The AI Horatius League

[Thrasybulos]

Welcome to a new Civ 4 AI bloodfest : the Horatius League !

As you may or may not be aware, I've endeavoured to try and find a way to rank the Civ 4 AIs in an AI Survivor-like context, using the Elo rating method.
And one major issue is that the Elo rating is designed for 1 vs 1 games, which isn't the case in AI Survivor.
Sure, I could just run 1 vs 1 games on a tiny map, but where would be the fun in that?
But... it recently came to my notice (after all these years, there are still things to discover about the game) that contrary to what I'd always simply assumed, there is nothing preventing running a game with duplicate leaders!

Pitting 3 instances of one leader versus 3 instances of another leader, I could have my cake and eat it: 6-player games which are also 1 vs 1 for ranking purposes!

Now of course, this is a tad goofy and won't reflect actual AI Survivor performance (if only for peaceweight distribution reasons).
But this is fun-goofy, so I went ahead!

Game Settings

I'll be using my now customary settings:

• AI Survivor S5+ rules: Deity level, no bonus techs, no AP, no huts, no events, no tech trading, no vassals.
• Adding to that: no UN, no barbs.

Victory conditions are thus limited to Spaceship, Domination, Culture (and Time in theory).
And there's going to be a new Conquest victory type: when all three opposing leaders are eliminated. In a game pitting 3 Shakas vs 3 Gandhis, if all 3 Gandhis are dead, I don't care which particular Shaka wins: it's a Shaka win.

Note: These are not team games. Fratricide wars are a very real possibility.


Tournament Format

Spoiler :

• The first phase of the tournament will be a Pool phase : 8 pools of 6 or 7 leaders.
  • Each pool will be run in a round-robin format: so 15 match-ups for the 6-player pools, and 21 match-ups for the 7-player pools.
  • Players will be ranked by total wins, then wins vs tied players, then by average win date.
  • The top 2 of each pool will move to the next phase.
  • For the 1st tournament, the leaders will be assigned completely randomly to a pool. For subsequent tournaments, past performance will allow pool seeding.
• Then we'll proceed to a 4-round knockout phase which will determine the winner.
  • In that phase, the tie-breaker, if needed, will be one extra game played on the AI Survivor S4-S7 mirrored map.
• Maps and "sets":
  • Each pool and each knockout matchup will be played on a different AI Survivor map.
  • The games will be played in "sets" of two games: a random starting position permutation will be drawn for each set, and the games will be mirrored accordingly.
    For instance, if Player1 gets assigned the 1,5, and 6 starting positions (and thus Player2 gets 2,3,4), the second game of the set will have Player1 starting from positions 2,3, and 4.
  • In the pool phase, each matchup will be played over a single set (2 games). That number will increase in the knockout phase, reaching 4 sets (8 games) for the Finals.

Note:
This isn't my "AI League 2.0": it's a different, side project to keep busy and which allows me to start working on the tools I'll need (all games results are saved to a database now for instance).

I'm actually done running the first tournament... so let's see how that went.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Tournament 1, Pool Phase

Spoiler Pool 1 :

First surprise: HC barely makes it!
Now, it might be a fluke, as he got hammered by Monty who, in turn, got hammered by just everyone else.

Spoiler Pool 2 :

A genuise surprise here: Gilgamesh doesn't make it!
Lincoln and Roosevelt, on the other hand, end up where we'd expect them: at the bottom.

Spoiler Pool 3 :

Ramesses:
I guess we have a tournament favourite now!

And Hatty beats Qin to the second place, making it an Egypt clean sweep.
Saladin disappoints.

Spoiler Pool 4 :

Freddy:

Spoiler Pool 5 :

I thought this setup would be the occasion for the economy-focused high peaceweights to shine.
Well, Viccy disappoints in a major way here, and while Gandhi does better, that's not good enough.

Spoiler Pool 6 :

Hannibal and Louis falter, but what could they do against top tier leaders like De Gaulle and Churchill?
Oh, wait...

Spoiler Pool 7 :

Justinian and Pacal do the job, with Willem right behind.

As for Darius...

Spoiler Pool 8 :

Mansa has to be a favourite here... but he got Shaka'd hard.

Suleiman and Cyrus doing so bad is a real shocker, though.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Tournament 1, Knockout phase round 1 (aka Pre-finals, aka Round of 16)

Spoiler Genghis vs Julius :

That one went to the tie-breaker.
Khan wins.

Spoiler Napoleon vs Churchill :

The crazies are having a field day it would seem!

Spoiler Ramesses vs Pacal :

And there goes the favourite out of the pools!
It was a close thing, though, even in the tie-breaker: Pacal's ship landed right before his civ got wiped out back on Earth.

Spoiler Zara vs Mansa :

That one wasn't close. Clinical Mansa.

Spoiler Kublai vs Huyna Capac :

HC getting his stride back?

Spoiler De Gaulle vs Pericles :

Ouchie. Toldya De Gaulle was a real star!

Spoiler Justinian vs Hatshepsut :

Sorry, Hatty.

Spoiler Shaka vs Ragnar :

Ragnar resorting to a Culture win was a bad a sign for him as you'd expect.
He fought well, but Shaka smash!

 

[Thrasybulos]

Tournament 1, Quarterfinals

Spoiler Genghis vs Napoleon :

Another shock of the crazies. In that situation, what khan Napoleon do?

Spoiler Pacal vs Mansa :

A close match, except for the tie-breaker when Mansa crushes Pacal.

Spoiler Huyna Capac vs De Gaulle :

Trust HC to put an end to a good joke.

Spoiler Justinian vs Shaka :

... or Justinian, for that matter.

 

[Thrasybulos]

Tournament 1, Semifinals and Finals

Spoiler Genghis vs Mansa :

Well, if you thought the Khan had simply got lucky, think again?
A very close call for Mansa, but again, the tiebreaker was a one-way affair.

Spoiler Huyna Capac vs Justinian :

That could have been the finals, and while Civ 4 is a game played with 52 players where the Incas usually win in the end... sometimes the Byzantines do, instead.

Spoiler Finals :

And if you thought from the start that Mansa was the heavy favourite... you were apparently correct.

Spoiler Final Bracket :

 

[Genghis the Barbarian]

Some of questions/comments

Spoiler :

1) I think the problem with this (very clever) format in general is it super nerfs culture leaders like Louis, Ram, and Gandhi, because they pretty much hurt each other in a not good way by taking religions away, stealing wonders, etc. This is especially so for high PW culturemongers, because they are very unlikely to conquer each other and thus not have enough religions and wonders for a viable culture play

2) Mansa is the exception to the above because he’s Mansa, and three Mansas is essentially an unstoppable T270 ticking time bomb. Also, Mansa’s biggest weakness IMHO is his culture, I truly believe he’d be much better if he just went pure econ and that this belief is confirmed by AHs. Other Mansas competing for religions actually works in his favor.

3) Conversely this format greatly favors crazy warmongers (hence GK, Shaka, Monty being pleasant surprises) because there are two scenarios:

A - 2-3 Shakas tag team an unlucky rival, grows big, boom conquest

B - Civil War - eventually there is one ginormous Shaka and the three little Freddles (this isn’t FNAF! XD) or Hatties don’t stand a chance

Both are good for the warmonger.

4) I think you should turn on the UN (to balance for high PWs a bit more) and turn on barbs (because being able to handle the barbs is still an important aspect of playing civ 4 and is thus needed to judge how good an AI is)

 

[Thrasybulos]

Thanks for the comments.

As far as what type of AI personnality this format favours... I'll reserve an opinion until more games have been played: I've started the second tournament, and it has already yielded some major surprises.

Keep in mind that this isn't an AH-like format: although many games are played, the "outlier" factor is very much in play. After all, in the Pool phases, each leader only has two games vs each other leader.
And beyond that, there's also the "luck of the draw" aspect for starting positions in the pool phase.
If a leader draws a 3 crappy spots vs 3 good spots game, that's gonna be a 1 - 1 result, while a competitor might have drawn a more balanced repartition and thus a chance at a 2 - 0 result.
(That's lead me to briefly consider using the same start repartition for all games in the same pool, but I ended up rejecting the notion).

I also thought that the culture-focused leaders would be negatively impacted, but that doesn't really seem to be the case: Gandhi didn't fare that well, but Hatty and Ramesses for instance did fine. So...

You may very well be correct regarding the warmongers, but again let's not draw hasty conclusions from a single sample set.
That said, if you are correct, then I wouldn't mind having the crazies shine for once, and it would also mean that if any AI Survivor game happened to be warmonger-heavy, they should be seriously considered for the win.
Doesn't happen too often, though: on top of my mind, I can only think of S4 G5, and the AH had the least warmonger (Kublai) as the favourite (although my jumbled AH experiment tended to show this was a fluke of the start draw: the favourite in this setup was whoever happened to be bordering both Bismark and Zara, and that was Kublai there).

As for enabling the UN and barbs: nah, they just add random noise to the results.
It's fun noise when watching AI Survivor, so they certainly have their place there, though.