Just looking at all the numbers (I can't open the saves) it appears that Aristocracy has produced the best results overall. Just imagine if the leader was Kandros.
It also seems that Aristocracy is supporting larger cities based on population figures(not a surprise to me at all although to others it may seem strange) and better vault levels (again not a surprise to me).
It also appears that the Aristocracy is in the best position to move forward to any victory type except Religious.
I have to disagree, I don't think that's close to the full picture, though I understand due to the fact that you haven't opened the saves. It's true Turin had a couple of very good runs and has discussed a lot of the things going into them, including early game war which helped greatly - so far (well, before Sephi) only one other game has been played with those same advantages. And even so, the best tech in a save I'd seen yet was Evernoob's GK game (I think he intended to transition into city states) which was also pretty peaceful. Also, even compared to GK games where the Aristocracy games had greater tech, they still lagged in production, I again don't know if this was player choice to maximize commerce or just what happened. (I know that in my second game I was emphasizing production, again, it's not just that. But having 3 cities produce nearly as much as 11 up to the same point is also a rather curious statistic, so I'm still guessing Turin really was straight maxxing commerce or something).
Also, while I agree Kandros is better suited to Aristocracy, I also think the difference this map made was even greater - it still would be fair to "imagine" if our neighbors weren't the two weakest AIs in the whole game, essentially setting us (all the players) up for very easy dominance once again - it's not a criticism of player skill, but the whole viability of the "warrior rush" strategy that has allowed Aristocracy games to keep up doesn't seem proven by this game either.
With all this said though, I'm a bit disappointed that we don't have a better metric of things in this game. Score/closeness to victory etc... really don't cut it, as this game was easy enough to achieve probably any victory with any reasonable start, and we've seen some vastly divergent games. Not that it's not interesting to see how different people have tackled the same game, that's one of the great things on the forums here, but I'm just not seeing the dominance of Aristocracy. Again, it's not like it's disastrous as good players can make a lot of things work, but Evernoob put it well in the OP that it's just not an "all the time" thing, and furthermore I still think that even if you do transition to Aristo later, this game is really well suited to early GK.
Lastly, @Sephi - a turn 260 Tower victory is pretty impressive indeed, especially just given the tech and the fact that our dwarven civ doesn't have any great inclination to magic. Amazing job there, also sounds like you also had a much better war effort against the deceitful Luchuirp than I did
. Got around 7 workers from him. Beelined bronze working instead of education which slowed down teching, but I thought Luchuirp would be more of a challenge. Adopted God king turn 108 and changed to city states around turn 140. I had conquered the whole continent (apart from some stupid barb cities) around turn 155. Then I focused on building infrastructure.
