Civ4 AI Survivor Season 8: Championship Game Alternate Histories

(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.)

Eauxps I. Fourgott: This is the thirteenth set of Alternate Histories that I personally have ever run, and that number is very appropriate for this set, as it turned out to be an extremely unusual scenario that wasn't really like any that I've personally witnessed before. Two major factors are responsible for the odd dynamics of this match: the large-sized map itself, and the exceptionally peaceful group of leaders who played on it.

The custom map built for this season's Championship was noticeably larger than average, which generated a lot of discussion leading up to the finale. I'm not sure exactly what the average total city count is in an AI Survivor game - there's no particularly convenient way to figure that out - but it certainly is less than it was on this map, which would see 70-80 cities founded in total over the course of a game. Everybody had a lot of space available to expand into, and so even this map's version of a runt civ wouldn't have less than ten cities except in particularly dire performances - and on most maps, ten cities makes for a pretty strong civ! This extra space leading to larger civilizations had three major effects that I noticed. One was that it made economic aptitude, and in particular the ability to manage happiness, all the more important in the early game. With the extra space making for longer landgrab phases than normal, leaders would be taxing their early economies with expansion for a significant period of time, and that gave an advantage to the Financial duo of Mansa Musa and Elizabeth, as well as Gandhi who would always have an early religion. They were able to scale their economies better as they expanded to get an early head start in tech on this map. Nobody ever horribly crashed their economy here to the point of 40 turn Iron Working or anything like that, but Churchill, Augustus, and Qin were all much more likely to have their GNP graphs sputtering along for a good while in the early game, thus starting them in an economic hole that they had no feasible way to dig out of.

Closely related to this was the critical aspect of early happiness. Most of the luxuries on this map were located in the center, with little available in the early game, and between this and the large number of cities that would soon be present, making it to one of the Government civics that provided extra happiness was a much bigger deal than normal. Gandhi and Mansa in particular, and Liz to a lesser extent, were pretty good at getting to Monarchy in a timely manner, which would lead to them adopting Hereditary Rule and growing their dozen or so cities much larger much sooner, making them far stronger. Augustus did decently on this front as well by frequently building the Pyramids and adopting his favorite civic of Representation, but Qin and Churchill were often quite slow to unlock any other civics, causing them to fall further behind early on as their cities were tiny compared to everybody else's. (On a related note, there was some comment about two leaders having furs available on their arms of the continent, while the other four had Calendar resources. This seemed not to be a particularly imbalanced feature of the map, however, as the furs' location at the very ends of the continent's arms resulted in a good deal of delay in connecting them. Mansa did a decent job thanks to getting culture earlier, but his early HR adoption was a much bigger deal, while Churchill frequently didn't get his furs connected until over a hundred turns into the game.)

The second consequence of the larger map was that it weakened military games. Since everybody had at least ten cities, everybody required a significant amount of effort to conquer; Qin could sometimes fall quickly to a dogpile, but otherwise, before the lategame when major tech disparities came into play, a leader would have to expend a significant amount of time and energy to conquer another, diverting resources from internal development and falling behind economically as a result. This is, of course, always something of a tradeoff in this game, but its effect was amplified here where a successful conquest took even longer. Very few of these games saw a leader move from a non-winning position into a winning one as a result of conquest, and I don't think anybody ever even hit 50% population/land area, much less the over 60% threshold for Domination. Of course that is partially because of the peaceful bent of this field, but the size of the map also made it one where the path of conquest was not a wise one. By a similar token, economic games were strengthened by the extra space; it was easy to get a 10-15 city empire by entirely peaceful means, and especially in the hands of a strong builder personality, a civ that big allowed for a very strong tech pace that accelerated these games - which, in turn, made conquest that much less reliable, since there was less time to pull it off!

And then there is the peaceful field of leaders that ended up in this year's finale. Not only did most of the field share a higher peaceweight, they also weren't very aggressive, with three of the game's most peaceful leaders present and Augustus's 4.6 the highest aggression rating on the entire map! While we've seen other high peaceweight games feature a lot of squabbling regardless, that was not the case in this match; instead, I watched an extraodinarily peaceful group of games, with far less wars than virtually any other map in AI Survivor history. The five wars that the real Championship game featured broke the record for least wars in an AI Survivor game, and this was proven to be no accident, as 60% of all replays had fewer than six wars. A mere four matches had more than six wars declared, and only one hit double digits (with ten wars)! What's more, there were plenty of games with LESS THAN FIVE wars: three replays had only four wars declared, four others saw a mere three wars, and one particularly absurd replay went from start to finish with only one war declared (Augustus vs. Qin, if you're curious). The highest total of wars declared by or against any single leader was a mere 34; by way of comparison, particularly warlike maps can see 80 or more by one leader! One other stat to hammer this home: it normally is an extremely rare occurrence for a leader to go the entire game without fighting a single war. It happened SIXTEEN TIMES in this set of games in addition to Liz's pacifist performance in the real Championship. Now, this low war count was partially because a particularly high proportion of wars on this map were fought to the death; there weren't very many peace treaties signed when one leader was clearly on the way out the door. But the extremely low counters do also reflect the reality that this setup simply had a lot less combat than virtually any other.

To make a long story short, then, the combination of the map and the leaders in this particular game worked out to make it extremely favorable for the three hardcore peaceful builder personalities. Basically, no matter what early wars were being fought or who was gaining ground, there would virtually always be at least one peacenik who had a very strong-sized empire and was able to sit back with it and tech, and it was virtually impossible to keep up with that. Mansa or Gandhi could pull it off occassionally, but even they faced difficulty in doing so, and the less economically adept leaders had virtually no chance. Qin was utterly hopeless on this map and never came remotely close. Augustus and Churchill had a couple of unusually strong games where they were in the thick of it in the late space race, but neither one was able to ever actually pull it off, Augustus's lone win instead coming from an unusual Diplomatic result. Instead, it would always be one of Mansa, Gandhi, or Liz - and for whatever reason, usually Mansa - who did the best job of teching up and cashed in with an extremely early victory. Augustus was at least able to do a decent job of building a strong empire off a conquest of Qin, clocking in with a top-two position in a third of all games, but otherwise it would be one of the teching trio in second place as well - Churchill and Qin both were completely locked out.

As for victory types, it turned out that Spaceship was the only condition that was likely to be met in this game. As mentioned before, the large map rendered Domination virtually impossible, not that anybody in this field wanted to go for it anyway. Diplomatic also proved unviable, as there would be a lot of Pleased faces in these games, but very few Friendly ones - for whatever reason, perhaps lack of shared wars, the leaders rarely racked up much in the way of diplomatic bonuses, and so it was extremely unlikely for any leader to have more than one supporter in the victory vote. Finally, Cultural was also very unlikely in this field, as the even religious split that we saw between Gandhi, Mansa, and Liz proved absolutely typical and was repeated in most games here. For once, they did split the Holy Cities largely evenly, and it was very rare to see any leader with more than three of them. Nobody ever turned the slider on with less than four Holy Cities, leading to a very small number of cultural attempts. There was only one game where I saw a true culture vs. space finish; the other two cultural victories both came when a clearly winning Mansa decided to flip on the slider instead of finishing his spaceship. Aside from that, there were one or two more times where the slider was flipped on without a hope of actually delivering a victory, and otherwise it was ignored in favor of the space race. But because of the economic aptitude of these leaders and the large number of cities they could get, space ended up being an unusually fast victory condition on this map. Let me put it in perspective: The official record for fastest spaceship victory is Turn 282, set by Mansa himself back in Season 3. In these replays, there were FOURTEEN space victories that came in before that point! Mansa himself beat out his own record on eleven separate occassions. The average victory date was a disgusting Turn 271, and there were even four different games where the spaceship had already arrived before Turn 260 hit, including two Turn 254 victories! These were blazing fast wins, and so even if leaders had gone for Cultural victories more often, I don't know if they would have succeeded.

As for a couple of specific points of interest that people had discussed about this setup: for one, there had been some speculation that the significant number of coastal cities that this continent made possible would make the Great Lighthouse extremely powerful on this map. However, I never noticed any particular differences in performance tied to who built it. Qin most often got it, as in the real game, and it certainly didn't help him be competitive with the rest, but even when someone like Mansa or Gandhi got it, it didn't seem to have a significant impact. The early religious race in the real Championship - or rather, the lack of one - also attracted some interest, and it turned out to be a somewhat unusual result. There were plenty of games where only Gandhi chased a religion out of the gate, but Mansa or Elizabeth would usually be going after one by the 20s or 30s; there was only one other result where we went as late as Turn 50 before somebody went for one. There also were some games where Mansa or Liz also went for a religion out of the gate, but regardless it was almost always one of the teching trio going for them: Augustus and Churchill founded an early religion only once or twice each, and Qin never did. Overall, there weren't any notable patterns to religion and religious diplomacy in these replays; Gandhi didn't normally get such a big Hindu bloc as he did in the real game, but that didn't seem to be a significant problem for him. One other note is the barbarians, whose spread and impact were highly variable across these replays. Sometimes they would be all over with six or seven total cities, while in other replays they barely were present. I didn't notice any patterns, though, as far as their city spawns helping or hurting any of the contenders; they seemed to be pretty unimportant in that regard, rarely causing any huge setbacks like we saw with Mansa in the real game. There were a couple of cases - in one game, they conquered Augustus's second city and held it for a significant period of time, resulting in him being greatly weakened, and in another they held Liz's capital for a good while (but without her even being very bothered - she just kept settling the center!). But most of the time, even if they did snipe one or two cities, it didn't have a significant impact on the game.

As a final general note, this setup did lend itself to some very close finishes. The real Championship had a fantastic nailbiter of an ending, and quite a few of these replays were similarly close or even closer, with about a third of all wins coming by a margin of less than ten turns; there were some blowouts as well, but this was a particularly good map for the narrow victories and there were quite a few crazy endings (although I never saw the same sort of nuclear fireworks as in the real game; that was a unique result). To go into specifics: in Game 11, Gandhi got six Holy Cities but his cultural bid still only beat Mansa's spaceship victory by less than five techs' worth of turns. In Game 6, Gandhi was set to win by space easily, only for Augustus to steal the win away from him with the set's only Diplomatic result. All three of Elizabeth's victories saw her only take the lead in the space race at the very end of the game, helped each time by free techs from the Internet. Game 3's space race came down to a same turn tiebreaker between Mansa and Gandhi, with Mansa unexpectedly winning despite his ship missing an engine. Finally, Game 15's ending was extremely similar to the real game's, except that this time the final space push worked out so that Mansa, Liz, and Gandhi all launched their ships ON THE SAME TURN. In the end, Mansa lost out due to missing an engine (again), while this time Gandhi won the tiebreaker over Liz for reasons unknown. I think the tiebreaker for same-turn spaceship arrivals might actually be completely random, but in any case that left the result unknown until the final turn! While we didn't quite get that, it's still worth celebrating that we got as tense of a finish as we did. We could easily have had Mansa undramatically winning by 20-30 turns instead!

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Mana Musa of Mali
Wars Declared: 17
Wars Declared Upon: 11
Survival Percentage: 95%
Finishes: 14 Firsts, 4 Seconds (78 points)
Kills: 12
Overall Score: 90 points

Now that I've thoroughly gone over the general trends from this game, I can address the elephant in the room: despite this map being theoretically balanced, which one would expect to result in much more even chances than on most maps, Mansa absolutely dominated these alternate histories with a 70% win rate! This is one of the most unexpected results I've ever seen in an Alternate Histories set, and I honestly don't know what exactly it was that made him so strong in these games. What I can say is how they played out for him, though: Mansa was always, and I mean ALWAYS, a strong contender. Gandhi and Liz each had some games where they didn't do so well and weren't competitive for the win. Mansa never did. He was always one of the tech leaders, and outside of a single replay was always part of the final space race. His only elimination in this set was a highly unusual game where he was dogpiled in the midgame by Augustus, Liz, AND Churchill, while at the same time pursuing a Willem gambit, and thus gradually overwhelmed. Even in that game, though, he'd been the tech leader prior to his dogpile, and the win would likely have been his has the attacks come in 15-20 turns later. Mansa only failed to place one additional time, when Augustus had a strong game to take the score lead and Liz beat Mansa to the spaceship by about three techs. In all eighteen other games, he either won, or finished in an extremely close second place; his real result, then, of losing by about twelve turns, was one of his worst games in the entire set! Mansa got to this point by playing an excellent economic game time and time again. He was a strong techer from the early turns, he would adopt Hereditary Rule early to start growing his cities, and so he'd have a lot of very large cities to power the old Mansa Moneybags economy. Mansa further was one of the best expanders in these alternate histories, in direct contrast to his real performance. He frequently got one of the largest empires on the map through purely peaceful means; it wasn't uncommon for him to have something like fifteen cities without firing a shot, and how are you supposed to stop Mansa when he's done that? Even when he didn't expand so well, though, he was always in the mix and usually in front, even sometimes beating out a similarly Financial Elizabeth who had more cities to her name. Either way, though, by a little or by a lot, he just kept winning. Further helping him out was the fact that his position was extremely safe, far from the map's resident troublemakers of Augustus and Churchill. Setting aside his only elimination, he was attacked a mere seven times in the other nineteen contests, and himself rarely stirred up trouble; thus he was undistracted and free to tech in peace, and was never in danger outside of that one replay. This truly was a dream scenario for Mansa.

But why was he so much stronger than everybody else with similar positions, even the other adepts in Gandhi and Liz? Ultimately, I really don't know what it was. The fact that he had furs on his arm of the continent may have helped; he didn't get them hooked up super quickly, but the extra early happiness when he did connect them may have made a difference. Mansa also built the Colossus in virtually every game thanks to his Mints pushing him to an early Metal Casting, and the early boost from that probably made the difference in some of his closer contests. (On the other hand, I specifically noted that he failed to get it in two separate games - and he won both of those games easily regardless.) What I don't think was a big factor in his success was his proximity to Qin, aside from the fact that Qin was no threat to him at all; there was some speculation that Mansa might profit from conquering China, but this was not part of his normal path to victory. It did happen from time to time, though it was unclear how much this actually contributed to Mansa's wins and there were also a couple of games where he narrowly lost after wasting effort fighting China. The majority of Mansa's wins, however, came without ever actually fighting Qin. Beyond that, I really can't say. Perhaps someone else is able to better explain it than me, or perhaps it really is the case that Mansa is in a league of his own when it comes to economic AIs, able to even consistently beat out two of the other best pure economic leaders in the game when on even footing. Whatever the case, he showed clearly here why he deserves his spot as the highest ranked leader in AI Survivor, and by the odds he absolutely "should" have become our first repeat champion if not for that silly city getting razed by the barbs. But don't feel too bad for him: as unlikely as his failure to win here was, it was even less likely for him to win the Season 6 Championship. I suppose his luck is simply evening out over time.

Gandhi of India
Wars Declared: 9
Wars Declared Upon: 20
Survival Percentage: 70%
Finishes: 2 Firsts, 7 Seconds (24 points)
Kills: 4
Overall Score: 28 points

Gandhi only narrowly finished the set in second place, but his actual performance across these games was the second-best by a good margin; he was a consistently strong leader who tended to outperform the others in a way that failed to translate into actual scoring under our metrics. Gandhi proved to be extremely good at the economic game here, and was Mansa's most consistent challenger both in the early game (where his constant early religions undoubtedly helped and he was often the first to get to Hereditary Rule) and in the lategame space races. Gandhi wasn't the best expander in these games, rarely getting much land in the middle, but he did fill in his own arm of the continent well, and thus still had a good base of high-quality cities that he managed to accomplish a lot with. Despite lacking Financial trait, he was often up with Mansa and Liz (or ahead of Liz) in tech, leaving the eastern trio in his dust, helped along by generous amounts of shrine income. Unfortunately for him, Mansa was also there, and Mansa was even stronger, so Mansa usually won and left Gandhi in no better than second place. Still, Gandhi did convert this into more second place finishes than anybody else (despite the picking contest having given him the second-least votes in that category!) and finished a number of other games very close to the win as well - for instance, he was a close competitor in all three of Liz's wins, despite not having come in second in any of them. He also did manage two wins when all was said and done, and came extremely close to two more - all of which I outlined above in the general section. While nobody was particularly good next to Mansa, Gandhi was absolutely a legitimate competitor, had a real chance of winning on this map, and his overall performance was decisively better than those of the other four leaders, even if the score doesn't reflect it in each case.

Aside from Mansa beating him constantly, the biggest downside to Gandhi's performance is that he was also the second-most likely leader to be eliminated in this game (despite only six total eliminations - yeah, this game was peaceful!). Still, this didn't seem to be indicative of any particular weakness on his part; he was a bit more likely to suffer inopportune attacks, but his actual fighting was just fine and in the few games where he did go down, he took a serious amount of effort to dispatch. He was just as likely to successfully repel or even start conquering his invaders (most frequently Churchill)! Overall, this was an impressive performance for Gandhi, and indicated that he really is a strong economic leader. While plenty of his successful results in the past have been lucky and his alternate histories frequently lackluster, these games showed that there is real aptitude for internal development there, and that his strong performances aren't entirely flukes. While Gandhi may not usually be the most likely leader to win any given game, he'll be a threat in almost all of them, and that remained the case here even with his preferred victory condition off the table.

Elizabeth of England
Wars Declared: 16
Wars Declared Upon: 7
Survival Percentage: 90%
Finishes: 3 Firsts, 3 Seconds (21 points)
Kills: 4
Overall Score: 25 points

Our actual Season 8 Champion turned out to have been rather lucky in the real game, which was quite possibly her best performance across all 21 plays of this matchup. Elizabeth was still solid on this map, but she was far from the best performer, and a lot less consistent than either Mansa or Gandhi as well. The biggest difference I could note in these games was that she very rarely expanded as well as she did in the real game; her expansion was usually average or poor as opposed to one of the best in the opening we saw play out. She also tended to arrive at Hereditary Rule for extra happiness later than Mansa or Gandhi, resulting in her getting a slower start, and I usually didn't see her leading the pack in early tech the way she did in the actual Championship (it was usually Mansa filling that role). This resulted in an inconsistent series of performances. Sometimes (in about a third of all contests) Liz wouldn't even look like a Financial leader, failing to tech notably better than the rest of the pack and getting left in Mansa/Gandhi's dust. Other times (about another third), she'd do all right in tech but fall out of contention by the endgame. Only in the final third of replays was she actually in the thick of it by the time the space race rolled around, and she never pulled out ahead by herself to win in convincing fashion - it was always close, and as I mentioned earlier she always got free techs from the Internet to aid her successful late pushes (albeit they didn't necessarily always make the difference).

One thing Liz did have going for her was that she had a very safe position, as Mansa and Gandhi tended to be model neighbors. Including the real game, she had SIXTEEN different games in which she was never attacked! Thus, whether strong or not so strong, Liz almost always at least had an easy path to survival; about the only way that could go wrong for her would be if she got on the bad side of Mansa to suffer a lategame conquest, and that only happened twice in all. (Her sole First to Die result was indeed a lategame conquest in a game where nobody died until the very end - she was eliminated a mere 26 turns before the end of that match!) The fact that she was left so alone, though, and yet was competitive for the win in such a relatively small number of games, is telling: how much worse would it have been if she actually had to deal with hostile invaders? Admittedly, this may have had more to do with Mansa's ridiculously strong performance than with real weakness by Liz, but it does seem to make her poor performances in past seasons' more hostile fields make more sense, especially given that Gandhi also tended to outperform her here. Overall, Liz proved that she could in fact win on this map and her victory didn't come completely out of nowhere, but her overall performance did leave something to be desired. She's clearly at least one step below the top tier of economic leaders.

Augustus Caesar of Rome
Wars Declared: 33
Wars Declared Upon: 11
Survival Percentage: 85%
Finishes: 1 First, 6 Seconds (17 points)
Kills: 8
Overall Score: 25 points

While he ultimately was almost never able to compete with this map's economic specialists for the overall victory, Augustus did put forward a series of respectable performances and had by far the best showing out of the three eastern leaders. His strong outings went much the same way as in the real game: he fought with Qin as one of the first wars of the game, and ultimately succeeded at conquering him. It varied whether he did this slowly or quickly, alone or with a friend (most often Mansa), but in any case this was a likely outcome in this scenario, occuring in nearly half of all replays. Augustus tended to have a much stronger early game than Qin, and that made this a fight that he could often win without too much trouble. Once finished, he'd usually have one of the largest territory bases on the map (helped also by the fact that, as in the real game, he tended to be one of the map's best expanders), and thus in excellent position to vie for a top-two position. He killed Qin early in eight different replays and only missed out on the top-two finish in one of those, making his real result a somewhat unlucky one in that regard - though that at least can be easily explained by his poorly-advised attack on a much more advanced Gandhi. (His only miss in these replays came from a similar circumstance, this time attacking Mansa while a couple of eras behind in tech.) Unfortunately for Augustus, conquering Qin did come with a significant cost in terms of economic development; while he didn't always stagnate to the degree that he did in the real game, the wars did slow his teching down enough that even the extra land later on couldn't make up for it. He was virtually always far behind the leader(s) in tech by the time he was done, leaving a win out of the question. There were only two games where Augustus was competitive in the final space race (in one of which he even finished the tech tree first, only to build his spaceship slower and thus still lose to Mansa), and his only win came from an extremely unusual game where he was able to get most of the territory from dogpiles of both Qin and Mansa (the latter's only elimination in the entire set), then secure Churchill's vote in the UN. Despite what some people had predicted, the UN was never an option outside of that one replay, as Augustus could never secure a significant amount of support, and so a win would have required more successful conquests than were in the cards on this map.

Furthermore, while Augustus looked pretty good in the games where he did well, he was also an inconsistent performer and there were plenty of less successful outings for him. This was often a result of him getting in an early war with Churchill, which almost never worked out well as it set him too far back to compete; he was able to quickly get peace, turn around, and conquer Qin as normal once, but otherwise never got a top-two spot in games where he fought with Churchill early on - even in the matches where he was successful at conquering him! Other times, Augustus simply got out to a bad start and was never competitive, even against Qin. He didn't always expand well and sometimes simply was too slow, or crashed his economy early on, or missed the Pyramids, or what have you, and was completely un-noteworthy in those games. The fact that the most aggressive leader on the map only scored eight kills - merely a quarter of his declared wars ending in an elimination - is telling; while he was capable at times, he was far from a heavyweight here. I also wonder how much of his overperformance compared to Churchill was due to their merits as AIs versus the fact that it was Augustus who bordered an easy target; I think Augustus was genuinely the stronger performer much of the time anyway, at least in the early game, but their respective records might not end up much different if their positions had been reversed. Overall, this was a decent performance by Augustus and he's shown himself to be one of the more militarily capable high peaceweights, but a builder's game like this was a poor fit for him. I suspect he usually needs some more warmongers around to slow down the tech pace - or a lopsided map in his favor, like in the playoff round - in order to reach his full potential.

Churchill of England
Wars Declared: 21
Wars Declared Upon: 20
Survival Percentage: 75%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 0 Seconds (0 points)
Kills: 5
Overall Score: 5 points

Churchill was dismissed as a contender prior to this game, and that read by the community proved to be correct, as he only came close to the top two a couple of times while never actually securing a podium finish. He was clearly the weakest high peaceweight on this map, and that was true from the early game on. While he did tend to have one of the strongest early expansion rates for some reason (perhaps because he had less buildings available early on and had to build more settlers? I don't know), this yielded only mixed results as far as actually holding a territory advantage by the time the map was filled up, and his early economy was almost always quite weak compared to the teching trio. It didn't help that Churchill was bad at managing his early happiness; he was slow to connect any luxuries, thanks in part to his lack of early culture, and he was usually one of the last leaders to reach Monarchy for Hereditary Rule, so even with the Charismatic trait in his favor, he would have smaller cities and a weaker economy for longer than his competitors. Coupled with his lack of any economic advantages beyond the Stock Exchange, this reliably set Churchill too far back to stand a chance of beating out the map's economic heavyweights; he was only in the mix in the final space race in a single game (I'm not sure what exactly was different that kept him competitive this time), but even then he finished behind both Mansa and Liz. He was never that close again.

Churchill's fighting record was also lackluster, especially for a leader whose only real hat is military! He got into a fair amount of trouble, attacked as often as Gandhi in addition to declaring the second-most wars himself, but found himself getting booted out of the game just as often as he managed to eliminate somebody else. Augustus, Gandhi, or Mansa could end up laying the smackdown on him sooner or later, with his five actual eliminations joined by a couple of close calls where the game ended just in time. Churchill didn't help himself by almost never going to fight the weak and unpopular Qin, only pursuing a single conquest against the Chinese leader; instead, he usually sparred with his neighbors Augustus and Gandhi, fighting each one in about half of the replays, with similar results for each one. He rarely was conquered, usually stalemated with only one or two cities changing hands on either side, and only twice against each was able to actually successfully grind down and conquer them; he just wasn't strong enough to consistently come out on top. Most of the non-Qin First to Die results on this map can be attributed to one of these wars, Churchill either grinding down one of his neighbors or getting ground down himself.

Aside from the one space race mentioned above, Churchill was only competitive for a top two spot a single time, in a game where he secured his only solo conquest of Augustus and later found himself in the second-place position near the end of the game. Unfortunately, he then threw it away by attacking Mansa while 2-3 generations behind in tech, getting blown out of his position as a result. Overall, this was a poor performance from Churchill, whose triple Championship runs had already been shown to be more the result of luck than skill, but it does bear mentioning that this was also a poor setup from him. As with Augustus - and really, any leader that doesn't specialize in economy - Churchill needs some troublemakers on the map to achieve his best results. In a tech-off like this, he was simply out of place.

Qin Shi Huang of China
Wars Declared: 7
Wars Declared Upon: 34
Survival Percentage: 15%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 0 Seconds (0 points)
Kills: 1
Overall Score: 1 point

Qin was a total disaster in these games, doing just about everything poorly. We'll start with the obvious: he was diplomatically screwed on this map, the peaceweight odd-one-out, and this did indeed contribute to him suffering more war declarations than any other leader by more than half and becoming the runaway favorite for First to Die. The peaceful nature of the map only increased the odds of this outcome, since nobody else was likely to even die to begin with - in the end, Qin suffered the same number of eliminations as ALL FIVE OTHER LEADERS COMBINED. However, this was certainly not a case where poor diplomacy sunk an otherwise decent position. Note that Qin was barely involved in two wars per game, and indeed only had two games where he was attacked more than twice - hardly getting brutally dogpiled all the time! Look closer and you'll see that there were seven different games in which Qin was attacked only a single time, and STILL was the first to die. It turns out that he wasn't just unpopular on this map - he was horribly weak as well.

Qin would usually be well behind the other leaders even before he got stuck in a war. For reasons that aren't clear to me, he was the most consistently slow expander of this group, usually at the back of the pack in early expansion as well as rarely breaking out into the center of the map. His early economy was also putrid, harmed especially by his lack of early happiness, where he suffered worse than any other leader on the map. He didn't get to new government civics in a timely manner, he rarely settled the middle where most of the luxury resources were, and he didn't even have the Charismatic trait to help out a little bit, so time and time again he had a bunch of tiny cities that couldn't grow at all while everybody else was starting to develop bustling metropolises, which combined with his already-smaller empire to frequently put him hundreds of points behind even Churchill when war broke out. This, then, I think is the biggest cause of his frequent early exits: he was a very easy target. Everybody else had a good-sized, solid empire that took a lot of effort to break through. Qin's often took a good amount of effort as well simply due to the size of the map, but victory was virtually assured for whoever went after him because he was so weak - and then there were also a handful of games where he DID get dogpiled and knocked out that much faster. Qin thus only survived three games in the entire set, and was eliminated before Turn 200 fully half the time - and on a map where everybody else combined to only record three total eliminations that early!

Even on the rare occassions where he was largely left alone and able to develop his civ normally, Qin was never remotely competitive. There was no condition he could meet, no milestone he could reach, to accelerate his development and turn into a real contender - he was always way behind. There were a handful of games where his early wars failed to take more than maybe one city from him, or he even avoided early fighting altogether, yet he never even so much as reached the top half on those occassions - he could slip ahead of somebody else who was getting totally beat up, but that was it. There was even one game where everybody else on the map (aside from the runaway Mansa) got in a nasty war and got beat up over the course of the game, while Qin was left entirely alone, and even then he could only finish in fourth place! Qin's only point in these games came from an unusual situation where he was on the favorable side of a dogpile, working with Churchill to conquer a weak Augustus and getting in the last hit in the process. Even then, though, Qin couldn't crack the top three, he was in the process of losing a later war to Churchill when the game ended, and he never came close to scoring another point in any of the other nineteen replays. I don't know what made Qin so economically hopeless on this map, but it was a performance worth forgetting, and I really am sorry that Playoff 3 played out such that we got stuck with him in the Championship, rather than a more viable high peaceweight leader.

Conclusions

One of the more entertaining subplots of the late season was the "Sullla curse", as our host's picks for the game winner failed to work out time and time again, to the point where it was referenced in later picking contest entries and he even admitted to picking Mansa for the Championship in hopes of jinxing him. And if this set of alternate histories is any indication, it worked! In most respects, we had a highly typical game: Augustus killed Qin first, there was little other fighting across the map, Churchill was irrelevant, the three western leaders battled it out in a tight space race after torching the others in tech, and Gandhi came in second place. The glaring exception is Mansa, who was the runaway favorite to win the game, but instead suffered an early city razing and subsequently failed to even place, an outcome that had roughly 10% odds! Cursed indeed. Those like myself who had supported Liz to win this game felt vindicated at the time, but in the end it turns out that the community was correct to favor Mansa - and indeed, this was a rare case where the community favorite was UNDERVALUED, with Mansa securing "only" about half the vote to win instead of his "truer" odds of about 70%. Amazingly enough, despite this finish also coming a single turn away from the fastest official spaceship win in the competition's history, it also graded out as a noticeably SLOW finish, with most alternate games ending in the 270s or even 250s. We had a memorable finish to the season, and the alternate playthroughs ended up being just as memorable, as the elements combined for a really distinct set of games to play out and write up. I think this has ended up being my beefiest AH writeup yet simply because there were so many aspects I wanted to write about! Hopefully it's proven as interesting to read as it was to watch, think about, and write. In the meantime, have a great offseason and watch out for the Sullla curse next year!