This summary for Playoff Three was written by Eauxps I. Fourgott with some assistance from TheOneAndOnlyAtesh. Many thanks for volunteering to put this report together! 
Our third and final playoff game of this season featured a rather unimpressive group of leaders, none of whom had been seeded at the start of the season. The most storied leaders from this group were Season 5 champion Mehmed, and Churchill who would be vying to appear in his third straight championship game, but each of them had only a single career win prior to this game. Like the other playoff matches, this one also had a majority of high peaceweight leaders, four to two, leaving the low peaceweights with rather long odds, but due to the low talent involved in the match, it was perceived as being more wide open. Still, the two low peaceweights - Mehmed in the northwest and Qin Shi Huang in the southwest - would have an uphill battle to reach the finals. In the center of the map were Pericles in the north and Sitting Bull in the south; their central positions would be more dangerous but would give them potential to expand through the low peaceweights. Sitting Bull also had a very nice starting location with plenty of room to expand, while Pericles was the only Creative leader in the match. In the east were two British leaders, Churchill leading England in the south and Victoria commandeering what we'll call Scotland in the north for this game. Vicky was the only Financial leader in the game, always a valuable advantage, while Churchill had another spacious start and double gold at his capital to go with his starting Mining tech, and both would be sheltered from the low peaceweights. This seemed to tip the scales in their favor, as while there was no huge favorite in the picking contest, the most popular view seemed to be that the two British would be the ones advancing. This was also another big game for our fantasy contest, with five coaches - antisocialmunkey, Bellomorphe, Eauxps, Henrik, and j_mie - holding a leader in this game. Whoever won here would put their coach in or very near the fantasy lead entering the final game of the season.
In direct contrast to the last game, filled with religiously-inclined leaders, many of whom had Mysticism tech from the get-go, this game had NOBODY that was particularly likely to chase a religion out of the gate and nobody that started with Mysticism, leaving the religious race wide open. It stayed wide open for a good while, too, as nobody was interested in pursuing a religion right out of the gate - it took 25 turns for somebody to start chasing one! Instead, the field began with other pursuits as they established their first cities, with varying results. Qin was the game's clear weakling from the early turns, as he chose a horrible location for his second city - it had zero commerce, zero immediately improvable tiles, and zero tiles that could produce more than two foodhammers, and he further tied it up on a slow settler build to stunt his expansion compared to everyone else's. Once that settler finally completed, he sent it to a similarly poor location, with no good tiles in the first ring. Qin also ended up as the only leader to delay getting culture in his cities for an inordinate amount of time, and on Turn 50 lost the settler for his fourth city to the barbarians! Sitting Bull also took advantage of his lack of cultural pursuits, and stole a plains cow tile from the second ring of Qin's second city when he founded his fourth city four tiles away and immediately built a totem pole. This was a disaster in every way for the Chinese.
Churchill was also a slow starter here. On the research front, he prioritized Archery and then Bronze Working, failing to tech anything that would allow him to improve the output of his fairly food-poor capital. On the expansion front, he claimed secure backlines with his second settler and spent a long time walking with the third before finally planting that city, taking longer than almost anybody else. Pericles had a fairly average opening, but did spend a while walking his fourth settler back and forth instead of getting out a quick plant. Mehmed's opening was also fairly average, although he did eventually found the first religion in Islam. Unfortunately for him, it appeared in a jungle-choked city on the west coast, where it was unlikely to be very useful. Instead, the strongest leaders in the early turns seemed to be Sitting Bull and Victoria. Sitting Bull enjoyed a nice capital location in a river valley filled with floodplains, was under little pressure from other leaders' settling early on, and was himself one of the first leaders to four cities, expanding well in an effort that resembled his winning performance from the opening round. Vicky's capital was quite nice, featuring a plains hill marble that she could quickly mine to get up to an output of 5 production, double clams that she could immediately improve, and a wet corn that she could also hook up after she researched Agriculture as her first tech of the game. This was thus a very strong location with solid commerce output; with her Imperialistic trait it could also churn out settlers in record time, leading to her being the first leader to four cities. Pericles and Churchill had both started fairly close to her, leaving it looking like she might be squeezed, but they largely settled away from her instead, keeping pressure light, and she later founded Christianity in a nice riverside city near the border with Pericles, increasing its odds of spreading to her neighbors and locking down some contested border territory. If she could keep the momentum from this start, she'd be the favorite to win.
However, as time went on, she was not able to keep her momentum. As we've seen from her and many other leaders, especially Financial ones, in the past, she simply stopped expanding at this point. (Is this behavior somehow related to the Financial trait? We often see it from those leaders - like Vicky, Huayna Capac, and Darius - which certainly seems indicative. It's worth some good community discussion.) That lovely settler pump of a capital never built a settler again, instead going for lengthy wonder builds, first Stonehenge and then the Temple of Artemis immediately afterwards. Vicky would eventually found one more city along the coast, but that was it - by the time her next settler was out, there was nowhere good to send it and it went and hid in her capital instead. She had only five cities, less than anybody else, and even with Financial trait, an early shrine, and several rivers, that didn't seem like it would be enough to keep up with the rest. She was in the weakest position of any of the high peaceweights. The two low peaceweight leaders were also in poor shape; they were both very unpopular, and at just six cities apiece at the end of the main landgrab phase, they had the smallest nations on the map after Victoria's Scotland.
That left the three other high peaceweights in the best positions to move on as we approached the first wars. Pericles was the smallest, but still had a decent seven cities after sniping a barb city out from Sitting Bull's nose, and his central position left him with options for military expansion. Churchill's vast available land coupled with Vicky's lack of expansion had given him room to recover from his slow beginning and let him get up to one of the highest city counts by the end of the landgrab, and he was now the score leader. On the other hand, Sitting Bull, who'd also expanded to a high city account after a more balanced opening, had an even more promising position, close to Mehmed and Qin and thus standing to better profit off their demises. As far as diplomacy went, there was little in the way of really tight bonds so far. Islam had spread to Qin and Christianity to Pericles, while Churchill had founded Judaism and seen it spread to Sitting Bull, creating three religious pairs; outside of those pairs, nobody was terribly fond of anybody else. Still, there was a general hatred of Mehmed and Qin in the air, and it seemed likely that the others would soon gang up on them and knock them out.
However, it was not to be. Our first war threw any such notion out of the window and instead completely altered the game's expected trajectory: Pericles declared war on SITTING BULL. 
This actually was not a particularly unlikely result, as Pericles had been Cautious towards everybody on the map except for Victoria, leaving him just as likely to attack one neighbor as another, but it still came as a surprise. There's a general expectation that the high and low peaceweight leaders know their teams and will work together against their opponents, and that expectation was certainly in full force entering this match. That's not how the game actually works, though, and this time it turned out that the high peaceweights were to fight amongst each other instead of cooperating. This certainly set up the low peaceweights as nicely as they could have asked for, and they were quick to take advantage, Mehmed dogpiling Pericles and Qin dogpiling Sitting Bull to try and take out their enemies while they were already down. As it turned out, Mehmed was in a better position to do this, not least because Pericles was the weaker of the two high peaceweights, losing a city to Sitting Bull even before the Ottomans joined the fray; Mehmed's intervention ensured his doom. Sitting Bull meanwhile turned his attention to China, cleaning up Qin's attackers and soon taking the city of Shanghai - and in the process, leaving a weakened Pericles for Mehmed to deal with, setting him up nicely to expand his empire.
Meanwhile, this left England and Scotland free to build up peacefully. Victoria was showing Ramesses from last game how to properly pursue a cultural gambit, quickly stocking up four holy cities and starting to build a ton of wonders. While she only had a few cities, there is an upside to lack of expansion, as the lower city maintanance costs can allow a leader to surge ahead in tech in the short term. Victoria was exploting this upside for all it was worth, and starting to look like a real threat to slip through this game, especially if she could culturally flip some conquered Greek cities. But Churchill was the real leader to watch here, nearly as big as a Sitting Bull who had already captured multiple cities, and starting to develop all of his cities nicely. He had a lot of heft, and while he was making some odd tech choices (in particular, his Gold flavor helped lead him to pursue a deep beeline of Banking - and his unique Stock Exchange - while he still lacked Calendar or Construction), he was a serious threat. He also didn't have particularly strong diplomacy with anybody thanks to his unpopular Jewish faith - his only convert, Sitting Bull, had later flipped into Victoria's Christianity. For a while he was content to build in peace - probably the correct choice at this juncture - but when he did choose to strike, almost anybody was fair game, and he'd have decisive impact wherever he chose. And after a while, just shy of 150 turns into the game, he chose...
...Victoria! This locked the map into global war and was an instant deathknell for Scotland's hopes of winning the game. However, it turned out not to be very good for Churchill, either. He was still working on Banking, which because of his deep beeline meant that he still lacked Construction and thus had no siege units. Victoria further had stout defenses bolstered by Chichen Itza, as well as longbow defenders. Even the knights that Churchill had already unlocked weren't going to accomplish much against that, and as he launched a bizarre three-pronged attack against three Scottish cities at once, they all got completely cleaned up. That seemed to kill England's momentum; Churchill was still far ahead in power and production, keeping Vicky down, but he wasn't getting anywhere fast, and the fruitless war bogged down his score, as he plunged down below Sitting Bull, Mehmed, and even Victoria. Then, when he finally got a big stack with catapults put together and had it parked outside the city of Nottingham, he decided to sign peace. Vicky did hand Nottingham over in the peace treaty, leaving her with a mere four cities and too small to really compete for the win, but this had been a highly costly 25 turns of warfare for Churchill, and he'd gotten almost nothing to show for it. He'd dropped from the frontrunning position to running even with the other game leaders.
Meanwhile, in the western wars, Sitting Bull's promising start ground to a total halt as he called off his attack on China, sending the main part of his army back to Greece. Qin was actually able to retake Shanghai, successfully stabilizing his position. The biggest problem with this move, though, was that Sitting Bull wasn't even able to take any Greek cities! After a lengthy siege of his first targeted city ended in success, Mehmed had the ball rolling, and so was pre-empting Sitting Bull and capturing all the cities for himself, jumping into first place on the scoreboard in the process. Sitting Bull eventually signed peace with Qin, getting Shanghai back in the process but nothing else. While the weak Qin had predictably failed to accomplish anything, this had also been a huge missed opportunity for Bull, who, like Churchill, had failed to press his advantage properly and thus not improved his position. Instead, it was Mehmed who was on the rise, as he was able to capture every single city that Pericles had founded, scoring the kill as the Greek leader was first to die.
This was a richly deserved result for Pericles, who had entirely dug his own grave. He'd started out fine and was in a decent position, perfectly poised to take on Mehmed and quite possibly gain off of him... but instead he attacked the friendly and much stronger Sitting Bull, completely tanking his chances and setting himself up to be dogpiled out. That was all she wrote and it was hard to shed any tears for him. With him out of the picture, we now had a tight three-way race between Churchill, Sitting Bull, and a shocking Mehmed, who had seen things align just right so far to become the only leader to make significant gains. He was slightly ahead in score and food, but not by much, and the three were quite close on all the other bar graphs. Mehmed was distinctly more unpopular than the other two, but Churchill and Sitting Bull fighting each other was very much on the table, especially with Churchill bordering Bull and not Mehmed. Qin and Vicky's chances of winning this game were done, but they had the opportunity to play spoiler by serving as fatal distractions. Where and when future wars broke out was still going to be critical in deciding the outcome of this game.
As often is the case, we had only a short interlude of peace before more conflicts broke out. Mehmed decided that now was the time to go for the gold, and launched a major attack on Sitting Bull! I think this was the correct time for him to strike: he had already reached gunpowder for his unique Janissaries, and everybody was still several techs away from rifles. With their bonus against all pre-gunpowder units, the Janissaries would be very effective against anything Sitting Bull could throw at him other than his own muskets. This was proven at the war's first siege, where Sitting Bull's major stack, full of medieval units, was obliterated, causing a gigantic drop on the power graphs that took him from roughly even with Mehmed to far behind him. The Ottoman army was able to quickly capture two border cities, and it looked like Sitting Bull might just be done - like Mehmed was simply going to rampage through his land, and that would be that. But Sitting Bull wasn't quite out of options: he beelined Military Science, just two techs away at the start of the war, and once he started deploying grenadiers, that seemed to stem the flow of blood. Mehmed had beelined rifles himself, but he still was unable to make further progress; Sitting Bull was able to clean up the attackers, push forward and retake one of his cities, and then sue for peace without having to give up any more. He had, just barely, held on, and while he went on to ignore Rifling for an unusually long time for a leader with Military flavor, he would be left alone for the next while, long enough to pick up the tech and make himself a relevant player again. As for Mehmed, he actually ended the war behind where he had started it in city count; while he held a single Native American city, he'd seen two of his Greek conquests flip to Victoria. He was still the frontrunner, but he had failed to decisively convert that into a sure top two position.
Meanwhile, Churchill soon returned to war against Victoria, and immediately resumed bungling the attack as he had done before. He sent a large stack straight to London, but its initial attack came up short, and the motley remnants were left with a single trebuchet for a slow-motion siege. There was a window here where Victoria seemed to have a real chance of bouncing back: she was flipping ex-Greek cities from Mehmed, close to Rifling tech, and Churchill was completely failing to take cities from her. However, she was pursuing a Willem gambit in full force, going for Constitution, Astronomy, Communism, Physics, and Chemistry all before pursuing Rifling (or even Military Science). Churchill had no such problems and himself soon unlocked Redcoats, and they were present among the reinforcements that joined the second siege of London. This time, the attack came in and was decisive: the wonder-filled city of London fell, and Vicky's strength was blown up in one fell swoop. With the heart of her empire gone, she was unable to mount much more resistance, and Churchill could quickly mop up the remaining cities. He actually missed out on the kill credit, as Mehmed joined the war in the closing turns and took back the city of Sparta to strike a totally undeserved finishing blow, but he got all of the rest. There was no more separation between England and Scotland - it was now all one United Kingdom, under the leadership of Churchill.
It had been yet another failed game from Victoria, who had clearly lost in the same way that we've seen her lose other games in the past: by failing to expand. The Imperalistic trait doesn't do much good if you only build two settlers during the main expansion phase! She was in perfect position to take a lead here, but her utter failure to expand properly left her too small to properly compete. Maybe it would have been different if she could have stayed at peace - she certainly did a far better job of pursuing culture than Ramesses had last game - but she had to fight, and wasn't big enough to properly do so, no matter how inefficiently Churchill pursued the attack. Thus she was out, and the dreams of a triple England or triple Financial championship were ended. Now there was one less distraction on the board, and still a close race between Mehmed, Churchill, and Sitting Bull. The captured Scottish cities had driven Churchill's score up and he and Mehmed were now jockeying for the lead; they also now had a shared border in former Greek/Scottish territory, making conflict more likely. Sitting Bull was a little further behind but still very much in the mix, and if he could get on the right side of a 2v1, he would still probably advance. Qin was the forgotten man, although competitive enough in tech to found the Divine Right religion and land the Statue of Liberty. He would still need a miracle to advance, but he was at least alive. The driving question now was how the three top leaders would fight; any of them could find himself in a 2v1, and if that happened, it was very likely that the 2 would be the ones to move on.
Almost immediately after Victoria's exit, Churchill swapped into Free Religion. This was a big boon for Sitting Bull, who now had the English leader Pleased towards him and unwilling to declare war. However, he seemed determined to prove that he didn't need Churchill's help to sink his game, as he soon launched a war against Mehmed, and it did not go well. Sitting Bull's initial attack stack was cleaned up almost immediately, causing his power to plummet again, and after a few scuffles back and forth, Mehmed's counterattack stack successfully took and held the core city of Poverty Point. Mehmed also compounded his advantage here by beelining a very early Assembly Line, putting up cheap Organized factories and adding infantry to his arsenal. Sitting Bull countered by teching Railroad for machine guns, and that let him fight off one stack at the border city of Snaketown, but at the same time Mehmed was sieging down another border city, Illinois, and successfully took it. A sortie by Sitting Bull was completely slaughtered, and then Mehmed attacked and captured Snaketown as well. Sitting Bull was clearly losing this war, and had made matters even worse for himself by poisoning the well with Churchill... literally! He had sent a bunch of spies to England, presumably to undertake the "Poison Water Supply" mission that he loves so much, and he'd racked up a -3 diplomatic malus with Churchill as a result, dropping their relations back down to Cautious. Once again, all eyes turned now to Churchill. Would he intervene, and on which side?
The answer: Churchill stalled. He started plotting war eventually, but took his sweet time to actually launch an attack, and Sitting Bull was gutted in the process. Soon his score had plummeted below even the inactive Qin's; we would indeed be seeing one low peaceweight make the finals. Churchill himself had taken advantage of the long peace, launching into the tech lead and a big score lead, but he'd also let Mehmed grow very strong in his own right and eliminated another leader from contention by his inaction. When he finally launched his attack on Mehmed, as we'd been expecting, Sitting Bull was down to just three cities.
Once the attack came in, though, Mehmed was toast. He and Churchill were virtually dead-even in power at the start of the war, but Churchill had the tech lead: he was using mobile artillery while Mehmed was still on cannons, and also had the advantage of gunships, bombers, and jets. Mehmed's power bar graph soon was cratering even harder than Sitting Bull's had, as Churchill's units swept in all across the Ottoman lands, and his big stack obliterated Mehmed's at Snaketown. The conquest of Native America was halted - Sitting Bull would barely survive. Churchill now was clearly in the driver's seat and was surely going to keep going until he won the game. Did that mean... Qin was going to come in second? He was about a thousand points behind Mehmed at the moment, but Mehmed's score was dropping fast, and Qin now led the exahausted Sitting Bull by about a thousand points himself. Or could Sitting Bull be brought back from the dead by city liberations? It would be close, but the final spot in the championship was on the line!
It should also be mentioned how long this game had stretched out, as a result of none of the four remaining leaders being very good economically. Sitting Bull attacked Mehmed around Turn 300, at which point everybody was still stuck in the Industrial Age. By the time Churchill got involved, it was already nearly Turn 350 - a late ending date on its own! - and he was still about a dozen techs from the end of the tree. This was a particularly slow one. In any case, the cities that had long ago been Greek fell quickly, and Mehmed's lead over Qin was halved in just a few turns. Churchill next started taking former Native American cities and liberating them back to Sitting Bull, whose territory more than doubled in size. As English forces started pressing into the Ottoman core, Churchill lobbed one nuke in ahead of them, and on the same turn Mehmed dropped below Qin in score - it was Qin and not Mehmed who ran against Churchill in the first UN election! And Qin himself finally got involved in the action again, backstabbing his game-long ally with his own declaration on Mehmed. This was no purely symbolic war, either, as Qin was able to vulture five separate cities to bolster his lead over Sitting Bull, protecting it against city liberation shenanigans. As for Mehmed, for all the time that he'd had spent on top of the scoreboard, all the ways this game had swung in his favor, he still wasn't going to reach the end. Churchill had been able to grow stronger and had irreversably ripped his empire apart. He did show some form of mercy at the end, calling a Stop the War resolution in the UN, which everybody voted for... except Mehmed, who in one of those bizarre quirks of the AI decided to DEFY the vote that would have kept him alive. Apparently he was just fed up with the whole situation and wanted out, and honestly I can't blame him. In any case, with the vote defied, Mehmed was entirely conquered just a few turns later - after Turn 370 - and out of the game in fourth place.
This had been an excellent game in almost all respects for Mehmed, right until the very end. In particular, he lived much of the game by diplomacy... right until he died by diplomacy. While his start had been poor, largely due to his unfavorable position, and he'd been an unpopular figure, he'd had the good luck to not have anybody attack him for either of the first two rounds of wars despite his reputation. Instead, he got the opportunity to dogpile Pericles, and took good advantage, executing an effective war of conquest to become a frontrunner - I expect he'd be on the wrong side of a multifront war more often than not in the alternate histories! While Mehmed did slow down in the middle of the game, he was then doing an excellent job in the third round, nearly entirely conquering one of the game's strongest leaders while having been attacked only once in the entire game. Unfortunately, his luck ran out there, as a Churchill who had enjoyed a much more privileged position finally attacked him, and that was that. The one point where it seems like Mehmed could have changed his fate was his choice of war targets in the second round; if he'd attacked Victoria instead of the much stronger Sitting Bull, he would likely have had a much easier time and would have given himself a chance to pick up several high quality cities. Instead, he waited until Churchill was almost done with her, getting absolutely nothing while giving Churchill the chance to challenge him. Still, Mehmed probably played the best overall game of anybody in this field, and would have been a deserving winner. Instead, though, he is out here, having come up short once more. At least he wasn't missing out on much of a chance of winning the title...
With the conquest of Mehmed complete, Churchill still sat about 6-7% short of the Domination threshold in land area. He only had five techs left on the tree, so a space win seemed to be most likely, although he could easily get over the Domination threshold from another war. Cultural was out of the question - while he did finally have his first city go Legendary on Turn 377(!), the other two were still only about halfway there, and with no culture-related traits, he was never going to halt his research to turn on the slider. As for the others, Sitting Bull had gotten almost his entire empire liberated back to him, but still sat a good thousand points behind Qin. He was out of luck, unless the Chinese were gutted in the game's closing turns. No such attack came in, though. Churchill decided to pursue the end of the tech tree instead, finally launching his spaceship on Turn 388. Now, oftentimes, we see this followed by the launching leader deciding to attack somebody else while their spaceship is en route... but it didn't happen this time. Instead, ten turns later, Churchill's spaceship arrived, and that was that.
It wasn't the most impressive victory from Churchill, but a win is a win. In this case, he was certainly carried by his favorable position: he had enough space to expand to a good size despite a poor start, a cushy diplomatic situation where he never once was attacked, and an undersize Victoria to the north whom he could easily conquer despite flubbing the attempt multiple times. Then, while he had long stretches of peace to tech and build up and some very high quality cities to take from the advanced Victoria, Mehmed had to fight much more for his land, didn't start as strong, and didn't get as strong of conquests; Mehmed had to put a lot more work into his game, which made it that much easier for Churchill to simply blow him away by the time they came to blows. Churchill's performance here would have been woefully inadequate had the map not lined up so well for him; even if Vicky had expanded properly, that might have been enough. This time, though, it worked out for him, and he was at least the clear strongest leader in the end. Now he's going to the Championship for the third season in a row; he'll have to do much better on that map if he wants to come close to the title.
Meanwhile, Qin is extremely lucky to be moving on here after having set himself out of contention for the win at a very early date. From that point on he needed a miracle to advance, and he got it as everybody else on the map except for Churchill imploded over the course of the game, leaving Qin in second by default. To his credit, he did try to make a play for relevance with his early attack on Sitting Bull, successfully sue for peace despite being weaker when that war didn't go so well, and then stay out of trouble for the rest of the game despite loathing his neighbor Sitting Bull. He even took opportunity when it came, vulturing several cities off of his dying ally to cement his position. He played this game correctly after the opening, and this time it was enough, despite how bad the opening had been. Note, though, how unpopular he was the entire game - never was anybody except Mehmed inclined to like him - and the fact that he NEVER was attacked despite that. Where wars break out is an incredibly important component to these games, and sometimes dodging those declarations is all that it takes to win out.
Finally, Sitting Bull's performance here is an excellent lesson in why two-front wars can be so bad for the AI. He found himself attacked early by both Qin and Pericles, and was more than a match for either leader on their own, in perfect position to conquer them... but when trapped at war with both, he couldn't make up his mind which one to go after, with the end result of him effectively attacking neither one. That seemed to permanently set him back, as the more efficient Mehmed was able to beat him back in both of their later wars and eventually knock him out of contention. Sitting Bull had been in a strong position early in the game, but as with Qin, the war declarations made all the difference; he wasn't able to come back after those inopportune early ones, and he sealed his own fate with the late attack on Mehmed.
This game was a bit of a bloodbath in the picking contest, with nobody cracking 20 points, but the winner was Plain Cow (not to be confused with Plains-Cow) with 19 points; gaining one point for victory date was enough to edge in front of a bunch of other entrants in this very long game. As for fantasy, this game ended the season for myself (Eauxps), with a final score of 17 points, leaving a tight five-way race for the title. j_mie with Churchill and 23 points, antisocialmunkey with Mansa and 22 points, and Kjotleik with Gandhi and 22 points are now the leaders, and if one of their contenders wins the Championship then they will win fantasy as well; they could even win without that if things line up right. Two other coaches are in weaker positions but in theory have a chance: Henrik has 19 points and Augustus in the championship, while Bellomorphe has just 16 points but both Elizabeth and Qin. His odds are very slim, but if things line up just right it could still happen. In any case, this contest won't end until the entire tournament does. Tune in for the Championship to find out who will come on top after this crazy season!
