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:
Pacal of the Mayans
Traits: Financial, Expansive
Starting Techs: Mysticism, Mining
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Past Finishes: Three Championship losses, two playoff round eliminations, two opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 4 First Places, 4 Second Places 
Total Kills: 9 
Overall Power Ranking: 37 points, tied 4th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Pacal has a top tier trait combination, with the amazing Financial and the good Expansive, allowing him to get those Financial cottages up and running even faster. He also gets the bad Holkan unique unit and the good Ball Court, which adds a nice boost to happiness in the midgame. Lastly, Pacal gets Mysticism and Mining for his starting techs, a pretty crappy pair only useful for chasing a religion out of the gate. Pacal is a pretty standard economic AI in most ways, with a low aggression rating (2.8/10), though his unit preference (4/10) isn't as suicidally low as some of the leaders like him. His flavours are Culture and Growth, and you can usually expect Pacal to pursue an early religion right out of the gate. Pacal is one of the two leaders (along with Huayna Capac) who combine a low peace weight with a heavily economic style of play. With a peaceweight of 2, an ideal Pacal game probably sees the warmongers and peaceniks fight it out amongst each other while he sits back and builds an insurmountable tech lead.
Past Performance: Pacal's combination of economic focus and low peaceweight have proven highly effective at moving him through the tournament: he's the only leader so far to manage the twin achievements of five playoff appearances and three Championship appearances! Pacal has shown convincingly that he's able to play the economic game and play it well, using that avenue to pull out to an unstoppable tech lead in all of his wins. His second-place finishes have been considerably less impressive, generally coming when he's considerably behind and somewhat lucky to be advancing at all. Those show his low peaceweight at work, though, allowing him to slip on by even if it's not his game. That said, when Pacal fails, he can fail hard - there's been multiple games where he was attacked before even connecting metals, leading to very early exits. He thus has similar strengths and weaknesses to other major economic leaders, but his peaceweight has allowed him to enjoy the consistent success that most of them have lacked.
Darius of Persia
Traits: Financial, Organized
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Hunting
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: Two Championship losses, two playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, two opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 3 First Places, 3 Second Places
Total Kills: 8
Overall Power Ranking: 29 points, 10th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Darius has arguably the best pure economic traits in the game, with Financial and Organized. While he's stuck with the weak Immortal and Apothecary, he also gets fantastic starting techs in Agriculture and Hunting, allowing him to improve his food resources quickly. Darius has one of the better set-ups overall, and thanks to his traits and starting techs, begins the game already slightly ahead of the field. Darius is clearly an economic leader in most ways. He has Gold and Growth flavours, and those combined with his traits mean Darius should almost always be able to construct a good economy. He loves building wonders (8/10), and unlike many of the other peaceful leaders, he builds enough units to defend himself too (6/10). That's lucky, because he also has a high peace weight of 8, and will often be target for attack from the more aggressive leaders. Lastly, Darius himself isn't necessarily going to build in peace, he actually has an average aggression rating (5.2/10), and he can and will claim more land by the sword if necessary. On paper, Darius probably has one of the best setups in the game; he's a peaceful leader with amazing economic traits, but he's also willing to defend himself and fight for more land.
Past Performance: Darius has established a reputation as one of the more sluggish, incompetent AIs out there. It's common to see him given a decent or even great starting position, only for him to fail to do much of anything with it and get outscaled somewhere along the way. At the same time, though, Darius is a seeded leader who has made the playoffs more often than not; his economic setup is legitimately great and allows him to be a dangerous techer even when playing from behind. Darius has had two really successful seasons, Four and Seven, which followed similar trajectories: he played strong games to get out to winning positions in his first two outings (while throwing away one of those wins in Season Four), only to get ganged up on in the Championship for an early exit. On the other hand, Season Six showed him at his worst; he had an amazing starting situation, only to just sit on it all game and take Second Place by default. Then in the playoffs, he had a very sheltered position and easy ticket to the Championship, but contented himself with four cities and actively avoided bettering his position the entire game. Outings like these have made him fairly unpopular in the community, yet it cannot be denied that if he has a decent position and bothers to expend the effort, Darius is a serious threat to win.
Asoka of India
Traits: Spiritual, Organized
Starting Techs: Mysticism, Mining
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, two playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, three opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 2 First Places, 2 Second Places
Total Kills: 2
Overall Power Ranking: 16 points, tied 25th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Asoka plays with Spiritual and Organized for his traits, a decent pairing with strong economic benefit but of no use militarily. As an Indian leader, Asoka gets the above average Fast Worker and Mausoleum combo, and his starting techs are Mining and Mysticism, a pair good for chasing religions and not much else; Asoka can struggle with improving his land in the early game, though the Fast Worker at least helps him catch up. Asoka is a generally peaceful leader, but is less polarised than his counterpart Gandhi. He's got a pretty low aggression rating (3.7/10), unit build (2/10) and tribute demand (1/10) preferences, but a high wonder (8/10) build rate. With religion and science flavours, you can count on Asoka to consistently build up a strong economy as long as he's left alone. Asoka places a strong emphasis on faith, but unlike a lot of the other religious zealots, he's actually pretty easy to get along with, with a minor penalty for differing religion but a huge bonus for shared faith. In theory, Asoka should find it easy to make friends and he's unlikely to get involved in too many wars unless he finds himself in a particularly hostile world.
Past Performance: Asoka has seen reasonable success in the competition, with his results generally depending closely on how much he has to fight. His successful outings have come from friendly maps where he never came under serious threat (or, in one case, a seemingly hostile map where nobody ever declared war on him, allowing him to waltz to victory). On the other hand, most of his defeats have come from games where he suffered repeated attacks and simply couldn't hold up under the pressure - only a couple of times has he legitimately played poorly and screwed himself out of a chance of victory. His most successful outing by far came in Season Five, where he picked up both of his career wins and was less than 50 turns away from becoming Champion via culture when he finally collapsed in the face of multiple attacks. With only two kills to his name, Asoka isn't much of a threat on the battlefield, but he's shown he knows how to play the economic game, and if he draws a map where he can sit back and build relatively undisturbed, he'll be a serious threat to win.
Brennus of the Celts
Traits: Spiritual, Charismatic
Starting Techs: Hunting, Mysticism
Peace Weight: 0
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: Two playoff round eliminations, two wildcard eliminations, three opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 2 Second Places
Total Kills: 5
Overall Power Ranking: 9 points, tied 36th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Brennus gets the Charismatic and Spiritual traits, a middle-tier economic pairing. He gets the less decent Gallic Warrior and Dun unique items, both well below average, and starts with Hunting and Mysticism techs, one of the "religion-or-bust" combinations. Brennus is less suicidally aggressive than his female counterpart, with only a moderately high aggression rating (7/10). Other than that, his preferences are pretty similar, with a moderate unit build rating (6/10) and a low wonder build rating (2/10), and Brennus is also highly unlikely to demand tribute (1/10). The other noteworthy difference between the two are their flavours, with Brennus' being military and religion. The male Celtic leader is far more likely to actually use his Mysticism start and research a religion out of the gate. He also cares a lot more about religion, with a high bonus and malus for sharing or not sharing faith with his neighbours. Brennus is basically one of the moderately aggressive, religious AIs, with an extremely low peace weight to boot (0/10).
Past Performance: Brennus has proved himself both one of the lesser and one of the least interesting of the low peaceweight leaders. He's typically ended up in fairly aggressive fields of leaders, and started games off well enough with full or partial conquests, only to see somebody else do it better, grow bigger than him, and usually fight and defeat him later in the game. He's never actually taken the lead himself or become a key player, and his best results were a pair of distant second-place finishes in the first two seasons. There's really not much else to say about this guy; he's a decent but second-rate conqueror whose time to shine has yet to come.
Hatshepsut of Egypt
Traits: Creative, Spiritual
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Wheel
Peace Weight: 9
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: One wildcard elimination, six opening round eliminations
Total Medals: No first or Second Place finishes
Total Kills: 0
Overall Power Ranking: 0 points, 52nd place (out of 52 leaders - dead last place)
Personality: Hatshepsut is a great leader for a Single Player game of Civ4 and a horrible leader for AI Survivor purposes. She has good traits in the Creative/Spiritual combo and a great civ in Egypt with Agriculture/Wheel starting techs and the War Chariot unique unit. The problem comes in the form of Hatshepsut's AI personality which is little short of suicidal for these matches. Hatty is almost as pacifistic as Gandhi, with a low aggression rating (3.7/10), a high peace weight, and a dangerously low build unit preference (2/10). She loves to build wonders (8/10) and heavily emphasizes religion in her diplomacy, with a big shared faith bonus and a major differing religions malus. Hatshepsut favors Culture and Religion for her research flavors, neither of which tends to contain much in the way of units, and Hatshepsut often finds herself an era behind in military tech despite good overall research. She will typically find herself serving as the "worst enemy" of all the low peace weight leaders and overrun with invasions from hostile neighbors. Hatshepsut needs to draw a field of high peace weight leaders where she can leverage her religious and cultural sensibilities to good effect.
Past Performance: Hatty carries the ignominious distinction of being the only leader in AI Survivor to never score a single point. She's never gotten a kill, and a pair of survivals as an irrelevant in Season Two are the most successful results she's ever achieved. Some of this has been her own fault; she's consistently proven to be a poor fighter, losing several protracted 1v1 conflicts, and one game in particular saw her attack a stronger rival early in the game en route to a quick exit. However, it's also worth recognizing that she's had some of the worst luck in terms of starting positions, routinely starting in positions that are central, border multiple hostile neighbors, or both; she hasn't gotten the same chance to thrive that other leaders have enjoyed. The past couple of seasons have been particularly brutal for her: Season Six saw her saddled with a central starting position, surrounded by six low peaceweight leaders, with predictable results. Then it looked like she would finally get her big break in Season Seven, with a great position that she leveraged to economic dominance, only to see Montezuma of all leaders grow to unstoppable runaway status off the ineptitude of his competition, then rampage through her territory right before she would have won by culture. Hatty's last-place position shouldn't be taken to mean that she's clearly the worst leader - rather, it reflects that she needs fairly narrow conditions to come out on top, and she has yet to see those manifest.
Ramesses II of Egypt
Traits: Industrious, Spiritual
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Wheel
Peace Weight: 6
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, one playoff round elimination, five opening round eliminations
Total Medals: 1 First Place, 2 Second Places
Total Kills: 1
Overall Power Ranking: 10 points, tied 33rd place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Ramesses is best summarized as a peaceful leader who loves to build wonders. His traits are well suited for this, with the Industrious trait granting additional production for wonders and Spiritual serving as a useful all-around development trait. The AI loves to waste turns in Anarchy flipping civics and it helps save them from their own follies. Ramesses is further helped by the presence of the powerful Egyptian civilization, which has excellent starting techs along with one of the game's best unique units in the form of the War Chariot. Unfortunately the whole is less than the sum of its parts as far as Ramesses is concerned, as his traits and AI personality contribute to one of the worst expansion rates in the competition. Ramesses is so busy building his wonders (10/10) that he forgets to train units (2/10) and struggles to get settlers out on the map to claim territory. He's helped here by a peace weight in the middle of the spectrum to prevent him from being quite as much of a sitting duck as Hatshepsut but the low aggression rating on Ramesses (3.7/10) makes it unlikely that he'll be able to snowball ahead from conquering territory. Ramesses also heavily emphasizes religion, strongly favoring his religious compatriots and disliking his rivals. With his Culture and Production tech flavors, he's another leader who's likely to found a religion despite not starting with Mysticism tech. Only in the rare situation where Ramesses is somehow able to acquire additional territory does he start to become a threat to win the game. His wonder-heavy gameplan simply doesn't work very well for AI Survivor purposes.
Past Performance: Ramesses has failed to accomplish much through most of his career, his AI Survivor story instead largely one of military defeats. He tends to have a strong early game and exit the landgrab phase in a solid position, only to see it all crashing down at some point thanks to losing a war. Whether he wars against multiple foes or just one, this seems to be a legitimate and important weakness for him, as he rarely gets the better of these conflicts and thus is eliminated in game after game - Ramesses is a rare leader who has never been to the Wildcard game. He's also thrown away multiple top-two positions with really terrible moves, such as declaring war on the dominant AI or signing away his best city in a peace treaty. On the plus side, he has managed to hang on for a couple of Second Place finishes now, and his recent appearance in the Season Seven playoffs featured a very strong start from which he was able to put on a dominant Cultural victory, while scoring his only career kill. Recent alternate histories have also suggested that Ramesses might be better than his results indicate, and his reputation might be on the upswing... but he still has a long way to go if he wants to be a real success story.
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Check back later for the community predictions!
