New AI Survivor from Sulla

[dankok8]

Raging barbs with this much tundra & ice is going to be messy- Toku and Bis in particular are likely to get wrecked. Im still trying to persuade myself this isn't a runaway win for a GW owning Hammurabi.

Yea I picked Hammy to finish second. I think building the GW will give him a strong head start and he and Mao will leave the warmongers behind in tech. Still don't think Hammy is aggressive enough or good enough economically to power the early GW to a win but we shall see. GK or Toku could derail his game quite badly whereas I think Mao even if/when he is the target is more suited to win a war.

 

[Nogbadthebad]

Still don't think Hammy is aggressive enough or good enough economically to power the early GW to a win but we shall see.

Yeah, that is the same reasoning I used to talk myself out of the Hammy runaway win, I'm hoping eventually someone angry enough will clobber him. I have Gilg for the win as cre/pro is almost ideal for this map. Had no idea about RU, but Fippy made sense about GK so have hedged my bets a bit and gone for him in case he runs away with it so I can get points for a GK/gilg combo.

Mao's terrible game last time out with a seafood start put me off him for this one, but he has some good land if it plays out right. Am wondering how many cities will fall to the barbs in this one- if he wasn't on a hill I reckon Bis could be the first barb outright kill.

 

[Fippy]

Louie didn't make the crowd happy

 

[dankok8]

Well needless to say Pacal got very very unlucky... He was actually handling Alex + Louis just fine but then Washington dogpiled and it was over. 1 v 3 is too tough!

 

[ArchGhost]

As annoying as Sullla's clear bias was on Friday , it was kinda funny to see that even one of the weakest AIs can still have its day if the others cause enough chaos.

Spoiler :

being for Pacal in a weak field makes sense, but the disdain for Louis and Charlie was getting old fast. Especially as Charlie has proven that either he is a better AI than he is a choice for a human player in previous games, or that the sample sizes are far too small to prove anything either way. Probably a little of both cases.

Congrats to Washington for once!

 

[Fippy]

Pacal messed this up himself, he was unable to take cities from Alex against Chariots and Archers.
By losing so many units in pointless and weak attacks he made himself vulnerable.
Deserved loss

 

[crullerdonut]

I think that there were a few unlikely things which led to the strange outcome of Washington in 1st place and Charlemagne in 2nd:

1. Pacal's Buddhism somehow spreading to France. I'm pretty sure that Louis XIV started plotting war against Pacal during the period in which he was Buddhist.
2. Regardless, there's the post by Kuro on the Realms Beyond forums that discusses the importance of shared borders and proximity: http://www.realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=9953&pid=739839#pid739839
   
3. Washington using a culture bomb, which created cultural tension between himself and Pacal, making it more likely for him to declare war on Pacal
4. Saladin adopting Washington's Christianity
   
5. Saladin attacking France from the north, which left him with a bunch of low-population high-maintenance cities
   
6. Charlemagne using Sid's Sushi to grow his cities

Fun game to watch, though. I just wish that Sullla would use a mod for better AI, at least in an exhibition match. It's pretty sad to see AIs continually settling their cities in uninhabitable Tundra with nothing in their 1st ring tiles, or making 90 units wait as 1 siege unit slowly bombards a city with a Walls+Castle, etc. etc.

 

[dankok8]

Holy crap these AI's in playoff game 2 were inept.

Willem loses his capital then captures it back then inexplicably gives it back when signing peace.

Julius decides not to settle more than 5 cities for some reason. Then has the stupidest tech priorities ever after getting insanely lucky to captures some Mao cities from Asoka. I picked him to win and he disappointed in a ridiculous way.

Asoka doesn't have Wheel until after 1000 BC and loses all his tile improvements to barbs. Just gets lucky that other AI's were at war the whole game.

Sury just suicides his entire army on Mao.

Honestly I thought the two best games were from Mao who played admirably (top in tech and power early on) but just got extremely unlucky to get dogpiled (he was the last guy Sury and Julius should have attacked logically). Augustus played a solid game but again just got dogpiled when he was winning a war against Willem. Although Augustus stupidly lost cities despite being an era ahead in tech in front of Julius so he doesn't get that much sympathy from me.

On a side note...

Funny thing about Willem is that he's actually a pretty aggressive leader. And quite likely to declare war at Pleased relations as well. Still think he's the best leader in this bunch by a huge margin. But not teching Rifling is his problem.

 

[Fippy]

Yup..Sulla can moan all he wants about "bad" leaders advancing, with his settings (and especially no mods) they are just all stupid
Agree that Mao actually played reasonably well and was dogpiled by umm..idiots? (other than Asoka, made sense there)
Augustus cannot fight for some reason and rarely attacks.

 

[crullerdonut]

I've asked, but Sullla doesn't want to use mods which improve the AI.

 

[Nogbadthebad]

Mao wasn't really that impressive- he had Asoka as worst enemy putting cultural pressure on his cap, and a 60T window when he had metal and Asoka had nothing to score an easy game winning kill. What did he do with the time? Turn the snow yellow.

Only really good play all game was Willem's recovery from losing his cap.

 

[dankok8]

The all-star game from last Friday was a very fun game. Agg AI was actually off so war declarations were more sensible and thus high peaceweight leaders had more a chance.