Sullla's AI Survivor Season Eight - Playoff Game 2 Thread

Interesting analysis as usual, Thrasy. I agree with some of it... but definitely not with other parts.

Justinian completely crashing his eco and falling a full era behind the other civs: definitely outlier. The reason Justinian is so strong is not because he makes religious allies (that was in AP times), it's because in spite of not being Financial, he's one of the best eco leaders in the game... with warmonger tendencies!

If this is the case, then what do you think was different about this game? I personally am thinking that Justin suffered from too much available land here, which induced him to crash his economy. I also noted in the AHs for Game 2 of this season that his peaceful win dates were not very impressive, suggesting that he might not do so well in economy against more peaceful fields. I think that was the case for him here.

The one thing we didn't get to see, and which should happen a fair amount of times is conflict between Ramesses and Augustus.

You think so? They were Pleased at 0 relations this game. Fred ran a different religion from Ramesses all game and most of the time was STILL unable to plot war. It takes very little for the two to be fast friends on this map.
 
Not my favorite game ever, honestly, but I was satisfied with the results, and that counts for a lot. I'm also very interested to see how an all-peacenik Championship plays out in the alternate histories. Odds are high that I will be running them on that particular map. (I think it extremely unlikely that Mehmed or Qin is moving on next week.)

My faith in Augustus was well-placed! Admittedly, I think he got somewhat lucky in being able to settle quite as much land as he did, but it's clear that his overall position here was quite strong and that he was to be one of the major players. Biggest question with his AH performances, I think, is how often does he get in conflict with his neighbors, and what happens then? It was never in the cards here, not like he needed it to be. He was in the driver's seat from an early date, a satisfying case of REX followed by successful development and fun to watch unfold.

Ramesses, on the other hand... oof. I was rooting against him (because I wanted Augustus to win) this game, and boy was he annoying to watch here from any perspective other than that! That was an incredibly incompetent culture game, even for the AI; I'd realized he was nowhere close to a victory long before Sullla stopped treating him as a serious threat, and even I was blown away once he turned on the slider and STILL wasn't due before Turn 400! Horrible game and I was really afraid he was going to backdoor second place anyway; I'd have even preferred Fred moving on to that! I'm guessing he normally does significantly better in the AHs but this certainly didn't warm me to him at all.

Justinian may not have had as good of a position as we'd thought! I mentioned this in my reply to Thrasy, but I wonder if he had too much space to fill here? Without the green land/gems/early Pottery of Augustus, it was a bit of a poison pill for his economy, and I think he got set too far back from that to have a shot at victory. The fact that even after conquering Brennus, he still had the worst research rate of anybody was also telling. We saw here that his land can still easily carry him to second place if he stays out of trouble, so it's reasonable to think that we might see a good number of those in the AHs. But I don't know that we should expect many wins.

I think I definitely overestimated Brennus's chances, he'd have to get absurdly lucky in joint wars to have a chance of moving out in front. More likely he's just a dead man walking. This also felt like a very typical Fred game to me, right down to starving his cities horribly in the Industrial era and jeopardizing his chances at second place. I don't know if that made a difference in the end, but certainly it would have been an extremely undeserving Championship ticket if he'd made it! I wasn't upset about that at all even though he's on my fantasy team.

It was fun to see Gandhi move on after such a rough game, and only fitting that he should be in the championship in the year of the peaceniks. That said, I definitely think he scammed yet another top-two finish here as his stupidly good luck in the real games continues. What if any of the eastern three tangles with him at any point in time? Or Justinian doesn't randomly hand him a city for peace despite winning the ongoing war in every respect? Or Augustus doesn't come riding to his rescue? Or he doesn't get a silly lucky barb city capture? Yeah. I think First to Die is a far more realistic result for him. At least he did do an impressive job of economic recovery and hold against the 2v1 for long enough - second place this game was something of a matter of "somebody had to get it", but Gandhi was far more deserving than Ramesses or Fred would have been. He's also moved above Darius in Pool Two now, with only Sury closer to the top octet.
 
If this is the case, then what do you think was different about this game? I personally am thinking that Justin suffered from too much available land here, which induced him to crash his economy. I also noted in the AHs for Game 2 of this season that his peaceful win dates were not very impressive, suggesting that he might not do so well in economy against more peaceful fields. I think that was the case for him here.
He has the second best Liberalism time (behind Lizzy) in my games. And I'm often impressed to see him keep up with, or even pull ahead of the likes of Pacal, HC, Willem, Mansa.
Now I don't remember him launching super early as I do for Darius for instance, but that's because his peaceful victories... usually aren't peaceful. War slows teching.

As for why he would have floundered in that respect in this particular game: I don't know. :dunno:
I've seen that happen too for other, usual good eco leaders: a game where, for some reason, their eco just doesn't take off.
Part of the explanation here may be that Shrine income helps Justinian keep the slider higher. Here, if he couldn't spread his religion, that income was kept lower than usual.

But I could also be wrong: I don't have the AH data, these are my opinions, not facts. So maybe the AH will show that Justinian crashing his eco is to be expected on the map. But until they do, it's my opinion they won't. :)

You think so? They were Pleased at 0 relations this game. Fred ran a different religion from Ramesses all game and most of the time was STILL unable to plot war. It takes very little for the two to be fast friends on this map.
I don't think that they should fight every game and that this one was an outlier in that respect.
But I believe they should fight in quite a few game (roughly half?), so what I meant is that we shouldn't take what happened in this game in this regard as the main scenario. The other scenario (where they fight) remains just as likely imo.

For instance, Gandhi founding one of the early religions and spreading it to Augustus while Ramesses gets the Monotheism religion seems like something that should be pretty common. Or either of them attacking that neighbour they have a huge border with before positive modifiers get them to Pleased.
Also, they don't have the same base peaceweight, so peaceweight randomization can open quite a gap sometimes.

Speaking of the last point, btw, when you guys run the AH, do you run them from the save file, or the wb file?
I expect the save file as it would be less fastidious to set up, and the initial scouts deployment would be consistent with what people could see. But that would also mean that the specific peaceweight values generated for that game (which people could not see) are kept game after game...
 
Speaking of the last point, btw, when you guys run the AH, do you run them from the save file, or the wb file?
I expect the save file as it would be less fastidious to set up, and the initial scouts deployment would be consistent with what people could see. But that would also mean that the specific peaceweight values generated for that game (which people could not see) are kept game after game...

So, this has been acknowledged already to be a flaw with the AHs. We have to use the WB file to get started, to check the "New Random Seed on Reload" option. Which means that the AHs are using a different set of peaceweight rolls than the real game. Once that's generated, we usually use an ordinary save file to run the games themselves since that is much quicker and easier, so those start-of-game rolls do remain consistent (not what techs leaders pursue, though - that isn't yet determined at the save).
 
So that's actually a worst of both worlds! :lol:

I don't expect you'd be able to convince Sullla to run them my way since, although it's much less hassle, it would imply adding another modded XML file and he's allergetic to mods.
But maybe you could convince him to at least check the "New Random Seed on Reload" for his games?
 
Are the WB files publicly available for download? Or do you have to ask Sulla?
 
They are, along with the normal saves, from Season 4 onwards (at the top of the "conclusion" page for each season on Sullla's site).

For Season 3, you can check my "Rumble Jumble" topic, I've posted them there (or you can make your own from the normal save games posted on Sullla's site).
For Season 1&2, they've been posted in my AI League topic.
 
So that's actually a worst of both worlds! :lol:

I don't expect you'd be able to convince Sullla to run them my way since, although it's much less hassle, it would imply adding another modded XML file and he's allergetic to mods.
But maybe you could convince him to at least check the "New Random Seed on Reload" for his games?

I'll try to remember to point out the New Random Seed option when the time is right. Presumably it's never occurred as a desired option since this impact was only noted recently.
Probably the ideal (at least from my AH philosophy of "examine the map's 'true' dynamics") is running them from the original save file so that we have the real game's PW and other rolls. But for the ones I run from this point on, I can probably do the next-best thing and start from a WB file each time.
 
Hey, I was watching the YT recording of this game, and I had a question regarding a Sullla comment. Somewhere around the 1:30:00 mark he references the number of dots over a unit's banner. What do those indicate?
 
Hey, I was watching the YT recording of this game, and I had a question regarding a Sullla comment. Somewhere around the 1:30:00 mark he references the number of dots over a unit's banner. What do those indicate?

That's the number of units currently on that tile. It goes up to seven dots, so often if you see a lot clustered together outside a city, it indicates a stack on the move.
 
That's the number of units currently on that tile. It goes up to seven dots, so often if you see a lot clustered together outside a city, it indicates a stack on the move.
Whoa, all these years and I am just learning this? Each dot represents how many? I always wonder how Sullla can mouse over a stack and quickly say how many units it is.
 
Whoa, all these years and I am just learning this? Each dot represents how many? I always wonder how Sullla can mouse over a stack and quickly say how many units it is.
Just one unit per dot. So for small numbers of units, it's a quick way to get a headcount. If it's a lot, that just tells you that it's a lot.

Sullla getting his quick counts is thanks to debug mode which has a ton of features that I don't know anything about. That particular one, though, when you hit a certain key (I think CTRL) and mouse over the stack, gives a bucketload of information in the lower left, one piece of which notes how many units are in a grouping. The big attack stacks usually have all the units grouped together in this way, so seeing the number associated with that is how he gets the count.
 
Speaking of which... beats me that after all these years, he's still never using ALT: that gives you the number of cities of the AI (no need to count them yourself) and tells you what "plan" the AI is currently pursuing (in particular whether it's plotting or not, and whether it's going for Culture or not).
Granted, an even easier way of getting most of that instantly would be BUG mod. :lol:
 
Speaking of which... beats me that after all these years, he's still never using ALT: that gives you the number of cities of the AI (no need to count them yourself) and tells you what "plan" the AI is currently pursuing (in particular whether it's plotting or not, and whether it's going for Culture or not).
Granted, an even easier way of getting most of that instantly would be BUG mod. :lol:
Yeah, that's the only mod I'd be asking Sullla to install for next season. For his own benefit so that he doesn't have to manually count cities 😂
 
Drilling into each leader to see who is plotting seems tedious mid-game, though the Fist going up might be a bit anti-climatic though.

He seems pretty anti-mod though, so it's kind of a moot point.
 
Not being a user of this mod myself, I'm team "keep the experience familiar to as broad of an audience as possible".

Maybe BUG doesn't change much, but I'd still rather see the exact interface that I'm familiar with.
 
"That is the truth I am searching for"


It's really not very different. It would change the bottom right box to include more info that we drill into right now, like if they're plotting war, or number of cities. Otherwise, it's basically the same.

Either way, the commentary and coverage is good, and it's a minor detail.
 
Drilling into each leader to see who is plotting seems tedious mid-game, though the Fist going up might be a bit anti-climatic though.

He seems pretty anti-mod though, so it's kind of a moot point.
That is kinda his website Realms Beyond's mantra although they do have some mods. They don't like BUG or anything that remotely changes gameplay. They have developed a FFH modmod I believe, and really small mods to help with their old adventure game series.
 
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All good - after years of BUFFY, I miss it when it's not there. Sometimes I play co-op MP with some friends, and they don't do mods.

Mostly I miss that I don't get auto-pause for chopping, whip reminders, or plotting war on the HUD, especially in MP, where we tend to play faster and more carelessly.

I get the appeal of the purity of no-mods even if I prefer BUFFY.
 
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