Civ4 AI Survivor Season 8: Conclusions

Season Eight wasn't quite as heavy on underdogs as the previous two seasons but still served up a series of unexpected results, starting with the very first match and continuing right up to the Championship where we crowned a winner who had never won a game prior to Season Eight. The biggest movers up the leaderboard were our new champion Elizabeth (13 points) and a surprising Augustus (12 points) who both won two games apiece. They were closely trailed by Mansa Musa who also won two games but without scoring even a single kill along the way - pure economic dominance there. Mansa leapfrogged Huayna Capac into the top spot overall with his strong season and now has an astonishing TEN victories; Huayna Capac has eight victories and Justinian is the only other leader who even makes it to five wins. Mansa and Justinian were the only Pool 1 leaders who managed to win games this year and the Pool 2 leaders were even worse without a single victory among the bunch. I tallied up the numbers and the Pool 1 leaders coming into Season Eight scored 20 points, Pool 2 leaders scored 11 points, and Unseeded leaders scored 104 points. As poorly as that might sound for our seeded leaders, they did even worse in Season Seven. If there's a lesson here, it's that community members shouldn't be afraid to pick underdogs!

Other leaders who had a bit of a breakout season included Hammurabi with 8 points (a win and three kills in an EXCEPTIONALLY unlikely Game One), Brennus with 7 points as the best of a very weak Wildcard field, and then Ramesses, Victoria, and Sitting Bull as unexpected victors of a single game each. With a win for Sitting Bull and another kill for Genghis Khan, every single leader in the group now has at least 5 points to their name... except for poor Hatshepsut who was once again locked out of scoring a single point. Hatty missed a Runner Up finish in her opening round game by watching Pacal eclipse her score on the final turn of the game, then had the score lead for most of her Wildcard game before self-combusting to Zara Yaqob in spectacular fashion. She's still behind the Apostolic Palace four years after its removal from the competition, sheesh! It's clear by now that Hatshepsut is both a poor leader for the AI Survivor settings and has also been incredibly unlucky after her near-misses in Seasons Seven and Eight. Will she finally be able to get a point in Season Nine?

Due to a series of high peaceweight AI leaders winning their opening round games at low odds, this turned into the season with the lowest number of kills on record. Only 37 of the 52 leaders were eliminated over the course of the season despite running an additional Wildcard game. That was certainly a major contrast to Season Three, the high-water mark for the violent warmonger leaders, when 46 of the 52 leaders were knocked out before the finish. Unlike most prior seasons, the kills that did take place were not heavily concentrated among the leaders making the Championship with a mere 6 kills shared between the six finalists. This again reflected the peaceful, econ-driven nature of the season we watched which was dominated by leaders who could out-tech and out-culture their opponents. As for the Golden Spear award, the winner from Season Eight turned out to be Mehmed with his 4 kills, two apiece from the opening round and playoff game. The only other leader to have more than two kills was... Hammurabi, who had three of them in his absurd opening round match. If you had Hammurabi as one of the top-scoring kill leaders going into this season, time to go purchase some lottery tickets.

The AI ranking list has also been updated to reflect an additional year of competition; I hid the columns for the first seven seasons to save space in this image, with the full data still contained in the Excel spreadsheet linked above. As a quick reminder of how the ranking system works, leaders score 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each kill. This is a completely arbitrary system, of course, but it seems to do a decent job of recognizing AI performance across different games and different seasons. I included an additional column listing the points scored solely in Season Eight to help indicate which leaders were the biggest movers in this season. As mentioned above, this was a season where our historical performers at the top of the table mostly faltered and allowed room for some newcomers to start pushing their way up the standings. Mansa Musa was once again amazing and came close to becoming our first two-time champion while Justinian proved that he's still one of the most fearsome competitors. Otherwise the leaders at the top achieved basically nothing though and this was the second straight season with a doughnut hole from Huayna Capac. We'll see if they can rebound into form in the next season or if new leaders will climb into Pool 1.

With the big season from Elizabeth and at least two points scored by Victoria, Washington, Lincoln, Frederick, Sitting Bull, and Roosevelt, the bottom of the scoreboard has experienced a sizable jump upwards. Hatshepsut and Genghis Khan are the only leaders who have never managed a first or second place finish (though the Mongol leader has SIX kills to go with his poor finishes!), and then Hatshepsut again is the only leader who hasn't scored a single kill. We've now run enough games that most of the mediocre leaders fall into the "one good game" category. This includes one-off showings from leaders like Bismarck and Isabella and Montezuma; these leaders can be effective given the right starting position or a uniquely favorable diplomatic situation but aren't good enough to consistently put up big numbers like the seeded leaders. (I had Churchill in this category before but he's scored enough Runner Up finishes and kills that he's climbed all the way to the final Pool 2 slot - Churchill!)

As we continue to run more seasons, the results keep becoming more evenly distributed when compared to past years; I suspect we'll get to a normal distribution in the data eventually. In Season Four, the leaders in the bottom half of the list accounted for 7 points while the leaders in the top half totaled a whopping 128 points. The same ratio for this season was 83 points against 52 points - still lopsided but nowhere near the same degree. Obviously as we continue to run more seasons of AI Survivor the results will get less stratified in this manner since the effects of any one season get reduced. I should also mention that last year's overall winner, Season Seven Champion Louis, turned back into a pumpkin again this season with an immediate First to Die exit and zero points scored. The French leader accomplished virtually nothing for the first six seasons, then went win-win-win to crush everyone and claim the title, then went out like a chump again this year. He certainly appears to be a boom-or-bust leader and this year was a major bust.

After eight seasons, the average score for an AI leader is now 20.26 points. I've noticed that the average goes up by about 2.50 points each season which makes perfect sense: there are 13 * 7 = 91 finish points available and we typically see about 40 eliminations (though we were well short of that this season). 91 + 40 = 131 and divide that by 52 leaders for roughly 2.52 additional points per leader per season. Obviously these points are not evenly distributed and instead tend to cluster at the top end of the leaderboard, which is why the average is 20.26 points but the median is only 18 points. Willem, Shaka, Boudica, and Hammurabi are currently tied at the center of the scoreboard with 18 points apiece in about a bizarre of a collection of leaders imaginable. The median leader has about 6 kills at this point which helps show the exceptional status of the top of the group. The median has been going up by about one kill per season in the last few years; the top of the kill table didn't move so Huayna Capac and Julius Caesar remain deadlocked for the total kill lead at 15, with both of them having zero kills again in Season Eight. That's two consecutive seasons with the overall kill lead tied at 15, who's going to break through that barrier first?

Another year's worth of data has allowed us to update the Trait rankings for Season Eight. We've done enough seasons at this point that a single additional year of competition doesn't swing the ratings around too noticeably. The traits that were strong in past seasons largely graded out as being strong once again. The one major change in the table this year was Spiritual leaders having an unusually good showing, causing the trait to climb the rankings closer to the front of the pack. There seems to be clear separation at this point between the top traits of Financial and Creative from the rest of the field, after Creative had another solid year and Financial was better than ever before. There's no question that Financial is one of the best traits for AI Survivor purposes as the extra commerce from Financial definitely helps a lot and the other expansion-oriented traits of Creative / Imperialistic are helpful to the AI leaders for obvious reasons. They let the AI claim more land on the map and then snowball off of having more total production queues. Most of our top-performing leaders have at least one of these three traits at their disposal. It's kind of amazing that Creative does this well with Hatty's big fat 0 point score weighing down the rankings!

There was another clump of seven different traits in the middle of the pack that graded out as having roughly similar scores. Imperialistic, Spiritual, Industrious, Organized, Protective, Expansive, and Aggressive were all roughly comparable to one another without much differentiation between them. I wrote the exact same thing about six of these seven traits at the end of Season Seven (with Imperialistic dropping back into the pack from a previously higher tier) and their continued ranking in the middle of the group suggests that they are all roughly comparable to one another. It doesn't appear that these traits are particularly great or particularly terrible for AI Survivor purposes. The Protective trait is still hanging solidly in this rankings (and even jumped over Expansive and Aggressive traits) so it appears to be pretty average in AI hands, not the "worst trait in the game" status that Protective has when played by humans. We've seen that the extra Protective promotions and cheap walls/castles genuinely do seem to help out when the AI leaders inevitably get into stupid wars. At the very least, it's hard to argue that Protective is noticeably worse than the other traits under these circumstances.

The Industrious trait continues to feel overvalued due to the presence of Huayna Capac, Stalin, and Louis (in Season Seven), with all of the other leaders having poor seasons but the trait grading out as average instead of terrible due to the three of them. Stalin increasingly looks like an early season fraud (with alternate histories showing that he was really lucky in Season Three) and it's questionable if Louis was more than a one-year wonder. Augustus having a strong Season Eight helped this trait out but it still slipped noticeably in the rankings as compared to earlier years. I think that this is one of the weakest traits for AI Survivor purposes that only looks decent because one of the best leaders in the game (our boy Huayna) happens to have the trait. I continue to think this is a bad trait for AI Survivor that happens to have some excellent leaders propping up its value.

Charismatic remained in next-to-last status this season, and which still feels surprising because it seems to be helpful for the AIs in terms of managing happiness. Even Churchill making another run to the Championship game wasn't enough to bump the performance of Charismatic and this is increasingly looking like one of the weakest options for AI Survivor purposes. There was a clear gap between the glut of traits in the middle of the pack and then the Charismatic/Philosophical duo at the bottom. Speaking of the Philosophical trait, it once again graded out as the worst in the competition for the fifth year in a row even with what was surely the best conditions we're ever going to see for this trait. Elizabeth and Gandhi finished in first and second place in the Championship and it still wasn't enough to move Philosophical out of the last spot. It's been a precipitous fall from the Season One version of these rankings which had Philosophical as the best trait overall. That was under the old Finish Ranking system that heavily valued silly stuff like not getting eliminated in the Wildcard game so it's not a direct comparison, but it's still noteworthy how the trait has collapsed in value over the following seasons. Philosophical is a poor trait for the AI leaders because they inevitably run so many specialists that they always get lots of Great People regardless. Plus the AI has no idea how to leverage individual Great People for timed Golden Ages, and of course we turn off Tech Trading to remove the value of lightbulbing followed by tech brokering. The Philosophical trait also happens to be paired with lots of pacifistic leaders with high peace weights, and as we've seen repeatedly, those are some of the worst-performing AI personalities under our settings. Philosophical is a solid trait overall in Civ4 but it clearly struggles under the games that we run.

We ran our third year of the Fantasy contest for AI Survivor in Season Eight and it was the most successful season yet. After rolling the maps for the season and then drawing the 52 leaders onto those maps, we held an auction draft where each of the eight contestants had 200 gold to spend however they chose; I was the moderator for the auction this year after participating (and winning!) back in Season Six. Our fantasy contestants could invest in a handful of favorites or spread out with lots of smaller bids on less popular leaders. Fantasy scoring was identical to our normal AI Survivor setup with 5 points for first place, 2 points for second place, and 1 point per kill, along with an extra 2 points for having a First to Die leader to attract bidding on leaders who seemed likely to make a quick exit. This was enormously entertaining and I had a blast tracking the results of the fantasy competition throughout the season, which was exceptionally close this year after two blowout results over our first two fantasy years. Amicalola was unable to defend his title and ended up with the lowest overall score, however almost everyone else was still in contention to claim the title going into the final game. Five different fantasy teams could have won depending on what happened, and if Mansa Musa had finished the game with a mere 25 more score points, he would have taken second place over Gandhi and resulted in antisocialmunky winning as opposed to Kjotleik. Bellomorphe would also have won if Elizabeth picked up a single kill, or Henrik could have won with an Augustus Diplo victory that nearly took place, or even j_mie6 could have won with a Churchill victory. What a fantastically close and exciting contest: 24 to 23 to 23 to 22 in the final scoring!

There will also be a more in-depth report looking at the fantasy competition once the alternate histories for Season Eight are complete. That will give us a better indication of who made excellent bids in the auction and who simply got lucky with their picks. Expect to see the results of this analysis in a few months when the alternate histories have been finished.

We crowned Elizabeth as the overall winner at the end of Season Eight and it certainly felt as though the English queen had this victory coming. She had two Runner Up finishes all the way back in Season One to make the initial Championship, then saw a very tough stretch of luck over the following seasons: seven games, seven eliminations. In Season Three, her Cultural victory was a mere five turns away from finishing when Julius Caesar captured one of her Legendary cities to stop the win before eventually eliminating her entirely. In Season Five, she had the most wins in the set of alternate histories that we ran and in Season Seven she should have advanced in second place behind Hatshepsut (which nearly always happened in the alternate histories) only to lose a settler to barbarians in the actual game en route to getting killed by Montezuma. Here in Season Eight, Elizabeth won an impressive opening round game and then saw her spaceship get beaten by a mere two turns to Mansa Musa's Cultural victory in the playoff game. It must have been sweet to out-race a Gandhi spaceship in the Championship game to secure the overall crown and a very deserving victory.

Anyway, I'd like to give thanks here once again to everyone here who took part in Season Eight of AI Survivor. Even if it was nothing more than spending two minutes to submit a prediction, the competition wouldn't have been the same without all of your contributions. Turnout in the picking contest was a slight increase even over Season Seven, with about 260-270 predictions on average for each game, eclipsing Season Five levels at the height of the COVID pandemic and essentially the best we've ever seen. Season Eight held seemingly the entire audience from the previous year and added new faces as well, averaging well above 200 viewers watching along on the Livestream. The initial Game One Livestream averaged 175 viewers over the duration of a stream that nearly went for 7 hours which is nothing short of incredible. A special shout-out to the CivFanatics contingent who once again added their own contributions with weekly forum threads and playoff betting odds to spice things up further!

I continue to be amazed at how many people are interested in watching the computer play against itself. This event simply would not be what it is without the lively banter in the chat taking place alongside the action. I am surprised again and again at the brilliant insights that the viewers come up with in their predictions, along with the hilarious and inane running commentary that makes it such a pleasure to put these games together. Over the upcoming months we'll take some time to look at alternate histories for other games from Season Eight and think about any additional fixes that we might add for the future. With any luck, and if impending baby #2 allows it, we'll be back again next year for Season Nine - thanks again everyone!