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Ha, I never thought I'd be getting comments to play the games slower. I kind of thought it would be the other way around.  Don't worry though, we'll space out the rest a bit since it won't be the weekend and I won't have as much time for this. I did want to get the first game done so that people would have an idea of what this looks like in practice. I hope that wasn't a problem.
I was thinking of drawing the matchups one at a time, in order to concentrate on each game as it happened and leave some mystery about who would end up in each one. However, I can just as easily draw them all at once and put a full bracket together if that's what people would prefer. Give me some more feedback on what you'd like to see.
And of course, there's still plenty of time to discuss the first game, which did not go at all as I was expecting.
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I'll bite on one; once he made his deep Medicine beeline, did Sury at least make hospitals?
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This is so great! Thanks for hosting Sulla. I'll admit that I've tried doing this a few times as well - it was a pet obsession of mine to try and play out the Earth 18 civs map with AIs. Of course that basically ended with a win to China every time because of their land, but with BetterAI mod and some tweaking of the starts I got some interesting results. But it turned out that the Americans could never beat the Aztecs in the New World even with double gems and copper placed at their capital.
I'm not surprised at the result of Game 1, because in my experience Creative civs tend to do the best. The AI is so bad at war that the advantage of grabbing more land area in the initial settling phase snowballs far more than it would with humans. I would expect to see Zara and Catherine do very well also, and I might bet on Catherine to win the grand prize.
Shaka, Hannibal and the Persians also do very well in my games, I've noticed.
I would vote to keep the brackets secret until the game is launched.
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Clean win for Sury, from what might be the worst starting position, both locally (resources in the vicinity) and geopolitically (neighbouring 4 of the 5 others) ...
Who's in Game 2?
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This is excellent; thanks for doing this, Sullla!
It should probably surprise no one that Sury won game 1 given the field he was facing, but the surprise finish with Peter literally voting himself out of contention was hilarious. I also love the way AIs marching halfway across the map through one (or more!) rivals' territory to lay claim to cities crushed by two (or more!) other civs' culture was pretty much the norm.
A couple of ideas, in case they're useful:
- If you want to give people lots of time to place "bets" but don't want to post full brackets yet, you can just announce the next set of competitors shortly after each game report is posted (instead of waiting until you're ready to start the next game).
- Here's a way to reshape the "brackets" to give all the AIs a more-nearly equal chance in round one while only adding one more game to the schedule: Play all the first-round games with six AI players each (so the first one you've already done still counts, but you'd use only six players for game 2 instead of seven). After eight games, you'll have four AIs left over for a ninth, in which they'll face each other plus two "Wild Cards" chosen from among the losers of the first eight games. The winner and runner-up from each of the nine first-round games will then move on to the "Playoff" round and the tournament will go on as planned. (This removes the disparity between leaders who have to face five opponents and those who have to face six, and would mean the "Wild Cards" don't automatically get into the playoff round; they just get a second chance. That said, the disparity can just be chalked up, like land and opponents, to the luck of the draw.)
And finally, a bold but risky prediction: Unless Sullla specifically acts to prevent it, at least one game will feature two leaders with the same civ. (Even if careful measures are taken, there's a small chance that a pair like Gandhi and Asoka or Lizzy and Vicky could both make it to the finals!)
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Toku had the worst start imo. Initial city spots had lots of brown land and he had desert to north and tundra to west. Ramses started ear jungle area which is really bad for AI as they don't take jungle into account properly and their porr worker management is especially bad with jungle. Also starts with lots of forests in capitol bfc were found bad for ais in the civfanatics tournament, Brennus had a start like that. It's true that Sury was in the middle of everything which could be bad. But he had good land to expand to, the floodplain region and Ramses as a peaceful leader got all the hatred early on which meant that Sury while in a central position had little foreign problem (also the religion helped him).
I think Peter had a good starting position, he had a safe corner position and ok land. Perhaps going for early wonders was a bad deal. At the T54 screenie he had only 4 cities, while Sury was the onyl one with 6. Surys good expansion and then his war success lead to most cities and from there he could snowball to victory as Sulla told he could do in the leader descriptions.
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Ha! Nice report! I would not have thought that this would be so entertaining.  I had checked "the original concept" at CFC quickly and I have to say that No Technology Trading and no Vassal States make this (at least for me) much more interesting.
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This was really fun  . Looking forward to the rest. Peter voting himself out of the next round was especially hilarious. Thanks for the write-up!
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(March 16th, 2014, 15:27)Sullla Wrote: Alright, Game One is in the books. Time to see how everyone's predictions worked out. Link to the game writeup is here, results are spoilered below if you'd rather cut right to the chase. http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ4/survivor1.html
These maps are random, by the way. I actually didn't want to do a perfectly balanced mirror setup. This is intended more as a fun storytelling experiment than a controlled laboratory test. I don't know how you could do a perfectly fair setup unless the whole system was a series of duel, done over a large number of repetitions, and that's not the goal here. For me at least, the randomness of starting positions and local resources is a good chunk of the fun.
Re the wild card situation if Peter did anything worthwhile with his Pyramids build then I'd consider him, if he just sat around twiddling his thumbs then nah, not good enough.
An alternative suggestion would be to take all the third place leaders, and run them in a winner takes all reprechage event to decide the best losers. It might be more interesting.
Travelling on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
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