season Two, I switched over to Livestreaming the matches in real time, and that made things infinintely more fun for everyone with the viewers getting to comment on the action in real time. It's not an exaggeration to say that the running commentary on the Livestream was often much more entertaining than whatever the AI leaders happened to be doing at the moment. Season Three saw more refinements to the process, with maps selected ahead of time and blindly assigned to the leaders for purposes of fairness, and online straw polls/predictions recorded before the matches and included in a series of written previews. Season Four initiated the adoption of the correct starting techs for each civilization along with the implementation of a second AI-controlled observer civ so that we could watch the voting in the Apostolic Palace without fear of a religious victory taking place. Season Five ditched the Apostolic Palace and saw the largest turnout yet in terms of the community. Aided no doubt by the COVID-19 pandemic that left many people working from home, Season Five of AI Survivor exploded in popularity to reach an average of 250 contest submissions and hundreds of viewers tuning into the Livestream. At its height, I was averaging 150+ viewers across the length of a seven hour stream and topping 250 viewers at its peak. Season Six added a fantasy sports contest with auction bidding of the AI leaders running in parallel with the normal scoring competition for each individual game. By the time that Season Seven rolled around, the format for AI Survivor was pretty well established and I didn't see the need to do much more in terms of changes. Let's hope that we can keep things going strong with an entirely new competition here for Season Seven.



The basic tournament structure will remain the same from past seasons. The 52 AI leaders in Civilization 4 get randomly sorted into eight opening round games, half of them with 6 leaders and half of them with 7 leaders. Two leaders will advance to the playoff round from each match, the winning leader and the non-winner with the highest in-game score. AIs who survive the match but do not advance will get one final opportunity to make the playoffs in a Wildcard game played after the opening round matches. The Wildcard game has had as many as a dozen leaders and as few as six leaders in past years and it can get a little bit weird as a result. (The Wildcard game is also the only one that we run with Raging Barbarians turned on, and yes, we have seen an AI leader lose their capital city to the barbs!) This creates our field of 18 leaders sorted into three playoff games of 6 AIs apiece. Finally, we feed the top two leaders from each playoff game, the winner and the highest scoring non-winner, into a championship game and crown an overall winner of the competition.

For Season Four, we tried out a seeding system akin to what the World Cup uses when drawing teams into its groups. This proved to be a big success and we'll be continuing it for Season Eight. The top eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 1, and the next eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 2. Each of the opening round games will have one leader drawn from Pool 1 and one leader drawn from Pool 2. The remaining 36 AI leaders in Civ4 will be unseeded and can be randomly drawn into any opening round game. Here's a list of which leaders fall into which category:




AI leader rankings are based on our customized scoring system of past performances; click here for a link to the full ranking as of the end of Season Seven. AI leaders score 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. While this is a purely arbitrary system, it seems to provide an effective metric for evaluating prior seasons of the competition. The idea behind the seeding system is to stop the top AI leaders from hitting one another in an opening round "group of death" match while still preserving the random draw element that makes this event so much fun. Choosing to pick pools of leaders ranked 1-8 and 9-16 is of course another arbitrary decision but there's some logic to having one top leader and another secondary leader in each of the eight opening round games. Ties for seeding purposes are broken by whichever leader had the best previous season, which is how Suryavarman and Hannibal slipped into the final spots for Pool 1 and Pool 2 over their peers with the same total score.

The game settings will continue over from the last Civ4 AI Survivor competition. We use Deity AIs to speed up the overall pace of the game and reach victory results sooner. The map script is the default Pangaea, designed to keep all of the AI leaders in close contact with one another. Prior to the Season Three competition, I went ahead and tested out some games with Continents or Archipelago setups, and they just didn't work that well. The Civ4 AI doesn't really know how to run naval invasions, and there were lots of wars that just did nothing because the AIs couldn't reach one another. They need to be on the same continent from what I've found, and Pangaea works well enough for that. We use Normal game speed and Standard sized maps, with the one exception of dropping the sea level to "Low" setting for the games with 7 AIs to create a little more room for the extra competitior.

For the game options, the biggest effect on the gameplay is turning off Tech Trading. I'll repeat here what I wrote in the setup phase from past years: "When tech trading is left on, the AIs tend to stay bunched together with no one ever getting too far ahead or falling too far behind. With everyone fielding the same units, it becomes difficult for the AIs to attack one another successfully, and generally makes for less interesting games. But when tech trading gets switched off, all of the AIs have to sink or swim based on their own research efforts. This spreads them out much more widely on the tech tree, and once the laggards fall a full generation behind in military tech, they tend to get swallowed up by their more advanced rivals." With tech trading removed, we frequently see some AIs fall an entire era or more behind in technology, which prevents would-be conquerers from ignoring their economies and trading their way to tech parity. A balanced approach tends to work the best in these games, with alternating periods of warring to expand followed by peaceful consolidation. Woe to those who fall behind in military tech in this competition - it nearly always ends badly. We've also increasingly noticed the different research preferences of the various AI leaders in recent years, with the warmongers overly obsessing on military techs and some of the peacenik AIs refusing to pick up Rifling even as they're dying to foreign invaders. Turning on tech trading would remove this important aspect of the competition and make the overall setup a lot less interesting.

Otherwise, we turn off Vassal States to prevent the AIs from surrendering to one another. If they can vassal when losing wars, hardly any of the AIs ever get eliminated, and that's boring. We want to see bloodthirsty games! No escape, no mercy. We also turn off Events because they're kind of a Single Player thing, and the AI doesn't understand what they do. Similarly, we turn off the goody huts to prevent unwanted prizes from getting handed out to the AIs. We've been moving towards a less random and more standardized setup for the past few years and this seemed like an obvious next step. No more cases of someone getting lucky and popping a critical tech out of a hut on the first turn of the game - now they need to research their own stuff like everyone else. We also use Aggressive AI to spice things up and increase the number of wars. The big thing that Aggressive AI does is remove a flag that will stop the AIs from declaring certain wars. Normally they will not attack someone who has more than double their military power. Turning on Aggressive AI removes that check in their coding logic. This leads to occasionally suicidal war declarations based on diplomatic relations, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to see!

The biggest change for Season Five was the removal of the Apostolic Palace (quite literally; I deleted the wonder from the XML files on my local computer). The Apostolic Palace had been the most controversial aspect of prior seasons from a gameplay perspective, with the AI civ that controls the Apostolic Palace often using it to shut down literally every invasion launched against them, or forcing everyone in the game to declare war on some hapless target. The argument in favor of the AP was that it introduces a wild and unpredictable element of chaos into each game which could be a lot of fun to watch. The argument against the AP was that a single wonder shouldn't have such a massively disproportionate effect on the rest of the gameplay, and in particular, it shouldn't become a magical shield that could shut down all aggression for hundreds of turns on end. I decided to run a poll question asking the community whether they wanted to see the inclusion of the Apostolic Palace for Season Five and the community voted decisively to remove it by a greater than 2:1 margin. The general consensus following the end of the season was that the gameplay had improved noticeably by leaving it out of the competition. We will not be bringing it back anytime soon.

New Changes for Civ4 AI Survivor Season Eight

The short answer to this headline is "not much". Since we've run seven full seasons in the past, we already have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work for this format, and further changes to the AI Survivor setup should be minimal moving forward. We're maintaining the climate setting back at the default "Temperate" option after experimenting with some of the other climates in past years. This should create more balanced maps with fewer huge patches of desert or ice or jungle. We'll also continue to use the "Choose Religions" options so that we can avoid getting Buddhism and Hinduism as the dominant religions in every game.

I've also learned over the years about the best ways to run the AI Survivor event from an organizational standpoint. Following the pattern that began in Season Six, I'm planning to hold the draw for all of the opening round games at the same time, on Livestream several weeks before the first match begins (currently planned for 10 May 2024 at the usual noon Livestream time). I'll pick out all of the maps for the games ahead of time and then we'll fill in the leaders from the initial draw. This is largely being done to help save time during the season; by drawing the leaders and prepping the maps before the season starts, I won't have quite as much work to do on a week-by-week basis. I'll also be able to post the previews for all eight opening round games immediately following the draw to again save time and let the community get an early look at the upcoming matchups. Aside from helping to cut down on some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into AI Survivor, doing the early draw also allows us to implement one of the more popular community features:



Fantasy Civ4 AI Survivor

A number of people previously asked about instituting some kind of fantasy feature in past seasons and we were finally able to test it out for the first time in Season Six before becoming a recurring feature in Season Seven. We'll follow the same setup as before: the leader draw will take place several weeks before the first match of the season. I will then post all of the opening round previews so that everyone has time to study the upcoming games. One week before the start of the season, I plan to hold an auction draft on Livestream with a group of other community members as we bid on which leaders we want to fill out our fantasy AI Survivor teams. I think that this would work with as few as four or five other individuals but my preference would be to get eight volunteers for a league of eight fantasy teams. I entered the fantasy contest (and won it!) in Season Six but my preference remains to have eight participants, as we did for Season Seven, so that I can remain in an impartial moderator role when conducting the auction draft. Amicalola was the winner of Season Seven and has already indicated that he intends to return to defend his title! We'll run through the AI leaders and see who can put the best team together for the rest of the season.

If you're interested in taking part in the auction draft, here's a bit more information:

* Scoring will be based on our standard AI Survivor points system: 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. The further that the leaders on your team make it, the more chances they'll have to score points.
* Unlike the normal AI Survivor points system, players will also score 2 points for having a "First to Die" leader on their team. This should make the bidding much more interesting!
* There are no "positions" to worry about or a limit to the number of AI leaders that can fit on a team. Whether to have a small handful of favorites or a large group of underdogs is a choice that fantasy participants will have to make.
* To take part in the auction draft, participants will need to be available for 2-3 hours starting around noon (EST) on Friday, 24 May 2023. (It would be a good idea to check one of those world clocks to identify the correct local time.) You will also need to join the Sullla Discord channel and a microphone is strongly preferred for voice communication.
* This is open to anyone interested who can be there for the live draft though I will give first priority to those who haven't had a chance to participate in past years. I will feel free to give preference to longtime AI Survivor community members though; for example, noted superfan LinkMarioSamus always has a spot if he wants it.
* Current signups: Amicalola, seven more spots TBD

To get a better feel for what this looks like, here's the video recording for the auction draft that took place before the beginning of Season Seven. I also put together a lengthy written analysis looking back at the fantasy results for Season Seven after the full competition was over. I'll keep track of the fantasy teams and we'll see who winds up having the best season once the games start! We will also still be running our normal picking contest each week; see the details below for those who are unfamiliar with the process. The fantasy draft is more intended for the serious fans of AI Survivor (which we absolutely do have!) as opposed to the picking contest which requires minimal time investment.

Watching and Following Season Eight

Games will be Livestreamed on my Twitch channel linked below, with most games starting at noon local time (east coast of North America) on Fridays. I will archive the recordings on Twitch and post them on YouTube for those who have trouble accessing the Twitch videos. I'm also soliciting help once again in putting together the written reports on the games that took place, in the same fashion that we've done for the games from past seasons. Several folks submitted written reports for Season Seven (special shoutout to Euxaps I. Forgott who did most of these writeups) and it was a blast getting to see different spins on how the games played out. It will be a huge help if the community can continue to help shoulder the burden of doing the written reports and allow me to concentrate on streaming and administering the games. Thanks so much for your help!

For those who are new to our event, we run a picking contest for each game that serves as the biggest driver of interest in AI Survivor. We ask contest entrants to pick:

* The winning AI leader
* The second place AI leader
* The "First to Die" AI leader
* The victory type of the winner
* The victory date of the winner
* The total number of wars in the game

The closer that the pick gets to the correct answers, the more points that it scores. We track scores for both individual games and the overall competition so there's always a chance to win an individual round even for those who missed earlier matches. The picking contest system will continue to use a Google Forms submission, which was a massive timesaver in recent seasons as compared to originally compiling forum posts. The current bracket will always be visible online, and I'll do my best to update it here on my website, on my Twitch page, on the Sullla Discord channel, and at Realms Beyond. We'll have a forum discussion thread there, of course, which I'll link on this page once the competition has started. Most of the discussion has migrated over time to the Discord though which has its own dedicated channel for AI Survivor (and which remained highly active even during the long drought between seasons). Scoring remains the same from past years, with points for first place, second place, first to die, victory date/type, and total number of wars. With points for the top two AI spots along with victory date and number of wars, we had scoring drama right up to the end of most every game, even when the winner had long since been determined. Check out the links below for more information on the scoring contest and how to submit your entries.

With all that said, here's a big list of the relevant links that follows below. Enjoy the new season of AI Survivor!

Main Season Eight Webpage

Sullla Twitch Page

Sullla Discord Channel

Civ4 AI Survivor Season Eight: Leader Previews

AI Reference Guide from CivFanatics

Complete AI Survivor Archives

Next Game: Opening Round Game One

Schedule: Season Eight Leader Draw, 10 May 2024 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Eight Fantasy Auction Draft, 24 May 2024 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Eight Game One, Starts 31 May 2024 at Noon EST

It's back again - get the popcorn ready. 

Does anyone know the details? He used to have a good MOO1 site but it's only on the archives now.

we can play on quick speed 

Hello charming and clever civ stranger,

From June 1 through June 10, I'm going to be unable to play Sid Meier's Civilization 4. During that time, how would you like to dip your toes into a pitboss game? I'd be available intermittently online, but you'd get to step into the fun of mid-game turns without all that tedious early game micromanagement. I can't predict that far ahead what the state of the game will be, but PB75 has a bunch of good players who will say nice things about you in their thread.

Come on in. The water's fine.

In the attempt to launch PB77, we ran into a big issue - namely Ramk hasn't been heard from in awhile. I reached out to Zulan, and he told me he hasn't been able to get in touch with him either. I'm really hoping everything is OK and Ramk is simply having an excellent internet-free vacation, and he'll soon return to make this thread irrelevant. However, the brief conversation from the PB77 signup thread I think sums it up quickly.

(April 29th, 2024, 09:48)scooter Wrote: As for actual Civ, I'm like a day or two away from opening a CivGeneral discussion on some sort of Plan B for Pitboss. Because as of right now, we have no way to play any new Pitboss games. Seems like a fairly important issue to begin sorting out. But I'm hesitant to jump the gun.

(April 29th, 2024, 10:07)Krill Wrote: I know this is a tech thread for a game, so I am hesitent to jump into a discussion on a more general point, but as a forum we realistically do want to have a back up plan for PB games. That alone is worth discussing so it's not unwise to open the general discussion in the general forum, even if Ramk turns up this evening well tanned and rested.

Howdy, i know ive done this before, but ive finally decided to try it again now that i know alot of the issues before.

To those that dont remember/werent part of it its a better version of the Earth 18 map from base bts/civ 4. The only changes ill be making to the map is connecting Japan to the mainland (otherwise Japan does NOTHING of note) and i think something in the America's.


Simplified: Chose a civ, and a leader for that civ. They start in/close to their historical starting spot. Can be either first come/first serve, or find everyone that wants to do it and then run a snake style pick. NOTE only 1 leader of each civ. 

IF i get at least 10 folks to sign up, ill donate 5$ via paypal to whomever's civ wins, and 10$ to a charity/ect if the AI wins.

No barbs/events/other normal stuff. AGGRESSIVE AI turned on.
Deity.

Open to other stuff.

Signups:
1. Mjmd- Mansa Musa
2. El grillo- Shaka
3. IjubIjana- Stalin
4. Scooter- Mao
5. Qqqqqq- Monty
6. Amica- Roosevelt
7. Tarkeel- Pacal
8. haphazard1- Ragnar
9. Miguelito- Gandhi
10. Civac2- Cyrus
11. Refsteel- Lizzy
12. Commodore- HC
13. Gavagai- Julius
14. Pindi- Kublai
15. Williams482- Hannibal
16. Yuri- Toku
17. Dreylin- Mehmed
18. Magic Science- Izzy
19. Donovan- Sury
20. Thrawn- Louis.
21.

I do like to use Klackons when playing Impossible (or Hardest in RotP). But I recently started experimenting with a new approach. I used to just try to build out my factories ASAP, to the appropriate population level. I usually build for 70% population, so 140 factories on the home world. And I'll do that on my second world as well, although sometimes I forget and it ends up with max factories.

But, I realized that on turn 1 Klackons generate more Research than Psilons. Of course the Pslion advantage grows as they build out factories. So, I instead switched to starting research right away with Klackons basically splitting my production between research and factories after I build scouts, and this has worked pretty well. It gives a good jump on research, especially for Construction and Planetology as needed. You can adjust Propulsion as needed depending on when you'll actually need the range.