Civ4 AI Survivor Season 8: Game Eight 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: Guess what? We had yet another opening round game where the high peaceweights coming out on top was a low-odds outcome. While Augustus and Lincoln were not completely doomed in this setup and both did make the playoffs again (and even win) on multiple occasions in these replays, they (and Lincoln in particular) were also eliminated in a majority of games and were not at all the "correct" picks for this map. The crowd was completely justified in thinking that Lincoln was in trouble here!

With that said, the overall community read on this game was still not particularly accurate. The predictions had this game as a toss-up between Cyrus, Julius Caesar, and Louis XIV, with Julius favored over the others, but in the alternate histories, there was only a single dominant leader: Cyrus. Cyrus was regularly a beast on this map, winning more than half of the games, managing to eclipse 30 kills across the set, and scoring more than the three next-best leaders combined, barely missing out on the 100 point mark. He was usually the score leader after the early part of the game, often by a lot, and in many contests maintained that lead all the way until victory. These weren't just games that Cyrus was winning: they were games where he was very clearly the winner from an early date. Only in the games where he wasn't able to expand properly (usually due to going to war too early) was he not a top-two contender for most of the match - so of course this is what happened in the real game, as the Sullla curse came to haunt him. Cyrus's real performance was a bottom 25% outcome, and that was a game where he solo conquered another leader to grow as big as any other nation on the map! Thanks to his premature strike, however, he was outgrown by multiple other leaders during that period, while in most replays it was Cyrus setting the pace that everybody else tried, and usually failed, to keep up with. Usually, in order to have a prayer of winning this game, somebody else would both have to play better than normal on his own AND see Cyrus falter more than usual. This failed to happen the majority of the time, however, and the minority who thought Cyrus had the best situation here was absolutely correct.

Outside of Cyrus, however, this map lacked clear answers or consistent performers. Rather than one that was greatly tilted in favor of the eastern low peaceweight leaders, as anticipated, it turned out to be an environment where almost everybody was a viable contender if things lined up right; aside from the hapless De Gaulle, all the other leaders were able to record at least one win and advance at least three times. However, it was also a map of mediocrity. For every strong winning or near-winning performance, any given leader would have several more pathetic performances to make one question how he could have ever come out on top, and aside from the slightly more successful Suleiman, nobody else was even able to reach a 50% survival rate. Ignoring Cyrus, no single leader was able to win more than two alternate games, and aside from him and Suleiman (who still couldn't make it to 50%), nobody was able to exceed a 30% advancement rate. Basically, while Cyrus was almost certainly going to be strong, the rest of the map was a crapshoot and could go any number of ways depending on how well everybody settled and where wars broke out. Each leader was stronger or weaker in his own ways - plenty of details on that below - and it made for an interesting set with quite a few results that threw me for a loop. As is usually the case when there's a dominant AI, the games where Cyrus faltered were often the most fascinating.

There'd been some expectation that this might be a lengthier game due to the large map size and lack of strong economic leaders, but that turned out not to be the case; most of the time, Cyrus (or whoever was strong enough to dethrone him) was able to wrap things up by the early 300s, with Spaceship narrowly edging out Domination as the most likely victory condition. My last general note for this game is on the founding of religions: as expected, this map was largely a toss-up in terms of who would get the first faiths, with no real religious focus or Mysticism starts on the map. All seven leaders founded an opening religion at some point during the set, although Louis, Augustus, and Suleiman were usually the most likely to go for them at the start of the game. Where religions spread was also an important factor and a big reason for the variations of results from game to game. A strong religious alliance with the right people or a profitable shrine could be just what a leader needed to come out on top, while on the flip side being a religious outcast could sink an otherwise promising position. There have been some maps in this season where this didn't seem to be such an important factor, or was pretty consistent from game to game, but this certainly was not one of them.

Now for a look at the individual leaders:

Cyrus of Persia
Wars Declared: 43
Wars Declared Upon: 35
Survival Percentage: 80%
Finishes: 12 Firsts, 2 Seconds (64 points)
Kills: 33
Overall Score: 97 points

The man of the hour, Cyrus benefited from a strong starting position that synergized well with his traits, as well as some quirks of the setup that minimized his trouble with other leaders. Cyrus's position was pretty spacious from the get-go, giving him room to expand to a good size, but he further had very little competition from his neighbors. Large deserts lay in the directions of both De Gaulle and Lincoln, causing them to favor settling in other directions rather than towards Persia, and to his south Julius Caesar often struggled to expand, leaving Cyrus with the opportunity to settle or capture extra cities around West Rome as well. Cyrus's land was also strong enough to sustain a good rate of expansion, with lots of rivers in the vicinity, gold close by, and silver and gems not far off either; as a result, while his economy could grow weaker as he settled, it never crashed entirely, and he was able to keep going and not fall too far behind in tech while expanding. His traits also worked well for this start: Charismatic provided extra early happiness to further sustain his economy, while Imperialistic was a great trait to use to fill up this land quickly. As a result, Cyrus ended most landgrab phases with the most cities - usually nine or more, a mark which anybody else struggled to hit - and thus was already in the driver's seat and very hard to stop.

Cyrus usually would follow this up by going out and conquering one or more leaders; in many of his successful games, he'd already be the clear game winner by the time his first conquest was done, although in some others he had to grow or develop his economy a bit more before reaching that point. In any case, though, as long as Cyrus was able to sustain a good growth rate early on, he'd soon enough reach a point where he was ahead in all metrics and couldn't be stopped. While the general expectation had been that he would go after Lincoln first, this turned out not to be especially likely, perhaps due to the desert between them reducing border tension. They still did fight early in some replays, but Cyrus turned out to be just as likely to fight Lincoln, Julius Caesar, or De Gaulle first - though notably, his own attack of Julius from the real game was not a likely outcome, as it was usually Julius starting their wars instead. There was no right or wrong choice from among these three leaders; for all three, there were games where Cyrus failed after fighting them early, and multiple games where he won after fighting them early. Lincoln was the most likely to yield a dominant victory, as he was the easiest target and his demise harmed Augustus by proxy while only mildly assisting Louis. Julius was the most risky option, as he was a tough target and fights against him could get drawn out, causing Cyrus to fall behind somebody else. De Gaulle was a middle of the road choice, with games featuring early wars with him almost always ending in a top two finish but never yielding a completely dominant snowball. The real best choice for Cyrus, though, was to fight nobody early on. He rarely did this, thanks to his own aggression and that of his neighbors, but when he did, his large size combined with developing while others fought made him truly unstoppable, and all three games where he did this saw him go on to win easily. For those who remember his heyday back in Season 2, these performances were very similar to the way he played to such great success in those outings. (One of these starts resulted in a particularly strong game where he won a ridiculous Turn 234 Domination victory!)

No matter who his first target was, though, Cyrus rarely stopped after one war; it had been suggested that his refusal to plot war at Pleased would be a detriment in this game, but if Cyrus ever was Pleased-locked on this map, it was only after he was already in a comfortable winning position - and relations would usually deteriorate later on, causing him to go back on the warpath. Cyrus's strength worked very well with his aggressive nature and central position, allowing him to exercise his advantage time and time again to amass such an impressive kill total and afford him several different avenues to victory. At times, this would result in him winning by Domination, but there were also plenty of games where he remained relatively peaceful to win by space (or just won by space before he could really make the final push for Domination). His spaceship wins were still plenty dominant though, and there was only one close result out of these dozen games.

Now, of course, there is a flip side to all of this, and that is that Cyrus tended to struggle when he wasn't able to get out to such a strong start (and occassionally even when he did). There were a couple of games in this set where he simply struggled to expand well for unclear reasons, leaving him at a similar level to the rest of the pack, but most of his worst games came when he repeated his strategy from the real game, attacking another leader well before filling out the available land around him. By stunting his growth (and leaving more land for other leaders to claim), he would squander his advantage and leave himself vulnerable to getting knocked down later on; there was one game where this worked, thanks to him going after a particularly weak Lincoln and quickly capturing multiple core cities, but the other three times that he did this (notably never against Caesar - instead these were against Lincoln, De Gaulle, and Suleiman), he ultimately ended up nearly knocked out of the game if not entirely eliminated. Cyrus's less successful games were also the ones where the dangers of his central start were exposed; he was liable to get in a fight with just about anybody, so usually when he wasn't getting ahead and winning, whoever was doing so would fight him and largely if not completely conquer him down the road. Only if a more peaceful leader like Suleiman or Lincoln was in the driver's seat did Cyrus stand a chance of coming in second place; it was a pretty feast-or-famine situation, and we did see this in the real game as he and Augustus fought a lategame conflict that he decisively lost. Still, in the end these weaker games were the less likely outcome, and Cyrus more often took the lead early on and never looked back. It was an impressive show, especially compared to all of the other jokers on this map, and Cyrus was unlucky not to finally get back in the win column this season.

(One last note - this set of Alternate Histories ended on a very dramatic note, as after playing such a dominant set, and sitting just three points shy of the one hundred mark, Cyrus unexpectedly ended up as the First to Die thanks to an early 2v1 against Julius and Suleiman! Such early dogpiles were normally rare, though; his neutral peaceweight certainly helped out here as Julius was the only leader decently likely to go after him early on.)

Suleiman of the Ottomans
Wars Declared: 46
Wars Declared Upon: 20
Survival Percentage: 65%
Finishes: 2 Firsts, 7 Seconds (24 points)
Kills: 9
Overall Score: 33 points

I bet you weren't expecting this result! Much of the crowd (including myself) had dismissed Suleiman as a contender for this game thanks to a cramped, jungle-bound starting location that seemed to drop him into too deep of a hole to contend from, and the real game seemed to prove this as he never amounted to anything and was fodder for De Gaulle. And to be fair, there were some replays where he similarly failed to expand much, especially when inconvenient barb cities spawned - something that did happen in the real game and I think was largely responsible for his poor showing. Sulei of course never amounted to anything in these games - although to his credit, he never folded quickly and often held out as in the real game, finishing as the only leader in this set who never was First to Die or died before Turn 200 (or 240). Moreover, these poor performances were only a minority of his games! Normally he was of a competitive size compared to everybody except Cyrus, and on these occassions he turned out to be the only other remotely consistent performer! Sulei had three advantages here that allowed him to outperform most of his competition: he frequently founded one of the early religions and would eventually end up with a profitable shrine to boost his research; his land was actually quite good once he hacked down the jungle, allowing him to grow his cities to large sizes and be generally stronger than other leaders with a similar city count; and most crucially, he was usually safe from any serious military threats. The hapless De Gaulle was his only close neighbor, and his neutral peaceweight helped ensure that the other leaders on the map would usually look elsewhere to stir up trouble. That meant that they virtually never attacked Suleiman in the early game before he could get up and running, and even later on would often leave him alone. Suleiman and De Gaulle did fight each other early, but only in half of all replays, and when they did fight it tended to result in stalemates, not Suleiman losing cities. As a result, he usually made it to the midgame with his core intact, and not infrequently with some extra cities to the east where Julius Caesar had failed to settle.

If Suleiman made it to that point, then he often could simply coast for the rest of the game, not fighting any dangerous foes and just sitting around in second or third place, with a solid territory base and one of the game's better economies. This would leave him still standing when much of the world had burned, putting him in position to be the only leader besides Cyrus to survive in a majority of replays, as well as amassing by far the most second-place finishes. Suleiman would often fight and pick off one or two relative weaklings during this time, but he usually did not accelerate in the same way that whoever was winning that game (usually Cyrus) was; he was solid, but not dominant, and that worked out fairly well. Again, his ability to avoid getting attacked was a major asset here: give Lincoln this pattern of development, and he'd just get dogpiled out in the mid- to lategame! But Suleiman was able to do the same thing and prosper while the rest of the world was off getting themselves killed. His best games were those where he was more successful at taking extra land early on; on two such occassions, it proved enough of a boost (when combined with Cyrus failing to play to his full potential) to hand him a Spaceship win.

Suleiman definitely showed how middling of a leader he is in this game, though, as he didn't excel in any aspect. Militarily, he accomplished little unless cleaning up a weak foe or participating in a dogpile, thus ending up with the lowest kill-to-top-two ratio on the map outside of Lincoln. Economically, he was one of the best on this map thanks to his land and frequent shrine, but still was only solid - this was no Elizabeth, for example. In addition to his two spaceship wins, he was competitive in the final space race one more time... and these three games had the three latest finishing dates in the entire set. So Suleiman couldn't properly snowball over the map, and he wasn't a strong enough techer to win that way unless the rest of the field played poorly - otherwise, he was a good-but-not-great leader who did a solid job of surviving but not of winning. I think this does offer some insight into his underwhelming results across his AI Survivor career; while not a disaster of a leader, he doesn't do any one thing well enough to get the edge absent a favorable start. Overall, though, this was still an impressive set and Sulei seemed to be a good leader for this slow burn of a starting position. It turned out that all that was needed for it to be workable was for its leader to expand decently and stave off early aggression, and unlike in the real game, Suleiman was usually up to the task.

Sullla EDIT: There was a lot of criticism of this starting position before Game Eight, with a number of commentators arguing that this map should have been rejected because Suleiman had no chance to be competitive. The lesson, as always, is that none of us know what we're talking about.

Augustus of Rome
Wars Declared: 37
Wars Declared Upon: 44
Survival Percentage: 45%
Finishes: 2 Firsts, 4 Seconds (18 points)
Kills: 14
Overall Score: 32 points

Augustus turned out to be the better of the two Caesars on this map despite a far worse diplomatic situation, and while the qualities of their starting positions undoubtedly were very important in this result, I also think that by now there's a good case to be made that he is the better overall AI Survivor player as well. As had been identified before the game, Augustus had a fairly strong starting position on this map, with a great capital that synergized perfectly with his traits and rather fertile land around him. This allowed him to get off to fairly strong starts, especially economically, and he further was one of the best techers in this game (aided by building The Great Lighthouse and Colossus in virtually every game, thanks to the combo of Industrious, Production flavor, and the only coastal start on the map) and so would usually lead in GNP by the midgame - and was further aided in some games by a profitable shrine, as he was one of the more likely leaders to chase an early religion. This made him a more effective performer in terms of pure early development than his adoptive father, and he further had a more appealing foe for early wars: while Julius would usually grapple with the very strong Cyrus (when the two Caesars weren't fighting each other, that is), Augustus instead got to deal with the considerably less intimidating Louis. While the two leaders' relative strengths varied from game to game, Augustus tended to be stronger on average and was able to get the upper hand over Louis more often than vice versa. He further was helped by having Lincoln on the other side of Louis, thus often plunging the Sun King into two-front wars, which was usually enough for Augustus to take him out. All of Augustus's strong finishes (and almost all of his kills) were based on conquering Louis (alone or with Lincoln) relatively early in the game, which would put him in a top-two worthy position and potentially set him up to take out other targets down the road. These were the games where he was a real contender, and he was as powerful in them as anybody not named Cyrus - as evidenced by his holding the only respectable kill total aside from Cyrus's. Augustus's two wins in these replays both followed similar trajectories to his real game: an early conquest of Louis to put him clearly in the lead at an early date, after which he was able to coast and eventually take down Cyrus head-to-head.

However, while this was a plausible result for Augustus and he was successful more often than many of his rivals, there were also plenty of games where he wasn't able to establish himself as a major power, and thus didn't accomplish much of anything. Augustus's expansion was medicore in this set and there were plenty of replays where it was as unimpressive as in the real game; this was partially because of his own tardiness in getting out settlers, partially because of Louis pushing down on him from the north, and partially because of the tendency of barb cities to spawn to the northwest and box him in prematurely. (And to the southwest, there was another sizable desert that formed a natural border between the two Romes.) Augustus thus often had only six or so cities after the landgrab, which limited his ability to perform; in particular, whenever Louis had a good landgrab (thus further squeezing his rival), it was much harder for Augustus to make headway against him, though at least he was able to consistently grab the closest iron resource to field Praetorians (undoubtedly a factor in him being as strong versus Louis as he was). There were also a good number of games (40% in total) where he had another problem: Roman civil war. Julius would come and attack him, and this was not a recipe for Augustus's success; while he could usually hold Julius off, and in fact was usually the stronger party in their conflicts, West Rome was a prickly foe and tough to take ground against, and so Augustus wasn't able to pull ahead in the same way that he could with an easy conquest of France. This further would often set the stage for Louis to dogpile Augustus, resulting in his elimination. On the plus side, these were normally the only two enemies Augustus had to worry about, as he had fairly good relations with the rest of the world and wasn't much of a dogpile magnet at all; De Gaulle only came over to attack him a couple of times in the set, Suleiman pretty much never fought him, and while he did get blown away by Cyrus several times, it was always in the lategame after Augustus had already clearly failed to win.

In the end, then, between poor landgrabs and unfortunate wars with Julius, Augustus struggled to consistently become strong on this map and only had a few really good games. Still, a strong position, steady personality, and Praetorians can count for a lot, and Augustus was not as doomed in this setup as he might have appeared to be at first. He certainly outperformed my expectations.

Louis XIV of France
Wars Declared: 40
Wars Declared Upon: 38
Survival Percentage: 35%
Finishes: 1 First, 3 Seconds (11 points)
Kills: 7
Overall Score: 18 points

On his road to the title last year, Louis put up some impressive Alternate Histories results in his first two games, when playing on maps that were tilted in his favor, but struggled considerably more on the level playing field of the Championship map. Those struggles continued here as the reigning champ was only able to claim a single win in this set and was far more likely to be the first to die. Louis suffered on this map from the same problems as we saw in the real game: a cramped starting position, which often left him with only six or so cities after the landgrab, and a bad local diplomatic situation as he was stuck between two high peaceweight leaders, one of whom had Praetorians. Louis compounded his issues by regularly going to war early, before he was capable of gaining any real ground; he pretty much never attained any results better than a stalemate in his early wars, and so this set his development back to no gain (and sometimes great loss). Especially in games where the western leaders were off doing their own thing and he was left on his own, Louis found himself in a rut that he couldn't get out of, and so in about half of all replays, he either was killed in the first set or two of wars, or else set back enough that he was easy pickings in the midgame. (Sometimes a low peaceweight leader would even march across the map to join in the fun!) His First to Die result in the real game was thus one of the most likely outcomes for that category, and Augustus and Lincoln's successes would be fueled off of his failures.

However, Louis did have one ace that he was sometimes able to pull out of his lace-lined sleeve: he was in the peaceweight majority, and that meant he could get help to deal with one or both of his foes. While there wasn't an exact 1:1 correlation, on the whole he tended to perform much better when Cyrus attacked Lincoln, Julius attacked Augustus, or both; this both relieved the pressure on him and gave him the opening to dogpile one of his foes and take some easy gains, and so he was able to become a real power in these matches, competitive in economy (he often founded one of the early religions and was able to set up a shrine) and usually in the running for a top two position. (There were also a few games where Louis expanded better than normal - his Creative trait and the spotty expansion of his neighbors were a big help here, and he saw better results than normal when fighting them in these games, although he was never able to secure a quick conquest on his own.) However, there still was a major issue for him here: Cyrus. Louis's more successful games always corresponded to strong Persia games, since a dogpile of Augustus meant that Cyrus wasn't wasting effort fighting Julius early, and a dogpile of Lincoln meant that he was getting easy gains. This meant that nine times out of ten (literally), Louis was able to break out of his corner... only to still be hopelessly behind the massive Persian empire, which would go on to win the game and consign him to second place at best. Louis was only able to come out on top a single time, a game where Cyrus underexpanded compared to normal and Louis took advantage of an early religion's economic boost to become the tech leader and take out Cyrus head-on en route to the set's only Cultural victory. In all his other strong games, though, it would have been suicide to even try to attack Cyrus. Louis just wasn't in a winning position on this map.

Louis's results further suffered in these replays as he struggled to stay out of trouble in the lategame; for as many games as he was quickly dispatched by Augustus/Lincoln, there were just as many games where he came out on top in the east, only to later get thwacked by one of the low peaceweights instead. He was not the most popular on this map and got on the others' nerves more than the likes of Cyrus or Sulei; his peaceweight was a bit too low in that regard, and so unless there was a strong religious or shared-war bond in play, the possibility of a late scuffle was usually still present. Louis thus never ended a game in a solid third place or anything like that; he was either a top-two leader, or eliminated or on his way there. If these games had lasted a little longer, he'd have had the same survival rate as poor Lincoln! In some ways, it feels like these results do thus undervalue him somewhat, as he was more likely to be a strong competitor than Julius Caesar or Lincoln, yet didn't score significantly more than them; in fact, in addition to his four top-two finishes, there were four more games where he was in a second place position until getting in an unfortunate war at the end of the game! On the other hand, the fact that this kept happening indicates that this was a real problem for him (especially when the backstab-happy fellow started the wars himself, which did happen more than once!), and cements that he deserves to be a tier below Suleiman and Augustus. Still, it is worth keeping in mind that, since Suleiman was usually the beneficiary of Louis's late demise, then had these late conquests not happened, it would have been Louis and not him with the second-best advancement rate on the map! As it was, though, Louis did end up not advancing significantly more often than anybody else except his fellow Frenchman. Overall, then, this set ended up as quite a mixed bag, albeit one that I think reflects more on his rough position than on his actual merits as an AI Survivor contender.

Julius Caesar of Rome
Wars Declared: 38
Wars Declared Upon: 15
Survival Percentage: 35%
Finishes: 1 First, 3 Seconds (11 points)
Kills: 5
Overall Score: 16 points

Julius Caesar was perhaps the most closely-watched leader entering this game: a lot of people believed this would be his return to glory and he garnered roughly 50% of winner picks, but others were skeptical and thought this was too spacious of a starting position for him. The skeptics were proven correct in this case, as Caesar struggled mightily throughout this set to make anything of his position, putting up a singularly unimpressive score in the process (beating out only Lincoln in the kill count is just sad for a Pool One warmonger). Julius's starting position did indeed turn out to be his downfall, as its spacious surroundings almost never helped him, although I don't know that those were really the problem either. The real problem was that Julius was a weak economic leader saddled with weak land. There was room for two nice but floodplain-heavy cities, including his capital, but the rest of his surroundings had bleh terrain and no early happiness resources. As a result, Caesar could only put out small, weak cities, and his economy would soon start crashing, forcing him to halt expansion prematurely. It was a big difference from Cyrus who had river-filled surroundings, at least one early happiness resource, and Charismatic trait! I thus saw the same pattern repeated over and over again: Julius would get out to five or six cities (if that), then have to stop and slowly nurse his economy back to health, only getting maybe two or three more cities in the rest of the landgrab phase and leaving the rest of his surroundings for others to claim (usually Cyrus, Suleiman, or whoever captured the inevitable barb city spawns - and as you'll have noticed from the previous sections, this had major implications for how the rest of the map played out). His cities would then remain small for a long time, and this set him too far back to be remotely competitive for the win.

Julius simply lacked options by the time he was ready to go to war, with no great targets. It didn't help that his two closest neighbors were the two best military leaders on this map: Augustus, who had his own Praetorians to counter Julius's, and Cyrus, who had the strongest nation in the game. Any war that was not a dogpile (and even some that were) was thus a losing prospect for Julius; he lacked the good first target to snowball off of, or perhaps more accurately was himself too weak to properly start the snowball. He frequently lost these replays in the same way that he did in the real game: fighting Cyrus and slowly losing (although it was nearly always Caesar and not Cyrus who started this conflict). Julius was at least able to put up a good fight most of the time, often making Cyrus work to conquer him, but conquer him Cyrus did. At other times Caesar avoided this war, and even managed to make himself competitive with the rest of the field, one of the better leaders on the board in GNP and power; these performances yielded his trio of runner-up finishes. Still, much like Louis, Caesar's stronger games nearly always corresponded with strong Cyrus games, and so he'd always be playing in the shadow of the Persian giant and not competitive for the win. Only in one highly unusual match did Julius come out on top: critically, this game saw him grow to a much bigger size than normal early on thanks to a multitude of barb city captures, as well as somehow securing a source of early happiness. The new, stronger Julius was thus able to successfully WIN against Cyrus in their opening war, ultimately conquering him completely and growing to an unstoppable size in the process. However, outside of this match and the unusual Game 20 where he again contributed to Cyrus's early exit (though this time with help), he never did well if Cyrus was having a bad game. Sometimes this was because Cyrus was getting set too far back while conquering him, paving the way for his later ouster, but other times there was no clear reason, so I'm unsure why the correlation is so strong.

Overall, then, this was indeed a deceptively poor setup for Julius; I'm not sure whether a more economic leader like Pacal could have made this start work or if it was just too bad regardless, but in any case it certainly wasn't good for a warmonger personality. Meanwhile, this is yet another type of setup where Caesar has performed poorly in the alternate histories; with each of these, it seems more and more the case that he's simply not very good unless he's able to get out to a strong start. As we've seen in the past, he can be terrifying under those circumstances, but outside of that he hasn't shown himself to be very resilient. There are some leaders who can still get it done from a weak position or opening, but I don't think Julius Caesar is one of them.

Lincoln of America
Wars Declared: 13
Wars Declared Upon: 60
Survival Percentage: 20%
Finishes: 2 Firsts, 1 Second (12 points)
Kills: 2
Overall Score: 14 points

I think that alongside Julius Caesar, Lincoln had one of the clearly worst starting positions on this map. There WERE an awful lot of furs near his capital, but overall the surrounding land was pretty food-poor, and in particular the area to his west hosted a large, inhospitable region full of desert and plains, which messed with his AI and often resulted in him spending the landgrab phase refusing to move his settlers at all west of his capital. Coupled no doubt with normal AI foibles, this resulted in an inconsistent set in terms of landgrabs; I didn't particularly notice any performances quite as bad as his real one, but there certainly were quite a few where he expanded quite poorly and was weak as a result; the nearby presence of Creative Louis didn't help at all, and there was even one replay where he successfully flipped one of Lincoln's core cities early on! On the other hand, there were some games where Lincoln was able to expand well, settling a lot of tundra fishing villages in particular, and had a strong empire as a result.

The bigger problem for Lincoln was his diplomatic situation. He was a high peaceweight fish in a low peaceweight pond, and while his compatriot Augustus was able to do okay in that situation thanks to warmonger respect and an out-of-the-way position, Lincoln didn't enjoy the same luxury. He never managed to last a game without being attacked, and indeed was predictably the most-attacked leader. For one, he fought with Louis in almost every single game; this wasn't a problem on its own, though, as Louis never managed to accomplish anything against him alone, and instead there were several games like the real one, where Lincoln worked with Augustus to eliminate his French rival. The big problem was that unlike in the real game, Lincoln almost always had to fight someone else, too! One or more of the other warmongers would frequently come after him early on, plunging him into a dogpile that he couldn't win; this could include the powerful Cyrus, whom Lincoln had a tough time withstanding even in a 1v1, although that particular result was not as baked into this setup as it had originally appeared, and Lincoln was able to dodge the Persian early on in a good number of games. Still, the early wars frequently went against Lincoln, crippling him even if they didn't kill him and giving him the highest First to Die rate on this map as expected. Even when he made it out of the early wars alive or even strong, he wasn't home free yet, as there would still be powerful warmongers elsewhere on the map and they would come after him sooner or later. There were three or four different games where Lincoln was in a top-two position by the midgame, only to later be attacked by a strong Cyrus or Suleiman or Julius and knocked out all the same. Of course, Lincoln didn't help himself at all by often ignoring Rifling, but I'm not sure that ever made the difference; it just wasn't a good setup for him. Even in the two games where he survived and didn't win, he was largely conquered later in the game, getting saved by Augustus in the nick of time in one and able to hold out to avoid death in the other - because he was fighting De Gaulle (and, amusingly, carrying out his resistance from former East France).

However, there were a couple of times that Lincoln was able to stay safe, and he did win on both of these occassions. The first time was a game where he formed a tight religious bond with Cyrus, allowing him to completely avoid attacks after an early Louis war for the only time in the entire set; since he got the majority of Louis's cities in that first war, this was enough for him to pull ahead in tech and win by space. In the second game he was attacked multiple times... but the first time was by De Gaulle, whom he was able to hold off while the rest of the world killed Cyrus and Louis for him, and the second time was by a Julius Caesar who had fallen behind in tech and could thus be repelled. Lincoln was still in potential trouble late in that game, sharing a world with two powerful Caesars who didn't care much for him... but they never actually attacked in the lategame, allowing him to win by space without ever capturing a city from a rival. Thus Lincoln was pretty good at internal development, but of course that is only one part of Civilization, and he didn't do so well at the "not getting killed by your enemies" part. In the end, then, Lincoln's real result made sense in that he got the expected result (a strong finish) from not getting attacked aside from Louis - but the "not getting attacked" part was quite unusual, so while his playoff spot wasn't a complete fluke, he certainly did get lucky.

De Gaulle of France
Wars Declared: 36
Wars Declared Upon: 41
Survival Percentage: 40%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 0 Seconds (0 points)
Kills: 6
Overall Score: 6 points

And then we come to the one and only hopeless leader on this map. De Gaulle just could not accomplish anything in this scenario, and his best overall performance was probably the one we saw in the real game, thanks to him getting lucky enough to capture multiple barb cities in the deep south, where he normally had little to no land in the replays. (His best final result would be from a game where he snatched two kill credits in dogpiles en route to a noncompetitive third-place finish.) I'm not sure what exactly made him so bad in the replays - perhaps his land wasn't so good? There weren't a lot of food bonuses but there was plenty of desert in his surroundings - but whatever the reason, he was woefully ineffective in game after game. Economically, he started strong in a couple of games before falling off, and otherwise was irrelevant, never able to keep up with the tech leaders. Military, he usually either fought in stalemates, dogpiles, or lategame wars where he was swept away by a superior foe. This left him with no edge over the competition, and thus locked out of the playoffs again and again. He secured exactly one solo conquest in this set, one of Suleiman that took three wars to finish, and otherwise was just the tagalong kid helping take shots at the other leaders; his dogpiling probably killed a few leaders' chances over the set, but that was about the most he could boast of. De Gaulle thus often ended up hanging around for a good while, but only in a non-competitive position, and he also frequently got on the others' nerves, leading to later wars - so he wasn't even able to survive in the majority of games! Now admittedly, De Gaulle did border the two strongest leaders on the map - but was he weak because they were strong, or vice versa? Or neither, since even against softer targets like Lincoln he couldn't accomplish much?

To be completely fair to the guy, I'm sure he would have racked up a couple of second place finishes if I'd run this set for long enough; there certainly were some games where he was in position to take a runner-up spot until the last set of wars went against him. On the other hand, he never came remotely close to any victory condition, while everybody else on the map was able to win at least one game in the set. Overall, this was a pretty embarassing match for De Gaulle, and while I don't know what exactly caused it, it's hard to believe that there's not something fundamentally wrong with his AI personality, given all the bad alternate histories results we've seen from him over the years. He certainly lived up to the newer moniker of "De Lol" this time around.

Conclusions

Overall, we saw a pretty unusual version of this map play out on the livestream. Augustus and Lincoln only advanced together twice during all the replays, with Lincoln in particular landing near the top of his range of outcomes, and while Augustus was proven to be one of the relatively good leaders, there were still two better candidates that were locked out of the playoffs. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the real game was De Gaulle being so much stronger than Suleiman; it had looked like the normal outcome, but in reality it turned out that they were about as strong and weak, respectively, as in any of the replays! At least we got one pretty ordinary result in the real game, in the form of Louis as First to Die.

I'd boldly predicted before running this set that the biggest moment of the game, Cyrus's attack of Julius Caesar, would be shown to be an unlikely outcome that wildly altered the match's trajectory, but this turned out to be only about one-third true. Cyrus attacking Julius was indeed unusual... but Julius attacking Cyrus wasn't, so they still fought, and the trajectory of the map wasn't affected as much as I'd expected. For sure, it removed Cyrus as a top leader, which was a relatively unlikely outcome - but not wildly outlandish one, and it didn't really have that much of a ripple effect across the rest of the map's dynamics. The east played out in a fairly typical manner, while the west was unusual but unaffected by that conflict.

What did have a ripple effect, though, was the broader results of the opening round. With the full round's set of Alternate Histories now complete, we can see that of the eleven higher peaceweight leaders who made the playoffs prior to the Wildcard round, EIGHT of them did so in low-odds outcomes, with only Mansa Musa, Ramesses, and Elizabeth being relatively likely to secure their playoff berths. Conversely, there were no higher peaceweight leaders that "should" have advanced but didn't (unless you count Isabella, whose theoretical spot was taken by Elizabeth instead to cancel that out). Now imagine this season's playoff round, but with warmongers in most of those starting positions instead! It would have been an extremely different end to the season. The high peaceweights really got a run of good luck this season, and it ended up paying massive dividends for them in a way that I expect we're unlikely to see happen again anytime soon. It certainly gave this season its own distinct flavor, and I'm glad that they got their time in the sun for once. We'll see if things get back to "normal" whenever Season 9 rolls along. Until then, thanks for reading!