Game 8
It was not without some trepidation that I approached this set of alternate histories. The original Game 8 had been memorable, but very long, and especially after a rather straightforward set from Game 7, I thought I might be in for a lengthy, relatively boring set that could become a massive slog to get through.
My fears proved unfounded, as Game 8 turned out to be one of my favorite sets to go through in the entire opening round! Like the original game, it proved to be a wild and unpredictable set, with all sorts of ways that the map could play out. I got a taste of what I was in for when six different leaders finished in the top two during the first three replays, and it wasn’t until my ninth time through that I finally got a winner/second place pairing that I’d seen before. Some of the replays were relatively straightforward, but there were plenty of surprises and weird turns to keep it interesting, and uncertainty over the final standings lasted all the way up until the final game.
As wild as the replays could get, though, I don’t think any of them approached the actual game that Sullla originally wrote up. After all, that game featured a leading Hannibal getting AP’d out in the early modern era, many cross-map crusades, a game length nearly 50 turns longer than the longest alternate history, and a Diplomatic victory that barely cut the game short before inter-turn processing would have made the difference between Asoka winning or getting eliminated. But perhaps the most unusual aspect of the original game was the fact that Mao won! This never happened again in the alternate histories; instead, Mao routinely performed poorly and was one of only two leaders (along with Wang Kon) who didn’t have much of a chance. His performance in the real Game 8 outscored his combined total across all 20 alternate games – talk about an outlier! It was a crazy result befitting this generally crazy map.
So if Mao wasn’t a contender in the alternate histories, what
was the expected dynamic of this map? Well, there’s no clear answer to that, as five different leaders all had roughly similar odds of finding success and advancing to the playoffs, in the 35-45% range. There were certainly some patterns that emerged over the set and some leaders were clearly stronger than others, but there were no sure bets here. Even survival was a bit of a crapshoot, with nobody dying more than 65% of the time but only two leaders making it through a majority of the games alive. The overall pattern, though, was that of the five western leaders duking it out for supremacy while Wang and Asoka hung out and teched with small empires in their eastern enclave. Over time and a number of wars, some combination of Cyrus, Hannibal, Churchill, or Bismarck would gain some territory and become major forces in the west, and eventually one of them would reach runaway status and finish the game as the clear winner – close finishes were rare on this map, even when more than one leader had become strong. Most often there would still be two strong leaders in the west at the end of the game, with the lesser one finishing in second place, but at other times there was only one true dominant leader and Asoka slipped into second place instead – or, in rare cases, get ahead and won himself.
Thanks to the large pool and long, twisting continent that played host to this game, it tended to be have rather long matches. I never got anything as ridiculously long as the real game, the but average length was close to 350 turns here, with no games finishing before Turn 300. It also tended to have fairly warlike games; again, nothing as extreme as the real game, but only a single alternate playthrough had a war counter in the single digits. It wasn’t as high here as in some games, though, indicating more conquests fought to their conclusions. Spaceship was unsurprisingly the dominant victory type, but Domination was surprisingly viable given the map’s size, showing up in 25% of the results. Diplomatic was expectedly a rare outcome, but not ridiculous here, showing up twice more in addition to the real result. The real dud in terms of victory condition was Cultural; only a single game ended this way and I don’t think the culture slider was run a single time across the entire set. This was the wrong group of leaders for that one.
Now for a look at the individual leaders:
Bismarck of Germany
Wars declared: 66
Wars declared upon: 45
Survival percentage: 85%
Total finishes: 7 firsts, 2 seconds (39 points)
Total kills: 23
Overall score: 62 points
Bismarck finished this set with the highest score by a good margin, and this felt like it accurately reflected his status as the strongest overall leader on the map even if he wasn’t as dominant as most #1 leaders. He was the most likely leader both to advance and to win outright, scored the most kills by a good margin (and indeed had one of the highest kill totals in the entire opening round), and was himself killed off only three times in the entire set. Bismarck benefited from one of the strongest starting positions on this map: it was rather spacious and allowed him to usually peacefully expand to one of the largest sizes in the early game, and his geopolitical position was also strong, giving him good conquest opportunities but little danger. Bis fought a lot in these games, being attacked the third-most times in addition to declaring the most wars himself, but between his strong empire and military tech focus, he was often up to the challenge. His most dangerous rivals were Cyrus and Hannibal, but they were way over to the west where they would be kept busy in the early game. Instead, Bis most frequently clashed with Mao early on, and he was basically always as strong as China if not stronger. He would also tussle with Asoka or Wang less frequently but no less successfully; their small size prevented them from posing any kind of threat to him whatsoever and they often were friendly neighbors that left him with a secure eastern flank.
As a result of this setup, Bis was one of the most consistent contenders on the map, and would usually be competing for a top two spot well into the game even on the occassions where he wasn’t ultimately successful. He was generally able to stay competitive in economy as well as territory; part of this was due to his larger territory base from conquests, but there were also games where he didn’t do any early conquering and still did just fine economically. His military tech focus seemed to help him as much as anything on this map, as he didn’t fall too far behind economically but was nearly always up with the frontrunners in military tech, if not ahead of them, thereby fueling his conquest machine. Bis also felt like something of a “lite” warmonger on this map; not as insane as the crazies, but usually continuing to fight and fight, usually either pressing his advantage to victory or else falling out of contention. He won four of this map’s five Domination victories, and was on the way there in two of his other wins; only one of his victories saw an entirely peaceful conclusion.
The flip side of this was that Bis did rely on snowballing to really pull ahead, and tended to fall more than just a tiny bit behind when he couldn’t pull it off. This was the case in many of his less successful outings, where he just couldn’t pull ahead in the same way, either due to less success on his part or a particularly strong performance from someone else. Sometimes he would still survive these in decent shape (only twice, though, was he still strong enough to finish in second), other times he’d be in the process of getting rolled up when the game ended; there were several games where he barely survived, including one amusing one where a captured Indian city, surrounded by intact Indian culture, formed a barrier between him and a Hannibal and Mao who had otherwise conquered him. As for his three actual eliminations, these game from games where he expanded relatively poorly, never really got out in front, and later on (but not before then) got conquered by some combination of the three low peaceweight leaders. As it turned out, the real Game 8 was one of these worst-case scenarios; normally, Bis was significantly stronger than in his real debut. Overall, this set supported the idea of Bis being a somewhat competent leader who can sometimes capitalize on a fairly strong position, but far from the best player out there. He didn’t totally bungle this and overall showed his military chops here, but I think other leaders could have done better with the same setup.
Hannibal of Carthage
Wars declared: 52
Wars declared upon: 23
Survival percentage: 40%
Total finishes: 6 firsts, 1 second (32 points)
Total kills: 11
Overall score: 43 points
Hannibal was the other leader who was relatively likely to win on this map, although his overall performance was a lot less consistent than Bismarck’s. Along with Bis, he had one of the best starts on the map, with good space to expand and a favorable diplomatic situation – Cyrus to the north was very easy to turn into a safe ally, and Churchill to the south was diplomatically unpopular. In Hannibal’s good games, he would convert this favorable start into a real advantage by the midgame, forging a good-sized empire thanks in part to land taken from one of his neighbors, usually Churchill. From there, his Financial trait would kick in and allow him to pull out to an unstoppable tech lead. This type of game gave him six wins and one close second place finish, and taken alone made him look pretty impressive. It was also the trajectory he followed in the real game, right up until AP madness made everything fall apart.
However, the rest of the time, Hannibal was a total dud on this map. Actually he had quite a strange trajectory through the replays, winning two of the first four games for a strong start, then surging into second place overall with three wins in a row at the end… but in the middle, he won only one of the other 13 games, and looked like a complete featherweight the rest of the time. There’s no neat way to explain his failures on this map, except that he simply was playing bad games of Civilization IV. His expansion was routinely poor, with him usually struggling to get out to more than six cities despite his ample land; sometimes this was because he went to war too early and got distracted, but at other times he simply stopped, ceding the rest of the land on the western peninsula to Cyrus. This usually left him a bit too weak to really compete, and he couldn’t gain any ground by going to war, either. He usually fought early wars against Churchill, but in many games he couldn’t make much progress, or even lost ground to the English. Wars with Cyrus were more rare, but were almost always bad news for him, and even when he and Cyrus worked together to grind Churchill down, it was often Cyrus who was getting the majority of the cities and pulling ahead. The result was a bunch of games where Hannibal either got knocked out early (he was First to Die five different times, with Churchill involved in all of those eliminations), or else survived the first round of wars but wasn’t strong enough to stay competitive, eventually getting knocked out down the road by Cyrus or Churchill or Bismarck. He also couldn’t stay out of trouble and only survived two of the games that he didn’t win; it was a real feast or famine performance.
There were also some downright bizarre games from Hannibal. One saw him in strong competition for a top two spot, only to fall into horrible starvation during the Industrial era, reaching a point where something like 70% of his cities were size 1 and unhealthy! That dropped him from viability to an easy enough foe for Bismarck to dispatch. Another saw him attack Cyrus very early, gain the advantage and quickly knock him down to just three cities, seemingly set up for a dominant snowball. But then he stalled out for ages trying to conquer those last three cities, allowing Churchill time to kill Mao, backstab him, and completely conquer him without ever having finished off the Persians. There was another game where he was in good position until Cyrus, who was Pleased towards him and in the process of sending his army across the world, randomly declared war on him instead for no clear reason, and of course his real Game 8 result where Asoka got him AP’d out of the game. Overall, this was a bit of an odd performance by Hannibal that left me unsure what to think of him. He was legitimately strong in some games but very disappointing in others, and I don’t know how much of this should be attributed to his AI personality.
Cyrus of Persia
Wars declared: 53
Wars declared upon: 22
Survival percentage: 75%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 5 seconds (20 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 36 points
Cyrus was one of this map’s most consistent performers, frequently playing at a solid level while rarely excelling. His starting position was both spacious and sheltered, on the edge of the map and only bordering a Hannibal who could easily become a war-proof friend. Hannibal further frequently failed to expand as well as he might, allowing Cyrus (with the help of his Imperialistic trait) to get a large number of cities, and he proved good at developing what he got to become one of the major powers in game after game. Before conquests started to take place, he was usually one of the strongest leaders.
Where things got a little mixed was when the conquering began. Cyrus sometimes did well at this to maintain a strong position; usually this was when he participated in a dogpile of Churchill and got good spoils. While wars with Hannibal were fairly rare, they also tended to go in Cyrus’s favor, and there were multiple games where he helped dogpile Hannibal early to grow strong. Other times, though, he didn’t fight enough or didn’t get a good portion of the spoils, and those tended to be the cases where he fell further behind and out of contention, later if not sooner. (Cyrus never died early and came close only once – he was still alive at Turn 220 in each and every game!) Cyrus was not the strongest techer on this map and relied more on his superior production and food capabilities to stay competitive. This often worked well (and he did rack up the second-most kills on the map), but if he couldn’t manage any decent conquests, somebody else would eventually outscale him. Even when Cyrus did remain strong throughout the game, it was hard for him to pull completely out in front and win, as he only managed this twice. The more common sight was for him to finish in second place or lower, a solid competitor but ultimately a second-rate one. I think the lack of many convenient conquest opportunities hampered him here, as he tended to be unwilling to fight Hannibal or Mao after the early game, leaving only Churchill as a good target, and that wasn’t enough to compete with the snowballs that other leaders could more easily execute.
The other notable aspect to Cyrus’s performance in these games was that he regularly engaged in cross-map crusades against Wang Kon. In general this sort of long-distance war wasn’t terribly common on this map, the real game being something of an outlier in that regard, but the specific matchup of Cyrus vs. Wang was a regular part of these games, whatever the reason may be. (Perhaps because their capitals were relatively close going westward over the ocean?) Cyrus was invariably stronger than Wang and these attacks went reasonably well; sometimes he’d stall out due to losing Open Borders with Bismarck, or something else silly like that, but often he was able to successfully conquer Korea to bolster his case for a top-two position; indeed, this helped him stay on top in one of his two wins.
Overall, Cyrus had one of the most typical performances in the real Game 8; a contender all the way through, but eventually outscaled by someone else and ultimately finishing in second place, was absolutely a realistic outcome for him. I think these alternate histories painted him as another mid-tier leader; decently capable and delivering reasonably well from a solid start, but clearly not the best economic leader and thus not performing as well as some others might have. This game seemed to have a lot of such mid-tier leaders, and I wonder if that’s the main reason why it proved as entertaining as it did.
Churchill of England
Wars declared: 18
Wars declared upon: 60
Survival percentage: 40%
Total finishes: 3 firsts, 4 seconds (23 points)
Total kills: 11
Overall score: 34 points
Along with Hannibal, Churchill was the other big feast-or-famine leader on this map. For starters, he was the odds-on favorite for First to Die, his result in the real game being duplicated an additional nine times here. This wasn’t a case of Churchill being a weakling; rather, he simply was stuck in a very bad diplomatic situation. He started between Hannibal and Mao, both of whom were predisposed to dislike him, and he was also the closest likely war target for Cyrus. As a result, he would often face multi-front wars, or multiple wars in quick succession, and it was hard to keep up with all of that pressure. Churchill tended to expand fairly well and could fight well one-on-one; early wars with just Hannibal or just Mao went well, as he could almost always hold his aggressor off and often start taking cities from them. But once Cyrus piled in as well, he was up against impossible odds. There was frequently nothing he could have feasibly done to avoid his fate.
But to Churchill’s credit, when he
wasn’t dogpiled and eliminated early, he was usually a strong competitor, clocking in with a top two finish in 7 out of 11 such games. The difference here usually wasn’t that he wasn’t fighting early wars against his neighbors – it was that he was winning them. If he wasn’t eliminated first, it was often because he was turning the tables and helping Mao or Hannibal to suffer that fate instead, and that left him with one of the game’s larger empires, clearly one of the major powers. By the time he reached this point, Bismarck was usually the only other leader who stood a chance of threatening him, and that translated to Churchill finishing behind Bis in second place four times, as well as winning three games of his own when he performed particularly well. (Bis and Churchill’s identical peaceweight resulted in them fighting each other only very rarely.) All but one of his kills were scored during these games as well. Churchill often was a slightly sub-par techer in the midgame, with one of the worst GNPs, but he was able to stay reasonably competitive for long enough that his territorial advantage could make up the difference.
There was only a small handful of games where Churchill neither died first nor finished in the top two; these were unusual results where his early wars stalemated, with somebody else on the map getting picked off first without Churchill gaining any advantage from it. This resulted in him either getting eliminated later down the road, or in a single case surviving in third place. Overall, this was a pretty good performance by Churchill given the circumstances, but when evaluating his merits as an AI should be taken with a grain of salt. I am guessing that Churchill benefited a good deal here from the bonus Deity starting techs that are no longer given out in modern seasons of AI Survivor; they didn’t immediately unlock any resources at his capital, but they no doubt sped up his overall growth curve by a decent amount, a big deal for a leader who’s generally been observed to be a particularly slow starter. If Churchill was given this map under the current ruleset, he may well have been routinely weaker and unable to put up as good of a fight in his early wars – a reason I like to use the original conditions, since we found out that he did in fact have solid odds of advancing as it was! But regardless of any extra benefit he got, Churchill did show once again here that he’s a good military AI in games where he’s able to get well-established and not dogpiled. It was a game all about fighting for him, and he handed it capably even though there were more than a few games where that simply wasn’t enough.
Asoka of India
Wars declared: 21
Wars declared upon: 35
Survival percentage: 50%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 6 seconds (22 points)
Total kills: 1
Overall score: 23 points
Asoka was the final viable leader on this map, but played a completely different series of games from the other four. Out west, it was all about the conflicts and wars, the advantage going to whomever could carve out a strong territory base in any given game. By contrast, Asoka was content to sit on just his initial six or so cities, instead clearly playing the best economic game (relative to city count, at least) of the bunch and routinely putting himself in a solid position that way. Asoka always dominated the early game culturally (helped by founding one of the opening religions in virtually every game) and would often be way out in front in terms of score at Turn 75. Even once the other leaders’ cities and scores started growing to put him behind in that regard, he would often maintain the GNP and tech lead for long periods of time, getting a lot of value out of the limited land he did have and playing the peaceful builder game quite well. Sometimes it was as late as the early modern era before his foes with 20+ cities caught up in tech with his six city empire! This strong tech and well-developed cities left him in position to slip into second place in games where only one western leader was very strong, and he translated that into the best second-place rate and the second-best top-two rate on the map.
However, Asoka performed very poorly on the military front. Admittedly this was partially just because he didn’t fight a whole lot of wars, but even when he did fight, he could have trouble accomplishing much (including stopping his enemies from conquering him) thanks to his small production base and failure to emphasize units. Asoka only managed a single kill across the entire set of 20 games, and most of his invasions went nowhere. Admittedly he couldn’t have accomplished too much, since he was so limited in city count as a result of his cramped starting position, but he certainly didn’t take much advantage of dogpiles, or usually make much headway against the similarly small Wang. There were also several games where he was attacked by a foe who had inferior military tech but made up for it with sheer numbers, as Asoka either couldn’t compete with the much bigger production base or simply failed to build enough units, only building useful units in three out of six cities at a time or something like that. Asoka rarely survived when he wasn’t finishing in the top two, with Bismarck or Cyrus usually responsible for his demise; his military weakness compared to Bismarck in particular fueled a good number of German victories. Then again, perhaps this was how he had to play; he was too small to effectively snowball, and so greater focus on military might have only sunk his economic efforts as well.
Asoka managed only two wins in this set of games, both coming on rare occassions where he was actually able to gain territory: once from a solo conquest of Wang (his only kill), and once from dogpiling Mao in a game that stalemated for over 200 turns, thus allowing him to maintain his economic lead for longer than usual. There were also a good number of games, much like the real Game 8, where it looked like he could have easily won a Cultural victory had he turned on the slider and pursued it in earnest, but I don’t believe he used the slider even a single time in all of these sets. I guess Spiritual/Organized is the wrong trait combo for the AI to pursue that victory condition? (Update as I edit this for posting: Or the behind-the-scenes rolls at map generation left it as a non-option.) In any case, Asoka won a single sliderless Cultural victory in game 15, where his culture machine was stronger than normal and he was in pole position for the space race anyway, and that was it. This ended up as a decent performance that shows that Asoka is at least a solid economic leader, but I think he could have done better had his AI not had that particular foible. A leader that primarily emphasizes culture is going to have a harder time winning the game if he never pursues the Cultural victory in earnest.
Mao Zedong of China
Wars declared: 34
Wars declared upon: 60
Survival percentage: 35%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 2 seconds (4 points)
Total kills: 3
Overall score: 7 points
The actual winner of Game 8 turned out to have been extremely lucky. Not only was Mao unable to score as high as in his original game in a single alternate history, he was unable to do so in all of them put together, and had the map’s lowest survival rate to boot! Mao was quite weak in these games and often little more than a punching bag. I don’t think his available land was particularly to blame – the quality of his landgrab varied from game to game, but he had the ability to get a strong territory base to work with – he just couldn’t perform effectively with it. His diplomatic situation didn’t help either, as he was attacked fully as often as Churchill. He often fought with his neighbors Churchill and Bismarck, and usually it was them getting the better of him, not the other way around, even when he was fighting them one on one. Even in scenarios where he was helping to dogpile Churchill, it wasn’t unusual to see him completely stall out trying to take a single city, while Cyrus and/or Hannibal scooped up the rest, leaving Mao little stronger at the end of the conquest. He was also attacked semi-frequently by Asoka and Wang Kon, who by themselves were little more than nuisances, but together with somebody else could help spell his doom. Wars with Cyrus or Hannibal were more rare, but no more helpful to the Chinese. Whatever the reason, Mao was never able to get the upper hand over any of his rivals, and that resulted in him falling behind in game after game.
So why did it go so well for him in the real game? After reading through the original writeup, it seems to have just been a perfect storm that went his way. For starters, Churchill and Bismarck both played at about their weakest level in the real game, minimizing their threat to Mao; he also never fought Bis until the lategame, which was a rare result. Mao himself was able to get a landgrab at the top end of possibilities, and then further benefited from the game stalemating for the first 200 turns or so; he wasn’t pulling out in front during that time, but nobody else was either, leaving him still in contention. His ability to conquer Churchill was unusual but caused by, again, Churchill being weaker than normal (and also softened up by a war with Hannibal immediately prior). Then he got lucky enough to get the best spoils off of the dogpiles of both Bismarck and Hannibal, getting more cities through the sheer randomness that comes into play in these scenarios, and eventually pulling into the lead that way. But keep in mind that he still would almost certainly have finished second to Hannibal, instead, had not the wacky (and never-repeated) total AP dogpile of Carthage taken place; that event both removed his biggest competitor, and allowed him to grow strongest by getting as many Carthaganian cities as he did. All three of Mao’s kills in the real game were scored during dogpiles, where the credit could just as easily have gone to somebody else, and do note that it took Mao over 430 turns to win in this game – and only that fast because of the UN cutting the game short! It truly took the wackiest of wacky outcomes on this chaotic map for Mao to come out on top.
In the end, then, Mao would suffer one of two fates. The more common outcome was for him to get ground down and eliminated somewhere along the way, usually by Bismarck. This could happen earlier in the game, as he was First to Die five times and suffered several more early eliminations, or it might come near the end. In other games, Mao was able to avoid dire conflict and make it through to the end. Sometimes this was as a totally irrelevant civ, but there were a few games where he was in legitimate contention for second place, and he managed to snag two such finishes in the end. He was never in contention for the win past the midgame, though, and his lack of kills is an accurate reflection of his poor military track record. Ultimately, however, I wouldn’t place too much stock in this result when evaluating Mao as an AI Survivor player, other than the fact that it supports the idea that he’s below the top tier of competition. He may well have been hurt by proxy here from the other leaders getting the free Deity techs, especially his neighbors Churchill and Bis, and in any case, the alternate histories from later seasons have shown him to be a capable enough leader. These results
do clearly show that he “shouldn’t” have made nearly as good of a first impression as he did, though, and given that as of this writing this game is Mao’s only career win, it’s safe to say that he’s generally a more second-place kind of leader, not one of the best in the competition.
Wang Kon of Korea
Wars declared: 30
Wars declared upon: 30
Survival percentage: 45%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 0 seconds (0 points)
Total kills: 1
Overall score: 1 point
Wang had a similarly cramped position to Asoka’s on this map, but none of his ability to make the best of it. His location was perhaps even more cramped, and in any case he didn’t have the same strong cultural game as Asoka, preventing him from gaining the early lead or same strong economy as India. Instead, he would run out of space to expand at five or six cities, and remain there for the rest of the game until he was either picked off (generally by Cyrus or Bismarck) or the game ended with him well out of reach of a playoff spot. There was no path to success here for Wang; he couldn’t even make reliable military progress against Asoka, much less the leaders who had a bigger military focus and more cities. Sometimes he would capture a Chinese city or two, but that was about it, and was nowhere near enough to make him competitive. Wang never even came close to a top-two finish, as there were too many other leaders and too much other land on the map for even a second-place backdoor to be in the cards. He got a last hit once during a dogpile of Mao, would sometimes be the tech leader in the midgame before betting outscaled by other leaders, and that was about it. I don’t think Wang is a particularly effective AI in the first place, and he had a poor setup here. Not much else to his story.
Conclusion
The alternate histories decisively showed that in some aspects, the real Game 8 had been highly unusual. Mao never came close to repeating his victory, and the victory date and number of wars were also significantly higher than in any of the repeated games. We also saw an unusually weak performance from the map’s typically strongest leader, Bis showing very little of the success he enjoyed in these games. At least some aspects were normal; Cyrus was one of the best picks for second place, Churchill was the favorite for First to Die, and Asoka and Wang also played fairly typical games from their positions. Interestingly enough, even though Bismarck was the most likely winner and Asoka the most likely runner-up, they only accomplished this together in a single game. The actual most likely ticket to advance was Bismarck in first and Churchill in second, which occurred in a mere 20% of the replays. This really was a wild map, and although the writeup itself has been a bit of a chore to type out, overall it’s probably my favorite of the fourteen alternate histories that I’ve completed so far.
With the entire Season One opening round of alternate histories complete, a look back at the overall results is in order. Who deserved to be remembered as the strong leaders of the inaugural season? Who just got lucky? Who just got UNlucky and flew under the radar for a while as a result?
In the end, of the leaders who advanced to the playoffs, the most “deserving” – AKA the ones for whom this was confirmed as the expected result via the alternate histories – turned out to be Brennus, Mansa Musa, Boudica, Huayna Capac, Augustus Caesar, Lincoln, Elizabeth, Pericles, and Catherine – half the entire playoff field. Rather a mix there between respected leaders and those who’ve accomplished little since Season One; if nothing else, it shows that starting locations do matter quite a bit! The mildly lucky playoff leaders, those with decent but ultimately lesser chances to advance, were Suryavarman, Justinian, Alexander, Suleiman, and Cyrus. This is an overall more successful and respected set of names, I feel, perhaps partially indicating that these are mostly stronger leaders who didn’t have such great positions. Finally, the two REALLY lucky leaders who made the playoffs when they had no business doing so were Stalin and Mao, interestingly both seeded leaders as of this writing. The last two playoff slots, of course, were filled with leaders from the Wildcard, and since I can’t really make and run a map for those who “should” have made it to this game without going completely into fantasy land, it’s harder to assess exactly how lucky Zara and Qin were. We’ll only get to see that with respect to the actual Wildcard field. (Addendum at editing time: That didn’t stop Thrasybulos! We’ll see how his Season 1 experiment turns out.)
On the flip side, there were a number of leaders who, according to alternate histories, were the most likely from their fields to advance to the playoffs, but in the real thing didn’t fare so well. Zara was one, but he did make the playoffs anyway via Wildcard. Peter and Asoka were two more who made the Wildcard but couldn’t advance from there, and then Isabella, Shaka, Bismarck, and especially Saladin all got totally raw deals as they were eliminated completely! This is a pretty mixed group of leaders and I don’t think there’s any broader conclusions to be drawn from it.
As for the Wildcard pool – what exactly makes a leader that should have been in the Wildcard? There’s not a clear answer for that, but for the sake of having a metric to analyze I’ll put in that bucket any leader who survived in at least half of all games, but was not one of the two most likely to advance to the playoffs. Using that metric, then, the “correct” Wildcard leaders for this season would have been Suryavarman, Napoleon, Justinian, Willem, Qin, Gilgamesh, Genghis, Washington, Julius Caesar, Darius, Frederick, Charlemagne, and Cyrus. That would have been quite a big game! You can see on this list three leaders who upgraded and made the playoffs outright as well as five more who were in the real Wildcard game; the really unlucky ones by this metric were Napoleon, Willem, Gilgamesh, Julius, and Charlemagne. On the other hand, every leader in the actual Wildcard game made either this list or the “should have been in playoffs” list – nobody scammed an unlikely Wildcard spot in the real season! Stalin and Mao (and to a lesser extent Alex and Suleiman) really were the only two super-lucky leaders from the opening round.
People will be able to save these writeups for later or read them all right away as they prefer.
