This is a continuing feature for Season Eight of Civ4 AI Survivor: a preview of each game before it begins, providing a quick summary of the leaders involved and how the community expects the game to shake out. We start as always with an overview of the map:
We've had requests in past seasons for an overview screenshot of the map with the resource icon turned on:
It's hard for me to see much of anything with all of those little icons but you guys asked for it, you've got it! Now for a look at our individual leaders:
Huayna Capac of the Incas
Traits: Financial, Industrious
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Mysticism
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Past Finishes: Season Two champion, one Championship loss, three playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, one opening round elimination
Total Medals: 8 First Places 
Total Kills: 15 
Overall Power Ranking: 55 points, 1st place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Huyna Capac is one of the strongest leaders in Civ4 and brings a frighteningly powerful total package to the competition. He has the always-excellent Financial trait and hasn't seemed to suffer overmuch despite having to pair it with the typically weak Industious trait. More importantly, Huayna Capac is the only leader who gets to take advantage of the overpowered Incan civilization, with the single best building in the game coming in the form of the "granary that also produces culture" Terrace. The unique unit Quechua is also surprisingly useful for AI Survivor purposes, as the AI leaders often struggle with barbarian archers and this unit allows Huayna Capac to roll over them without issue. Huyna is one of the rare AI leaders who joins together outstanding economic abilities with an aggressive streak, and that tends to be the most dangerous setup possible for these games. Huayna has a fairly high aggression rating (6.7/10), a low peace weight, and he's willing to plot war at "Pleased" relations. His weaknesses are an excessive love of wonder-building (8/10), although he's better able to afford this thanks to the Industrious trait, and a heavy emphasis on religion. On the rare occasions where Huayna falters, it's due to tieing up too many cities on wonders and getting stuck in destructive religious conflicts. More often than not though, Huayna Capac will found his own religion and use it to dominate the diplomacy while scoring every wonder on the map and running over a series of poor fools who can't keep up with his teching prowess.
Past Performance: Huayna Capac is virtually undisputed as the best leader in AI Survivor, succeeding time and time again and in all sorts of ways. Executing crushing Domination snowballs (including the fastest win in AI Survivor history), coming from a distant last place to win by culture, taking perfect advantage of strong starts, turning a poor start into a crushing victory, successfully warding off three enemy civs at the same time... this guy has done it all. As a result, he has more wins under his belt than there are seasons, and aside from Mansa Musa, he has double or more the wins of every single other leader - and with a bigger mean streak translating to more kills, as well as a lower peaceweight giving him greater safety, his ranking above Mansa is clearly no fluke either. Huayna's only been killed in the opening round one time, as even his weaker performances have usually seen him slip by for another chance in the Wildcard. Now, with all that being said, Huayna is, in the end, a silly AI, and we've seen him fail in all sorts of ways too. He's struggled more in the playoffs as well, with only two successful playoff round games in five appearances. Huayna is far from invincible, and failure from him shouldn't be a great shock - but it's still less likely than a crushing success.
Hannibal of Carthage
Traits: Financial, Charismatic
Starting Techs: Fishing, Mining
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: Four playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, two opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 2 First Places, 2 Second Places 
Total Kills: 10
Overall Power Ranking: 24 points, tied 16th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Hannibal has one of the better trait combinations and can be a highly dangerous contestant if he successfully balances his military and economic strengths. Hannibal has the always-useful Financial trait and combines it together with Charismatic, which can often come in handy given how the AI struggles to manage happiness in its cities. In the rare case where Hannibal manages to build Stonehenge, he'll be off and running against the rest of the field. Carthage as a civilization is notably weaker, with subpar starting techs for anything other than a coastal start and a horse archer unique unit that takes a strength hit compared to the base unit. Hannibal is a militaristic leader in terms of personality, with a fairly high aggression rating (7/10), low peace weight, and Military for his research flavor (paired together with a lesser Gold preference). His build unit rating isn't quite as high (6/10) and Hannibal is undercut to some degree by failing to plot war at "Pleased" relations. When Hannibal does well, he's able to conquer additional territory and then make it economically profitable through use of his Financial trait. However, he will also sometimes pick foolish conflicts and stall out his economy with too much warring in a way that even Financial cottage cheese can't rectify.
Past Performance: Hannibal has recently had some very extreme performances. On the one end, his Season Six opener saw him choose a terrible second city site that, due to the quirks of the AI, resulted in him taking nearly a hundred turns just to settle his third city! On the other end, his Season Seven opener was an extremely impressive performance where he successfully broke out of a highly cramped starting position to conquer half the map and win. For the most part, though, he's somewhere in the middle, as a decently capable warmonger who nevertheless struggles to fully get it done. He's had a lot of suboptimal finishes after promising starts; some were legitimately not his fault, as he was saddled with lousy starts or inopportune war declarations, but there's also been quite a few matches now where he just didn't do enough to better his position, or did too much to try to better his position, and resultingly got passed up and finished in second or third place. As a result, while he's made playoffs over half the time, he's never been able to string together two straight placements to reach the Championship. His two highly dominant wins and strong kill total speak to the high ceiling he can reach and have (barely) made him a seeded leader for this season, but so far he's failed to perform consistently.
Frederick of Germany
Traits: Philosophical, Organized
Starting Techs: Hunting, Mining
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: One playoff round elimination, one wildcard elimination, five opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 1 First Place
Total Kills: 1
Overall Power Ranking: 6 points, tied 46th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Frederick is another peaceful AI leader, albeit one lacking most of the tools necessary to be effective. His trait pairing of Philosophical and Organized comes off as underwhelming for a builder game, lacking Financial or Expansive or Creative or even the likes of Spiritual. There's nothing here to help Frederick to get off to a fast start and also nothing to allow him to max out at a higher economic tier after the expansion portion of the game has finished. All of Germany's unique stuff comes far too late in the game to matter and the German starting tech pairing of Hunting + Mining is only mediocre. Frederick's AI ratings are generally average across the board, with scores of 4/10 in seemingly every category. He has a high peace weight, he doesn't train a lot of units (2/10), and he doesn't start many wars (4/10 aggression rating). Frederick is probably most notable for having only one research flavor, Production, a choice which hasn't fared particularly well in practice. He's generally a pretty boring AI overall, trying to pull off one of those pacifistic "sit in the corner and tech to a victory" strategies but without the traits or civ choice to pull it off.
Past Performance: Frederick has proven to be one of the competition's worst leaders, scoring all of his points in a single game and accomplishing nothing else in his other appearances, save sometimes serving as a useful meatshield. Even his one win wasn't very impressive: he had a strong start and got just enough gains from a single war, but did nothing else of note the entire game and only barely beat out Sitting Bull of all people in a late spaceship victory. As for his other games, he has suffered from some legitimately terrible starts, in central positions surrounded by enemies, but he's also had several perfectly serviceable starts that he simply failed to do anything with. Most telling is his Season Seven outing, where he completely tanked his economy with just five cities and rendered himself a dead man walking without any outside intervention, in one of the worst performances we've ever seen. As a peaceful leader without real economic strength, Frederick simply lacks the tools to find success in most circumstances.
Shaka of the Zulus
Traits: Aggressive, Expansive
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Hunting
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Past Finishes: Four playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, two opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 1 First Place, 3 Second Places
Total Kills: 7
Overall Power Ranking: 18 points, tied 22nd place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Shaka gets the Aggressive and Expansive traits to play around with, two middling traits that create a roughly average combination, if well-fitted for conquest. He also has the below average (in AI hands) Impi, and the extremely strong Ikhanda for his unique items, an above average pairing that, again, works well for militaristic play. Lastly, Shaka has the Agriculture and Hunting pair for his starting techs, which allow him to get out to a fast start. If you haven't picked up on it yet, Shaka is all about the military. He's one of the "Crazies" who cross the threshold from "aggressive" to "nuts", and his aggression rating (9.2/10) is the fourth highest in the game. Like most of the other Crazies, Shaka's only flavour is Military, and he builds units at a frenetic pace (10/10) while ignoring wonders (2/10). Surprisingly, Shaka is quite unlikely to demand tribute (1/10), but other than that, he's a fairly standard hyper-aggressive leader. Shaka's traits, unique items and flavour are all pretty unhelpful in constructing an economy, and usually he doesn't even try. Expect Shaka to spend his entire game warring on the high peace weight pacifists (or anyone else, for that matter!), and his success to largely depend on whether those wars are successful or stall out.
Past Performance: Unlike the other hyperaggressive warmongers, who just flame out over and over again and have rarely amounted to much, Shaka has managed to consistently make himself a contender, reaching the playoffs more often than not and often making a significant impact even when he's not ultimately successful. While he's only fully set up a successful snowball once, in the opening round of Season Two, he's still proven consistently able to find smaller successes and avoid imploding in the same way as other warmongers, enough so to scrape by in Second Place several times. Even his defeats are sometimes impressive - multiple times now, he's become the largest empire on the map, and only slowly fallen once taken on by all of the remaining leaders combined, a behemoth that took an immense effort to bring down. Now, all this being said, Shaka does routinely have a terrible economy, and his playoff round success has been extremely limited, suggesting that he is in fact a significant step below the competition's best leaders. Still, whatever the reason may be, there's a method to his madness, and he's proven to be a legitimate threat in these games.
Sitting Bull of the Native Americans
Traits: Philosophical, Protective
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Fishing
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: One playoff round elimination, six opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 1 Second Place
Total Kills: 0
Overall Power Ranking: 2 points, 51st place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Sitting Bull is stuck with the Philosophical and Protective traits; in other words, the two worst performing traits in the entirety of AI Survivor. This immediately puts him in a bit of a hole. Sitting Bull also gets the unimpressive Dog Soldier and Totem Pole for his unique items, neither of which help matters. His only redemptive feature is his starting techs of Agriculture and Fishing, yet even they are merely above average, meaning that Sitting Bull plays the game at a serious disadvantage. As a personality, Sitting Bull the AI is a series of contradictions. He builds a lot of units (8/10) and doesn't bother with wonders (0/10). He is the most likely leader in the game to demand tribute (10/10), and his flavours are Military and Growth. This all sounds like the makings of an aggressive leader in the vein of Ragnar or Alex, and yet, Sitting Bull has a lower than average aggression rating (4.3/10). He simply doesn't attack very often. He also has a high peace weight, preferring the likes of Gandhi and Elizabeth to Montezuma and Shaka. This, along with his traits, largely leads to an AI that constructs a strong military that he doesn't use, and a weak economy to boot, with Sitting Bull struggling to keep up in tech with even the rabid warmongers. It doesn't paint an impressive picture, and as a general rule Sitting Bull doesn't just start in a deep hole; he's unwilling to dig himself out.
Past Performance: Heavily armed pacifism has not proved a winning strategy in these games, and there's a legitimate case to be made that Sitting Bull is the worst leader in the entire competition. Despite his military focus, he's one of only TWO leaders remaining to have never scored a single kill! To be completely fair to the guy, he has gotten a pretty bad set of map draws, frequently surrounded by hostile foes that tear into and cripple him before he has the chance to do anything for himself. However, his performances when this hasn't happened haven't suggested that we've been missing out either, typically featuring... not much of anything. For example, in his lone relatively successful game, he expanded well in the beginning and could have easily won, but then simply failed to be proactive enough throughout the game, settling for a narrow Second Place instead. He may make for a small sample size, but Sitting Bull nonetheless suggests quite strongly that a peaceful leader who doesn't focus on his economy is a losing prospect.
Willem of the Dutch
Traits: Financial, Creative
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Fishing
Peace Weight: 4
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Past Finishes: Two Championship losses, five opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 2 First Places, 2 Second Places
Total Kills: 4
Overall Power Ranking: 18 points, tied 22nd place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Willem has one of the strongest economic setups in the game and he's been held back thus far only by his poorly-chosen set of research priorities. Willem has one of the best possible combinations of leader traits in the Financial + Creative pairing. Not only does Willem benefit from the free border pops and the Financial commerce bonus, there's even some basic synergy between the two in the form of cheap libraries. Willem's Dutch civilization is significantly less powerful, though it does have decent starting techs and can become strong if the Dikes ever show up in time to matter. As an AI leader Willem has middling scores in almost every category, lots of 4/10 and 5/10 ratings across the board. His aggression rating is about average at 6.7/10 and his peace weight also sits in the middle of the scale. Willem has a very low religious emphasis and he won't found his own faith very often despite his strong economic abilities. The single biggest weakness for Willem comes in the form of his tech preferences: he has Gold and Science flavors, which turn out to be one of the worst possible combinations for military tech. Willem has repeatedly refused to research Rifling technology to a ludicrous degree, in some games finishing Assembly Line and Flight (!) techs before picking up Rifling. This has led to his elimination at the hands of much less advanced civilizations as he needlessly fights with muskets against rifles. We have a general rule for Willem: if he makes it to Rifling tech then he wins the game; otherwise, he finds himself getting eliminated.
Past Performance: Willem is one of those leaders whose success has been very tightly concentrated; in his case, he scored all of his career points across Seasons Four and Five, and has accomplished absolutely nothing in the other five seasons. Looking at those two seasons, Willem looked like a top-tier leader; he showed how economically strong he can be with the two best traits in the competition, put out three strong winning games (one sniped away by a Cultural victory), recovered from an early loss of his capital for another second-place finish, made the Championship twice in a row, and got out to a good start there both times before eventually getting beaten back militarily. Season Four in particular looked like it would be his title, until he showed his most infamous weakness: ignoring the Rifling tech for ages on end, allowing a foe with weaker overall tech to attack and conquer him despite his lead. Despite his successes in those two seasons, though, Willem's failure across the rest of his career means he's not even a seeded leader. Seasons 1-3 saw him just play ineffectively, but his last two appearances gave more hope for a resurgence in the future, as both saw him get out to promising starts before getting attacked relatively early by another strong leader. If Willem can avoid such an early attack in a future game and get a better chance to build up, we may well see him return to glory and make a real run for the title once more.
Here's what the community was thinking based on the prediction contest before the game took place:
The legendary Huayna Capac was once again the community favorite going into Game Three with a bit more than 50% of the vote. The Incan leader was significantly more popular than anyone else in terms of outright winning the game, with Shaka and Hannibal trailing distantly in his wake. For once we had a clear favorite for the second place category as Hannibal received votes from about 40 percent of the community submissions, a higher amount than anything we'd seen thus far for the difficulty Runner Up category. Then First to Die was split very evenly between Willem and Sitting Bull, with Frederick the only leader receiving any votes of consequence in that category, before another relatively even split between Spaceship, Domination, and Culture for the victory condition. I was a bit surprised not to see more votes for Culture given how many people were picking Huayna Capac to win but I guess they were thinking he might go the Spaceship route.
Finally, here are some of the best/craziest written predictions about what would take place during the game. There were many other excellent entries but I had to pick and choose my favorites to keep this from running on too long. Thanks again for the submissions!
GreenJacket: Willem being sandwiched between Shaka and HC means he has very little chance. That leaves Hannibal and HC as the only viable players on the field. Although Hannibal has a lot of floodplains, HC has a much more balanced distribution of resources which will propel him to victory. Frederick will probably be held back by barbs or something stupid like that.
LaserGuy: Really interesting map. By starting position, Fredrick should win this without difficulty, but, come on, it's Fredrick. He couldn't win against an empty map. HC and Willem have really bad starts IMHO. Too much forest in their capitols, not a lot of commerce resources accessible. HC may spend a lot of time chasing wonders with his stone/marble start and land is desperately short in the south, especially as Willem is likely to settle south, Hannibal like West, so I worry HC is going to get squeezed hard. Hannibal's start is also very cramped and he is also not great at expanding, so he could get squeezed as well. Shaka has double corn and an elephant in his capitol, which is about as good as he could possibly hope for. He has tons of space and doesn't have copper so he isn't going to go on the warpath *too* early. Best case for him is to crush Willem early, then roll through the rest of the field to a quick domination victory. Normally I'd say he'd be a huge longshot against such a strong field, but I just don't think the financial AIs are going to be able to overcome the massive space advantage of the northern leaders.
Smelly Mildred: The Boers will be no match for Shaka Zulu. SHAKA HAS SMELLY MILDRED'S ETERNAL BLESSING!!!
NotSpamBot: Oh boy it is Shaka Time! He has a great capital, great land to expand into, and Willem and Frederick as neighbors to eat. His only problem is that he is eventually going to crash into Sitting Bull and if there is one thing Sitting Bull is good at (and it really is the only thing he is good at) it is dying slowly. This should allow Huyana and Hannibal to grow a tech lead and enable them to resist or even attack the Zulu.
danjuno: The safe call has screwed me in both of the previous games, so I'm going to pass on Huayna. I like Hannibal's start better anyway, and he's in the opposite corner of Shaka. Here's hoping this is finally our unlucky boy's year. Willem is too close to Shaka for my liking, and his peaceweight will only result in a backstab after Shaka is done FACEstabbing Frederick and Sitting Bull many, many, many times. Frederick is right next to Shaka. Splat. Speaking of our favorite stabby boy, Shaka has plenty of squishy wonderhogs to maul (none of whom except Huayna are even that good at this whole "economy" business, and Huayna is far away), though I'm fairly confident he will stall in the late game and watch as one of the southern leaders blasts off for Alpha Centari.Sitting Bull exists.
the_lord_admiral: Boom Shaka laka? Why not? Shaka has a strong combination to start with, with double corn likely allowing for quick expansion, lots of beautiful land available, elephants and iron for strong early military units (but not copper, so he avoids stupidly early plotting), and neighbors who chronically forget to train an army. I see him running over Willem, and then steamrolling that into a conquest of Freddy and/or the Bull, which would make him simply unstoppable. Hannibal should do well with Financial + rivers but he just doesn't have the space, and Huayna just looks too likely to get distracted by wonders to build a large enough empire.
Khnud: The way I see it, this is either a Shaka domination win or a Huayna cultural victory. I just can't see any of the other leaders standing a chance. Willem will fold first, he'll get squeezed between Huayna's holy cities and Shakas military. The other guys will fight amongst themselves but not accomplish much.
Kenny und Erik: Huayna is a great leader, but I really do not like his starting position with desert all around him. The spot with the pigs between him and Hannibal will be a critical early game decision to watch for. Frederick has a great settling potential, but is a weak AI. I decided to vote for Shaka. He has a great capital spot that perfectly synergizes with his starting techs, good surrounding land to settle and a clear path to victory: attack and crush Willem decisecly early and snowball to victory.
Dagoth Gares: Forget Scylla and Charybdis, it's all about being caught between Huayna and Shaka. Good luck, Willem!
Congele: Willem going to get killed by Shaka, who has lots of room to expand. But Shaka doesn't tech well in a NTT game going to fall behind. Hannibal would do better but he seems rather boxed in and can't expand with difficult to take down leaders such as HC and Sitting Bull
LinkMarioSamus: I'm picking Shaka to win partially for the sake of an entertaining result, but I think there's a good chance it can actually happen. He has the best capital of the four low PW leaders here, with Willem in a precarious position where Shaka and HC are his closest neighbors and then both HC and Hannibal seem very cramped. Also if Genghis Khan could cause as much damage as he did last game by building virtually nothing but units, imagine what Shaka is capable of given he's supposedly even more likely to build units, he has weaker neighbors, and his starting techs are much better. I'm picking Hannibal 2nd due to him being furthest from Shaka while having an identical PW (not necessarily a guarantee they won't clash mind, especially with the religious side of the game completely up in the air with HC having the only Mysticism start), and Sitting Bull FTD because he sucks, he looks like dogpile bait on this map, and we need to keep up the streak of a Protective leader being FTD! Being honest, how the heck do you predict a game like this?
Ethan: The middle of the map is going to be a barbarian empire that will be bigger than sitting bull's. hannibal is cursed to slam headfirst into the native americans while shaka is not well placed for an easy conquest (as HC will culturally crush any Willem conquest). i see frederick being shielded and doing decently well (out of character, yes) but Huyana Capac having absolutley no opposition in the spam wonders and turn on the culture slider front. inca wins before t300.
RefSteel: With no copper nearby but plenty of iron (and horses) Shaka's Inevitable Aggression should be delayed until he has a chance of actually accomplishing something. Then as the only low-peace-weight neighbor of Food Tier Freddy, and well positioned to share a slice of Willem's undefended wonders with Capac, the Zulu have the best military expansion options on the map. By the time he gets around to slamming into Sitting Bull's CG90 longbows, Shaka and his war allies should have enough mass to grind them down as well. I'm betting on few but long and decisive wars this time around, ending only when the Domination threshold forces Shaka to regretfully stop.
blindeli: Two useless leaders, two leaders that are usually okay, one warmonger and ... uh, Huayna Capac, best AI Survivor ever? This one seems easy. Willem is first to die because he ignores military stuff while sitting right next to Shaka. If Shaka is smart, he then continues fighting the weaker leaders and gets into a comfy second place behind Huayna Capac. Frederick and Sitting Bull do nothing but wait until somebody comes to conquer them. Hannibal tries to do the conquering, but just gets overshadowed by Huayna Capac next door in everything he does.
Tincuradan: Three financial techers, two sitting duckeys, one crazy Shaka, and a partridge in a pear tree!
Mansa da man: I feel so vindicated by the Game One Alternate Histories! Especially since my Kublai/Peter/Hammers FTD pick got me a grand total of 0 points. So why am I picking the Hammers of this game, Freddy the Unready, to win? Don't worry, I'm asking myself that too, but hear me out. Even Freddy, for all his incompetence, will have a hard time messing this up. Most AI who are terrible at economy lose in the early game with their single digit science and 30+ turns Bronze Working while ignoring Pottery. Freddy starts with both Mining and Gold (good luck delaying mining now) and has a beautiful fertile land with rivers and free commerce all handed on a platter. He is guarded to his South by the best wall one could ask for and that crazy warmonger to his West will likely attack the Creative civ oppressing his puny, zero culture cities. Freddy is peaceful enough to fill up what should be Shaka's land like that weird Victoria game in S5 (and putting Organised to good use!) while Shaka's off attacking 60% culture defenses pre-catapult. And then strike at the opportune time and become too big to stop. There's just one hitch in this entire plan. This is Freddy...
Ambassador Pineapple: The most fun leader in this game is by far Shaka, so thats who im picking to win. Hannibal has had it rough in past seasons, so he gets to come second (might not have metals though, yikes). Willem closest to shaka means FTD, unless Shaka goes wandering.... Shakaphants will rule this earth with a domination victory. Capac is always a choice, but marble and stone in his capital together with poor land could mean he just builds wonders and tries for Cultural. Hopefully he wont get there in time. Shaka Smash!!!
smithy: If we were to view this game as if it were Teamfight Tactics: then Frederick has totally lucked himself into the best frontline tank in the game- this should carry him through the early rounds. He also has a pretty decent backline area to go with this. Unfortunately his carry is something akin to a one star one cost. Contrarily, HC has the most notoriously squishy frontline unit available, and not a lot of backline to work with. However the carry unit is drastically in need of a nerf... and has best in slot itemization (seriously- stone, marble and copper?). The PVE enemy is also badly bugged- he starts off at far too high difficulty with this start before falling off dramatically in the later rounds. He is also not handing out any economic benefits at all today since he lacks any commerce potential in the available land and is disinclined to develop any. Oh, and in other news- Hannibal has once again found himself with last pick on the starting position carousel.
BluesyCobalt: I don't care about who wins, I'm just rooting for Observer Civ to finally research Iron Working.
