Sullla's AI Survivor Season Eight - Game 1 Alternate Histories Thread

[Plains-Cow]

Sullla recently posted the alternate histories for the first CIV IV AI survivor game for season 8. It seems as though the other AIs in that game, despite even teaming up against Hammerman in an all-out world war against him, just ended up feeding him bites of their empires over a long period of time since they'd keep peaceing out shortly after others joined in and returned captured cities in exchange for peace. This ended up allowing Babylon to win a Domination victory by essentially fighting only defensive wars in almost every DOW instance.

Write-up: https://www.sullla.com/Civ4/civ4survivor8-1A.html

I'd say that one of the most notable quotes from the entire thing is:

"For everyone who watched that and thought, "wow there's no way Hammurabi could pull that off again", you were absolutely correct because he didn't in the alternate histories. This guy was a dead man walking and absolutely the correct pick to be First to Die."

Hammurabi really pulled through that last game, showing that sometimes all you need to win is a plains-cow tile in your heart rather than in your capitol's starting ring.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

What a set! My jaw dropped when I saw that MAO was the most likely winner; turns out culture wasn't as much of a problem for him as I'd assumed! It sounds from the writeup like he got that fertile region near Kublai most of the time, and my initial analysis had thought that he'd be a good contender if he could do that. But I later doubted his ability to culturally hold it.

Kublai's performance seems to line up pretty well, though either his extra land wasn't as much of an advantage as we though, or he just wasted it by being such an underwhelming leader.

My postgame analysis about Boudy was right. Even peaceweight couldn't help her much in this one. It was also neat to see that I was correct about Peter being the biggest beneficiary of Hammurabi's demise.

RIP the high peaceweights, it turned out that first impressions were usually correct for this map. Churchill wasn't as good of a pick as I'd thought/hoped, and we were absolutely correct about Hammurabi's chances. I was surprised to see how much of an outlier his victory was!

My pregame analysis had Churchill/Kublai as the best picks for winner, so a fairly bad pick (half credit for Kublai at least). But I did nail Peter as the most likely 2nd placer and Hammurabi as the favorite for First to Die, so that's satisfying!

 

[lymond]

Yeah, watching it now. Very interesting results. Hammy win was def a huge outlier. He was FTD 50% of the games, and never won once. Church only won once by Dom, so my pick did not look as good as I thought. Pete won 2 or 3 games, but it was mainly Kublai and Mao winning most.

 

[danjuno]

No one is truly safe from RNG shenanigans. Hammurabi wins by Domination when he should've died 90% of the time!

 

[urbestfriend]

Honestly I think what surprises me the most is churchill's performance. I know his diplo situation is pretty bad but after the last few seasons, I figured he'd always be a safe bet to sneak in as a boring 2nd place survivor at least around 25% of the time.

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

I will go ahead and apologize to Plains-Cow: despite his defensive snowball, Hammurabi may very well have stumbled into victory after all!

Having thought Hammurabi could place first up to 15% of time, I am definitely surprised. The results would appear to undermine the advantage of a good start. That synergy seemed to sustain Hammurabi through victory in the game we watched, but it ended up meaningless in the Alternate Histories. For sure, Peter emerges even more underrated, and Hammurabi will have a lot to prove in the playoffs.

How lucky am I to have scored points off Hammurabi winning the opening round of the past two seasons!

 

[Plains-Cow]

I will go ahead and apologize to Plains-Cow: despite his defensive snowball, Hammurabi may very well have stumbled into victory after all!

Having thought Hammurabi could place first up to 15% of time, I am definitely surprised. The results would appear to undermine the advantage of a good start. That synergy seemed to sustain Hammurabi through victory in the game we watched, but it ended up meaningless in the Alternate Histories. For sure, Peter emerges even more underrated, and Hammurabi will have a lot to prove in the playoffs.

How lucky am I to have scored points off Hammurabi winning the opening round of the past two seasons!

Why apologize? Were we on opposite sides of something or did we disagree on something?

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

Just a difference of opinion in characterizing his victory. I think the Alternate Histories show you were closer to the target.

 

[Fippy]

I find this really weird, Peter always does good in alternate histories but never live.
Or Monty last year with a 1/21 win. Conspiracy theories

 

[NickGabben]

Sullla should play 20 rounds of the game and present the results before the live stream. It would be all the more impressive to land a bet like Hammurabi to win then!

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

That would certainly make the outlier results more exciting, but anything normal would be pretty boring if we know that's the usual course ahead of time.