Civ4 AI Survivor Season 9: Conclusions

Season Nine was a swing and a miss for the two leaders who have historically been most dominant in the competition, with both Mansa Musa and Huayna Capac failing to achieve anything. However, it was a fantastic season for three different peaceful builders who each made big surges up the standings. Ramesses was our overall champion who played three games and won three games, scoring 15 points for first place finishes and exceeding the points that he had scored in the first eight seasons combined. He only managed a paltry two kills across his three victories (both of them coming in the Championship) which should provide an indication of how culture-obsessed he was in his initial two games. The other big movers were Gandhi with a pair of Cultural victories and Victoria with two additional wins for herself, both of these leaders sitting near the top of the peaceweight scale. We've already run alternate histories for Gandhi's opening round win and Victoria's playoff triumph, both of which ranged from "unlikely" by Gandhi to "insanely improbable" for Victoria. Gandhi continuously seems to be able to defy the odds in winning these Cultural victories but he's up to 38 points from pure finishes now, more than anyone else other than the Mansa / Huayna duo.

Other leaders with solid seasons included Gilgamesh, Stalin, and Louis who all scored 7 points to lead the low peaceweight individuals this season. Each of them won their opening round game and had the potential to make bigger moves before faltering in the playoffs (Louis made the Championship but only by getting backdoored there by Victoria). Amusingly, Joao pulled off the rare feat of three different Runner Up results for 6 finish points, which also happened in Season Eight when Gandhi did the same thing somehow. To be fair to Joao, he also lost a same-turn Spaceship finish to Victoria in his opening round game which was one of the closest endings we've ever seen. And I feel compelled to point out that somehow Hatshepsut is *STILL* behind the Apostolic Palace five years after its removal from the competition, sheesh! It's clear by now that Hatshepsut is both a poor leader for the AI Survivor settings and has also been incredibly unlucky after her near-misses in Seasons Seven and Eight. Will she finally be able to get a point in Season Ten?!

This was another season where the high peaceweight builder civs did well and therefore resulted in fewer kills than many past years. Only 38 of the 52 leaders were eliminated over the course of the season which is the second-lowest on record after Season Eight's 37 kills. That was certainly a major contrast to Season Three, the high-water mark for the violent warmonger leaders, when 46 of the 52 leaders were knocked out before the finish. Notably the kills that did take place were heavily concentrated among the leaders that reached the playoffs and eventual Championship. Those 18 leaders shared 34 of the 37 kills among them and, in a real rarity, there were ZERO kills scored by anyone who was eliminate in the opening round! Normally at least one or two of the early exits manage to land a kill for themselves, not in Season Nine though. Everyone who went out in the opening round was a total dud this year. As for the Golden Spear award, the winner from Season Nine turned out to be Victoria, of all people, who wound up with 5 total eliminations. This was mostly due to her awesome showing in Playoff Game Two where Victoria somehow ran over the map with a Domination victory that had three kills. We already know from the alternate histories that this was a ridiculously rare outcome, probably 1 in 100 odds or lower, so don't go expecting Vicky to win this award again any time soon.

The AI ranking list has also been updated to reflect an additional year of competition; I hid the columns for the first eight seasons to save space in this image, with the full data still contained in the Excel spreadsheet linked above. As a quick reminder of how the ranking system works, leaders score 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each kill. This is a completely arbitrary system, of course, but it seems to do a decent job of recognizing AI performance across different games and different seasons. I included an additional column listing the points scored solely in Season Nine to help indicate which leaders were the biggest movers in this season. As mentioned above, this was a season where our historical performers at the top of the table faltered and allowed room for some newcomers to start pushing their way up the standings. With our change this season to include only the past five years of data in our seeding system, the Pool 1 and Pool 2 leaders will look very different for Season Ten. Ramesses and Victoria will be Pool 1 leaders while Huayna Capac and Pacal will drop down to Pool 2. Justinian, Suryavarman, and Kublai Khan will all be unseeded! Should make for some fun times.

As we continue to run more seasons, the results keep becoming more evenly distributed when compared to past years; we seem to be approaching a normal distribution in the scoring data. In Season Four, the leaders in the bottom half of the list accounted for 7 points while the leaders in the top half totaled a whopping 128 points. The same ratio for this season was 90 points against 39 points - still lopsided but nowhere near the same degree. Obviously as we continue to run more seasons of AI Survivor the results will get less stratified in this manner since the effects of any one season get reduced. Last year's winner, Season Eight Champion Elizabeth, had a respectable title defense with a Runner Up finish and two kills in the opening round before getting knocked into early irrelevancy in her playoff game. We still have not had a repeat champion yet though with the number of past winners climbing to nine it's getting more and more likely for someone to claim the double crown.

After nine seasons, the average score for an AI leader is now 22.70 points. I've noticed that the average goes up by about 2.50 points each season which makes perfect sense: there are 13 * 7 = 91 finish points available and we typically see about 40 eliminations (though we were a bit short of that this season). 91 + 40 = 131 and divide that by 52 leaders for roughly 2.52 additional points per leader per season. Obviously these points are not evenly distributed and instead tend to cluster at the top end of the leaderboard, though this tendency has been dying over as we run more seasons. Augustus, Hammurabi, Asoka, and Qin are all tied at the central point of the table with 22 points apiece in a shared group that likes to build stuff. The median leader has about 6-7 kills at this point which helps show the exceptional status of the top of the group. The median has been going up by about one kill per season in the last few years and there was some slightly movement there in Season Nine with Justinian landing 3 kills to bring him up to 15 total. Two kills from Gilgamesh and a single kill for Huayna Capac brought the two of them into a tie for first place at 16; it's quite close at the top with the pair of them at 16 followed by Justinian and Julius Caesar at 15. Somehow Caesar has zero kills in the past four seasons and still remains right there in the second place spot.

Another year's worth of data has allowed us to update the Trait rankings for Season Nine. We've done enough seasons at this point that a single additional year of competition doesn't swing the ratings around too noticeably. The traits that were strong in past seasons largely graded out as being strong once again. The one major change in the table this year was Industrious and Spiritual leaders having an unusually good showing, causing the traits to climb the rankings closer to the front of the pack. There seems to be clear separation at this point between the top traits of Financial and Creative from the rest of the field, after Creative had another solid year and Financial continued chugging along. There's no question that Financial is one of the best traits for AI Survivor purposes as the extra commerce from Financial definitely helps a lot and the other expansion-oriented traits of Creative / Imperialistic are helpful to the AI leaders for obvious reasons. They let the AI claim more land on the map and then snowball off of having more total production queues. Most of our top-performing leaders have at least one of these three traits at their disposal. It's kind of amazing that Creative does this well with Hatty's big fat 0 point score weighing down the rankings!

I've been writing for the past few years that Industrious felt overvalued due to the presence of Huayna Capac, Stalin, and Louis (in Season Seven), with all of the other leaders having poor seasons but the trait grading out as average instead of terrible due to the three of them. Well, that's no longer a tenable position after the tear that Ramesses has been on over the past few seasons. It's clear that both Ramesses and Louis are always a threat to go heavy culture and cheese out a win from mediocre strategic positions. When given a favorable peaceweight situation as Ramesses repeatedly had this year, he can run over the map by winning Culture or Space using the power of his nearly-guaranteed shrine income. So with Ramesses and to a lesser extent Louis and Augustus doing so well, it's no coincidence that Industrious has been steadily moving up our rankings and now sits well above average - clearly this trait does better than we once thought.

There's another clump of five different traits in the middle of the pack that graded out as having roughly similar scores. Imperialistic, Protective, Organized, Expansive, and Aggressive were all roughly comparable to one another without much differentiation between them. I wrote the exact same thing about most of these traits at the end of Season Eight (though Imperialistic seems to have jumped back up to a slightly higher tier) and their continued ranking in the middle of the group suggests that they are all roughly comparable to one another. It doesn't appear that these traits are particularly great or particularly terrible for AI Survivor purposes. The Protective trait is still hanging solidly in this rankings (and even jumped over Expansive and Aggressive traits) so it appears to be pretty average in AI hands, not the "worst trait in the game" status that Protective has when played by humans. We've seen that the extra Protective promotions and cheap walls/castles genuinely do seem to help out when the AI leaders inevitably get into stupid wars. At the very least, it's hard to argue that Protective is noticeably worse than the other traits under these circumstances.

Charismatic dropped all the way down to last place status this season, and which still feels surprising because it seems to be helpful for the AIs in terms of managing happiness. This was an absolute dud year for the trait as all nine of its leaders scored a combined 4 points - 4 points! The nine Industrious leaders had a combined 42 points between them!!! Charismatic is increasingly looking like one of the weakest options for AI Survivor purposes. There was a clear gap between the glut of traits in the middle of the pack and then the Charismatic/Philosophical duo at the bottom. Speaking of the Philosophical trait, it narrowly moved out of the last place spot after sitting there for the last five seasons. This was mostly due to the heroic efforts of Gandhi who surged into the Championship and sits far above any other Philosophical leader with 43 lifetime points. It's been a precipitous fall from the Season One version of these rankings which had Philosophical as the best trait overall. That was under the old Finish Ranking system that heavily valued silly stuff like not getting eliminated in the Wildcard game so it's not a direct comparison, but it's still noteworthy how the trait has collapsed in value over the following seasons. Philosophical is a poor trait for the AI leaders because they inevitably run so many specialists that they always get lots of Great People regardless. Plus the AI has no idea how to leverage individual Great People for timed Golden Ages, and of course we turn off Tech Trading to remove the value of lightbulbing followed by tech brokering. Philosophical is a solid trait overall in Civ4 but it clearly struggles under the games that we run.

We had two close years of competition in Fantasy during the last two seasons, however here in Season Nine we saw ABC170 / TheOneAndOnlyAtesh run away with the event. His 38 fantasy points were high enough that the fantasy contest was decided before the Championship game even took place, though we did have an absolute nailbiter for second place between Vincarius and Lobster667 when Joao held on to the Runner Up spot by a mere 10 points, 3233 points to 3223 points, on the final turn of the game. ABC170 scored huge fantasy points from cheap bids on Gandhi, Asoka, and Qin while also getting solid value from his large investment into Justinian (and could have done even better there knowing how strong Justinian was in his alternate histories). No one else was especially close to this result, though it was amusing how maniamuse had 17 fantasy points from Ramesses and 2 points from the rest of the fantasy team combined. Our defending Fantasy champ from Season Eight was Kjotleik who unfortunately did not see things work out in his favor this time around. We're going to say that this was a rebuilding year for Kjotleik where all of his star players went down with injuries, something like that!

There will also be a more in-depth report looking at the fantasy competition once the alternate histories for Season Nine are complete. That will give us a better indication of who made excellent bids in the auction and who simply got lucky with their picks. Expect to see the results of this analysis in a few months when the alternate histories have been finished.

This winner of this season was Ramesses who was clearly no fluke as he won all three of his matches this year. There was no backdooring into the title like Charlemagne in Season Four or Mehmed in Season Five, Ramesses seemed to get stronger in each game that took place as he went from a fragile Cultural win in the opening round to a more impressive Cultural ending in the playoffs into a truly impressive Spaceship win in the title game that easily could have been parlayed into Domination instead. Ramesses has two "culture" trait with Spiritual / Industrious and seems to be very good at founding a religion despite not beginning the game with Mysticism tech. If he does get his hands on an early religion, he's one of the most likely leaders in the game to build Stonehenge and combine that with Egypt's obelisk unique building to generate an early Great Prophet for a quick shrine, then use religion to make allies with all his neighbors while pushing for a Cultural win. It's not one of my favorite AI strategies and it makes for sometimes boring Livestream games but it's undeniable that this is effective. The CivFanatics crew has been arguing for some time now that Ramesses is one of the strongest AI leaders in Civ4 and this was the season that he really broke through and validated that opinion in AI Survivor.

Anyway, I'd like to give thanks here once again to everyone here who took part in Season Nine of AI Survivor. Even if it was nothing more than spending two minutes to submit a prediction, the competition wouldn't have been the same without all of your contributions. Turnout in the picking contest was a slight increase even over Season Eight, with about 300 predictions on average for each game, eclipsing Season Five levels at the height of the COVID pandemic and essentially the best we've ever seen. Season Nine held seemingly the entire audience from the previous year and added new faces as well, averaging well above 200 viewers watching along on the Livestream. A special shout-out to the CivFanatics contingent who once again added their own contributions with weekly forum threads and playoff betting odds to spice things up further!

I continue to be amazed at how many people are interested in watching the computer play against itself. This event simply would not be what it is without the lively banter in the chat taking place alongside the action. I am surprised again and again at the brilliant insights that the viewers come up with in their predictions, along with the hilarious and inane running commentary that makes it such a pleasure to put these games together. Over the upcoming months we'll take some time to look at alternate histories for other games from Season Nine and think about any additional fixes that we might add for the future. With any luck, we'll be back again next year for Season Ten - thanks again everyone!