Eauxps I. Fourgott
AI Survivor Nerd
- Joined
- May 16, 2024
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- 412
Playoff 2
Coming into this set, I expected a straightforward group of games that would confirm that the real result had been typical, and that Mansa and Liz would clean up this map.
Then I started the set off with three straight games where the low peaceweights dominated, and thought that the real result had been a major outlier.
Then I played through the entire set, by the end of which it was clear that the real answer lay between those two extremes.
In the end, there were three different types of games that this map could play host to. The most common type, and the one seen in the real game, was the Mansa cultural game. Mansa turned out to be a total beast at culture on this map, usually assembling an engine that could hand him a victory by Turn 300, so in a sense this map boiled down to whether the others could beat the clock or not – and in a bunch of games, they couldn’t. Whoever was stronger or weaker in each particular iteration, the important thing was that they were not bringing the game to a conclusion or doing anything about Mansa until he had hit terminal velocity and couldn’t be stopped from winning. (There were no near misses here, no games where Mansa just barely pulled it off or got a city captured right before the end. He either was way ahead or not that close, with one sort-of exception that we’ll get to later.) This was largely due to perhaps the most significant overall dynamic of this map: a failure to conquer effectively. Mao and Alexander ended the set with decent if not great kill totals, and the rest couldn’t manage more than a smattering. This map barely managed two eliminations per game despite having plenty of conflict, and there were a lot of inconclusive wars or partial conquests that were left uncompleted. This group just lacked the killer instinct – Alex was the only particularly warmongery leader on the map, and his willingness to call off one war to pursue a different target halted the progress of quite a few conquests on its own. Thus in many games, it just took too long for the first leader to be eliminated and others to get strong, which gave Mansa in his out-of-the-way corner all the time he needed to pull ahead. There were even two separate games in this set where NOBODY died, both of which resulted in wins for Mansa. So the more or less “default” outcome turned out to be the one where Mansa ended the game by Turn 300; it took one or more other leaders doing something to knock him out or outpace him to get a different result. Within that constraint there were a lot of different ways the games could go, with all five other leaders finishing second behind Mansa at least once, but his cultural menace remained a constant.
When Mansa wasn’t winning, it was usually because the low peaceweights dominated the map. This was the other major way that the game could go, with the three peaceniks getting picked off one after the other until it was just Mao, Qin, and Alex fighting it out for the win. These guys had one major advantage over the high peaceweights: they were capable of working together. Mansa, Liz, and Lincoln pretty much never came to each other’s aid, always just content to sit back and do their own thing. The low peaceweights certainly did this some of the time as well, and they could also get in fights with each other (thanks especially to Alex being among their number), but there were also some games where they did cooperate to kill off Lincoln and Elizabeth fast enough that Mansa was still vulnerable, after which he’d inevitably be next. Now, there were also games where they worked together but still weren’t able to pull it off, taking so long that Mansa won anyway, but this could at least sometimes work out, leaving them as the last three leaders on the map and free to take the top two spots in some order; Mao was the strongest overall of the three and the most likely to win in this scenario, but any of the three could do it. Note though that this outcome required the high peaceweights to be gotten completely out of the way: of the seven games won by a low peaceweight leader, Liz and Lincoln died in every single one, while Mansa survived by the skin of his teeth a single time as the game ended before he could be finished off. If the high peaceweights were surviving, that paved the way for Mansa to win, so any good result for the low peaceweights required their elimination. For the most part, the rule for this map was that the low peaceweights had to eliminate someone before Turn 200 to win. All seven of their victories saw this take place, while all but a couple of the Mansa victories saw all three peaceniks survive until that point.
Finally, there was a third small set of these games: the Elizabeth victories. These go in a category of their own because each of her three wins had at least some weirdness to it; there didn’t seem to be a true pattern to her success, and instead she got lucky a few times. One of these victories was otherwise a standard Mansa win, but cut short unexpectedly when she won via the UN. The other two both relied on AP dogpiles that went in her favor and paved the way for her to be more dominant than usual. They are, essentially, the anomalies in an otherwise binary map.
Now for a look at the individual leaders:
Mansa Musa of Mali
Wars declared: 26
Wars declared upon: 19
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 10 firsts, 2 seconds (54 points)
Total kills: 3
Overall score: 57 points
Mansa once again graded out as the top leader on the map, but it was a far less impressive performance than his opening round game. There he dominated in all facets, frequently going out there and scoring lategame conquests as the uncontested strongest leader on the map. Here he tended to simply hide away in his corner and do his econ thing while fighting as little as possible, even in the lategame. On his opening map, Mansa was usually well in front on the scoreboard in the games that he won, but here there was at least one leader with a bigger, overall stronger empire than his in more than half of his winning games – economy and culture were the only things he was doing better. Basically, this was a dream scenario for Mansa to just sit back and tech and culture, out of the way and with the even higher peaceweight Lincoln and Liz to serve as meat shields. He only fought in 45 total wars in these games, while all three low peaceweights fought in at least 90 – he really was playing a completely different game from them!
But as we might expect from him, Mansa did do an excellent job at playing the cultural and economic game. This field was especially a great one for him to go nuts on the cultural stuff: he founded one of the opening religions in every single game, and went on to found at least five of them almost every time, stacking up a bunch of Holy Cities and potential cultural buildings. In fact, due to the lack of religious focus from the rest of this field, in 40% of replays, Mansa was able to land the fabled Hydra – founding all three of the game’s early religions! I don’t think I’ve seen that once on any other map but he did it eight separate times here, and in four of those games he went on to found all seven religions himself. As a result, he invariably had a strong cultural engine and would flip on the slider when he made it to the lategame, winning shortly thereafter. These were fast wins, too: all ten of Mansa’s wins were by culture, and only a single one went beyond Turn 300 – his real effort was unusually slow in that regard. I even saw two games where he won by culture on Turn 253 and Turn 251 – absolutely ridiculous. In addition to culture, Mansa was a monster in tech as usual. He pulled ahead from an early date in most games and never looked back; even Elizabeth couldn’t keep up with him most of the time, sometimes despite having more cities, and the others were nowhere close. This helped seal some of Mansa’s wins, as he’d be fielding infantry just as his first rivals were bringing rifles onto the scene, and have tanks to guarantee his safety by the time he turned on the slider; if he was left alone too long, his military tech was simply too good to be stopped. His usual path was to tech up to Mass Media and build all of those cultural wonders, then get to Plastics at a nice early date and turn on the slider there. There were some variations, but this path worked well as it both maximized his culture output and guaranteed military safety. If he was left in peace long enough to reach that point, there was little that could be done to stop him.
However, Mansa wasn’t very impressive in any other regard. His expansion varied in these games and sometimes was really quite good; those games tended to be his easier wins. Other times, though, he lagged, with his tech and cultural attempt noticeably slowed down as a result. He also was virtually useless on the battlefield, with a mere three kills and probably less than a war declared per game of his own volition (he was brought into a bunch of AP dogpiles). Mansa was entirely uninterested in joining the fight against the low peaceweights and would simply sit back and watch Lincoln and Liz deal with them alone; sometimes this worked as they bought him enough time to make the culture victory a reality, but at other times his isolation cost him dearly as he found Greek or Chinese armies marching at his gates before he was able to pull ahead, with lethal results. Little as he cared for his allies, he wasn’t able to stand alone if they were both stamped out. (The allies were an excellent shield, though; Mansa was only attacked three times in the thirteen games where Liz and/or Lincoln survived. Every single other attack came from the games where they both died and the low peaceweights dominated.) Even on the occassions where Mansa did get up and attack somebody, it rarely worked that well; he usually could get no further than a stalemate, unable to advance his position through conquest. There was a string of three games in the middle where he took his advanced military and conquered some land in the lategame, once he was already far enough ahead, and these games provided all three of his kills. Aside from those, though, he was irrelevant as a military leader.
In the end, Mansa was quite boom-or-bust on this map, as he almost always would either win or get eliminated. The only exceptions were the one low peaceweight game where he was on death’s door when saved by the bell, and the three Elizabeth wins: two were games where she narrowly beat out his Cultural attempt, and the last was the sole true irrelevant-but-not-dying game, where Mansa was stuck on six cities the entire game and about 70 turns behind Liz’s cultural bid. Overall, this was obviously a decent performance given Mansa won half the games, but we saw definite weaknesses, in the form of his military irrelevance and refusal to be a team player. It was a good reminder that even AI Survivor’s top ranked leader (as of this writing) is far from infallible – but he did very much deserve his first championship appearance.
Mao Zedong of China
Wars declared: 56
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 80%
Total finishes: 4 firsts, 5 seconds (30 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 46 points
Mao was perhaps the strongest overall leader on the map; he wasn’t able to match Mansa’s insane culture and tech output, but he was often strong in terms of production/food/power, was the most likely leader to win when the low peaceweights came out on top, the second-most likely overall to advance, scored the most kills, and died the least. While the starting positions on this map were reasonably balanced, I think Mao’s might have been the best overall, with good backlines and high quality land. He was almost always able to expand to one of the bigger city counts, and when he developed his land properly could do quite well economically to become one of the top leaders in many games. He further was often able to better his position by taking at least some cities from a rival, usually Lincoln (whom he fought in virtually every game) and sometimes from Alex as well. While in most cases this still wasn’t enough to be competitive with Mansa and Liz in tech, Mao was usually the foremost of their rivals by the midgame. Even in the games where he didn’t fare so well, Mao often did an excellent job of defending and was a tough nut to crack. He battled his way back into a top-two position in one game despite losing multiple core cities, and overall was very difficult to finish off; aside from one unusual result where he suffered an early AP dogpile, he only was eliminated three times in this set, each time in the lategame.
Mao’s winning games relied on him conquering some extra territory off of Lincoln early on. This was by no means a guarantee of ultimate success, but in most cases, when he was able to do this and then get some time to build up, he’d be the strongest nation on the map; in three games, this led to him easily being in position to win after the high peaceweights had been dispatched. (His fourth win came from an otherwise second-place position when he was able to sneak out a Diplomatic victory.) On the other hand, the other half of the time that the low peaceweights came out on top, Qin or Alex was able to keep up with or eclipse his own growth; while Mao was solid here, he wasn’t consistently on top. Still, he only missed the top two in one of the low peaceweight games, and came in second place in more Mansa games than either Alex or Qin. Mao’s non-winning games ran the whole gauntlet, from games where he lost ground early on and was a weakling the entire game, to games where he was leading for a long time until hitting an unfortunate war declaration or two, to games in the middle where he was strong but not exceptionally so.
Mao’s less-warmongery personality for a low peaceweight was also on display in these games. He was more willing than most to take the time to build up his economy and did a better job in that regard than either of his compatriots. On the other hand, his non-military research preferences left him vulnerable to skipping Rifling for long periods of time, which resulted in his elimination at least once. Despite being less aggressive than the likes of Alex, though, Mao was still perfectly willing to get his hands dirty when he needed to, declaring the second-most wars on the map. He was at least partially responsible for the majority of Mansa’s eliminations; he wasn’t totally ignoring the Malinese threat and made a reasonable effort to deal with it, although the distance between them made it hard to accomplish anything unless Mao had already grown stronger by other means. Overall, this was another solid but unspectacular performance by the chairman, and a nice reversal after he’d been so disappointing in the set from Game 8. Mao is no top-tier leader but he’s more capable than a lot of others.
Alexander of Greece
Wars declared: 69
Wars declared upon: 23
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 1 first, 5 seconds (15 points)
Total kills: 14
Overall score: 29 points
The next three leaders were all roughly even in overall effectiveness, with Alex ending up with the best score, thanks to being the only leader besides Mao who racked up a respectable kill total. Alex performed as you would expect from him, going on the warpath early and often and pretty much never stopping. There were only four games in the entire set where he declared less than three wars on his own, and he was attacked less than once a game on average (AP shenanigans aside) in large part because he was usually the one to start any potential conflict! On this map, this strategy turned out to be decently if not resoundingly successful, and Alex ended up being the most interesting (and often the most important) leader on the map, often swinging the results for other leaders based on whom he chose to attack at what times. The real result of Alex attacking Mao first turned out to not be the most likely outcome, as instead he usually starting by taking a swing at Lincoln; this was a major reason for Lincoln’s rough performance, and there were good odds that this would turn out to be the first step to a successful low peaceweight game. Alex also went across the map to attack Liz a decent number of times, and again this often played a crucial part in the purging of the peaceniks. He didn’t fight Mansa much in general since they were on opposite ends of the map, but once Lincoln and Liz were out of the picture, Alex could and did do his part to make sure that Mansa went as well, contributing to as many of his eliminations as Mao did despite his distance. On the flip side, though, Alex was not fully committed to the cause of Team Evil, and was quite willing to attack Mao and Qin as well even when there were peaceniks still on the board. He had varying success against them at different times, but of course this was not a recipe for the low peaceweights as a unit to succeed, and in particular any game where he went after them first ended in a Mansa victory. An Alex attack at the wrong time could spell doom for any leader, and he could flip on a dime; there were multiple games where he started a 2v1 war on one side, only to sign peace and attack his supposed ally. He was the single biggest swing player on the map and had a major impact as a result.
As far as bringing him personal success, though, this wasn’t a very consistent performance. Alex was able to win a single game, coming out on top of a scuffle with Mao once the peaceniks had been disposed of, but aside from that performance, he never ended up at the top of the heap, somebody else always doing better. Alex’s remote position made it a bit difficult for him to gain enough conquests to take the actual lead, and his teching was horrid, by far the worst of any leader in this field. He sometimes made up for it with numbers and determination, or military beelines, or his rivals’ own failures to research military tech, but sometimes he was simply left in a position where he couldn’t win any more battles. Alex’s early settling was also inconsistent; he had a fairly large peninsula and could sometimes settle a strong core as a result, but other times he went off to war too early, leaving himself smaller than he could have been with empty land still around him. Alex’s performances thus ended up all over the spectrum, from games where he never quite got going to games where he conquered the better part of one or more rivals, proving himself a legitimate player and finishing in second place as a result. One noteworthy aspect of this performance, though, was his surprisingly low elimination rate, as he advanced in as many games as he was completely knocked out in. This was a result of his sheltered position at the end of the continent; nobody had very easy access to him except for Mao, and the closest rival in that regard, Lincoln, was never left alone for long enough to deal with Alex. As a result, except for an unusual Elizabeth Domination game, Alex wouldn’t die unless Mao came after him, with or without assistance. (On the flip side, there were also multiple games where Alex swooped in and knocked out Mao.) Thus his First to Die result in the real game was quite unlucky, with him only suffering this fate two additional times in the alternate histories.
Overall, I’d describe this performance as “surprisingly competitive”. Once again, I didn’t expect a lot from Alex given his starting position, and once again he exceeded my expectations, although not to the same degree as in Game 3. It just goes to show that you can never count out a warmonger with a strong start – while that’s much more rare in the modern era with the free starting techs removed, it still happens from time to time, and even if that warmonger’s chances of winning the game aren’t terribly high, they can still prove to be extremely important to the game’s outcome. In the end, Alex got a somewhat lucky result to reach the playoffs in Season 1, which was then counterbalanced and then some as he placed on the bottom of his spectrum of possibilities in the playoffs. Still, there were far less impressive leaders this season, and if nothing else Alex was certainly entertaining to watch in these replays.
Elizabeth of England
Wars declared: 24
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 60%
Total finishes: 3 firsts, 4 seconds (23 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 27 points
Elizabeth played a completely different set of games from Alexander, yet in the end was just about as successful (albeit with way fewer kill points). Liz avoided fighting as much as possible, with less than one non-AP war declaration per game on average, and instead sought to tech and build up her civ. But while she was often fairly good at this, it usually wasn’t enough to deal with the competition she had to face. On one side, she had three low peaceweights who wanted nothing more than to knock her out of the game, and were able to do so a decent amount of the time. On the other side, she had Mansa, who was almost invariably even better at building and teching than she was and would win by culture long before she could approach any victory condition herself. Only when the stars aligned, in a manner that couldn’t consistently be replicated, was she able to come out victorious.
As has been mentioned before, in the low peaceweight games, Liz would inevitably be ganged up on and eliminated at some point. While this was largely a simple case of the weight of numbers working against her, Liz’s own fighting was not terribly impressive in these games, either. Even in one-on-one fights, she would fairly often lose cities, even though she had more to start with or was fighting an Alexander who had insanely long supply lines, and she very rarely took significant territory from her rivals on her own. She also was rather spotty in terms of researching Rifling in a timely manner; it didn’t matter too much on this map, thanks to her strong overall research and her rivals’ propensity to similarly ignore the tech, but there were certainly some games here where she was overwhelmed shortly before unlocking the redcoats that had the potential to turn the tide. In any event, Liz’s elimination was a prerequisite to the low peaceweights emerging from this map victorious, so naturally she didn’t prosper at all in those games; not that she deserved to, as she was always happy to leave Lincoln out to dry and never made any effort to stop her natural enemies from getting the upper hand. On the other hand, she almost always at least made it out of the Mansa games alive, only getting eliminated in a single one of his ten victories. The two fought some of the time (Mansa seemed to be roughly as likely to attack her as he was to attack a lower peaceweight), but were generally ineffective at attacking each other; only in the games where the low peaceweights dogpiled Liz was this an important point. When Mansa was doing well, he would just sit back and do his culture thing, allowing Liz to play out her own game. She saw varying success in these games, but ultimately was the most likely leader to finish second to Mansa, gaining that result four times in games where the low peaceweights were entirely unsuccessful and her plan of peaceful development paid off, sometimes supplemented by a few wartime gains. Her actual result was thus reasonable, if not overwhelmingly likely.
As I mentioned earlier, all three of Elizabeth’s wins came from unusual circumstances: in one she won a Diplomatic victory from a third-place position; in another she managed to out-culture a smaller-than-normal Mansa, with the biggest swing in her favor coming when Qin was AP’d and she culturally assimilated much of the spoils; and in the third and most impressive, she gained the most from an early AP dogpile of Mao, then went on to wipe out Qin and Alex as well, barely hitting Domination before Mansa would have won yet another Cultural victory. Since none of these wins came from ordinary game patterns, though, I have to conclude that Liz’s actual chances of winning the game were minimal. The setup of this map meant that Mansa was almost assuredly going to win if he wasn’t killed first, and Liz was in the way of his getting killed, so she was left without much hope in that regard. Overall this was a bit of a disappointing result after her dominant opening round performance, but it could have gone much worse. She wasn’t as ‘worthy’ of making the championship from this point of view as Justinian and Mansa were, but she was also no Suryavarman, and we’ve had far more troll-tastic Championship leaders over the years.
Qin Shi Huang of China
Wars declared: 49
Wars declared upon: 41
Survival rate: 65%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 3 seconds (16 points)
Total kills: 7
Overall score: 23 points
Qin was the final of the three “mid” leaders on this map, and the least interesting as well as the least successful. For the most part, there wasn’t a lot in the way of specific patterns to his games here. His expansion was variable, often fairly good but sometimes overly slow, resulting in him being weaker. He fought with Elizabeth a lot, with variable results, and also was attacked by Alex with some frequency; on the other hand, he didn’t fight with Lincoln all that much, as they each tended to be busy with their rivals on the opposite sides. Qin tended to do an average job of building his economy and an average job of fighting; in both cases not terrible, but not particularly good. He was well outpaced economically by Mansa and Liz, and wasn’t able to consistently see the same success on the battlefield as Mao and Alex. As a result, he ended up being the master of none, leaving him with a bunch of thoroughly mediocre performances. A couple of times, he was strong enough overall to finish in second place, but it was far more common for him to simply fall short with a 0-point performance, with or without an actual elimination.
Qin’s central starting position ended up as a mixed bag in these games. On the one hand, it offered strong potential for settling a lot of land, as well as putting him in the best position to easily profit from the demise of any of the three high peaceweights; indeed, this is how he was able to pull ahead in both of his wins, low peaceweight success stories where Qin got a strong portion of the spoils to pull in front. (He was in a winning position in a third game as well, to be fair, only to be pre-empted by a UN vote that declared Mao the winner instead.) On the other hand, it also allowed anyone and everyone to come after him; all five other leaders played a part in multiple of his seven eliminations. I feel like I should be able to note more about Qin here, but as it is I can’t think of anything else interesting to write down. Practically everything about his performance was unremarkably average. He was essentially the tagalong kid to the low peaceweights; he did legitimately help with their successes, but next to the imposing presence of Mao and entertaining antics of Alex, he clearly fell short. Not a set of games that reflected particularly well on him in any way.
Lincoln of America
Wars declared: 16
Wars declared upon: 63
Survival rate: 35%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 1 second (2 points)
Total kills: 0
Overall score: 2 points
Lincoln was the runt of this map; not only was he the only leader without a chance of winning, he was also the only leader who didn’t survive in more than half of the games! His position on this map was unenviable in every way. While the starting land itself wasn’t terrible, I do think it was the weakest overall position on the map, and more to the point, he was stuck among a bunch of leaders who would hate his guts. Qin often left him alone to focus on Elizabeth, but that still left Lincoln with Alex and Mao to deal with, and I don’t think there was a single game where he wasn’t in a fight with one or both of them by Turn 100. Lincoln thus ended up as the sacrificial lamb for Mansa: if he could hold out well against his attackers, it was usually enough to ensure that Mansa (or Liz) would eventually emerge victorious, while if he fell quickly, a low peaceweight win became far more likely. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Mansa and Liz didn’t seem very appreciative of his role, and pretty much never came to his aid; he was stuck dealing with his attackers by himself, except for the occassions where Alex and Mao went at each other’s throats instead. Even in the games where his wars didn’t equal an early exit, they still left Lincoln without a hope of victory; he was almost never able to improve his position, leaving him too weak to climb back up to a strong position militarily and far, far behind the game leaders in tech. Look at it this way: every other leader on this map had at least two games where they were never attacked at all. This happened to Mansa ten times! But not only did Lincoln not have any of those games, he didn’t have a single game where he was attacked less than twice. It was impossible to properly prosper under these conditions.
Even on the rare occassions when Lincoln started to get the upper hand over a foe, he didn’t seem able to convert it into actual points. Often this was simply because somebody else would take a swing at him before he was able to finish what he was doing, but eventually this turned into an absurd Charlie Brown-esque spiral where the points were constantly swept away from him at the last moment. For example, in Game 2, Lincoln had taken multiple cities from Mao and was in the process of conquering Alex, only to have his progress halted by a Qin backstab before Mao used the AP to force his cities back over. Game 12 saw him prosper off an early dogpile of Qin, only to later be rolled over by a technologically advanced Mansa. In Game 20, he got the last hit on Qin’s core in a dogpile… only for Qin to have a random ex-barb city elsewhere that allowed Alex to take the kill credit instead. In Game 17, Lincoln entirely knocked out Mao, only to see Alex declare war at the last second and snipe the kill credit, and later was locked out of a top-two position, despite being in second place in score, as the third-place Liz won via the UN (granted, he did bring that one on himself by voting for her). Only a single time was Lincoln able to score, in an odd no-deaths Game 15 where everybody else stagnated and his pattern of peaceful development thus carried him to a second-place finish. Overall, though, while Lincoln was certainly somewhat unlucky in these replays, he also just had a really bad setup and was almost always a non-contender, through no real fault of his own. It turned out that his performance in the real game was near the top of the spectrum of possible outcomes.
Conclusion
In the end, the real Playoff Game 2 was pretty typical. While Mao and Alex were just as likely as Liz to take the runner-up spot on the whole, the specific combination of Mansa in first place and Liz in second was indeed the most likely Championship ticket, and Mansa winning an early Cultural victory was absolutely the expected result. (The weird part was it taking all the way to Turn 320 in the real game.) The most unusual aspect of the real game was Alexander’s early exit, an ignominious fate for a leader who was able to score in half of the replays, and this in turn resulted in the real game having less wars than average. Lincoln surviving to the end was also fairly unusual, though by no means an unreasonable result. The central question of this map was if the low peaceweights could work together to take out the peaceniks in time, and Alex’s early attack on Mao in the real game assured that the answer would be “no”. We are now two for two as far as the actual winner matching the expected winner in these playoff games; will Zara dominate again in Playoff three and make it a clean sweep? We’ll find out soon enough!
Coming into this set, I expected a straightforward group of games that would confirm that the real result had been typical, and that Mansa and Liz would clean up this map.
Then I started the set off with three straight games where the low peaceweights dominated, and thought that the real result had been a major outlier.
Then I played through the entire set, by the end of which it was clear that the real answer lay between those two extremes.
In the end, there were three different types of games that this map could play host to. The most common type, and the one seen in the real game, was the Mansa cultural game. Mansa turned out to be a total beast at culture on this map, usually assembling an engine that could hand him a victory by Turn 300, so in a sense this map boiled down to whether the others could beat the clock or not – and in a bunch of games, they couldn’t. Whoever was stronger or weaker in each particular iteration, the important thing was that they were not bringing the game to a conclusion or doing anything about Mansa until he had hit terminal velocity and couldn’t be stopped from winning. (There were no near misses here, no games where Mansa just barely pulled it off or got a city captured right before the end. He either was way ahead or not that close, with one sort-of exception that we’ll get to later.) This was largely due to perhaps the most significant overall dynamic of this map: a failure to conquer effectively. Mao and Alexander ended the set with decent if not great kill totals, and the rest couldn’t manage more than a smattering. This map barely managed two eliminations per game despite having plenty of conflict, and there were a lot of inconclusive wars or partial conquests that were left uncompleted. This group just lacked the killer instinct – Alex was the only particularly warmongery leader on the map, and his willingness to call off one war to pursue a different target halted the progress of quite a few conquests on its own. Thus in many games, it just took too long for the first leader to be eliminated and others to get strong, which gave Mansa in his out-of-the-way corner all the time he needed to pull ahead. There were even two separate games in this set where NOBODY died, both of which resulted in wins for Mansa. So the more or less “default” outcome turned out to be the one where Mansa ended the game by Turn 300; it took one or more other leaders doing something to knock him out or outpace him to get a different result. Within that constraint there were a lot of different ways the games could go, with all five other leaders finishing second behind Mansa at least once, but his cultural menace remained a constant.
When Mansa wasn’t winning, it was usually because the low peaceweights dominated the map. This was the other major way that the game could go, with the three peaceniks getting picked off one after the other until it was just Mao, Qin, and Alex fighting it out for the win. These guys had one major advantage over the high peaceweights: they were capable of working together. Mansa, Liz, and Lincoln pretty much never came to each other’s aid, always just content to sit back and do their own thing. The low peaceweights certainly did this some of the time as well, and they could also get in fights with each other (thanks especially to Alex being among their number), but there were also some games where they did cooperate to kill off Lincoln and Elizabeth fast enough that Mansa was still vulnerable, after which he’d inevitably be next. Now, there were also games where they worked together but still weren’t able to pull it off, taking so long that Mansa won anyway, but this could at least sometimes work out, leaving them as the last three leaders on the map and free to take the top two spots in some order; Mao was the strongest overall of the three and the most likely to win in this scenario, but any of the three could do it. Note though that this outcome required the high peaceweights to be gotten completely out of the way: of the seven games won by a low peaceweight leader, Liz and Lincoln died in every single one, while Mansa survived by the skin of his teeth a single time as the game ended before he could be finished off. If the high peaceweights were surviving, that paved the way for Mansa to win, so any good result for the low peaceweights required their elimination. For the most part, the rule for this map was that the low peaceweights had to eliminate someone before Turn 200 to win. All seven of their victories saw this take place, while all but a couple of the Mansa victories saw all three peaceniks survive until that point.
Finally, there was a third small set of these games: the Elizabeth victories. These go in a category of their own because each of her three wins had at least some weirdness to it; there didn’t seem to be a true pattern to her success, and instead she got lucky a few times. One of these victories was otherwise a standard Mansa win, but cut short unexpectedly when she won via the UN. The other two both relied on AP dogpiles that went in her favor and paved the way for her to be more dominant than usual. They are, essentially, the anomalies in an otherwise binary map.
Now for a look at the individual leaders:
Mansa Musa of Mali
Wars declared: 26
Wars declared upon: 19
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 10 firsts, 2 seconds (54 points)
Total kills: 3
Overall score: 57 points
Mansa once again graded out as the top leader on the map, but it was a far less impressive performance than his opening round game. There he dominated in all facets, frequently going out there and scoring lategame conquests as the uncontested strongest leader on the map. Here he tended to simply hide away in his corner and do his econ thing while fighting as little as possible, even in the lategame. On his opening map, Mansa was usually well in front on the scoreboard in the games that he won, but here there was at least one leader with a bigger, overall stronger empire than his in more than half of his winning games – economy and culture were the only things he was doing better. Basically, this was a dream scenario for Mansa to just sit back and tech and culture, out of the way and with the even higher peaceweight Lincoln and Liz to serve as meat shields. He only fought in 45 total wars in these games, while all three low peaceweights fought in at least 90 – he really was playing a completely different game from them!
But as we might expect from him, Mansa did do an excellent job at playing the cultural and economic game. This field was especially a great one for him to go nuts on the cultural stuff: he founded one of the opening religions in every single game, and went on to found at least five of them almost every time, stacking up a bunch of Holy Cities and potential cultural buildings. In fact, due to the lack of religious focus from the rest of this field, in 40% of replays, Mansa was able to land the fabled Hydra – founding all three of the game’s early religions! I don’t think I’ve seen that once on any other map but he did it eight separate times here, and in four of those games he went on to found all seven religions himself. As a result, he invariably had a strong cultural engine and would flip on the slider when he made it to the lategame, winning shortly thereafter. These were fast wins, too: all ten of Mansa’s wins were by culture, and only a single one went beyond Turn 300 – his real effort was unusually slow in that regard. I even saw two games where he won by culture on Turn 253 and Turn 251 – absolutely ridiculous. In addition to culture, Mansa was a monster in tech as usual. He pulled ahead from an early date in most games and never looked back; even Elizabeth couldn’t keep up with him most of the time, sometimes despite having more cities, and the others were nowhere close. This helped seal some of Mansa’s wins, as he’d be fielding infantry just as his first rivals were bringing rifles onto the scene, and have tanks to guarantee his safety by the time he turned on the slider; if he was left alone too long, his military tech was simply too good to be stopped. His usual path was to tech up to Mass Media and build all of those cultural wonders, then get to Plastics at a nice early date and turn on the slider there. There were some variations, but this path worked well as it both maximized his culture output and guaranteed military safety. If he was left in peace long enough to reach that point, there was little that could be done to stop him.
However, Mansa wasn’t very impressive in any other regard. His expansion varied in these games and sometimes was really quite good; those games tended to be his easier wins. Other times, though, he lagged, with his tech and cultural attempt noticeably slowed down as a result. He also was virtually useless on the battlefield, with a mere three kills and probably less than a war declared per game of his own volition (he was brought into a bunch of AP dogpiles). Mansa was entirely uninterested in joining the fight against the low peaceweights and would simply sit back and watch Lincoln and Liz deal with them alone; sometimes this worked as they bought him enough time to make the culture victory a reality, but at other times his isolation cost him dearly as he found Greek or Chinese armies marching at his gates before he was able to pull ahead, with lethal results. Little as he cared for his allies, he wasn’t able to stand alone if they were both stamped out. (The allies were an excellent shield, though; Mansa was only attacked three times in the thirteen games where Liz and/or Lincoln survived. Every single other attack came from the games where they both died and the low peaceweights dominated.) Even on the occassions where Mansa did get up and attack somebody, it rarely worked that well; he usually could get no further than a stalemate, unable to advance his position through conquest. There was a string of three games in the middle where he took his advanced military and conquered some land in the lategame, once he was already far enough ahead, and these games provided all three of his kills. Aside from those, though, he was irrelevant as a military leader.
In the end, Mansa was quite boom-or-bust on this map, as he almost always would either win or get eliminated. The only exceptions were the one low peaceweight game where he was on death’s door when saved by the bell, and the three Elizabeth wins: two were games where she narrowly beat out his Cultural attempt, and the last was the sole true irrelevant-but-not-dying game, where Mansa was stuck on six cities the entire game and about 70 turns behind Liz’s cultural bid. Overall, this was obviously a decent performance given Mansa won half the games, but we saw definite weaknesses, in the form of his military irrelevance and refusal to be a team player. It was a good reminder that even AI Survivor’s top ranked leader (as of this writing) is far from infallible – but he did very much deserve his first championship appearance.
Mao Zedong of China
Wars declared: 56
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 80%
Total finishes: 4 firsts, 5 seconds (30 points)
Total kills: 16
Overall score: 46 points
Mao was perhaps the strongest overall leader on the map; he wasn’t able to match Mansa’s insane culture and tech output, but he was often strong in terms of production/food/power, was the most likely leader to win when the low peaceweights came out on top, the second-most likely overall to advance, scored the most kills, and died the least. While the starting positions on this map were reasonably balanced, I think Mao’s might have been the best overall, with good backlines and high quality land. He was almost always able to expand to one of the bigger city counts, and when he developed his land properly could do quite well economically to become one of the top leaders in many games. He further was often able to better his position by taking at least some cities from a rival, usually Lincoln (whom he fought in virtually every game) and sometimes from Alex as well. While in most cases this still wasn’t enough to be competitive with Mansa and Liz in tech, Mao was usually the foremost of their rivals by the midgame. Even in the games where he didn’t fare so well, Mao often did an excellent job of defending and was a tough nut to crack. He battled his way back into a top-two position in one game despite losing multiple core cities, and overall was very difficult to finish off; aside from one unusual result where he suffered an early AP dogpile, he only was eliminated three times in this set, each time in the lategame.
Mao’s winning games relied on him conquering some extra territory off of Lincoln early on. This was by no means a guarantee of ultimate success, but in most cases, when he was able to do this and then get some time to build up, he’d be the strongest nation on the map; in three games, this led to him easily being in position to win after the high peaceweights had been dispatched. (His fourth win came from an otherwise second-place position when he was able to sneak out a Diplomatic victory.) On the other hand, the other half of the time that the low peaceweights came out on top, Qin or Alex was able to keep up with or eclipse his own growth; while Mao was solid here, he wasn’t consistently on top. Still, he only missed the top two in one of the low peaceweight games, and came in second place in more Mansa games than either Alex or Qin. Mao’s non-winning games ran the whole gauntlet, from games where he lost ground early on and was a weakling the entire game, to games where he was leading for a long time until hitting an unfortunate war declaration or two, to games in the middle where he was strong but not exceptionally so.
Mao’s less-warmongery personality for a low peaceweight was also on display in these games. He was more willing than most to take the time to build up his economy and did a better job in that regard than either of his compatriots. On the other hand, his non-military research preferences left him vulnerable to skipping Rifling for long periods of time, which resulted in his elimination at least once. Despite being less aggressive than the likes of Alex, though, Mao was still perfectly willing to get his hands dirty when he needed to, declaring the second-most wars on the map. He was at least partially responsible for the majority of Mansa’s eliminations; he wasn’t totally ignoring the Malinese threat and made a reasonable effort to deal with it, although the distance between them made it hard to accomplish anything unless Mao had already grown stronger by other means. Overall, this was another solid but unspectacular performance by the chairman, and a nice reversal after he’d been so disappointing in the set from Game 8. Mao is no top-tier leader but he’s more capable than a lot of others.
Alexander of Greece
Wars declared: 69
Wars declared upon: 23
Survival rate: 70%
Total finishes: 1 first, 5 seconds (15 points)
Total kills: 14
Overall score: 29 points
The next three leaders were all roughly even in overall effectiveness, with Alex ending up with the best score, thanks to being the only leader besides Mao who racked up a respectable kill total. Alex performed as you would expect from him, going on the warpath early and often and pretty much never stopping. There were only four games in the entire set where he declared less than three wars on his own, and he was attacked less than once a game on average (AP shenanigans aside) in large part because he was usually the one to start any potential conflict! On this map, this strategy turned out to be decently if not resoundingly successful, and Alex ended up being the most interesting (and often the most important) leader on the map, often swinging the results for other leaders based on whom he chose to attack at what times. The real result of Alex attacking Mao first turned out to not be the most likely outcome, as instead he usually starting by taking a swing at Lincoln; this was a major reason for Lincoln’s rough performance, and there were good odds that this would turn out to be the first step to a successful low peaceweight game. Alex also went across the map to attack Liz a decent number of times, and again this often played a crucial part in the purging of the peaceniks. He didn’t fight Mansa much in general since they were on opposite ends of the map, but once Lincoln and Liz were out of the picture, Alex could and did do his part to make sure that Mansa went as well, contributing to as many of his eliminations as Mao did despite his distance. On the flip side, though, Alex was not fully committed to the cause of Team Evil, and was quite willing to attack Mao and Qin as well even when there were peaceniks still on the board. He had varying success against them at different times, but of course this was not a recipe for the low peaceweights as a unit to succeed, and in particular any game where he went after them first ended in a Mansa victory. An Alex attack at the wrong time could spell doom for any leader, and he could flip on a dime; there were multiple games where he started a 2v1 war on one side, only to sign peace and attack his supposed ally. He was the single biggest swing player on the map and had a major impact as a result.
As far as bringing him personal success, though, this wasn’t a very consistent performance. Alex was able to win a single game, coming out on top of a scuffle with Mao once the peaceniks had been disposed of, but aside from that performance, he never ended up at the top of the heap, somebody else always doing better. Alex’s remote position made it a bit difficult for him to gain enough conquests to take the actual lead, and his teching was horrid, by far the worst of any leader in this field. He sometimes made up for it with numbers and determination, or military beelines, or his rivals’ own failures to research military tech, but sometimes he was simply left in a position where he couldn’t win any more battles. Alex’s early settling was also inconsistent; he had a fairly large peninsula and could sometimes settle a strong core as a result, but other times he went off to war too early, leaving himself smaller than he could have been with empty land still around him. Alex’s performances thus ended up all over the spectrum, from games where he never quite got going to games where he conquered the better part of one or more rivals, proving himself a legitimate player and finishing in second place as a result. One noteworthy aspect of this performance, though, was his surprisingly low elimination rate, as he advanced in as many games as he was completely knocked out in. This was a result of his sheltered position at the end of the continent; nobody had very easy access to him except for Mao, and the closest rival in that regard, Lincoln, was never left alone for long enough to deal with Alex. As a result, except for an unusual Elizabeth Domination game, Alex wouldn’t die unless Mao came after him, with or without assistance. (On the flip side, there were also multiple games where Alex swooped in and knocked out Mao.) Thus his First to Die result in the real game was quite unlucky, with him only suffering this fate two additional times in the alternate histories.
Overall, I’d describe this performance as “surprisingly competitive”. Once again, I didn’t expect a lot from Alex given his starting position, and once again he exceeded my expectations, although not to the same degree as in Game 3. It just goes to show that you can never count out a warmonger with a strong start – while that’s much more rare in the modern era with the free starting techs removed, it still happens from time to time, and even if that warmonger’s chances of winning the game aren’t terribly high, they can still prove to be extremely important to the game’s outcome. In the end, Alex got a somewhat lucky result to reach the playoffs in Season 1, which was then counterbalanced and then some as he placed on the bottom of his spectrum of possibilities in the playoffs. Still, there were far less impressive leaders this season, and if nothing else Alex was certainly entertaining to watch in these replays.
Elizabeth of England
Wars declared: 24
Wars declared upon: 47
Survival rate: 60%
Total finishes: 3 firsts, 4 seconds (23 points)
Total kills: 4
Overall score: 27 points
Elizabeth played a completely different set of games from Alexander, yet in the end was just about as successful (albeit with way fewer kill points). Liz avoided fighting as much as possible, with less than one non-AP war declaration per game on average, and instead sought to tech and build up her civ. But while she was often fairly good at this, it usually wasn’t enough to deal with the competition she had to face. On one side, she had three low peaceweights who wanted nothing more than to knock her out of the game, and were able to do so a decent amount of the time. On the other side, she had Mansa, who was almost invariably even better at building and teching than she was and would win by culture long before she could approach any victory condition herself. Only when the stars aligned, in a manner that couldn’t consistently be replicated, was she able to come out victorious.
As has been mentioned before, in the low peaceweight games, Liz would inevitably be ganged up on and eliminated at some point. While this was largely a simple case of the weight of numbers working against her, Liz’s own fighting was not terribly impressive in these games, either. Even in one-on-one fights, she would fairly often lose cities, even though she had more to start with or was fighting an Alexander who had insanely long supply lines, and she very rarely took significant territory from her rivals on her own. She also was rather spotty in terms of researching Rifling in a timely manner; it didn’t matter too much on this map, thanks to her strong overall research and her rivals’ propensity to similarly ignore the tech, but there were certainly some games here where she was overwhelmed shortly before unlocking the redcoats that had the potential to turn the tide. In any event, Liz’s elimination was a prerequisite to the low peaceweights emerging from this map victorious, so naturally she didn’t prosper at all in those games; not that she deserved to, as she was always happy to leave Lincoln out to dry and never made any effort to stop her natural enemies from getting the upper hand. On the other hand, she almost always at least made it out of the Mansa games alive, only getting eliminated in a single one of his ten victories. The two fought some of the time (Mansa seemed to be roughly as likely to attack her as he was to attack a lower peaceweight), but were generally ineffective at attacking each other; only in the games where the low peaceweights dogpiled Liz was this an important point. When Mansa was doing well, he would just sit back and do his culture thing, allowing Liz to play out her own game. She saw varying success in these games, but ultimately was the most likely leader to finish second to Mansa, gaining that result four times in games where the low peaceweights were entirely unsuccessful and her plan of peaceful development paid off, sometimes supplemented by a few wartime gains. Her actual result was thus reasonable, if not overwhelmingly likely.
As I mentioned earlier, all three of Elizabeth’s wins came from unusual circumstances: in one she won a Diplomatic victory from a third-place position; in another she managed to out-culture a smaller-than-normal Mansa, with the biggest swing in her favor coming when Qin was AP’d and she culturally assimilated much of the spoils; and in the third and most impressive, she gained the most from an early AP dogpile of Mao, then went on to wipe out Qin and Alex as well, barely hitting Domination before Mansa would have won yet another Cultural victory. Since none of these wins came from ordinary game patterns, though, I have to conclude that Liz’s actual chances of winning the game were minimal. The setup of this map meant that Mansa was almost assuredly going to win if he wasn’t killed first, and Liz was in the way of his getting killed, so she was left without much hope in that regard. Overall this was a bit of a disappointing result after her dominant opening round performance, but it could have gone much worse. She wasn’t as ‘worthy’ of making the championship from this point of view as Justinian and Mansa were, but she was also no Suryavarman, and we’ve had far more troll-tastic Championship leaders over the years.
Qin Shi Huang of China
Wars declared: 49
Wars declared upon: 41
Survival rate: 65%
Total finishes: 2 firsts, 3 seconds (16 points)
Total kills: 7
Overall score: 23 points
Qin was the final of the three “mid” leaders on this map, and the least interesting as well as the least successful. For the most part, there wasn’t a lot in the way of specific patterns to his games here. His expansion was variable, often fairly good but sometimes overly slow, resulting in him being weaker. He fought with Elizabeth a lot, with variable results, and also was attacked by Alex with some frequency; on the other hand, he didn’t fight with Lincoln all that much, as they each tended to be busy with their rivals on the opposite sides. Qin tended to do an average job of building his economy and an average job of fighting; in both cases not terrible, but not particularly good. He was well outpaced economically by Mansa and Liz, and wasn’t able to consistently see the same success on the battlefield as Mao and Alex. As a result, he ended up being the master of none, leaving him with a bunch of thoroughly mediocre performances. A couple of times, he was strong enough overall to finish in second place, but it was far more common for him to simply fall short with a 0-point performance, with or without an actual elimination.
Qin’s central starting position ended up as a mixed bag in these games. On the one hand, it offered strong potential for settling a lot of land, as well as putting him in the best position to easily profit from the demise of any of the three high peaceweights; indeed, this is how he was able to pull ahead in both of his wins, low peaceweight success stories where Qin got a strong portion of the spoils to pull in front. (He was in a winning position in a third game as well, to be fair, only to be pre-empted by a UN vote that declared Mao the winner instead.) On the other hand, it also allowed anyone and everyone to come after him; all five other leaders played a part in multiple of his seven eliminations. I feel like I should be able to note more about Qin here, but as it is I can’t think of anything else interesting to write down. Practically everything about his performance was unremarkably average. He was essentially the tagalong kid to the low peaceweights; he did legitimately help with their successes, but next to the imposing presence of Mao and entertaining antics of Alex, he clearly fell short. Not a set of games that reflected particularly well on him in any way.
Lincoln of America
Wars declared: 16
Wars declared upon: 63
Survival rate: 35%
Total finishes: 0 firsts, 1 second (2 points)
Total kills: 0
Overall score: 2 points
Lincoln was the runt of this map; not only was he the only leader without a chance of winning, he was also the only leader who didn’t survive in more than half of the games! His position on this map was unenviable in every way. While the starting land itself wasn’t terrible, I do think it was the weakest overall position on the map, and more to the point, he was stuck among a bunch of leaders who would hate his guts. Qin often left him alone to focus on Elizabeth, but that still left Lincoln with Alex and Mao to deal with, and I don’t think there was a single game where he wasn’t in a fight with one or both of them by Turn 100. Lincoln thus ended up as the sacrificial lamb for Mansa: if he could hold out well against his attackers, it was usually enough to ensure that Mansa (or Liz) would eventually emerge victorious, while if he fell quickly, a low peaceweight win became far more likely. Unfortunately for Lincoln, Mansa and Liz didn’t seem very appreciative of his role, and pretty much never came to his aid; he was stuck dealing with his attackers by himself, except for the occassions where Alex and Mao went at each other’s throats instead. Even in the games where his wars didn’t equal an early exit, they still left Lincoln without a hope of victory; he was almost never able to improve his position, leaving him too weak to climb back up to a strong position militarily and far, far behind the game leaders in tech. Look at it this way: every other leader on this map had at least two games where they were never attacked at all. This happened to Mansa ten times! But not only did Lincoln not have any of those games, he didn’t have a single game where he was attacked less than twice. It was impossible to properly prosper under these conditions.
Even on the rare occassions when Lincoln started to get the upper hand over a foe, he didn’t seem able to convert it into actual points. Often this was simply because somebody else would take a swing at him before he was able to finish what he was doing, but eventually this turned into an absurd Charlie Brown-esque spiral where the points were constantly swept away from him at the last moment. For example, in Game 2, Lincoln had taken multiple cities from Mao and was in the process of conquering Alex, only to have his progress halted by a Qin backstab before Mao used the AP to force his cities back over. Game 12 saw him prosper off an early dogpile of Qin, only to later be rolled over by a technologically advanced Mansa. In Game 20, he got the last hit on Qin’s core in a dogpile… only for Qin to have a random ex-barb city elsewhere that allowed Alex to take the kill credit instead. In Game 17, Lincoln entirely knocked out Mao, only to see Alex declare war at the last second and snipe the kill credit, and later was locked out of a top-two position, despite being in second place in score, as the third-place Liz won via the UN (granted, he did bring that one on himself by voting for her). Only a single time was Lincoln able to score, in an odd no-deaths Game 15 where everybody else stagnated and his pattern of peaceful development thus carried him to a second-place finish. Overall, though, while Lincoln was certainly somewhat unlucky in these replays, he also just had a really bad setup and was almost always a non-contender, through no real fault of his own. It turned out that his performance in the real game was near the top of the spectrum of possible outcomes.
Conclusion
In the end, the real Playoff Game 2 was pretty typical. While Mao and Alex were just as likely as Liz to take the runner-up spot on the whole, the specific combination of Mansa in first place and Liz in second was indeed the most likely Championship ticket, and Mansa winning an early Cultural victory was absolutely the expected result. (The weird part was it taking all the way to Turn 320 in the real game.) The most unusual aspect of the real game was Alexander’s early exit, an ignominious fate for a leader who was able to score in half of the replays, and this in turn resulted in the real game having less wars than average. Lincoln surviving to the end was also fairly unusual, though by no means an unreasonable result. The central question of this map was if the low peaceweights could work together to take out the peaceniks in time, and Alex’s early attack on Mao in the real game assured that the answer would be “no”. We are now two for two as far as the actual winner matching the expected winner in these playoff games; will Zara dominate again in Playoff three and make it a clean sweep? We’ll find out soon enough!
