March Madness: Civ4 AI Edition

[T-hawk]

I wasn't playing along with all the predictions, but I did nail one from the beginning:

but not one of the ones that can fizzle out into religious and missionary stupidity like Mansa or Isabella

Mansa's good, except in the 25% or so of games where he does that, so it was a matter of time before he took himself out of the running in one of these games. Sullla, did you see what Mansa was doing at that time? I'd bet it was the Temple of Artemis, which the religious AIs love to unlock and build way too early, wasting that enormous amount of hammers for that really mild payoff.

[antisocialmunky]

Hm, I basically world builders a map for this game. Usually when Mansa went missionary mode he tried to culture victory and he managed to pull it off a few times.

I can't say I'm surprised, my tallies were 5/4 Mansa/Justin wins. I think the Justin AI is really good at expanding in the early game and unlike Isabella, he's not as aggressive as his paper numbers would suggest. So you have three factors working in his advantage:

1) Focuses on Expansion Early
2) Doesn't seem to get dragged into mid-game wars and instead improves his econ
3) Usually fights a late game war at a time of his choosing.

I wonder if also his tendency to amass Cataphracts but rarely fight in the mid-game helps as well? In one game, he murdered Mansa Musa with several Wagners worth of gunships.

[Brian Shanahan]

Thanks for doing this Sullla, it was very entertaining.

I wonder how things would shape out if we replayed all the games?

[BRickAstley]

Or for that matter, played every game on one of the more fair circle maps like the last game was on.

[Old Harry]

I'd like to see how they did on noble without all the production bonuses and extra start techs, just because that would seem more like one of our MP games. Although you'd need to press enter a whole lot more times to get to the end...

[Sullla]

Final results from our picking contest. First, starting with the championship game:

- We had only two picks for our winner Justinian, only Nakor and Twinkletoes went with the Byzantine leader. Mansa Musa was the favorite, followed by Zara. All six leaders were picked by at least one person, although Suleiman had only one backer (pindicator).

- Runner Up had six correct picks for Zara. This category always seemed to be split, and it was no different here. Mansa Musa and Suryavarman were the most popular choices.

- Suleiman was correctly picked as the first to die by almost half of the field. Elizabeth, Mansa Musa, and Justinian were evenly split on submissions after the Ottoman leader.

- Spaceship was our most popular victory type, followed by Domination, and those seemed like good picks given the way that this game played out. We did have one pick for Culture!

- The Turn 296 victory date was earlier than usual, which meant that nearly all of the predictions were about 10-20 turns too late. The three picks for Turn 300 were the closest.

As far as individual results go, we had a photo finish at the top position. Ceiliazul had a rough game while Katon submitted our second-highest score of the round. The result was a 1 point difference in score, with Ceiliazul taking the pole spot. (Of course, Katon had one fewer game to score points - see below.) Congratulations for making it such a tight race.

* Tyrmith returned after a long absence to submit the high score of the round with 18 points. Katon was second with 16 points, and we had a number of others in double digits. This was a modest scoring round overall.

* Thanks to the brave/bored souls who submitted predictions for all twelve of our games: Ceiliazul, Bobchillingworth, von Adlercreutz, slowcheetah, Dantski, Commodore, David Corperial, Yell0w, Hashoosh, Twinkletoes, Sian, and Brian Shanahan. That's a lot of ballots to get in over two months of time. I hope everyone had fun.

Next the specific playoff contest results:

- Justinian's unexpected victory resulted in a whitewash on the first place position. No one picked Justinian to win, I guess he showed all of us. This caused in a lot of ties.

- Six entries had Zara Yacob picked for second place: Ceiliazul, dazedroyalty, Dp101, Ituralde, darrelljs, and Yell0w. After adding the points from the earlier playoff games, we had a four-way tie for first place. Darelljs and Yell0w occupy their own spots, and then there's a giant group of more ties. I've listed everyone in alphabetical order to clarity's sake, but those are all huge ties in point of fact. Blame Justinian!

Then the final results page with more ways of ranking:

- For ease of reading these charts, I've highlighted first place (gold), second place (silver), third place (bronze), fourth and fifth place (green), and sixth and seventh place (blue). This is to help the top scores stand out more at a glance.

- On the left are the standard scores, and the playoff scoring contest. The next column is the standard + playoffs category, which mostly looks pretty similar. Ceiliazul takes the top spot here as well, not surprising given the highest score in both of the other categories. Katon is second, and Bobchillingworth is third. Dazedroyalty (4th) and Ituralde (6th) jump up the charts with their high scoring playoff contest.

- Next up is the per-game scoring category, standard scoring divided by number of entries. Katon takes the gold medal here, by a full point over anyone else. Antisocialmunky and Ceiliazul were close to one another for the silver. Hesmyrr and Parkin were almost identical for fourth/fifth, and TheSunIsDark and dazedroyalty both had excellent numbers given their limited number of submissions (nine each). Brian Shanahan's random number generator entries led to a series of zero scoring results, and the lowest per-game score of the competition at 6.5 points. (I used a minimum of six entries to qualify here. Gawdzak's 16 points from a single submission obviously shouldn't count for top score. Worth noting: Tyrmith had an amazing 59 points from only 4 entries!)

* Finally, I looked at the Best Five games, since we had a request for that earlier. Ceiliazul and Katon again took the top spots, with Ceiliazul coming out ahead by a whisker. Hesmyrr and Azza tied for the bronze medal, and there was another tie for seventh between Parkin and dazedroyalty. The Best Five scores mostly looked like the standard scoring again.

Overall, I'd give a special shoutout to Ceiliazul and Katon, who look to have submitted the best results in some order. How to rank it all is beyond me, but I think that they had the strongest claims. Once more, thanks to everyone who submitted these predictions, and I hope you all had some fun.

[Ichabod]

LOL, I beat darrell...

[darrelljs]

I think I came in 5th .

Darrell

[Ceiliazul]

Thanks, Sulla, that was lots of fun!

You can mail my major award to my home, should i pm you my home address?

once again, 3 cheers for sulla!

[TheSunIsDark]

This one was almost as low scoring as Game Eight! The near-mirrored start here made leader and civ much more important than starting position. Correct in Second Place, Victory and 4 turns away from date. All for precisely the wrong reasons!