[BTS] Sullla's AI Survivor Season Eight - Wildcard Game 1 Thread

[Fippy]

Barbs ruined Asokas game but not much else, yup.

 

[lymond]

haphazard1 used to be quite active on CFC some years ago, but appears he's not been on site since 2019 (i have seen him on RealmsBeyond site now though)

 

[Kaitzilla]

View attachment 699483

Not a single time.

Great picture

 

[Keler]

Summary of the game
-There was no barbs
-Asoka expansion phase ruined by the only left over barbs
-First time there was peaceweight in the live stream game and Catherine got dogpiled
-Hatty randomly convert free religion for no reason but to become new worst enemy of all pw 6 leaders and die
-Joao randomly convert free religion for no reason but to not vote for diplo win

Conclusion
-Facepalm, no one deserved to win but someone had to win

 

[Fippy]

Did anyone see yet how misplaced poor Washy is in the next game

 

[antimony]

He would need to pull a Hammurabi with raging barbs on... Ouf.

 

[danjuno]

This is season 8, he'll absolutely do it, lol. Lincoln finished top 2 for crying out loud!

Also, I knew Hatty was going to throw away her chance at points, but that was awful.

 

[The Rook]

Sullla shouted out @The Rook and @Kaitzilla for their scores!

I'm just happy Sullla distinguished our nearly indistinguishable pseudonyms.

@Kaitzilla: Well that didn't go too well, I mean missing the victory date by a massive 8 turns! Seriously, has anyone scored more than 28 points in Survivor history?

 

[Gumbolt]

We seem to get to the end of every game this season and everyone always says they should not of won. I don't think anyone was really a favourite this game. I can't see Joao or Indians winning many of the replays.Perhaps on the alternatives Histories things will go differently. Zara/Hatty and Greeks could do very well. Just look how bad the Greek start was with no wheel. Wheel for Ai is such a great starting tech.

 

[Plains-Cow]

We seem to get to the end of every game this season and everyone always says they should not of won. I don't think anyone was really a favourite this game. I can't see Joao or Indians winning many of the replays.Perhaps on the alternatives Histories things will go differently. Zara/Hatty and Greeks could do very well. Just look how bad the Greek start was with no wheel. Wheel for Ai is such a great starting tech.

It's really all about that wheel->pottery play. If they wait until turn 80, they're almost always toast.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Zara has regained a seeded position!!!

With four points in this game, his total jumped up to 25 - and he wins the tiebreaker over Louis/Alexander. Alex thus presumably drops back out of Pool Two after a brief stay, while Louis is now definitely on the bubble. If anybody else scores enough to hit 25 total points or more (if Alex scores any points next week, for example), he's out.

Fun game! I honestly found myself rooting against the Hatty culture train this time, and it certainly made for a more interesting contest when Zara attacked her instead of just sitting back and letting her win.

The weirdest thing about this contest to me was the barbs and how they ended up playing out. Overall not having too devastating of an effect makes sense, but, well, things certainly ran counter to my expectations in terms of who did and didn't get hit badly by them. I wonder how much of that was normal.

Pericles, for example, received what I thought was one of the biggest blows, as he got a bad early surge that seriously hampered his early expansion - he didn't end up sheltered at all! That completely threw my idea of him founding later religions and going for culture out the window; even if he did win in the end, it definitely wasn't how I thought he would do it. I wonder if that's normal, and what his games look like if he handles them better and doesn't get out to such a slow start? Based on how solidly he played even in this case, I'm willing to bet pretty well! He ought to be one of the AH's top scorers.

On the flip side, Hatty barely struggled at all despite what had looked like an exposed position; that really helped jumpstart her economy and when Zara attacked Cathy, I thought that was GG Hatty! Definitely a big turnaround from there, and clearly she's going to win some cultural victories in the alternate histories. But will she always be this strong out of the gate in those, or did she get lucky this time? That's what I'm really wondering. (Also, as far as that kill credit that was "robbed" from her and kept her locked out of points... it would have been a very flukey kill credit if she had gotten it, since that was the only city she took! As far as overall effort goes, Zara clearly deserved it more.)

Cathy seemed to more or less get her worst-case scenario here, with everybody except Joao dogpiling her. There was real potential for her here too, with Asoka starting as weakly as she did; I think a snowball should be in the cards for her some of the time, when she gets luckier in diplomacy. I don't know how much better she would have been even if she'd picked up Islam, because who else would her neighbors have been attacking, anyway? As it was, this was a perfect storm.

Zara definitely outperformed expectations and didn't seem very bothered by the barbs at all, but at the same time betrayed his ineffectiveness at actually pulling out a victory. He deserved to lose after signing Heliopolis back to Hatty.

My opinion of Joao's abilities has definitely gone down after this season; clearly he needs some way to keep his economy afloat in order to actually compete. With that said, I think my comment about the lack of culture compared to everybody else sinking his chances on its own was pretty accurate. That really put him in a rough position this time. We've seen now that he got unlucky in Game 6 and that was actually a good setup for him, so he's clearly not a total dud, but this time I think he did actually have a bad setup and I'd be surprised to see much from him in the AHs.

Finally, what a stinker from Asoka! It didn't seem to me that the barbs even hit him that hard - I think they just happened to strike at the right places/times to work perfectly with his own problems with lack of food to really keep him in the basement. Definitely not a game that reflects well on him as an AI leader.

Pericles ought to serve as a good meatshield for the English in the playoffs; if I had to guess right now without analyzing the map too closely, looks like one of those will probably win, and one of the four westerners will take second place after eventually growing through conquest. But we'll see!

 

[Fippy]

What happend to Asoka could prolly happen with any other AI.
They are coded to not move settlers out if barbs are in their way.
We sometimes see this when Sulla says "what's he doing with that settler?" or "why are they turning around?".

So being central against raging barbs is really dangerous for them..
even if they have enuf units, and human players would easily navigate around barbs with them, AIs are already put off just by them being in bad locations.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

What happend to Asoka could prolly happen with any other AI.
They are coded to not move settlers out if barbs are in their way.
We sometimes see this when Sulla says "what's he doing with that settler?" or "why are they turning around?".

So being central against raging barbs is really dangerous for them..
even if they have enuf units, and human players would easily navigate around barbs with them, AIs are already put off just by them being in bad locations.

Yeah, the barbs didn't seem to be that big of a part of his problem. It was moreso that he refused to build settlers for a long time, and had so little food.

 

[danjuno]

He did lose a settler escorted only by a warrior... and the proceeded to build double wonders in his only two cities. A little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Not really getting how people can think Cathy stands any chance in this setup.
She's a rather poor leader to start with, and if Gandhi were alone in a low-peaceweight field, everybody would be "he's sooo deaad" (and they'd be absolutely correct).
This is the exact same scenario.

While I was away, I ran some autoplay AH on the laptop for season 4 games which had a very strong favourite, turning on Raging Barbs to see what kind of impact it has, if any.
Not completely done yet, but so far the answer seems to be one we should have expected: "it depends".

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

if Gandhi were alone in a low-peaceweight field, everybody would be "he's sooo deaad" (and they'd be absolutely correct).
This is the exact same scenario.

You could be right that Cathy doesn't actually have a chance on this map, but this statement at least is definitely not true. There's a big difference between starting next to Asoka/Hatty/Pericles and starting next to, say, Mehmed/Gilgamesh/HC. The former have much less of a killer instinct and there was no guarantee that she was going to get dogpiled like this. With Gandhi, since his PW is more extreme and those at the opposite end of the scale are more aggressive, you know the dogpile is coming.

 

[Plains-Cow]

I feel like Cathy could have done well if she didn't pick up Buddhism.

 

[Thrasybulos]

The dogpile is still coming in that scenario. It may come later than in the Gandhi vs warmongers scenario (turn 150-200 vs turn 100), though, but coming it is.
I believe we've seen enough games to debunk "the big bad warmonger in a peaceniks game devours them one by one and cruises to an easy Domination win" scenario as pure fantasy.
The "big bad warmonger" gets put down. Every time.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

And what if religious spreads are different, Zara and Pericles practice different faiths (say, Zara picks up Buddhism), and they fight each other instead?

Based on the game we saw, Cathy would probably have devoured Asoka in that scenario and been ready to meet and take some land off a backwards Harry attack.

I'm not saying you're definitively wrong. We'll find out who's right about this one when the AHs come in. But to me this still looks like the scenario where the warmonger actually had a chance.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Look at game 6 from this set: very similar scenario, and that's one where Cathy nearly made it, thanks to what you suggest, ie religious wars amongst the high peaceweights.
Nearly.
When the odds are that stacked, threading the needle is nigh impossible.

I wish it weren't the case, and I'd be glad to be proven wrong. But there are cases where peaceweight is indeed destinity.
I just find it odd that everyone agrees on that when it's a high peaceweight in a low peaceweight field, but when it's the reverse situation, people go "nah, it's fine".