Well, that was a textbook demonstration of the conquest cascade.
1) Early attack on a rival who has started poorly and lacks strategic resources for stronger units (and in this case, lacked Archery even)
2) Beeline catapults
3) Keep the armies marching until someone stops you or you win
Alex stinks as an economic leader, but when you have 3x the land of anyone else that hardly matters.
So, 9 points in a single game. How many leaders have fewer for five seasons of AI Survivor?
Did Season 4 have this many games where whether AIs had early access to copper or not made a big difference? All I know is that that never used to be a concern, but we're getting tons of results (esp. this season) determined by a leader not having early metal and getting attacked earlier. Pretty sure that it's at least partially because of the drop in starting techs (so it takes longer to research Bronze/Iron Working), but I wonder if there's any other factors going on (map generation?).
In any case, that is the definition of a tour de force. Entertaining even though the results were absolutely not desirable for me.
I'm seeing people saying that Justinian got unlucky, but really I don't think Alex's shenanigans affected his game much if at all. It got Peter two more cities and that's it - I feel like Peter had a significant edge of Justin despite that and would've crippled him regardless. A well-played game by Peter who would be looking like a decent shot to win in most games.
As far as the upcoming game goes - wow is that a mess to predict. The leaders who seem to on the whole have the best positions to me are both missing easy copper! No clue how that one will go.
Maybe the cold climate setting has changed the copper distribution, compared to previous seasons? I am not sure of all the effects that cold climate has.
The lack of the usual deity AI starting techs definitely has a big impact. It provides a longer window where AIs will not have the techs to hook up metals, especially for AIs that chase early religion. And in Zara's case it meant no Archery as well, which really hurt him.
I think there's just way less copper in general because of the huge tundra areas. I'm going off memory but I'm pretty sure some of the maps don't have enough easy copper for 2 entire players? For example the upcoming game I remember there's at least two copper resources in the southern inhospitable ice where no cities will be till end-game.
(July 11th, 2020, 21:17)Fluffball Wrote: I think there's just way less copper in general because of the huge tundra areas. I'm going off memory but I'm pretty sure some of the maps don't have enough easy copper for 2 entire players? For example the upcoming game I remember there's at least two copper resources in the southern inhospitable ice where no cities will be till end-game.
I think that's it, indeed.
I actually like the cold setting for the tournament, it seems to be the best fit so far.
There's the whole copper situation that means early effective wars are actually possible (cuts both ways, though, since AIs won't launch wars without strategic ressources : bordering a warmonger lacking metals is safer, initially).
But mainly, it means that with less viable land, the AIs are more clustered at the start. Which leads to proximity wars instead of silly across-the-map pointless offensives targetting their "worst enemy". Have we had any of those this year, actually ? On top of my head, I can't recall any.
And games seem to be more likely to end with a domination win than in previous seasons where 80% of the games ended in next-turning until a ship reached Proxima Centauri.
You might find these informations from the XML interesting, when it comes to the whole copper situation.
(June 2nd, 2020, 00:32)Charriu Wrote: I've converted all the data in the BonusInfo.XML into a nice spreadsheet. For anybody trying to make a very natural map you can take this as a reference.
Mixed feelings on the lack of copper this season; on one hand, it's nice to see ultra-aggressive leaders have a chance to shine, and it's probably exactly what the developers had in mind when designing them- an impetus to human players to settle for strategic resources and research techs with little-to-no economic value. It's also a small boost to leaders like Sitting Bull, not that it helped him this year. At the same time, it's an enormous element of luck which barely relates to the competence of any given competitor.
Hmm, after a season and a half with this change active, I'm increasingly starting to feel like turning off the free Deity starting techs has introduced a lot of variance into the competition. We keep seeing civs fail to research Mysticism/The Wheel/crucial early military techs and then ending up severely hamstrung due in large part to that one decision, and I can think of a number of games, both this season and last season, where this played a pretty major role in the outcome.
I'm not sure what to think about that; on the one hand, clearly this is the AI's own fault for being dumb and I'm not super sympathetic to compensating them for their dumbness, but, on the other, it seems really difficult to predict which AIs will do this in a given game, and the impact is large enough that it might be significantly reducing the skill cap of the picking contest. I wonder if our sample size is approaching the point where we can start to discern patterns with respect to which AIs tend to do this? Stalin's habitual aversion to Mysticism seems to be a reasonable enough case study; his championship game last year was torpedoed by this, and I wonder if the community as a whole (myself included) might be overrating him a bit due to this issue.
I totally agree that this was the change with the biggest impact in recent seasons. I'd argue this is the same reason for Mansas performance last year.
How many leaders have fewer for five seasons of AI Survivor? 
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