Game Three Alternate Histories Spreadsheet
One of the recurring features of past seasons of AI Survivor have been our "alternate histories", running additional iterations on the same maps to see if the same events would play out again. Game Three turned into a duel between Gandhi and Julius Caesar, with the militaristic conqueror in the west unable to overcome the technological edge of the peaceful builder in the east. Was that something which would unfold in each game? This was a topic that called for more investigation with alternate history scenarios. Following the conclusion of Seasons Three and Four 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. Would we see the same patterns play out again and again on this particular map?
The specific inspiration to run these alternate histories came from Wyatan. He decided to rerun the Season Four games 20 times each and publish the results. The objective in his words was twofold:
- See how random the prediction game actually is. There's a natural tendency when your predictions come true to go "See! Told you!", and on the contrary to dismiss the result as a mere fluke when things don't go the way you expected them to (pleading guilty there, Your Honour). Hopefully, with 20 iterations, we'll get a sense of how flukey the actual result was, and of how actually predictable each game was.
- Get a more accurate idea of each leader's performance. Over 5 seasons, we'll have a 60+ games sample. That might seem a lot, but it's actually a very small sample, with each leader appearing 5-10 times only. With this much larger sample, we'll be able able to better gauge each leader's performance, in the specific context of each game. So if an AI is given a dud start, or really tough neighbours, it won't perform well. Which will only be an indication about the balance of that map, and not really about that AI's general performance. But conversely, by running the game 20 times, we'll get dumb luck out of the equation.
Wyatan did a fantastic job of putting together data for the Season Four games and I decided to use the same general format. First I'll post the resulting data and then discuss some of the findings in more detail. Keep in mind that everything we discuss in these alternate histories is map-specific: it pertains to these leaders with these starting positions in this game. As Wyatan mentioned, an AI leader could be a powerful figure on this particular map while still being a weak leader in more general terms. Now on to the results:
Game One | Game Two | Game Three | Game Four | Game Five
Game Six | Game Seven | Game Eight | Game Nine | Game Ten
Game Eleven | Game Twelve | Game Thirteen | Game Fourteen | Game Fifteen
Game Sixteen | Game Seventeen | Game Eighteen | Game Nineteen | Game Twenty
(Note : "A" column tracks the number of war declarations initiated by the AI, "D" the number of times the AI is declared upon, "F" the points for finish ranking, and "K" the number of kills.)
This was the most surprising game for alternate histories that I can remember running. It turned out that we hadn't seen a normal game at all because we had a strong Caesar and that almost never materialized when I replayed the map. Far from Caesar getting unlucky in the actual Game Three as I had been expecting, we had instead seen the high water mark for Roman efforts on this setup. So what was going on here - why was one of the top AI Survivor leaders struggling so badly despite having a praetorian-unlocking iron resource at his capital city? What we had all largely missed was that this turned out to be a terrible scenario for Julius Caesar. The biggest problem was the presence of four different high peace weight AI opponents who were all predisposed to dislike Caesar (and Suleiman). This inherently stacked the deck against the low peace weight leaders and created a hole that they had immense difficulty digging out of. Many of us thought that Caesar and Suleiman could overcome this by working together as a team to take down the rest of the field. That's where I badly misread how this game would take shape: I was wrong, dead wrong, about Roman/Ottoman cooperation. Not only did Caesar and Suleiman clash in the actual Game Three, they proceeded to fight one another in pretty much every single one of these alternate histories. They just could not avoid attacking one another! 
With the two militaristic leaders expending so much energy fighting one another in game after game, that left the door open for the high peace weight leaders to run away with things. This was precisely what happened both in the actual Game Three and also in the alternate histories.
The basic logic of AI Survivor (and the whole Civilization series more broadly) is that a successful AI will devour one of their neighbors and then snowball off their land to a victory. While this did sometimes happen in the alternate histories for Game Three, it was surprising how rarely anyone was able to make progress via the military route. Caesar in particular would spend every game fighting his neighbors and rarely making much headway. When his wars went badly, he was swept off the map and eliminated. But even when he did manage to take down Mehmed or Frederick or Elizabeth, there was always another AI leader somewhere else on the map who had spent the previous 150 turns teching away in peace and now had a massive edge in technology. Many of these games had two or three or even four AI leaders simultaneously running a pacifistic farmer's gambit at the same time. This created a prisoner's dilemma for the low peace weight leaders: they could strike down one or two of those peaceful builders but they couldn't get them all and then Gandhi would show up with tanks or mobile artillery or whatever and that would be the end of things. It was quite a reversal from what we normally see in AI Survivor - the revenge of the high peace weight pacifists!
This meant that there were far fewer eliminations in my replays of Game Three than what we typically see in our matches. There were only 44 total kills across the 20 games that I watched; compare that to the 62 total kills in the alternate histories for Playoff Game Three's bloodbath. That playoff game had half again as many deaths and the difference was very noticeable. These more peaceful scenarios reached their apogee in Game #10 where I watched an entire match play out and no one died!
We've never had an official AI Survivor match finish with zero kills and this proves that it is possible, if unlikely, with the right mix of peaceful AI leaders. This particular game was characterized by lots of fighting and backstabbing such that no one was ever able to conquer a rival. It also had a lot of cross-map wars that sucked up long turns with nothing of consequence resulting. Then just to prove that this result wasn't a total fluke, I had the same thing happen in Game #20 with no one dying again! The situation in the latter game was more of a bizarre outlier result however, as Suleiman had a single city remaining which was completely surrounded by Caesar's culture but the Romans wouldn't sign Open Borders with the Indian army trying to finish the job. A single tile of Roman culture was responsible for another "None" result in the First to Die category. I'm glad that we didn't get these results in the actual Game Three although it would have been amusing to see the whole community melt down over a game with zero deaths.
This was also a weird game in the sense that there wasn't really a clear top AI amongst the high peace weight leaders. Gandhi won five times, Frederick won five times, and Elizabeth shockingly won six times despite never being the leader on the scoreboard at game's end. Gandhi seems to have been the overall strongest of these AI leaders although not by any kind of clear margin. He had the most total finish points from first and second place finishes and ironically ended up with the most kills amongst the high peace weight group. I'm a bit surprised that he didn't win more games but the Indian leader didn't tunnel as hard on the Cultural victory path as we might have expected and that allowed other leaders to grab some victories. Frederick did much better than I expected in winning five matches, all of them by Spaceship, and out-dueling Caesar in a bunch of different scenarios. He was helped enormously by the overall diplomatic environment as he was repeatedly able to engage in 2 vs 1 wars against the Romans, or alternately hit Caesar with superior technology after getting 100 turns to sit in the corner and build peacefully. He was also helped by having very high quality land in his core, lots of rivers and floodplains and resources. The actual game where we saw Caesar conquer Frederick was a rare outcome, their warring typically went in the other direction with Frederick taking out Rome.
Elizabeth had a very challenging starting position in the middle of the map and therefore it wasn't surprising that she was eliminated at a far higher rate than the other high peace weight leaders. She was never able to develop a large empire and usually found herself stuck on half a dozen cities. However, she focused very hard on the Cultural victory path and shockingly was able to squeeze out six different victories, all of them via the same victory condition. Take a look at the finishing screenshots for Game #11 or Game #14 or Game #20 to see how Elizabeth was able to conjure up a win despite being far, far behind the leaders in land and population. This was another consequence of having so many high peace weight leaders who rarely start conflicts and don't declare war at "Pleased" relations. The more militaristic AI leaders would have swatted away a technologically backwards neighbor and stopped those cultural shenanigans from taking place. There were a bunch of times that Gandhi or Frederick were heading for the spaceship and I saw Elizabeth grab victories that by all rights didn't belong to her.
And Hammurabi? He was just as useless in these alternate history scenarios as he was in the real game. Enough said. 
Now for a look at the individual leaders:
Gandhi of India
Wars Declared: 16
Wars Declared Upon: 49
Survival Percentage: 75%
Finishes: 5 Firsts, 7 Seconds (39 points)
Kills: 10
Overall Score: 49 points
Gandhi was probably the overall best leader on this map in terms of total performance but it was a lot less clear than any of the other alternate histories I can remember investigating. Perhaps this is another inherent weakness of the high peace weight leaders: because they aren't conquering territory and slaughtering their rivals, they leave the door open for weaker competitors to find a way to snatch away a victory through cultural or diplomatic hijinx. Gandhi had the good fortune to be drawn into a game with mostly high peace weight leaders and that allowed him to run his favorite gameplan: grab all of the religions while building peacefully for as long as possible. He always had enormous cultural pressure pushing against Hammurabi and especially Suleiman which made it very difficult for anyone to attack India. Gandhi's best performances came when Suleiman was drawn into wars with Caesar and Elizabeth to leave him undisturbed for long turns of peaceful building. He had Hammurabi to the north but the Babylonians were ridiculously inert and almost never invaded. When Hammurabi did fight someone, his most common target was Elizabeth and that suited Gandhi just fine. There were many games where Gandhi would avoid fighting Suleiman but end up getting most of the Ottoman territory anyway as his culture swallowed up someone else's conquests. Gandhi also ended up with 10 kills, more than almost everyone else, as he acted in a janitorial role by cleaning up a rival who had fallen extremely far behind in technology. Caesar and Suleiman died a bunch of times to Indian tanks while they were still fielding rifles. It was awfully nice to have a whole continent's worth of meat shields protecting Gandhi's territory while he teched and built away in peace.
For all of his success, Gandhi did suffer elimination five times and was even First to Die on three occasions. These were scenarios where one of two events played out: either Suleiman was able to win the 1 vs 1 clash with Gandhi or India wound up practicing a religion that no one else in the world followed. These were unlikely outcomes because Gandhi's religion usually spread to his neighbors and was adopted by someone else, but it did happen on rare occasions. Gandhi also threw away several games by chasing after the spaceship and allowed a lesser competitor (usually Elizabeth) to slip over the cultural finish line first. Based on the scoreboard alone Gandhi should have won more games than he did here, and this was a situation where his peaceful personality was a real detriment. Gandhi repeatedly signed peace treaties when he was crushing an opponent in warfare and could have pressed on to the finish. He simply doesn't have it in him to stomp out his rivals. However, Gandhi's edge in population and territory was enough for him to land a series of second place finishes in situations where he didn't win, and that was ultimately the reason why he graded out with the most points. I think that he was both the top leader for this map and also someone who left a lot on the table; he could have been far more dominant than he actually was.
Frederick of Germany
Wars Declared: 19
Wars Declared Upon: 18
Survival Percentage: 85%
Finishes: 5 Firsts, 5 Seconds (35 points)
Kills: 7
Overall Score: 42 points
Believe me, I'm as shocked as anyone else that Frederick did this well in the alternate histories. He was widely expected to be roadkill for Caesar and that simply didn't happen when I kept watching all of these maps. I think that Caesar successfully eliminated Germany exactly twice in the 20 alternate history scenarios (Game #2 and Game #4) so what we experienced on Livestream was not a common occurrence at all. Frederick turned out to be very good at avoiding warfare entirely on this map. He was only engaged in 19 offensive wars and 18 defensive wars despite a survival rate of 85%, one of the lowest tallies that I can remember from any of these alternate histories investigations. Frederick was fully as inert as we're used to seeing from other games, sitting around building and teching and not doing much of interest. The big difference is that this ended up being an effective strategy on this map. If Caesar failed to attack Germany, then Frederick would tech ahead and get so far down the tech tree that Rome could never win in a fight. If Caesar did attack Germany, the Ottomans or the English or even the Indians would inevitably attack Caesar from the other side and deliver the relief that Frederick needed. He rarely faced any real pressure and often found himself able to clean up an exhausted, technologically backwards Roman empire sometime in the midgame or lategame. Frederick only had seven kills and I think six of them came at the expense of Julius Caesar. Thanks to the wider diplomatic situation, Frederick actually had the advantage in his matchup with Caesar.
Frederick wasn't interested in chasing after a Cultural victory and never ran the cultural slider in these games. It's not what you would expect given his Philosophical/Organized traits but apparently he only goes for Spaceship victories as that was the path taken in all five of his victories. Frederick won 4 of the first 7 games that I ran and it was looking like he might be a juggernaut on this map before sanity was restored and he only won once in the last 13 games. There were seven different games where Frederick survived to the finish without taking a top two spot, a reflection of his pacifistic personality as well as the overall peaceful nature of this scenario. Despite the fact that he scored a bunch of strong finishes, Frederick really didn't do anything different or showcase any unexpected talents in these matches. He's going to sit around and build his cities and that's pretty much it. This is not a dynamic leader in any way, he simply happened to have a strong starting position and a favorable diplomatic environment. I'm confident that if we put Mansa Musa in Frederick's spot he would run away with the competition but Frederick just can't manage the same kind of performance. Considering how strong Frederick was in many of these games, the 19 war declarations is a damning indictment of his AI personality. He has no idea how to snowball a game.
Elizabeth of England
Wars Declared: 13
Wars Declared Upon: 32
Survival Percentage: 50%
Finishes: 6 Firsts, 0 Seconds (30 points)
Kills: 2
Overall Score: 32 points
Elizabeth was dealt a rough hand in this game in terms of her starting position, stuck in the middle of the map with very little land available that wasn't desert, tundra, or jungle. She greatly exceeded expectations by managing to find her way to six different victories, all of them Cultural, despite never leading on the scoreboard at any point in time. This was the only remotely plausible avenue for Elizabeth to win games and she managed to find it repeatedly in spite of her adverse circumstances. It was a really impressive result for a leader who hasn't been able to accomplish much after a successful run back in Season One. Because she was almost always in a weak position, Elizabeth declared the fewest wars of anyone in this game at only 13, well under one per game on average. She actually had two different victories without a single offensive war started, something that's almost unheard of in AI Survivor. Her vulnerable starting position left her subject to being eliminated as the English were knocked out of half of these games and Elizabeth was First to Die on five separate occasions. However, Elizabeth's teching was always solid thanks to her Financial trait and she was willing to engage in risky gambits to run the cultural slider at an early date while seeking unlikely victories. Elizabeth managed to accomplish this enough times that I can't say it was an unlikely fluke - this was a real strategy that proved to be effective on this map.
There was no one opponent that Elizabeth fought against the most. She drew a lot of attacks from Suleiman but also from Caesar and Hammurabi; England was the only nation that the Babylonians consistently seemed to invade. Frederick and Gandhi almost never attacked Elizabeth, but on the rare occasions where they did, it could produce some wild results. Suleiman's victory in Game #3 was heavily due to the fact that Gandhi launched a bizarre sequence of wars with Elizabeth and left India vulnerable to conquest. Elizabeth's own war declarations were so rare that I couldn't identify any clear patterns in who she attacked. She only managed a paltry two kills, far fewer than anyone else even in this peaceful sequence of alternate histories. This was a leader who was typically weak and bullied, struggling desperately to survive while running the cultural slider and praying to be left alone. While I do not think this would be a successful strategy in most fields of AI leaders, this was exactly the kind of setup where it was effective. Elizabeth might have won even more games if she'd been fortunate to draw a corner start like Hammurabi or Gandhi instead of being stuck in the center of the map. She can be dangerous if drawn into a group of high peace weight leaders but otherwise likely won't survive long enough to reach the end of the tech tree or triple Legendary cities.
Suleiman of the Ottomans
Wars Declared: 50
Wars Declared Upon: 29
Survival Percentage: 55%
Finishes: 3 Firsts, 2 Seconds (19 points)
Kills: 11
Overall Score: 30 points
Suleiman was surprisingly the more successful of the two leaders with low peace weight scores on this map. He survived far more often than Caesar, killed off more competitors than Caesar, and most importantly won three games as compared to zero for the Romans. This was difficult for me to understand at first, since it's pretty clear that Caesar is a superior AI Survivor leader and didn't have to deal with the difficult central starting position. Why did Suleiman end up with the better performance? I spent some time thinking about this and eventually came up with a clear answer: better prospects for conquest. It should be noted first of all that Suleiman was a leader with high variability. He had three victories but he was also the leader most likely to be First to Die. When things went badly for Suleiman, they tended to go very badly. He could easily be the subject of a dogpile and get crushed at an early date, something that happened in the actual Game Three but also in the alternate history scenarios in Game #4 and Game #12 and Game #19. Suleiman wasn't just First to Die a bunch of times, his eliminations also tended to come at early dates. He suffered eliminations on Turn 145, Turn 162, Turn 151, Turn 166, and Turn 159. Elizabeth was the only other AI leader who was consistently knocked out of the game this quickly.
But if Suleiman wasn't the subject of a gangpile, he had more realistic opportunities to snowball ahead militarily than Caesar did. There was one giant target available for him to attack: Gandhi. Suleiman didn't fight him as much as I expected (in part because they often shared a religion) and frequently the Ottomans would just bang their heads ineffectually against the Indian defenses when they did fight. However, on the rare occasions where Suleiman was able to break through and start capturing cities, he found himself with rich conquests perfect for zooming ahead of the rest of the field. It's not a coincidence that Gandhi was eliminated in all three of Suleiman's victories. Each time, it was the powerful Indian cities that provided the snowball opportunity for Suleiman. Caesar lacked this same chance and in fact often wasted time fighting ineffectual wars against Gandhi from the other side of the map. Suleiman could take cities from Gandhi and not have them be crushed by Indian culture in a way that Rome lacked. A disproportionate amount of Suleiman's kills and scoring came from those three games, 6 of his 11 kills and 21 of his 30 points. Suleiman also had far better luck at adopting Gandhi's religion (which was usually the game's dominant faith) while Caesar usually found himself practicing an unpopular religion from the western side of the map. All told, it meant that Suleiman was able to wring at least a handful of strong performances out of this map even though it might have felt unintiutive ahead of time. Suleiman seems to be a pretty bog-standard warmonger and he made the most of his few chances. When he managed to get ahead of everyone else, he rolled over the remaining peaceful competition without breaking much of a sweat. He wasn't terribly impressive but he made the most of a bad position.
Hammurabi of Babylon
Wars Declared: 26
Wars Declared Upon: 10
Survival Percentage: 95%
Finishes: 1 First, 4 Seconds (13 points)
Kills: 6
Overall Score: 19 points
Hammurabi was the opposite of Elizabeth and Suleiman: he did as little as possible with his starting position. Hammurabi was short-changed on land with his corner starting position but we've seen games from powerful AI Survivor leaders like Huayna Capac where they're able to play their way out of that disadvantage and make something of themselves. Despite his tundra-heavy location, Hammurabi had an excellent diplomatic position with extreme pacifists Gandhi and Elizabeth on his borders. He was attacked only 10 times in 20 games - a paltry average of 0.5 invasions per game. In fact, there were 13 different games where Hammurabi was never attacked at all. This is the biggest reason why he managed an absurd 95% survival rate since he was almost never attacked by anyone at any time. You would think that given the complete lack of any pressure being placed on Hammurabi from other leaders, he would have found his way to several victories and more than a handful of second place finishes. Even if he did absolutely nothing but build wonders the whole game, surely he would have at least stumbled into some Cultural victories by dumb luck, right?
Not so much as it turns out. Hammurabi had exactly one strong performance in Game #16 where he eliminated Elizabeth at an early date and executed a genuine snowball en route to a Spaceship victory. Otherwise, it was a whole lot of nothing from the Babylonian leader as he became strong in only one other match (Game #5) while accomplishing virtually nothing. Hammurabi rarely fought with Gandhi and he never managed to pull off a successful conquest on the few occasions where they did clash, not even one time. He was sucked into wars with Elizabeth a bit more often and was usually the aggressor when it came to Babylonian/English disputes. These attacks almost never achieved anything either, with English cities almost always successfully holding out against Hammurabi's incursions. When the Babylonians decided to avoid conflict altogether and focus on peaceful infrastructure, Hammurabi nonetheless still wasn't able to out-tech his opponents. Gandhi and Frederick were both significantly better than him at the economic side of the game and I don't think that was purely due to the low-quality terrain surrounding Hammurabi's start. Elizabeth had things at least as bad and suffered from three times as many invasions yet she ended up with six wins to Hammurabi's sole victory. There were a staggering 14 games where Hammurabi avoided elimination yet couldn't manage a top two finish. This guy had "Wildcard game" written all over him. I would argue that he had the most pathetic showing in this group since he was pretty much left completely untouched and still couldn't muster up more than a single good game.
Julius Caesar of Rome
Wars Declared: 56
Wars Declared Upon: 42
Survival Percentage: 20%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 2 Seconds (4 points)
Kills: 8
Overall Score: 12 points
Julius Caesar ended up being the worst-performing leader on this map in a true shocker. I detailed some of the issues that he had in the overview section above but I want to explore what happened to him in further detail here. The single biggest problem was a poor diplomatic situation that caused him to be the enemy of most of the other leaders in the game. Everyone other than Suleiman had a high peace weight which caused an inherent dislike of the low peace weight Caesar. The solution would have been for Caesar and Suleiman to work together against the rest of the field, however that simply did not happen in pretty much any of these games. I never saw a single match where both Caesar and Suleiman were powerful, always one or the other and frequently neither of them. The land between them was set up in such a way that their borders would always overlap and cause major tensions between the two. Throw in the fact that they often ended up with different religions and could both plot war at "Pleased" relations and it was a classic recipe for conflict. Suleiman was the most frequent target for Caesar's wars and vice versa. They could occasionally work together against Elizabeth or Gandhi but in both cases Suleiman was better positioned to take advantage of the spoils from those wars, not Caesar. I don't recall ever seeing them work together against Frederick as Suleiman didn't seem interested in fighting with Germany. And Frederick was usually able to defeat Caesar if it came to a 1 vs 1 situation between their empires, either because he was ahead in tech or because Caesar would be blindsided by an additional foe from another direction. Caesar was never able to get an easy conquest in the games that I watched, with any territorial gains coming through exhausting wars of attrition.
Speaking of wars, another problem for Caesar was the vast number of them that he was caught up in. He fought 98 wars in all (!) broken down as 56 offensive wars and 42 defensive wars. By way of comparison, Frederick engaged in 37 total wars and Hammurabi was caught up in 36 of them. Caesar found himself in far, far more wars than anyone else in this game. Now obviously that was heavily driven by his own choices since he started so many wars himself but it does help to explain why Rome was frequently trailing badly in terms of infrastructure. It often felt to me as though Caesar was some kind of feral animal, thrashing about wildly and striking out in every direction but without finding much success. Sometimes his wars went poorly and that was simply it. Unfortunately, even when his wars went well, they were constantly undercut by additional factors outside Caesar's control. There were repeated games where he conquered Suleiman at great cost only to see half of the captured cities flip over to Gandhi's control due to India's massive cultural presence. Other times Caesar would be winning a war against Frederick only to have Suleiman or Elizabeth or even Gandhi race across the map to backstab him. Or he would be steamrolling over Suleiman when Germany launched an attack from the north. In Game #14, Caesar had knocked out Suleiman and 80% of Frederick only to have Gandhi send tanks to the other side of the continent to eliminate him. There was always another enemy out there who had been teching away in peace for the last 200 years and had units that Rome couldn't match.
The net result was Julius Caesar suffering an amazing 80% elimination rate. That includes the two games where no one died, and Caesar was looking at an even worse 90% elimination rate before he reached the finishing date in the last two games that I watched. He was only First to Die twice and had a lot of late elimination dates, Turn 307 and Turn 311 and Turn 322 and Turn 356 and Turn 305 and Turn 349. In other words, Caesar was a tough out and he didn't give up easily even when he was way behind in tech. He just couldn't match four different AI leaders simultaneously running a farmer's gambit on the map. Caesar did not have a clear target to absorb and snowball off of like Suleiman did with Gandhi. Frederick would have been the best option there but every time that Caesar tried to conquer Germany he always found himself backstabbed from another direction. It was also highly difficult for Caesar to win that matchup; Frederick had better land and could always drag out the fighting into a quagmire such that even if Caesar won he'd be too far behind technologically afterwards. There just wasn't much that Caesar could do on this map to turn his position into a winner. The relatively cramped map probably didn't help as Caesar tends to be excellent at expanding and there simply wasn't enough open terrain for him to leverage in this world. He did manage 8 kills, more than Frederick and Hammurabi despite their vastly higher survival rates, which isn't bad considering how rarely Caesar survived to the finish. I think that if you swapped Caesar and Frederick's starting positions, he'd be in a much better position since he wouldn't constatly be fighting with his natural ally Suleiman. This may be worth of investigation as a curiosity piece.
This game had no clear answers as far as the picking contest went. There was no dominant AI in terms of winning the game and there was also no big favorite for First to Die. It seems to have been roughly even odds as far as whether Gandhi or Frederick or Elizabeth would win the game and the other two categories were pretty much a total crapshoot. One clear thing to emerge from these alternate history scenarios was that Domination was not a viable victory condition, only showing up in a single match. Spaceship and Cultural had about the same odds of taking place with Frederick favoring the former and Elizabeth the latter. This was one of the more unsatisfying games to explore for alternate histories since it didn't yield up much in the way of clear answers. Most of the games were a big jumble and then one of the high peace weight leaders eventually came out on top. Still, if you enjoy the setups where the high peace weight leaders get a chance to showcase their stuff, this was the game for you. It's rare to see Diplomatic victories occur more often than Domination ones but that was the case this time around.
