March Madness: Civ4 AI Edition

[TheSunIsDark]

Got the Russian leaders the wrong way round, didn't know Stalin would get screwed with all the war declarations. 13 points, though.

[Sullla]

With Game Seven now in the books, let's look at some of the more interesting predictions from the field.

Winner: Catherine
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Gandhi
Number of Leaders Surviving: 3
Victory Type and Victory Date: Space Race, T288

For Mother Russia!

As much as I'd love Gandhi to advance, his starting position is not in a very good spot and there is a good chance he will found his own religion and piss off either Saladin or Charlemange, in addition to starting next to Stalin who is Aggressive and will not like him much. Stalin will gobble up Gandhi, perhaps with help by the religious leaders, then move on to Victoria later, while Charlie and Saladin hate each other and never get off the ground. Catherine's expansionistic starting location will give her an excellent start, followed by swallowing up Charlie mid game, and then Catherine will beat Stalin in a close Space Race due to superior tech speed.

Kuro was one of five players to pick the winner, runner up, and first to die correctly. This was also the first prediction to be submitted, so I guess it set a successful pattern for the rest of the field. We had a lot of high scores this time around.

Winner: Stalin
2nd place: Catherine
First dead: Gandhi
Number of leaders surviving: 3
Victory: Domination t290

Stalin kills Gandhi and Victoria, Catherine expands wildly, they work together to kill the Protective civs and Stalin wins by Domination.

This was pretty much what went down, aside from getting the Russian leaders backwards. We had a lot of that in this game. Why couldn't Stalin have spawned as the red/Moscow Russian civ and Catherine as the orange/St. Petersburg one?

Winner: Catherine
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Ghandi
Number of Leaders Surviving: 3
Victory Type and Victory Date: Domination Turn 303

Ghandi ist just way too close to Stalin and also edged in by Victoria and Saladin. He has no chance against those as close borders will make things diffcult from the beginning. Meanwhile Catherine as almost a quarter of the continet all to herself and will claim most of it due to her traits. The midgame will see the evil Russian leaders going against Saladin and Victoria, while Charlemagne will hold his own for a while. In the end he will also succumb to the Russian bear on Turn 303!

Nailed it. Except that the Russians were even more bloodthirsty than expected!

Winner: Victoria
Runner up Catherine (Highest score)
First to Die: Saladin
Survivors: 3 (Vicki, Stalin and Cathy)
Victory: Space t316

I'm going a bit off the regular expectations, saying that Gandhi manage to butter up someone else to the degree that he's not the first to die (although much more likely the second one to do so) ... Catherine is going to end up mere % from Domination, but stupidly sits out warring with someone for the last bits of land, while Victoria manages to get a spaceship off

This didn't happen, but it was one of the very few predictions that didn't have Catherine winning, and that made it interesting to read.

Winner: Cathy
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Charlemagne
Number of Leaders Surviving: 2
Victory Type: Domination
Victory Date: 338

Some thoughts on random.orgs picks. I was actually leaning either Cathy/Sally or Cathy/Unkie Joe myself so thats not a bad pick. The RNG rolled Stalin twice for first to die before I got Carolus Magnus (random pick of one to 6 same number three times is 1 in 216 so not unrealistic), and the site seems to think it'll be two left standing with Cathy getting enough spoils to fall over the line.

This was startlingly accurate from a series of random number picks! It missed only Charlemagne as first to die, which would have made this entry our most accurate entry ever. Maybe the cyborgs are sharpening their knives and getting ready to take over after all...

We all are going to look really stupid if Gandhi wins this and Catherine is first out!

Never underestimate Gandhi's ability to get himself killed, with his 10/10 peace weight and has 0/10 unit emphasis.

I'll put the results table in the next post as usual.

[Sullla]

Here's our big picture for Game Seven:



* We had 39 entries this time, and we've been holding steady around 40 so far. Thanks to thestick and RiverBabble for joining in this time.

* Catherine was the overwhelming favorite to win, with about 2/3 of the entries picking her to take the group. I guess the geographic draw and leader traits were too attractive to pass up. Stalin was the next most popular, and I'm uncertain how many of those picks were genuine, and how many were accidental Catherine picks that came out wrong. I tried my best there, ultimately I had to go with what people wrote if they didn't clarify things. We had 1 pick for Saladin, 1 pick for Charlemagne, and 0 picks for poor Gandhi.

* There was no clear consensus for the runner up spot; Victoria was the most popular pick (14/39). This category seemed to be much harder to get.

* Gandhi was CRUSHINGLY popular as the first to die, picked by 85% of our ballots. And you were all correct to do so, as it turns out. Apparently he really was doomed. I didn't even think about this until after the game had begun, I simply tried to get roughly fair starting positions, and it turned out Gandhi was in the dead center of the continent. This is the highest percentage of picks in any category we've done so far in the competition.

* Unsurprisingly, we only had three people pick that 2 leaders would survive. Every single other entry had 3 or 4 to survive, which weren't bad picks given the pattern of past games. Not this time, said Cathy.

* Domination (16) narrowly edged Spaceship (14) as a victory pick. Most of the rest were for Diplomatic victory through the UN; Parkin was the only one to pick Culture. Will we ever get a Cultural win in this competition? The AI definitely will go for culture sometimes.

* Most victory date picks undershot the mark, understandable given the last game where 100% of the picks overshot the early date in Game Six. This time the tech pace was significantly slower thanks to all the warring. Brian Shanahan's (random) Turn 338 pick was the only one earlier than the actual T332 ending. There were a lot of picks in the 15-30 turns too early range.

As far as our individuals went:

- Brian Shanahan's random ballot tops the game with an impressive 21 points. He landed both leaders advancing to the playoffs, 2 surviving leaders, Domination as victory condition, and victory date to within six turns. It's a shame that those winning RNG seeds were used on a Civ4 AI competition and not on picking lottery numbers.

- We had five people correctly pick all three leaders in the three major categories. Congrats to Ceiliazul, Twinkletoes, Ituralde, Kuro, and Dhalphir. Picking the leaders is the primary goal of the competition, and getting all three in the same game is tough to do.

- Azza, Jabah, and TheSunIsDark also picked the correct three leaders, only with the two Russians reversed. That still made for a very good score, with 5 points for the backwards Russians. We also had a bunch of people get two out of the three leaders, more than I can list here.

- Becko, Gavagai, and Brian Shanahan were the only ones who predicted the bloodbath with 2 leaders surviving. Now, will anyone be brave enough to pick that in a game with 7 leaders instead of 6 leaders?

- Brian Shanahan was, again, the closest to the victory date. Six turns away. Jkaen was the furthest away, 120 turns too early with a Turn 212 submission. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be Turn 312 there, but I had to go with what was written. Plus it makes for a more interesting submission.

- Katon remains in first place overall, now by a single point over Hesmyrr. Ceiliazul and Dantski are breathing down their necks a couple points behind, followed by a large group in the 60s. Scoring was very high this round, average score was roughly 12 or 13 points, probably the best we've ever had. I don't expect it to be quite so good for the next game, there's no obvious "Kill Me" sitting duck in that one.

Tomorrow we'll post the writeups for the final group of leaders along with the starting map. Thanks again for your participation.

[RiverBabble]

My first reaction to the results could be boiled down to three words:

Good GRIEF, Catherine!!

Sheesh, that was the craziest round yet. I was totally expecting Catherine to pound Stalin into the ground before tromping toward the others. Very entertaining report to read, too - So! Many! WARS! (And to think, this WASN'T the game with the three insane trigger-happy aggressors.)

[Dp101]

If it wouldn't be too much trouble, could we have a video with commentary for each match in the next stage of the competition?

[antisocialmunky]

It would be cool but what is there to add?

I guess you could stream your 350 presses of the 'enter' key and put some ads on it. Your tubeYou fanbase is getting quite antsy.

[Sullla]

I've thought about it, but as antisocialmunky says, these wouldn't make for very good videos or livestreams. My time is spent either scrolling around the map and occasionally hitting enter, or pulling up Notepad in another window to write down my thoughts on what's going on. Civ4 has never been a game that translates easily to videos, and these AI games are probably even worse than someone playing normally. A livestream would be equally problematic, with a dozen people asking to see a dozen parts of the map or different charts all at once, not that I have time to sit down and do a marathon streaming session anyway.

Trust me, written reports really are the best way to do these games. If someone wants to set up their own video version of AI competition after this is over, by all means be my guest.

[antisocialmunky]

Can you release the initial saves for the next round? It would be interesting to monte carlo atleast one game to see how deterministic the AIs are.

[Ceiliazul]

If Sulla wants to appease the youtube subscribers, theres always the Babylon AW game to finish...

After this time consuming project is done, of course!

[Ituralde]

If only Catherine had hit the Domination threshold earlier, before finishing off Victoria and my results would have been perfect.

Not too disappointed in how they turned out in the end, either way and I have to agree that this was one crazy game. Saladin and Victoria both looked like having a good shot at the Runner-Up slot, but Mother Russia showed them all!