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Ever since the championship game for Season Four of AI Survivor wrapped up with its bizarre ending, I wanted to replay it and see if the same events would play out again. My operating theory was that the actual championship that we saw had been a wildly unlikely sequence which was unlikely to occur again. Following the conclusion of Season Three of AI Survivor, I had gone back and investigated some of the previous games and found that they tended to play out in the same patterns over and over again. While there was definitely some variation from game to game, and occasionally an unlikely outcome took place, for the most part the games were fairly predictable based on the personality of the AI leaders and the terrain of each particular map. The Season Four Championship would represent an unusual test in this regard, since the map itself was mirrored and all six of the leaders enjoyed completely identical starts. This would allow a sequence of tests to focus more on the leaders themselves and less on the underlying terrain. Would we see the same patterns play out again and again on this mirrored setup?
Note: the ending screenshots on this page have different resolutions because the games were played on three different computers. I love how Civ4 is playable even on little netbooks these days!
Winner: Charlemagne
Runner Up: Kublai Khan
First to Die: Darius
Kills: Willem (1), Gilgamesh (1)
First of all, let's quickly recap what took place in the actual Season Four Championship. (Here's the link to the full writeup for the curious.) Charlemagne established Buddhism while Darius founded Hinduism. Stalin struggled to expand for reasons that weren't entirely clear, perhaps because of barbarian cities appearing near his borders. After a peaceful early game, Darius came under attack from Kublai Khan and was completely taken over, with Willem gaining some of the trailing spoils as well. This left the Dutch in the position of tech leader and they were in the process of running away with the game when Kublai decided to attack. Willem inexplicably refused to research Rifling tech despite being far ahead in science, and this allowed Kublai to carve him up and eventually eliminate the entire civ along with some late help from Gilgamesh. Kublai now took over as the game's juggernaut, and had a certain victory in hand right up until he decided to chase after a Cultural victory. This idiotic decision allowed Charlemagne, who had been far behind in tech and land area for the whole game, to eventually catch up and surpass Kublai by winning a very late Spaceship victory. It was a ridiculous result that in no way reflected the gameplay that had taken place, with first Willem and then Kublai throwing away certain wins. I strongly suspected that we would not see anything quite so absurd from repeated games on the same map. So how would Charlemagne in particular fare from a series of rematches? Let's find out.
Winner: Kublai Khan
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Charlemagne
Kills: Kublai (3), Stalin (1)
Same initial city spots. Charlemagne Buddhism, Darius Hinduism. Stalin Stonehenge, not troubled by barbarians in this game and much stronger than in the Championship. Gilgamesh again attacks Willem and again gets stalemate, but in this game Charlemagne attacks Kublai Khan instead of Gilgamesh. Stalin piles in on the other side of Charlemagne and the two divide up his territory, Charlemagne becoming First to Die. Darius builds Apostolic Palace for unpopular Hinduism, Willem converts and then calls a Crusade resolution against Gilgamesh, getting everyone else in the game to declare war. Gilgamesh gets torn to pieces by other four leaders. After a long period of peace, Willem attacks Kublai despite being far behind in power. He again refuses to research Rifling tech and it doesn't go well; Kublai spends the next 100 turns slowly killing him in solo fashion. Darius gets ignored for practically the whole game, building every wonder and founding every religion, before Stalin finally invades. Stalin is much larger but Darius is ahead in tech and their conflict stalemates until peace is signed. Darius get to Assembly Line and then goes 100% culture on the slider. Stalin tried again a little bit later and had more success this time (since their tech had equalized), turning the game into a race as far as whether Darius could win by culture before getting conquered. Stalin took Pasargadae 15 turns before it could go Legendary and that was the end of Darius' chances to win. Kublai joined in at the end and claimed the kill credit. The two of them appeared to be heading for a spaceship ending, only for Kublai to declare war on Stalin and slowly pry away enough cities to get over the Domination limit. Kublai was five techs from launching at the end, Stalin seven techs away.
Winner: Kublai Khan
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Darius
Kills: Kublai (3)
Charlemagne Buddism, Darius very late Hinduism. Willem founds Judaism to give the world three major religions. Stalin was weak again in the landgrab phase, unclear why (no barbarian cities near him). Gilgamesh starts out the warring by invading Darius and instantly capturing a border city. However, Gilgamesh actually crashes his economy to the point that his units go on strike (!) and the war stalls out without further cities changing hands. Eventually Kublai also attacks Darius followed by Stalin also invading Persia. Nothing happens for a long time since no one has catapults. Willem is the real winner by virtue of not fighting until he is double invaded by Charlemagne and Gilgamesh; he fends them off with no cities lost. Finally Kublai uses his catapults to overrun Darius and claim all but one city. Willem has a monster tech lead and should win easily from this point, but he again refuses to research Rifling tech and gets taken down by a coalition of Stalin and Charlemagne and Kublai. Meanwhile, Gilgamesh had never managed to fix his economy and was still researching Fishing tech (!!!) on Turn 200. What the heck, Gilgamesh! Charlemagne and Stalin invaded and began carving him up, only to be stopped by an AP resolution. Stalin then converts to Judaism thanks to capturing its Holy City and attacks his previous gamelong ally Charlemagne. No cities change hands and this clears the way for Kublai to get incredibly far ahead of everyone else. Kublai decides Charlemagne has to go next, and he ruthlessly eliminates Holy Rome with Stalin and Gilgamesh riding his coattails. Kublai decides to go for a culture but this actually helps him get the last few tiles needed for a Domination victory. Somehow Gilgamesh was still alive despite being in the Medieval era.
Winner: Darius
Runner Up: Charlemagne
First to Die: Gilgamesh
Kills: Darius (3)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Stalin early Hinduism. Kublai did not settle along the coast this time for unknown reasons. Stalin completes a super early Turn 28 Stonehenge; he went very wonder-heavy in this game and didn't expand that well. Gilgamesh attacks Willem with no success, then attacks Stalin and similarly achieves nothing. Willem surprisingly invades Kublai, which goes poorly when Gilgamesh turns around and counter-invades the Dutch. This is followed by Darius attacking Gilgamesh, which devolves into a bloody stalemate, and then Stalin attacks Charlemagne. There's a long period of drawn out 1 vs 1 wars (Kublai vs Willem, Darius vs Gilgamesh, Stalin vs Charlemagne) which goes on for dozens of turns. Eventually Kublai and Darius start to pull away in their respective conflicts, although Charlemagne then muddies the waters by invading Kublai with the Dutch on their way out. The real winner turns out to be Darius, who manages to achieve a solo kill on Gilgamesh and become the game's top powerhouse. The Charlemagne/Willem alliance also does surprisingly well, knocking the Mongols back into the pack and preserving Willem's life. Very slow tech pace for this game with all the warring. The tech path chosen by Darius was even dumber than Willem's in the actual Championship game - Assembly Line and Flight before Rifling?! - but it didn't matter because Darius stayed safe while the other leaders squabbled in various wars. Eventually Darius decided to kill Kublai, and wow, what a stomp it was, tanks and mechs crushing Mongolia off the face of the earth in a dozen turns. Then on the very next turn, Darius attacked Stalin and went on to eliminate him too. Sheesh, this was like a hit list of the low peace weight leaders. Darius was just about to launch the spaceship when he ticked over 62% land area for the Domination victory. Very strange game, felt like an outlier result.
Winner: Willem
Runner Up: Kublai Khan
First to Die: Charlemagne
Kills: Gilgamesh (1), Kublai (1), Willem (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Gilgamesh Hinduism. (Judaism was bizarrely founded on Turn 120, after Confucianism!) Gilgamesh also landed Stonehenge and was the early score leader this game. Darius started out the warring by invading Gilgamesh followed by Kublai and Stalin invading Charlemagne. These wars were inconclusive and Willem eventually took over first place by virtue of staying at peace, only for him to also attack Charlemagne and then be joined by Gilgamesh. Faced with a 4 vs 1 scenario, Charlemagne quickly collapsed and was partitioned between the invaders. Darius founded Confucianism which no one else practiced, and when he started a war with Stalin, Kublai quickly joined on the Russian side. They slowly eliminated Darius over the course of several dozen turns, with Stalin getting most of the spoils. This raised Stalin from the bottom to the middle of the pack and made him semi-viable as a competitor. By this point Gilgamesh had emerged as the game leader, with the most territory and strong research capacity. A long period of peace followed, with some warring between Willem and Gilgamesh but no territory changing hands. This was obviously good news for Willem, who somehow researched Assembly Line and Combustion before Rifling tech without it hurting him. Around Turn 250, Willem and Gilgamesh went to war again along with a new Kublai/Stalin conflict to plunge everyone into combat. The latter war had no major effects, but Gilgamesh had idiotically started running the culture slider while researching Replaceable Parts, while Willem's teching kept going and going and going. The eventual result was Dutch tanks versus Sumerian muskets, ouch. Willem completely eliminated Gilgamesh to become the world's largest power... then turned on the culture slider rather than finishing the tech tree, argh! Stalin was on pace to win a late Spaceship victory, and Willem apparently realized this because he finally stopped running the culture slider and declared war. This led to a massive nuclear exchange, with the Dutch launching about 50 nukes in total and ravaging the Russian military. Stalin finished the whole tech tree and all but one spaceship part, but he could not get the SS Stasis Chamber completed, not with his empire in ruins and glowing in the dark from radioactive fallout. Willem won by Domination just barely before Stalin could win by Spaceship - fantastic game! 
Winner: Kublai Khan
Runner Up: Gilgamesh
First to Die: Charlemagne
Kills: Gilgamesh (2), Darius (1), Kublai (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Darius early Hinduism, Kublai late (Turn 100) Judaism; Darius also finished a Turn 35 Stonehenge. Willem expanded poorly in this game, no clear reason why. Gilgamesh started the warring in this alternate history as well, invading Charlemagne and snatching two border cities before the war stalemated for a long time. Very peaceful early game outside of that one war. Eventually Stalin attacked Darius in a war that went nowhere, while Gilgamesh reached catapults and began to make renewed progress against Charlemagne. Kublai Khan was the overall game leader, and he made his move by attacking an exhausted Darius in the medieval period. This war was interrupted by a Dutch attack that stalled out with no cities changing hands, with everyone signing an eventual treaty. The bigger story was Gilgamesh completing his lengthy 125 turn conquest of Charlemagne with a solo kill, absorbing the entirety of the Holy Roman lands. This made Sumeria the game's clear powerhouse, and it was therefore a seemingly suicidal move when Stalin attacked Gilgamesh a short time later. However, he was joined by Willem to create a 2 vs 1 situation, and the result was another stalemate until peace was re-signed. Two major wars dominated the Industrial era. In the first, Stalin attacked Darius only to have the decision backfire horribly, as Stalin lacked Rifling tech and was overrun and eliminated by the Persians. In the other, Kublai invaded Willem and took several cities, only for the superior technology of the Dutch to hold the line and begin turning them back. Right when the momentum of the war was swinging, Gilgamesh invaded Willem from the other side. Enormous numbers of rifles and cavs were sufficient to overrun tanks and infantry despite a truly heroic defense by the Dutch that lasted more than 50 turns. Kublai slowly researched his way to tanks as well, but Gilgamesh did not because he had stopped teching to chase after a longshot Cultural victory. Darius then attacked Gilgamesh, leading to the bizarre sight of Persian mechs fighting Sumerian rifles... and still only fighting to a draw. After a little while of that, Gilgamesh turned science back on and Kublai piled into the war on his side, with the two of them combining to destroy Darius. Kublai was then able to finish the tech tree and win via Spaceship before Gilgamesh could get three cities to Legendary status. Gilgamesh had two 50k cities and a third at 46k when the game ended - close finish.
Winner: Gilgamesh
Runner Up: Charlemagne
First to Die: Darius
Kills: Gilgamesh (3)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Darius late (Turn 51) Hinduism. This was a game where Stalin expanded well as opposed to some of the others where he struggled. In contrast, Darius had fewer cities than anyone else and failed to expand for no clear reason. Willem surprisingly started the warring this game with an attack against Kublai, which he was in the process of losing when Charlemagne intervened on the Dutch side. Meanwhile Darius invaded Gilgamesh and this war was also turned around when Stalin counterinvaded Darius, plunging the entire world into conflict. Kublai was strong enough to survive the 1 vs 2 long enough to get peace with Willem, but Darius emphatically was not, and the Gilgamesh/Stalin pairing combined to eliminate him over the next three dozen turns, with Sumeria getting most of the spoils. Kublai was winning his individual wars against Willem and Charlemagne, only for Willem to vote through an Apostolic Palace crusade resolution that caused everyone else to attack him. Despite being one of the game leaders, Kublai could not survive the 1 vs 4 scenario and was eliminated next, with his territory evenly divided and becoming a patchwork quilt of different nations. Although Willem was the tech leader he once again refused to research Rifling, and Gilgamesh rushed there and then sneak-attacked him with rifles and cavalry. Willem's absolute refusal to research military techs (he had Assembly Line before Rifling again) resulted in his rapid demise at the hands of the Sumerians. Gilgamesh was now the runaway AI and could walk to any victory condition, so naturally he farted around running the culture slider for a while. Finally he decided to invade Charlemagne and the Domination victory followed in just three turns.
Winner: Kublai Khan
Runner Up: Darius
First to Die: Charlemagne
Kills: Kublai (2), Stalin (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Darius Hinduism, Willem late (Turn 85) Judaism. This was yet another game where Stalin and Darius were out-expanded by the other four leaders over the initial 100 turns. Gilgamesh opened up the action by attacking Charlemagne this time, which led to very heavy fighting over a single border city that slowed both leaders significantly. Darius then surprisingly attacked Willem followed by Kublai also invading the Dutch and Stalin declaring on Holy Rome. Willem and Charlemagne were both left in 1 vs 2 scenarios, and although Willem was able to hold his own for some time, he inevitably began to lose cities to the Mongols. Gilgamesh had fought Charlemagne, then signed a treaty and attacked Darius, then signed another treaty and attacked Charlemagne again in a confusing series of diplomatic turns. The wars were evenly balanced for a long time, but eventually Gilgamesh and Stalin completed their elimination of Charlemagne, with Gilgamesh getting about 80% of the cities and Stalin landing the deathblow. Willem had also been suffering mightily in his lengthy war with Kublai Khan, slowly losing most of his core cities to keshiks and war elephants, and the Mongols rushed to an early Rifling tech that sealed the deal. Kublai and Gilgamesh dominated the game as the two strongest AIs at this point, and Gilgamesh also would have conquered Darius with ease if the Persian leader hadn't repeatedly used his control of the Apostolic Palace to shut down several Sumerian invasions. After a period of peace there was huge news: Gilgamesh invading Kublai in a battle between the game's top leaders. This proved to be an epic disaster, as Kublai had rifles while Gilgamesh did not, and by the time that the Sumerians reached Rifling tech, the Mongols had already reached Assembly Line. Kublai completely overran Gilgamesh from one end of his empire to the other, capturing all two dozen Sumerian cities and winding up just short of the Domination limit. Stalin and Darius were still fighting an inconclusive war against one another, and it only took half a dozen turns for Kublai to join in attacking Darius to finish off his Domination victory. He almost managed to knock Persia into third place before going over the land threshhold of 62% for the win.
Winner: Willem
Runner Up: Stalin
First to Die: Gilgamesh
Kills: Stalin (2), Willem (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Darius very late Hinduism (Turn 67); Stalin randomly picked up a seaborne Buddhism spread at an early date. This was yet another game where Darius and Stalin came out of the expansion phase weaker than the other leaders - perhaps it's because they were the only two non-Imperialistic and non-Creative leaders? Every leader converted to Buddhism except for Hindu founder Darius so it's not surprising that he was the first target, invaded by Stalin and losing a border city in the process. Gilgamesh attacked Willem at about the same time, sparking a lengthy mutually destrictive war that had no cities changing hands until Stalin joined on the Dutch side. This was a tipping point that saw Gilgamesh begin to fall apart. Meanwhile, Kublai Khan invaded Darius and took advantage of the exhasted state of the small Persian kingdom to begin overrunning it. This turned into a race as far as who would be eliminated first, and Gilgamesh won that dubious honor. Darius ended up surviving as a rump state temporarily, signing a peace treaty with just four cities left, only to be finished off a little bit later by Stalin. Willem had conquered most of the Sumerian lands and that was a terrifying scenario for the rest of the field, a territorially dominant Financial civ. Kublai Khan and Charlemagne apparently saw this and both attacked before Willem could get too far ahead in tech. This time Willem was only mildly stupid in terms of tech research, picking up Rifling tech after Kublai had it but not before something insane like Assembly Line. Willem lost a couple of border cities while waiting for Rifling tech to arrive and then signed a peace treaty. Stalin, Willem, and Kublai all went into the lategame with excellent chances to win some kind of victory. Willem predictably zoomed out in front in science while at peace, and he had Assembly Line researched by the time that Kublai attacked again. This war went much better for the Dutch, slaughtering the Mongolian army of rifles and cavs with infantry and artillery, then recapturing a border city before signing peace. Stalin was invading Charlemagne at the same time, although his progress was slow due to having no tech advantage. He eventually eliminated Holy Rome with tanks, mobile artillery, and a few nukes. Kublai made one final attempt to stop Willem, only to lose most of his army then hastily sign peace. Willem's science was too strong and he won easily by Spaceship.
Winner: Willem
Runner Up: Kublai Khan
First to Die: Darius
Kills: Kublai (1), Charlemagne (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Gilgamesh Hinduism. All three northern civs ended up Hindu while the three southern civs went Buddhist. This was a weaker Gilgamesh opening than most other games (two barb cities popped up in his area) although he still came out of the expansion phase with more territory than Stalin or Darius. This was a very peaceful game for a long time, great news for Willem. The combination of a weaker Gilgamesh and Great Lighthouse for Willem had him flying through the tech tree during these peaceful turns. Gilgamesh finally started the warring in the AD years by attacking Stalin; the main effect of this inconclusive war was dropping both leaders to the bottom of the scoreboard. The second war didn't break out until Turn 175 when Kublai invaded Darius, then a double war declaration popped up shortly thereafter with Willem and Charlemagne attacking Gilgamesh. This was followed by an Apostolic Palace resolution pulling Willem/Stalin/Charlemagne into the war against Darius, and all of a sudden the game was drowning in bloodshed. Willem was just finishing Rifling tech with Gilgamesh still stuck in the Medieval era while Darius had four different leaders attacking him. It turned into a race as to who would be first eliminated, with Darius narrowly kicking the bucket first. By the time that this round of warring was over, Willem was more than a full era ahead in tech, unlocking tanks while the other three leaders were roughly around Scientific Method. Kublai foolishly tried to attack Willem with rifles + cavs and it went exactly as bad as you'd expect, with a 100 unit Mongol stack killed in the opening turns of the war followed by a Dutch counterinvasion. Willem could have kept pushing to an easy elimination but signed peace after taking all the border cities and then went back to teching. That was basically it aside from some inconsequential wars involving Charlemagne, Willem was too far ahead to be stopped as he researched techs at nearly 4000 beakers/turn (!) en route to another Spaceship victory. This one landed before Turn 300 in a very impressive performance, and Willem was also less than 20 turns away from winning by Culture as well.
Winner: Kublai Khan
Runner Up: Gilgamesh
First to Die: Darius
Kills: Gilgamesh (2), Kublai (1)
Charlemagne Buddhism, Willem super late Hinduism on Turn 74 (!), Darius Judaism. The Dutch captured a barbarian city only six tiles east of Gilgamesh's capital in this game, and that caused all three northern civs to be shifted westward in their settlement pattern as compared to where they normally appeared. Gilgamesh started the fighting with an invasion of Charlemagne, immediately capturing a border city and followed by Kublai also attacking Holy Rome from the other side. Charlemagne surprisingly was able to fight to a stalemate and get peace with Kublai. Meanwhile Stalin initiated a war with Darius that seemed to be roughly even in nature, followed by Willem joining in a separate invasion of Persia. Then Kublai attacked Willem to put everyone in the game at war, leading to mass violence on all sides. The fighting was relatively even until Kublai managed to get a Crusade resolution voted through the Jewish Apostolic Palace against Willem, leading four different civs to invade him. Willem was trapped in a 1 vs 4 scenario and Darius was simultaneously in a 1 vs 3 scenario. Darius was the first to be eliminated and Willem lasted only half a dozen turns longer. Kublai came out of this big round of warring as the dominant power, with Gilgamesh also in a reasonably strong position. Charlemagne was the weakest leader remaining and practiced an unpopular Buddhism shared by no one else, and therefore it wasn't a surprise when Stalin and Gilgamesh invaded and tore him apart. Kublai decided to chase after culture rather than maintain his tech lead, and unlike in most games this had him on track to hit three Legendary cities shortly after Turn 300. You would think that this would cause Kublai to try and ride things out peacefully to the finish, but nope, he decided to invade Stalin while still going 100% culture on the slider. Kublai was slowly winning the war (despite his tech not advancing for the previous 50 turns) when his Cultural victory arrived right on schedule.
This was a fascinating series of games to watch, with lots of unexpected twists and turns factoring into their outcomes. Adding in the original championship game played out on Livestream, it led to a sample size of 11 total matches on this map. (Ideally we'd keep going to get N > 30 for a better statistical trial, but each game does take about an hour to run and there are practical limits to how much time I'm willing to invest in this project. Feel free to download the savegame files at the top of this page and run more iterations on your own if desired.) Here's a summary of the results of those eleven games:
Just as we saw with the alternate histories following Season Three, many of the same patterns played out repeatedly in game after game. In particular, the AI leaders placed their initial three or four cities in exactly the same location in every single game, with variation in settling patterns not starting to appear until well after Turn 50. I suspect that the mirrored terrain was a major reason for this, but it was still striking how little change there was in this regard. Kublai would sometimes put his second city on the coast and sometimes not, and that was the only variation that I observed. Another trend that took place repeatedly was poor expansion on the part of Darius and Stalin. The two of them were nearly always the last two leaders on the scoreboard at the end of the traditional landgrab phase. Darius seemed to spend too much of the early game engaged in wonder-building and lacked the Imperialistic and Creative traits enjoyed by the other leaders. Stalin was more inexplicable, and although there were one or two games where he expanded at a normal rate, in most games he struggled mightily. It couldn't have been barbarians in all of those games, or at least not only the presence of barbarians. I think that a major problem was Stalin's refusal to research Mysticism tech, which he did over and over again, leaving Stalin's cities with unexpanded borders for the first 100 turns of the game. This denied Stalin access to all of the resources in the second ring of his cities, setting him back noticeably in the early turns.
I also observed that Gilgamesh started the warring more often than not, again and again launching the first invasion. This was an expected result since he had the highest aggression rating of anyone in this group. The biggest variation from game to game involved which leaders would be targeted by those war declarations, which seems to be one of the biggest dice roll aspects of how the AI behaves. With everyone bordering everyone else and a lot of "Cautious" diplomatic modifiers on all sides, the recipients of these invasions changed significantly on repeated playthroughs. Other things were more predictable: Charlemagne founded Buddhism in every game, and more often than not Darius was the founder of Hinduism. This didn't seem to be a religious-heavy game in general, with Charlemagne being the only leader who cared much about it. Willem once again ignored Rifling tech in game after game, sometimes researching all of the way up to Assembly Line before backtracking for rifles. This confirmed that his anti-Rifling tech preferences were a genuine weakness in his AI personality, not simply a one-off wacky choice in the championship. And Kublai Khan similarly did chase after a Cultural victory in several of the other games, if not to the same self-destructive results as we saw in the official game. Gilgamesh tended to be the one who screwed himself with cultural pursuits in these alternate histories.
There were some clear conclusions to draw as far as evaluating the performance of the AI leaders in the championship. First of all, the obvious conclusion: Kublai Khan was by far the best leader out of these six, and it wasn't particularly close. Kublai won five times in eleven games and finished in second place another three times. He racked up the most kills at 12 and was only eliminated twice, while also never being unfortunate enough to wind up as the First to Die. (One of his two deaths also came from an Apostolic Palace "crusade" resolution at a time when he was one of the game leaders.) Kublai managed to win in three different fashions as well, scoring Domination, Spaceship, and Cultural victories at different points in time. Kublai was nearly always one of the top leaders on the scoreboard, either the game winner or a close competitor for the winning position. He expanded well, fought well, and teched well. If the actual championship game had reflected the true strength of the AI leaders, Kublai would have been the winner in a cakewalk.
The second-best leader in terms of actually winning the game was also quite clear, and it was Willem of the Dutch. This might seem strange based on that table that I posted above, where Willem was only in the middle of the group, but that undersells Willem's performance because he scored few kills and never came in second place. Willem was a high-risk / high-reward leader in this competition. These games confirmed the dictum established earlier in Season Four: if Willem gets to rifles he wins the game, and if he doesn't then he gets eliminated. The Dutch leader had three wins and seven eliminations in eleven games, nearly always winding up with one of those two fates. Willem's teching prowess virtually assured that he would win if he could stay out of too much fighting, and the one game with little combat (Alternate History #9) was a complete Dutch stomp. The gigantic Achilles Heel for Willem was his consistent refusal to research Rifling tech, as he repeatedly did backflips to avoid picking up that crucial military tech. If his tech preferences weren't so anti-Rifling in nature, Willem would have won five or six of these games and been the top overall leader, hands down. It's that serious of a weakness for him. Without that giant flaw he'd be as strong as Huayna Capac in the AI Survivor hierarchy. With it, he's a highly situational leader who needs the right conditions to prevail.
The other leaders were more of a mixed bag. Gilgamesh expanded well and typically sat at the top of the scoreboard coming out of the early phase of each game. However, he was repeatedly undercut by his high aggression rating, picking too many wars that ended up stalemating and dragging him down into the pack. On the occasions where Gilgamesh's early wars worked out, he could become a terrifying foe and snowball his advantages into a dominant position. In most any other situation though, he tended to self-destruct with excessive warring and ill-chosen invasions of stronger rivals. His bizarre choice to run the cultural slider, sometimes as soon as following Printing Press research, also didn't help him. Stalin was typically undercut by his weak early game performances, and if he could make it out of the landgrab phase in a decent position, he tended to do quite well. Stalin didn't end up winning any of these iterations but he had close second place performances on several occasions. The table above is likely underestimating his performance a bit. As for Darius, he was easy to figure out in this game: Darius was a weaker version of Willem. Darius was hurt by having a high peace weight of 8 in a game with mostly leaders lower on the scale, and he tended to be even more clueless about military research and wonder-building than Willem. In the one outlier game that Darius won (#3), he actually researched both Assembly Line and Flight before Rifling tech, getting away with this because all of the aggressive leaders were off fighting one another while leaving him alone. Even though Darius posted a win in one of my test games, I believe that he was probably the weakest overall choice out of these six leaders. He came out of the expansion phase in a weak position in virtually every single game, and unlike Stalin he had a worse diplomatic situation by virtue of his high peace weight. Darius was eliminated in nine out of eleven games and was First to Die more than anyone else.
Finally we come to the issue of Charlemagne, our winner of the official championship game in Season Four. I wrote on my Season Four Conclusions Page that I regarded him as a complete fraud and argued that he had essentially lucked his way into an overall victory. Running these repeated tests did nothing to disabuse me of those earlier impressions. Charlemagne consistently struggled in game after game after game, typically sitting around fourth or fifth place on the scoreboard a good distance behind the top leaders. He repeatedly did a poor job of getting tile improvements down in his territory, partially because he was too eager to research religious techs, and this caused Charlemagne's expansion to be no better than average despite his Imperialistic trait. Charlemagne was eliminated seven times in eleven games and was First to Die four times, with only Darius performing worse in this regard. Somehow he only managed a single kill across those games, which involved luck to some degree, true, but also reflected the fact that Charlemagne was never a dominant leader at any point in time.
Perhaps the most damning condemnation of Charlemagne's performance was the fact that he was never in a position to win any of these games, or was even the top AI leader on the scoreboard. He wasn't even the top leader in the game that he did win! All of the other AI leaders had a path to victory of some kind: Kublai and Gilgamesh and Stalin via conquest, Willem and Darius via science. What exactly was Charlemagne's means of winning the game? Some other leader was better at winning every victory condition type, except maybe for a religious-based Diplomatic victory. But Charlemagne wasn't even too good at that, as he typically didn't do a great job of spreading his religion with missionaries. The Buddhism that he established in every game mostly served to make lots of enemies and often ended up getting him killed. Charlemagne was essentially an also-ran in this final match, a mediocre performer overshadowed by the military performance of Kublai/Gilgamesh and the economic dominance of Willem. In the two games where Charlemagne finished in second place (Alternate Histories #3 and #6), he was a distant trailer who had no shot whatsoever to win. This was a far cry from games like Alternate History #4 or #5, where the runner-up was narrowly edged out by the winner. Charlemagne never experienced anything of the sort. Even in the game that he did win in the actual championship, he was again a distant trailer who had no shot whatsoever until his rivals decided to self-immolate themselves by hopping onto their own pyres and striking up a torch. I watched Charlemagne play eleven full games on a perfectly fair mirrored map, and at no point did he ever look like the best leader in the group.
Darius may have had the weakest overall performance because he was eliminated so many times, but at least he did have a realistic path to victory due to his Financial economic power. Charlemagne had no plan other than "hang around the middle of the scoreboard and hope other leaders screw up". He probably had the lowest odds to win the game out of all six competitors, and I think that if we ran this test 100 times, Charlemagne would only win something like 5-10 of those games. This was a clear fluke result. It's too bad that we'll always remember the ending to an otherwise amazing Season Four with this flawed final winner.
