Eauxps I. Fourgott
Victoria's Valkyries
- Joined
- May 16, 2024
- Messages
- 275
All right, prepare for a mega-post! I have a seeding update, general post-game analysis, thoughts on the current fantasy situation, and a look forward at the Wildcard and playoffs both!
First off, seeding update!
Cyrus has regained a position in Pool Two! He is now the #14 seed, and while he could potentially lose this position again later in the season, he at least has it for now. With zero points across the last two seasons, Mao Zedong has now lost is Pool Two position and will be an unseeded leader for the first time in Season 9. Alexander has now taken his place on the bubble. Will he battle back and keep his position in the Wildcard game, or is he out as well?
Meanwhile, with his total loss today, Louis XIV is now officially the lowest-ranked former champion, remaining a single point behind Charlemagne. He is also only two spots away from losing his seeded status. I don't think that is especially likely to happen, but we shall see. Julius Caesar also fails to score any points for the third consecutive season, but he is in a position where I think it is unlikely that three different leaders will beat him out to drop him into Pool Two. Maybe next season, though...
Game Analysis
First off, I don't think we saw a particularly normal outcome today! I agree with the sentiment that Cyrus's early attack on Julius Caesar was unlikely. If that doesn't happen and they both go elsewhere - two of the largest nations with the two of the highest power ratings on the map, mind - I think this game plays out much differently. Lincoln almost certainly does far worse. Augustus and De Gaulle are also unlikely to perform as well, and by extension at least Louis has better prospects. However, regardless of the odds, this season continues its odd trajectory of largely seeing the high peaceweights buck the odds and prevail against their warmongering competition. I believe that at least this game and Game 3 will be shown to have been outliers much like Game 1, and I think there's a good case that games 6/7 will be the same. And somehow, two of the only low peaceweights to advance did so in majority high-peaceweight fields! (Qin and Pacal) What an odd season. I do think it's cool, though, that we're seeing a season of high peaceweight dominance for a change. Maybe Season 9 will go back to chalk!
Anyway, I think the story of this game was the low peaceweight leaders bumbling around, mostly ignoring the peaceful duo, and the latter taking full advantage to run away with things. I wrote twice in the picking contest (once for myself and once for random.org) of the possibility of the four western leaders getting bogged down in infighting, letting Lincoln and Augustus deal with Louis by themselves... and that's exactly what happened! My only mistake (which cost me 5 points in the picking contest) was thinking that in this scenario, one of the western leaders would grow strong and assume a second-place position. Instead, they were all bogged down enough that none of them succeeded. All except arguably Suleiman played poorly; Augustus and Lincoln both got lucky and just played the best games of Civ. Sometimes it's better to be lucky and good!
For leader-by-leader analysis, let's start with our winner, Augustus Caesar. This was a strong comeback performance by a leader who I feel is somewhat underestimated in the AI Survivor community. The early game was very suspect, with atrocious expansion - think how much more easily he might have won if he'd just built more settlers! - and an iffy defense against Louis almost ended his chances then and there. However, I think we can all agree that this was one time where Praetorians made the difference, allowing Augustus to shred a major French stack with minimal losses - turns out that units that are essentially strength 16+ with all those defensive bonuses factored in are pretty darn hard to hurt! And to his credit, Augustus played well from that point on. He successfully turned things around and was winning the war against Louis even before Lincoln joined in. With help from America, he was able to finish the war quickly to go back to economic mode. In a game with no religious AIs, Augustus played the part convincingly and did an excellent job of leveraging early Christianity to assume a dominant economic position, from which his top-two position was secured earlier than Lincoln's and he soon enough became the obvious winner. He also very convincingly laid the smackdown on Cyrus, the premier warmonger of the map, to secure his victory. The Diplo vote may have been a fluke but there was no question that Augustus was winning the game, one way or another. While, like any winner, he had some good luck involved in his win (in this case the four western leaders ignoring him and Lincoln), and I think that both his strong capital and his strong unique unit were absolutely necessary for him to keep up and be in a position to win, he also played well and was a deserving winner. I do believe that Augustus is one of the better high peaceweight AIs, all things considered, with a good balance of economic and military focus that leaves him decently competitive in econ while also being far less of a pushover than many of his compatriots. He also has a pretty strong-looking position for the playoffs, and I think he has good odds of making the Championship for the first time this season.
Funnily enough, even though this was undoubtedly at the top of the range of outcomes on this map, I was still disappointed by Lincoln. Mainly because he didn't do as good of a job of teching as I had predicted despite being largely left alone. Then again, though, perhaps that was simply me underestimating the economic heft of Augustus, the other peacenik on this map (I certainly didn't see the giant gold income from spreading Christianity coming!) Lincoln did perform head and shoulders above all the warmongers in economy, at least. Like Augustus, Lincoln had an overall poor early game; he was especially a disaster early on, with only three cities for a long time, failing to settler with double settlers for a protracted period of time, with two of his three cities unable to even control all of their first ring tiles for lack of culture and with no ability to fight back had Louis whacked him early. However, all things considered, he handled this situation well. He didn't put off all the critical techs for a ridiculously long time; instead, he knocked out IW/Archery/Myst/Masonry all in a row to get culture running and the ability to actually fight back. He still would have been screwed, I think, had Cyrus attacked him as well, but when faced with a single attack, Lincoln easily held it off (not repeating his stunt from last year!) and then, critically, took the initiative and attacked Louis back during the Roman campaign to make it a dogpile and secure a good amount of extra territory for himself. That left it fairly easy for him to coast to victory, despite a failure to replicate his success against Western France. He got a bit lucky later on in being ignored by Cyrus while he was vulnerable, but it wasn't outrageous. Overall, I wouldn't exactly call this an impressive performance from Honest Abe, but it was a capable one, and that was enough in this particular runthrough to secure a playoff spot. I am happy to see him finally succeed for the first time since Season One (!), and coupled with Liz's victory last week, that makes Suleiman the final playoff leader from the inaugural season to never repeat the feat. Meanwhile, I get three fantasy points from him! I can't say I was expecting this much success when I bid on him, but with how my other bids worked out, I needed it...
As for the rest of the field, it was varying degrees of failure. I think it's fair to say, though, that the biggest failure was our reigning champ, Louis XIV. I think I was fairly accurate earlier in this thread when I predicted "his most likely outcome is to go to war early with Augustus or Lincoln and hamstring both his target and himself"; however, what I got wrong was the assumption that he would get some help fighting the peaceniks. With Cyrus and JC instead locked in a death struggle, Louis was stuck fighting both of them on his own, and that wasn't a fight he could win. He wasn't able to win either war solo (though to be fair, he did execute a strong landgrab and would've gotten the edge over Augustus were it not for Praetorians), and folded under the pressure of both; the diplo elsewhere changed his trajectory from playing a supporting role in the warmonger's success to being fuel for the peaceniks. I suspect he does rather better in the Alternate Histories, but I also feel like this was more of a typical performance from him than his exemplary run last season; he tries to do everything and doesn't do it well enough to come out on top most of the time.
Then there was my big fantasy bid, Julius Caesar, who failed utterly. The concerns about his economy seemed to be borne out here; he didn't over-expand, but his econ was pretty bad in general, he fell too far behind in tech, and happiness was also an issue a bit later on. That said, things were made worse for him by the early attack from Cyrus; JC was stuck fighting a war he wasn't prepared for against a foe with a strong production base, and that irreparably stunted his momentum. What will happen in the (presumably normal) outcomes where he doesn't get attacked early and can take the initiative himself? Maybe he still has a shot if he gets the conquest train rolling. In any case, though, this particular performance was bad on all counts. He expanded decently but that was pretty much impossible to not do from his position. He teched poorly, and only took a single city from Cyrus when he started the war with a ridiculous disparity of Praets against a metal-less foe! Then he made perhaps the worst possible war declaration when he went on the offensive, and lost badly even before falling significantly behind in military tech. A big disappointment and my fantasy bid here was ill-placed, it seems. Stalin's got a lot of bad press for performing poorly since his big run in Season 3, but JC has been almost as bad, with no wins since Season 4 and no points at all since Season 5! Did he simply get lucky and/or benefit from the free extra techs early on, and really isn't capable enough to come out on top in most situations? With each different type of field he fails in, it seems more and more likely.
Cyrus played the best out of the low PWs. His early wardec aside, he expanded well, built his cities well after his first war, and was the only leader who appeared to be a credible threat to the high PWs by the midgame. That said, his early declaration on Julius was completely insane and doomed to fail. It badly stunted his momentum as he had to pour a TON of production into the war, gained him nothing, and was not that close to gaining him anything. An attack on Lincoln, by far the more likely outcome, would surely have served him much better. While Cyrus was able to largely recover from this and gain the upper hand over Caesar in their second conflict to grow to the largest size on the map, it ultimately proved too little, too late. His early economy was much slower to get off the ground than Lincoln and Augustus's, and his lengthy failed war (and later lengthy successful war) where they only had minor skirmishes at most early, and then a relatively quick 2v1 after that, set him back too far to have a chance at coming out in front of them. Maybe he could've knocked Lincoln out with a quick strike, but that was no given, and even then he may simply have set himself up for an Augustus dogpile. I think Cyrus can be successful on this map with an actually helpful early war, but his choices here doomed him to failure. He joins Cathy, Joao, and Sury in the "lucky to be in the WC" club.
De Gaulle perhaps did the most effective job of squandering a promising position. His early game was strong, and between that, his solid starting position, and the Cyrus/Julius mess, he was in the driver's seat to win for a while. A tidy conquest of Suleiman or something of the sort could have set him on a snowball and gotten him an easy playoff spot. Instead, though, he struggled mightily to conquer his clearly weaker neighbor, and completely bungled his shot in the process. He took ages and ages to get through Suleiman, and by the time he was done, he clearly had no shot of breaking the top two unless Lincoln/Cyrus/Augustus got in such a mess that two of them were knocked out - and with Lincoln and Augustus being such strong allies, that wasn't going to happen. This wasn't a terrible game from De Gaulle, but it also wasn't at all impressive, and he probably deserves his WC less than Cyrus.
Finally, Suleiman didn't necessarily play that badly, but was simply unable to overcome his lousy starting position. If there was a place where he failed, it was in expansion, where his rate was not great, but he also had a slow position and a lack of space to expand into. From the early game, he was basically consigned to the role of competing directly against De Gaulle, and with DG's much stronger position, this wasn't a competition that Suleiman could win barring something very lucky, which failed to materialize. Kudos to him for making a try of it, taking the initiative, and attacking DG himself, and also for defending very well to hold out as long as he did, but ultimately, with everybody else ignoring the western irrelevants (I at least predicted that correctly!) he was doomed. I expected little from my fantasy bid and I got little.
Next, an update on the fantasy contest. At the conclusion of the opening round, the current leader is... me! I currently have 17 points, with three leaders still alive and able to contribute (Fred, Vicky, and Lincoln. Totally planned it that way
). Kjotleik is in a very strong second place, with 15 points and all five of his leaders still alive (Justinian, Gilgamesh, Pacal, Gandhi, and Sury). The other six fantasy coaches all have scores in the 9-11 point range, with between 2-6 leaders alive depending on the team. No true runaways (yet) or complete duds here, a pretty close contest!
I'll post here a quick "power ranking" I wrote up about everybody's fantasy prospects:
1) Kjotleik. Not in first place at the moment, but his entire team is still alive after the opening round and Justinian and Pacal both have a lot of potential in the playoffs. (And I said they were bad bids!) Still extremely dangerous.
2) Eauxps. Currently in the lead but with only three leaders, none of whom have super strong positions (or at least that's how it feels to me). There's definite potential there and I'm certainly going to avoid last place, but I'll need some more luck to break my way to win.
3) antisocialmunky. Difficult to evaluate, because he essentially only has Mansa, but things are looking very good for Mansa! I doubt he can carry ASM to the solo win but he might come close.
4) Henrik. His chances have resurrected the past two weeks; he's in the main pack now and still has four leaders. Augustus has a nice start in Playoff 2 as well. Still a tough road but he's no longer a bottom feeder.
5) j_mie6. Co-king of the Wildcard round, what happens there will decide a lot. High potential due to that (he still has 6 leaders alive!) but how likely is any of that to hit? Not sure. If WC comes up empty then he only has Churchill and Sitting Bull. I like Churchill's odds to add a few more points with another second but not to carry this team to victory.
6) Amicalola. Like j_mie, there is some potential due to a large number of leaders still in, but it's mostly wildcard leaders for Amica and no individual leader has especially good odds, and he's currently in (a narrow) last place. Not a great position.
7) Bellomorphe. It's basically Liz carrying Bello's chances, and while she could go off, sharing a playoff with Mansa and Pacal makes that a tenuous prospect at best.
8) El Grillo. Basically this team is all Hammurabi, and that's never a good sign.
Finally, a look forward to the rest of the tournament.
We have a confirmed format for the Wildcard! With an unprecedented 13 leaders, Sullla is doing something new and dividing this into two games, one with six leaders and one with seven. Basically it's like another two opening round games, except the barbs will be Raging and, critically, only the winner of each game will advance - second gets nothin' except Power Ranking points!
Conveniently, we got a neat draw which mostly separated the two games based on peaceweight of the leaders involved. Game 1 will have almost all of the higher peaceweights, with Cathy as the only warmonger in the field. Game 2 will have almost all of the lower peaceweights, with Washington as the only true peacenik. It's a fun setup, I think! We won't be able to predict much until the maps are released (hopefully later tonight); all I can say for now is it looks like Cathy and Washington are not playoff-bound. (Side note: @lymond , is there any problem with my making the thread for WC 1 myself once the details are out? I'm looking forward to analyzing it!)
Then we get to the playoffs, where the high peaceweights' advantage is confirmed. Game 1 is confirmed as four high PWs versus two low, with one of the low (Pacal) being passive as well. Game 2 is currently a 4-1 split, another clear advantage for high PW even though the final leader is likely to be a warmonger. Game 3 is a 3-2 split but the final leader will almost certainly be high PW. Will we get a largely peaceful Championship? We'll see, but this should at least be an interesting round!
As for the final result, I suspect that this season now belongs to a Financial leader. I think Mansa has the inside track on the overall win here; Pacal also has a decent shot despite his PW outcast status, I think, especially with his playoff start, and Liz and Vicky are also possibilities. I think our field now vastly prefers a successful "sit back and tech" strategy, and would be surprised if somebody not Financial manages to do it best. We'll see, though!
And as for what I'm rooting for, I think I have five outcomes that I'd most prefer: Mansa does well as expected to become the first repeat champion; Justin somehow beats the odds to become the first repeat champion instead; Liz manages to pull one out and shows how much of a threat she can be; my boi Lincoln secures the unlikely victory and gives me a handsome fantasy payout in the process; or Hatty gets the ultimate comeback story, bouncing back from the Wildcard and 0 career points to win it all.
First off, seeding update!
Cyrus has regained a position in Pool Two! He is now the #14 seed, and while he could potentially lose this position again later in the season, he at least has it for now. With zero points across the last two seasons, Mao Zedong has now lost is Pool Two position and will be an unseeded leader for the first time in Season 9. Alexander has now taken his place on the bubble. Will he battle back and keep his position in the Wildcard game, or is he out as well?
Meanwhile, with his total loss today, Louis XIV is now officially the lowest-ranked former champion, remaining a single point behind Charlemagne. He is also only two spots away from losing his seeded status. I don't think that is especially likely to happen, but we shall see. Julius Caesar also fails to score any points for the third consecutive season, but he is in a position where I think it is unlikely that three different leaders will beat him out to drop him into Pool Two. Maybe next season, though...
Game Analysis
First off, I don't think we saw a particularly normal outcome today! I agree with the sentiment that Cyrus's early attack on Julius Caesar was unlikely. If that doesn't happen and they both go elsewhere - two of the largest nations with the two of the highest power ratings on the map, mind - I think this game plays out much differently. Lincoln almost certainly does far worse. Augustus and De Gaulle are also unlikely to perform as well, and by extension at least Louis has better prospects. However, regardless of the odds, this season continues its odd trajectory of largely seeing the high peaceweights buck the odds and prevail against their warmongering competition. I believe that at least this game and Game 3 will be shown to have been outliers much like Game 1, and I think there's a good case that games 6/7 will be the same. And somehow, two of the only low peaceweights to advance did so in majority high-peaceweight fields! (Qin and Pacal) What an odd season. I do think it's cool, though, that we're seeing a season of high peaceweight dominance for a change. Maybe Season 9 will go back to chalk!
Anyway, I think the story of this game was the low peaceweight leaders bumbling around, mostly ignoring the peaceful duo, and the latter taking full advantage to run away with things. I wrote twice in the picking contest (once for myself and once for random.org) of the possibility of the four western leaders getting bogged down in infighting, letting Lincoln and Augustus deal with Louis by themselves... and that's exactly what happened! My only mistake (which cost me 5 points in the picking contest) was thinking that in this scenario, one of the western leaders would grow strong and assume a second-place position. Instead, they were all bogged down enough that none of them succeeded. All except arguably Suleiman played poorly; Augustus and Lincoln both got lucky and just played the best games of Civ. Sometimes it's better to be lucky and good!
For leader-by-leader analysis, let's start with our winner, Augustus Caesar. This was a strong comeback performance by a leader who I feel is somewhat underestimated in the AI Survivor community. The early game was very suspect, with atrocious expansion - think how much more easily he might have won if he'd just built more settlers! - and an iffy defense against Louis almost ended his chances then and there. However, I think we can all agree that this was one time where Praetorians made the difference, allowing Augustus to shred a major French stack with minimal losses - turns out that units that are essentially strength 16+ with all those defensive bonuses factored in are pretty darn hard to hurt! And to his credit, Augustus played well from that point on. He successfully turned things around and was winning the war against Louis even before Lincoln joined in. With help from America, he was able to finish the war quickly to go back to economic mode. In a game with no religious AIs, Augustus played the part convincingly and did an excellent job of leveraging early Christianity to assume a dominant economic position, from which his top-two position was secured earlier than Lincoln's and he soon enough became the obvious winner. He also very convincingly laid the smackdown on Cyrus, the premier warmonger of the map, to secure his victory. The Diplo vote may have been a fluke but there was no question that Augustus was winning the game, one way or another. While, like any winner, he had some good luck involved in his win (in this case the four western leaders ignoring him and Lincoln), and I think that both his strong capital and his strong unique unit were absolutely necessary for him to keep up and be in a position to win, he also played well and was a deserving winner. I do believe that Augustus is one of the better high peaceweight AIs, all things considered, with a good balance of economic and military focus that leaves him decently competitive in econ while also being far less of a pushover than many of his compatriots. He also has a pretty strong-looking position for the playoffs, and I think he has good odds of making the Championship for the first time this season.
Funnily enough, even though this was undoubtedly at the top of the range of outcomes on this map, I was still disappointed by Lincoln. Mainly because he didn't do as good of a job of teching as I had predicted despite being largely left alone. Then again, though, perhaps that was simply me underestimating the economic heft of Augustus, the other peacenik on this map (I certainly didn't see the giant gold income from spreading Christianity coming!) Lincoln did perform head and shoulders above all the warmongers in economy, at least. Like Augustus, Lincoln had an overall poor early game; he was especially a disaster early on, with only three cities for a long time, failing to settler with double settlers for a protracted period of time, with two of his three cities unable to even control all of their first ring tiles for lack of culture and with no ability to fight back had Louis whacked him early. However, all things considered, he handled this situation well. He didn't put off all the critical techs for a ridiculously long time; instead, he knocked out IW/Archery/Myst/Masonry all in a row to get culture running and the ability to actually fight back. He still would have been screwed, I think, had Cyrus attacked him as well, but when faced with a single attack, Lincoln easily held it off (not repeating his stunt from last year!) and then, critically, took the initiative and attacked Louis back during the Roman campaign to make it a dogpile and secure a good amount of extra territory for himself. That left it fairly easy for him to coast to victory, despite a failure to replicate his success against Western France. He got a bit lucky later on in being ignored by Cyrus while he was vulnerable, but it wasn't outrageous. Overall, I wouldn't exactly call this an impressive performance from Honest Abe, but it was a capable one, and that was enough in this particular runthrough to secure a playoff spot. I am happy to see him finally succeed for the first time since Season One (!), and coupled with Liz's victory last week, that makes Suleiman the final playoff leader from the inaugural season to never repeat the feat. Meanwhile, I get three fantasy points from him! I can't say I was expecting this much success when I bid on him, but with how my other bids worked out, I needed it...
As for the rest of the field, it was varying degrees of failure. I think it's fair to say, though, that the biggest failure was our reigning champ, Louis XIV. I think I was fairly accurate earlier in this thread when I predicted "his most likely outcome is to go to war early with Augustus or Lincoln and hamstring both his target and himself"; however, what I got wrong was the assumption that he would get some help fighting the peaceniks. With Cyrus and JC instead locked in a death struggle, Louis was stuck fighting both of them on his own, and that wasn't a fight he could win. He wasn't able to win either war solo (though to be fair, he did execute a strong landgrab and would've gotten the edge over Augustus were it not for Praetorians), and folded under the pressure of both; the diplo elsewhere changed his trajectory from playing a supporting role in the warmonger's success to being fuel for the peaceniks. I suspect he does rather better in the Alternate Histories, but I also feel like this was more of a typical performance from him than his exemplary run last season; he tries to do everything and doesn't do it well enough to come out on top most of the time.
Then there was my big fantasy bid, Julius Caesar, who failed utterly. The concerns about his economy seemed to be borne out here; he didn't over-expand, but his econ was pretty bad in general, he fell too far behind in tech, and happiness was also an issue a bit later on. That said, things were made worse for him by the early attack from Cyrus; JC was stuck fighting a war he wasn't prepared for against a foe with a strong production base, and that irreparably stunted his momentum. What will happen in the (presumably normal) outcomes where he doesn't get attacked early and can take the initiative himself? Maybe he still has a shot if he gets the conquest train rolling. In any case, though, this particular performance was bad on all counts. He expanded decently but that was pretty much impossible to not do from his position. He teched poorly, and only took a single city from Cyrus when he started the war with a ridiculous disparity of Praets against a metal-less foe! Then he made perhaps the worst possible war declaration when he went on the offensive, and lost badly even before falling significantly behind in military tech. A big disappointment and my fantasy bid here was ill-placed, it seems. Stalin's got a lot of bad press for performing poorly since his big run in Season 3, but JC has been almost as bad, with no wins since Season 4 and no points at all since Season 5! Did he simply get lucky and/or benefit from the free extra techs early on, and really isn't capable enough to come out on top in most situations? With each different type of field he fails in, it seems more and more likely.
Cyrus played the best out of the low PWs. His early wardec aside, he expanded well, built his cities well after his first war, and was the only leader who appeared to be a credible threat to the high PWs by the midgame. That said, his early declaration on Julius was completely insane and doomed to fail. It badly stunted his momentum as he had to pour a TON of production into the war, gained him nothing, and was not that close to gaining him anything. An attack on Lincoln, by far the more likely outcome, would surely have served him much better. While Cyrus was able to largely recover from this and gain the upper hand over Caesar in their second conflict to grow to the largest size on the map, it ultimately proved too little, too late. His early economy was much slower to get off the ground than Lincoln and Augustus's, and his lengthy failed war (and later lengthy successful war) where they only had minor skirmishes at most early, and then a relatively quick 2v1 after that, set him back too far to have a chance at coming out in front of them. Maybe he could've knocked Lincoln out with a quick strike, but that was no given, and even then he may simply have set himself up for an Augustus dogpile. I think Cyrus can be successful on this map with an actually helpful early war, but his choices here doomed him to failure. He joins Cathy, Joao, and Sury in the "lucky to be in the WC" club.
De Gaulle perhaps did the most effective job of squandering a promising position. His early game was strong, and between that, his solid starting position, and the Cyrus/Julius mess, he was in the driver's seat to win for a while. A tidy conquest of Suleiman or something of the sort could have set him on a snowball and gotten him an easy playoff spot. Instead, though, he struggled mightily to conquer his clearly weaker neighbor, and completely bungled his shot in the process. He took ages and ages to get through Suleiman, and by the time he was done, he clearly had no shot of breaking the top two unless Lincoln/Cyrus/Augustus got in such a mess that two of them were knocked out - and with Lincoln and Augustus being such strong allies, that wasn't going to happen. This wasn't a terrible game from De Gaulle, but it also wasn't at all impressive, and he probably deserves his WC less than Cyrus.
Finally, Suleiman didn't necessarily play that badly, but was simply unable to overcome his lousy starting position. If there was a place where he failed, it was in expansion, where his rate was not great, but he also had a slow position and a lack of space to expand into. From the early game, he was basically consigned to the role of competing directly against De Gaulle, and with DG's much stronger position, this wasn't a competition that Suleiman could win barring something very lucky, which failed to materialize. Kudos to him for making a try of it, taking the initiative, and attacking DG himself, and also for defending very well to hold out as long as he did, but ultimately, with everybody else ignoring the western irrelevants (I at least predicted that correctly!) he was doomed. I expected little from my fantasy bid and I got little.
Next, an update on the fantasy contest. At the conclusion of the opening round, the current leader is... me! I currently have 17 points, with three leaders still alive and able to contribute (Fred, Vicky, and Lincoln. Totally planned it that way
). Kjotleik is in a very strong second place, with 15 points and all five of his leaders still alive (Justinian, Gilgamesh, Pacal, Gandhi, and Sury). The other six fantasy coaches all have scores in the 9-11 point range, with between 2-6 leaders alive depending on the team. No true runaways (yet) or complete duds here, a pretty close contest!I'll post here a quick "power ranking" I wrote up about everybody's fantasy prospects:
1) Kjotleik. Not in first place at the moment, but his entire team is still alive after the opening round and Justinian and Pacal both have a lot of potential in the playoffs. (And I said they were bad bids!) Still extremely dangerous.
2) Eauxps. Currently in the lead but with only three leaders, none of whom have super strong positions (or at least that's how it feels to me). There's definite potential there and I'm certainly going to avoid last place, but I'll need some more luck to break my way to win.
3) antisocialmunky. Difficult to evaluate, because he essentially only has Mansa, but things are looking very good for Mansa! I doubt he can carry ASM to the solo win but he might come close.
4) Henrik. His chances have resurrected the past two weeks; he's in the main pack now and still has four leaders. Augustus has a nice start in Playoff 2 as well. Still a tough road but he's no longer a bottom feeder.
5) j_mie6. Co-king of the Wildcard round, what happens there will decide a lot. High potential due to that (he still has 6 leaders alive!) but how likely is any of that to hit? Not sure. If WC comes up empty then he only has Churchill and Sitting Bull. I like Churchill's odds to add a few more points with another second but not to carry this team to victory.
6) Amicalola. Like j_mie, there is some potential due to a large number of leaders still in, but it's mostly wildcard leaders for Amica and no individual leader has especially good odds, and he's currently in (a narrow) last place. Not a great position.
7) Bellomorphe. It's basically Liz carrying Bello's chances, and while she could go off, sharing a playoff with Mansa and Pacal makes that a tenuous prospect at best.
8) El Grillo. Basically this team is all Hammurabi, and that's never a good sign.
Finally, a look forward to the rest of the tournament.
We have a confirmed format for the Wildcard! With an unprecedented 13 leaders, Sullla is doing something new and dividing this into two games, one with six leaders and one with seven. Basically it's like another two opening round games, except the barbs will be Raging and, critically, only the winner of each game will advance - second gets nothin' except Power Ranking points!
Conveniently, we got a neat draw which mostly separated the two games based on peaceweight of the leaders involved. Game 1 will have almost all of the higher peaceweights, with Cathy as the only warmonger in the field. Game 2 will have almost all of the lower peaceweights, with Washington as the only true peacenik. It's a fun setup, I think! We won't be able to predict much until the maps are released (hopefully later tonight); all I can say for now is it looks like Cathy and Washington are not playoff-bound. (Side note: @lymond , is there any problem with my making the thread for WC 1 myself once the details are out? I'm looking forward to analyzing it!)
Then we get to the playoffs, where the high peaceweights' advantage is confirmed. Game 1 is confirmed as four high PWs versus two low, with one of the low (Pacal) being passive as well. Game 2 is currently a 4-1 split, another clear advantage for high PW even though the final leader is likely to be a warmonger. Game 3 is a 3-2 split but the final leader will almost certainly be high PW. Will we get a largely peaceful Championship? We'll see, but this should at least be an interesting round!
As for the final result, I suspect that this season now belongs to a Financial leader. I think Mansa has the inside track on the overall win here; Pacal also has a decent shot despite his PW outcast status, I think, especially with his playoff start, and Liz and Vicky are also possibilities. I think our field now vastly prefers a successful "sit back and tech" strategy, and would be surprised if somebody not Financial manages to do it best. We'll see, though!
And as for what I'm rooting for, I think I have five outcomes that I'd most prefer: Mansa does well as expected to become the first repeat champion; Justin somehow beats the odds to become the first repeat champion instead; Liz manages to pull one out and shows how much of a threat she can be; my boi Lincoln secures the unlikely victory and gives me a handsome fantasy payout in the process; or Hatty gets the ultimate comeback story, bouncing back from the Wildcard and 0 career points to win it all.
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mooo!
