March Madness: Civ4 AI Edition

[Sullla]

It's tournament time on the sports calendar here in the US! Time to fill out your brackets and start rooting intently for teams that you've never heard about before. But what if we could create a bracket for Civ4, and pit the AIs against one another in a battle for supremacy? I can't be the only one who would enjoy watching the madness that results from a reality TV style throwdown.



Borrowing shamelessly from a group at CivFanatics, I present Civ4's version of AI Survivor. All 52 leaders facing off against one another in a series of matches to advance through the bracket to one final championship game. Which AI will emerge on top as the strongest in the game?

I've done a lengthier introduction on my website, and I'm working on putting together the first game. I hope that at least some of you agree that this will be entertaining to watch. At the very least, it will give everyone something to read while the Pitboss 18 tech team works out the remaining bugs.

[Bobchillingworth]

Awesome idea


All my bitcoins on Shaka, please. That dude always did well back when I played SP.

[TheHumanHydra]

Really? In all my games, he ended up as technologically backward as the Zulu (unfortunately) were in real life: he literally had impis to my redcoats once.

Anyway, yeah, really cool idea; I'll be watching.

[pindicator]

Where do we fill out our brackets?

[dtay]

Willem! Willem! Willem!




http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

[Dhalphir]

are you going to stream or show video of the matches?

[T-hawk]

Is it 1-on-1 duels or bigger games?

1-on-1 favors the warmongers. Guys like Shaka lose in bigger games, he can stay close enough in tech to overrun one enemy max, but that wins a duel.

I'd bet on Ragnar in a tournament bracket of duels, he's good at building lots of units while also holding his economy together.

If it's 4-8 player games, the favorite has to be a good economic leader, but not one of the ones that can fizzle out into religious and missionary stupidity like Mansa or Isabella, or builds too few units like Willem. Probably Pacal.

[Ichabod]

I put my bet on Gilgamesh.

Very nice idea.

[Dhalphir]

It would have to be duels, otherwise it's not really a tournament.

[Bobchillingworth]

Duels make a lot of sense, but it would take substantial effort to set dozens of them up, plus they heavily favor the most aggressive AI (in terms of personality, not necessarily the trait). I believe Sulla's proposal involves about a dozen games with several AI each.