This is a continuing feature for Season Nine of Civ4 AI Survivor: a preview of each game before it begins, providing a quick summary of the leaders involved and how the community expects the game to shake out. We start as always with an overview of the map:
We've had requests in past seasons for an overview screenshot of the map with the resource icon turned on:
It's hard for me to see much of anything with all of those little icons but you guys asked for it, you've got it! Now for a look at our individual leaders:
Mansa Musa of Mali
Traits: Financial, Spiritual (2 culture traits)
Starting Techs:Mining, The Wheel
Peace Weight: 9
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Gold, Secondary Religion
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Free Market
Zealotry: Extreme
Past Finishes: Season 6 champion, two Championship losses, one playoff round elimination, three opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 17
Total Medals: 10 First Places, 0 Second Places 
Total Kills: 8 
Overall Power Ranking: 58 points, 1st place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Mansa Moneybags is the best AI leader in the game when it comes to pure economy and it's not a close comparison. He is an absolute fiend with research even under our settings where Mansa's well known propensity to engage in tech trading gets disabled. Mansa Musa also benefits from an amazing pair of cultural and economic traits, Financial for endless cottage cheese and Spiritual to avoid ever wasting turns with the AI's frequent civic shifts alongside cheaper temples to really get the culture train rolling. The Malinese civ has the premier defensive unique unit in the Skirmisher (which is important as he is an ultra-high peaceweight) and a decent building in the Mint. The unique Mining/Wheel starting tech pairing is also not half-bad, but if Mansa overprioritizes religion (due to a heavy religious emphasis + a secondary Religious flavor) he can lock himself out of connecting early food bonuses for quite some time due to not starting with Mysticism. On that note, Mansa has a dominant Gold flavor that serves to turbocharge his economic capabilities. Mansa's strategy is as effective as it is predictable: blanket the landscape in cottages and tech like a banshee. He's extraordinarily good at doing this even with a limited number of cities; we've repeatedly seen a Malinese empire with five cities still leading the pack in tech. If Mansa ever manages to amass a large amount of territory, may god have mercy on your soul, because he will plot war at "Pleased" and isn't afraid to lay the smack down despite his 1.6/10 aggression rating. Mansa Musa is always a formidable opponent and will usually win the game if he doesn't get roughed up by his neighbors.
Past Performance: Mansa is widely recognized as the premier economic leader in this competition, and his overall prowess and achievements are only rivaled by those of Huayna Capac. Aside from Huayna, no other leader has won more than half of the games Mansa has! Mansa was especially strong in the early seasons of AI Survivor before the free Deity starting techs were removed, making the playoffs in three straight seasons and reaching the Championship twice. He was denied a full victory in these seasons, however, thanks to playoff or championship fields full of low peaceweight leaders who wanted a piece of him. Since his first three seasons, he has been about as boom-or-bust as one can be. His highs - including three economically dominant wins en route to a Season Six ring and a bronze medal near-victory in Season Eight despite terrible barbarian luck - have been astronomically high, but he's also failed militarily and thus died in the Opening Round three times, a stretch that included two straight First To Die eliminations. The removal of the free techs seems to have hurt him a fair amount, making it much harder for him to survive an early assault. Recently, community members have uncovered another flaw - Mansa needs a high food start, as without it his starting techs can slow him down and he can have difficulty working enough cottages to truly get the machine going. With that said, Mansa Musa is the first leader to ever sweep an entire Alternate Histories set and then some - it took 27 map reruns for a different leader to win his Season Eight opening round game - and nobody else can technologically torch the competition quite like he can.
Kublai Khan of the Mongols
Traits: Aggressive, Creative (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs: Hunting, The Wheel
Peace Weight: 1
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Military, Secondary Culture
Warmonger Respect: +2
Base Attitude: 0
Favorite Civic: Bureaucracy
Zealotry: Medium
Past Finishes: Season 4 runner up, two additional Championship losses, one playoff round elimination, four opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 16
Total Medals: 3 First Places, 5 Second Places 
Total Kills: 13
Overall Power Ranking: 38 points, 5th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Kublai Khan has a personality far more conducive to success than his grandfather. His warmongering benefits from the Aggressive trait while the Creative trait helps to push out early game borders and provide at least some degree of research support with cheap libraries. It is no accident that the historically most successful warmongers have held the Creative trait, and Kublai in particular comes out of the gate shielded from a warmonger's worst instincts, as alongside being Creative his Mongolian civ gives him The Wheel to prevent him from crashing his economy. Outside of starting techs, however, Mongolia is more hit-or-miss, as while the Keshik and Ger are strong for warmongering, Keshiks can prove to be a poison pill for the AI if they build too many of them, fail to utilize them properly, and try to slam them against enemy Elephants. As his traits suggest, Kublai Khan's style is to balance cultural and military goals, generally doing a pretty good job at this. He has average ratings for training units, building wonders, and aggression (6.4/10). Kublai's tech preferences are expectedly Military and Culture in nature, and he lives up to his Mongol heritage by plotting war at "Pleased" relations. Long story short, Kublai Khan is the military + culture leader done correctly, unlike several others who try and fail at this combination.
Past Performance: Kublai has been one of the most consistent leaders in these games and as a result is one of the highest-ranked in the entire competition. His resume is absolutely loaded - he is one of three leaders to have played in three Championship games, he has scored at least one point in six out of eight seasons, and was the only seeded leader to win a game in an upset-filled Season Seven. Almost always, he is a leader of note exiting the landgrab phase and can typically maintain a solid empire for much of the game, vying for a second-place position if nothing else. With that said, he is as notorious for his disappointments as he is for his achievements. Multiple times, he's failed to conquer a much smaller and weaker foe for ages on end, or taken what should have been a great position and failed to accomplish anything with it, like last season where he culture-flipped a rival's core city and yet still completely stagnated en route to an eventual elimination. He does carry the typical economic weaknesses of pure warmongers and can have a lot of trouble keeping up without a snowball - he for sure has benefitted a lot from friendly diplomatic fields that do not call him out on his deficiencies. By far his worst fumble came in the Season Four Championship, where he committed the biggest championship choke since 28-3: in the driver's seat with the win right there for his taking, he inexplicably switched up the culture slider instead and let a backwards Charlemagne walk home with the trophy. This seems to have broken something inside him, because he's had quite an unremarkable track record since then save for his Season Seven victory. Still, his ability to put himself in the mix time and time again cannot be denied, and he'll virtually always be an expensive Fantasy draft pick due to his sheer consistency.
Asoka of India
Traits: Spiritual, Organized (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs: Mining, Mysticism
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Flavors: Primary Religion, Secondary Science
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Free Religion
Zealotry: Medium to High
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, two playoff round eliminations, two wildcard eliminations, three opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 14
Total Medals: 2 First Places, 2 Second Places
Total Kills: 2
Overall Power Ranking: 16 points, tied 30th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Asoka (pronounced with an ‘sh' sound, not an ‘s' sound - i.e. not like the Star Wars character) is one of the game's less distinguished cultural leaders. As one of the two Indian leaders, he does get the always-useful Fast Worker as his unique unit, although his starting techs of Mining/Mysticism aren't the greatest and have led to growth issues in the past. He also gets the Spiritual/Organized trait pairing, which is a big problem as although his playstyle is best suited to a Cultural win condition, he only has one cultural trait which makes him far less likely to actually try to win by Culture - a defect that literally cost him a victory in his AI Survivor debut. Asoka will usually seek to form a religious bloc as he likes to use the starting Mysticism tech to found Buddhism out of the gate, gives a high diplomatic bonus for shared religion, and won't attack his allies who have attained Pleased status. However, with a favorite civic of Free Religion, he'll also happily abandon those bonds later in the game. Beyond that he plays a builder's game, with a high wonder build rating but low unit build rating, and Religion and Science as his tech flavors. He's not as extreme as some, with a 3.7 aggression rating, but nonetheless he generally prefers to sit back and pursue an economic victory condition in peace.
Past Performance: Asoka has a pretty spotty track record across the competition's history. He's had one truly successful season, Season Five, where he picked up both of his career wins - the first in a largely friendly field where he never came under serious threat and the second in a hostile field that somehow never attacked him - and was less than 50 turns away from becoming Champion via culture when he finally collapsed in the face of multiple attacks. Beyond that, he's collected a couple of runner-up finishes from friendly fields and otherwise come up empty. Earlier in his career, he could at least use the excuse of military pressure, as he often faced multiple attacks and eventually crumpled under the pressure despite a valiant effort. Lately, however, he's simply given underwhelming performances, like in his Season Six opener where he failed to settle more than five cities, or the Season Eight Wildcard where he was ravaged by barbarians and food woes, founded just three cities, and failed to grow them past size two. With a mere two kills across eight seasons, he's also proven to not be much of a threat on the battlefield. While his potential for an early religion and ability to defend himself makes him more viable than some builder AIs, by now it seems clear that his insufficient trait combination for culturing renders his ceiling too low to be a noteworthy leader in these contests.
Cyrus of Persia
Traits: Imperialistic, Charismatic (0 culture traits)
Starting Techs: Agriculture, Hunting
Peace Weight: 3
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Flavors: Primary Military, Secondary Growth
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Vassalage
Zealotry: Medium
Past Finishes: Season 2 runner-up, one additional Championship loss, one playoff round elimination, one wildcard elimination, four opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 14
Total Medals: 1 First Place, 6 Second Places
Total Kills: 10
Overall Power Ranking: 27 points, 13th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Cyrus has Charismatic and Imperialistic for his traits, a high synergy combination both for warfare and expansion. While he has very good starting techs with Agriculture and Hunting to help him quickly improve basically any food resource he has, his uniques are bottom-tier for AI Survivor due to Immortals; while most AI cannot plot war until they unlock metal units, the Persian leaders can plan disastrously early wars with just strength four Immortals. This is due to the AI needing at least two unit flags to plot: while regular Chariots only have the "mounted" flag, Immortals have both "mounted" and "anti-archer", giving their wielder enough to be coded to plot wars. This is especially a trap for Cyrus as he has a pretty high aggression rating (7/10) and builds a fair number of units (6/10). Interestingly enough, he loves wonders (8/10), cares an average amount about religion (big bonus for sharing, small malus for difference), and his flavours are Military and Growth. It creates the image of another one of the snowball leaders, and Cyrus' game plan seems to be building a lot of cities with Imperialistic, getting them tall with Charismatic and his Growth flavour, and then crushing a neighbour or two once he has an advantage in food and production (and hopefully stronger units than Immortals).
Past Performance: Cyrus's AI Survivor career got off to a promising start, as he followed up a Season One playoff appearance with a breakout Season Two, outputting three strong games and falling just seven turns short of being the champion! Since then, he's had a much rougher go at it, failing to make it out of the Opening Round in four of the past six seasons. He rediscovered some of his spark in Season Six, his best season in years where he returned to the Championship off a pair of second place finishes, but he finished the final game in a distant third. Most recently, he bungled what should have been an easy Season Eight opening round victory with a poorly thought out Immortal rush of Julius Caesar and then was a complete no-show in his Wildcard Game. His struggles have shone a light on two significant flaws: 1) he's a warmonger with not particularly great economic tools who cannot plot at Pleased, and 2) he can plot with four-strength Immortals, which are terrible units to rush with in Survivor games. Don't be fooled by his rocky history or the solitary win, though - while he's had a tough time finding lasting success, Cyrus is almost always a major player in his games. No one will be surprised if he undergoes a renaissance.
Elizabeth of England
Traits: Financial, Philosophical (2 culture traits)
Starting Techs: Fishing, Mining
Peace Weight: 9
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Gold, Secondary Culture
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Free Religion
Zealotry: Low to Medium
Past Finishes: Season 8 Champion, One Championship loss, six opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 12
Total Medals: 2 First Places, 3 Second Places
Total Kills: 4
Overall Power Ranking: 20 points, tied 23rd place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Elizabeth is an easy AI personality to understand, a pacifistic economic leader who will always seek out some kind of non-military victory condition. Elizabeth has one of the best pure teching trait combos in Financial/Philosophical, and while it's true that there's some anti-synergy there between running cottages and running specialists, there's little doubt that this setup will output a lot of beakers and Lizzy is the rare leader who can utilize Philosophical competently. Moreover, it gives her the magical double-culture pairing that establishes an immediate ticking clock in any game she is in. Her biggest weakness comes in her almost total lack of anything that helps with the first 100 turns, a major reason why she is not considered a top-tier leader in human hands. However, if Elizabeth survives the early game and ends up with a solid portion of the map under her control, she's one of the toughest leaders in the game to stop, especially since she has Redcoats to establish herself militarily and prevent her from attempting Willem gambits. She has struggled in AI Survivor precisely because this happens so rarely, as Elizabeth has an exceedingly low aggression rating (1.9/10) and a low build unit preference (2/10). Surprisingly, she will indeed plot war at "Pleased" relations, but in most games you're more likely to see someone else invading England as the Virgin Queen ignores military to her detriment. In summary, Elizabeth performs far better in games with other high peace weight leaders where she's left alone to build in peace. She's a far better version of Frederick and a weaker version of Mansa Musa.
Past Performance: Elizabeth looked like a formidable leader in Season One, riding a wave of near-victories to the Championship. She was still credible for the next couple of seasons as well, starting strong in Season Two only to lose to a two-front war, then losing a heartbreaker in Season Three when Julius Caesar conquered one of her big three Cultural cities when she was a mere five turns away from winning. For the longest time, that tragedy seemed to shatter Lizzy's spirit, and she ran into a multi-season long dry spell where she was frequently saddled with garbage land, hostile diplomatic fields, and pure rotten luck (like in Season Seven where she lost a major city to the barbarians in a low-odds combat roll). By Season Eight, she had rolled yet another crappy start amidst a field of warmongers and was written off as an afterthought... only to shock the community with a masterfully played Opening Round upset. In her subsequent playoff game, her SPACESHIP effectively tied with MANSA MUSA'S CULTURE (seriously, that's insanely impressive)... and then she EMERGED VICTORIOUS IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME to become the first female AI Survivor champion. Mrs. Sullla's namesake has by and large proven to be one of the best pure techers in Civ 4, but at the same time her expansion and fighting can leave much to be desired, making her into a classic boom-or-bust economic leader. As her defending champ status shows, she booms pretty hard.
Hatshepsut of Egypt
Traits: Creative, Spiritual (2 culture traits)
Starting Techs: Agriculture, The Wheel
Peace Weight: 9
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Flavors: Primary Culture, Secondary Religion
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Organized Religion
Zealotry: High
Past Finishes: Two wildcard eliminations, six opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 10
Total Medals: 0 First Places, 0 Second Places
Total Kills: 0
Overall Power Ranking: 0 points, dead last place, 52nd out of 52 leaders
Personality: Hatshepsut is a top tier leader for a human and a poor leader for AI Survivor purposes. She has excellent traits in the double-cultural Creative/Spiritual combo and an amazing civ in Egypt with Agriculture/Wheel starting techs, the War Chariot unique unit, and the Obelisk that has incredible synergy with Hatshepsut's religion + culture emphasis. The problem comes in the form of Hatshepsut's AI personality which is little short of suicidal for these matches. While her aggression rating of 3.7 is not that much in the grand scheme of things, it is quite high when compared to many of her cultural peers and has gotten her into unnecessary early tussles that come back to bite her. She combines that with a high peace weight, and a dangerous combination of a low build unit preference (2/10) and a high wonder rating (8/10). The latter rating is the key difference between her and fellow culturemonger Gandhi who seems to defend himself more competently because he is not tying up all his cities on wonders in an all-out war. Furthermore, she emphasizes religion in her diplomacy, with a big shared faith bonus and a major differing religions malus. Hatshepsut favors Culture and Religion for her research flavors, neither of which tends to contain much in the way of units, and Hatshepsut often finds herself an era behind in military tech despite good overall research. She will typically find herself serving as the "worst enemy" of all the low peace weight leaders and overrun with invasions from hostile neighbors. Hatshepsut needs to either draw a field of high peace weight leaders or a sheltered starting position for her wacky gambits to succeed.
Past Performance: Hatty carries the ignominious distinction of being the only scoreless leader in AI Survivor, and at this point her stepson with mummy issues and her no good dirty rotten pig-stealing great-great-grandfather must have put a massive curse on her. She's never gotten a kill and has only survived to the finish in a mere three games, being relevant in just one. Some of this has been her own fault; her dogged pursuit of all things culture and religion related has not only hurt her militarily, but in extreme cases hurt her economy as she pursues Music and Divine Right beelines over Currency and Education. However, one must acknowledge that she's suffered some truly horrible luck across the competition's history. Her earlier seasons saw her stuck in positions that were central, surrounded by multiple hostile neighbors, or both. Things have taken a turn for the ridiculous in recent years: Season Seven saw her on the cusp of a cultural victory before she was taken out at the last minute by a runaway Montezuma, in what alternate histories showed was an exceptionally unlikely outcome caused by her best meatshield (Lizzy)'s poor handling of the barbarians. Meanwhile, she was in a top two spot for the entire game in her Season Eight opener, only to fall to third place on THE LAST INTERTURN OF THE GAME, and in her wildcard match, she missed out on her first kill credit due to turn order before once again getting defeated militarily when she was about to win by culture. This was particularly sad because she would have been a scary contender in the year of the high peaceweights. Sorry to kick a woman while she's down, but even the long-defunct Apostolic Palace has outscored her. To be fair, she's definitely not the worst leader in the competition, for she almost always starts well and does have a gameplan that is capable of delivering fast victories. However, it should be abundantly clear that she has serious military and diplomatic weaknesses that have so far prevented her from accomplishing anything.
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Check back later for the community predictions shortly before this game begins!
