One of the recurring features of past seasons of AI Survivor have been our "alternate histories", running additional iterations on the same maps to see if the same events would play out again. The first game of the season kicked us off with a Mansa Musa dud performance and a rather surprising Asoka victory. Was that something which would unfold in each game? This was a topic that called for more investigation with alternate history scenarios. Following the conclusion of previous seasons of AI Survivor, I had gone back and investigated some of the completed games and found that they tended to play out in the same patterns over and over again. While there was definitely some variation from game to game, and occasionally an unlikely outcome took place, for the most part the games were fairly predictable based on the personality of the AI leaders and the terrain of each particular map. Would we see the same patterns play out again and again on this particular map?
The original inspiration to run these alternate histories came from Wyatan. He decided to rerun the Season Four games 20 times each and publish the results. The objective in his words was twofold:
- See how random the prediction game actually is. There's a natural tendency when your predictions come true to go "See! Told you!", and on the contrary to dismiss the result as a mere fluke when things don't go the way you expected them to (pleading guilty there, Your Honour). Hopefully, with 20 iterations, we'll get a sense of how flukey the actual result was, and of how actually predictable each game was.
- Get a more accurate idea of each leader's performance. Over 6 seasons, we'll have a 75 game sample. That might seem a lot, but it's actually a very small sample, with each leader appearing 5-10 times only. With this much larger sample, we'll be able able to better gauge each leader's performance, in the specific context of each game. So if an AI is given a dud start, or really tough neighbours, it won't perform well. Which will only be an indication about the balance of that map, and not really about that AI's general performance. But conversely, by running the game 20 times, we'll get dumb luck out of the equation.
Wyatan did a fantastic job of putting together data for the Season Four games and since then we've continued to use the same general format. First we'll post the resulting data and then discuss some of the findings in more detail. Keep in mind that everything we discuss in these alternate histories is map-specific: it pertains to these leaders with these starting positions in this game. As Wyatan mentioned, an AI leader could be a powerful figure on this particular map while still being a weak leader in more general terms. This particular set of alternate histories were run by TheOneAndOnlyAtesh - many thanks for spending so much time on this task! 
Now on to the results:
Game One | Game Two | Game Three | Game Four | Game Five
Game Six | Game Seven | Game Eight | Game Nine | Game Ten
Game Eleven | Game Twelve | Game Thirteen | Game Fourteen | Game Fifteen
Game Sixteen | Game Seventeen | Game Eighteen | Game Nineteen | Game Twenty
(Note : "A" column tracks the number of war declarations initiated by the AI, "D" the number of times the AI is declared upon, "F" the points for finish ranking, and "K" the number of kills.)
TheOneAndOnlyAtesh: This was the set I had the most personal interest in running as I was perhaps Asoka's loudest and proudest supporter, jumping to get Asoka on my Fantasy team and crowing to anyone who would listen that he was a true contender in this game despite his insane economic competition and his central positioning between two low peaceweight warmongers. Let's say I was tooting my own horn when Asoka won a dominant victory. However, did I celebrate too soon? Did I just happen to get insanely lucky on a dubious opinion? After all, the livestream game was a bit weird and exhibited signs of being an unreplicable outlier.
It turns out, I was vindicated and then some, as Asoka surpassed even my highest expectations. He tied for the most kills (and was unlucky to not have had more), had a 75% playoff advancement rate, and only died a single time in an outlier Kublai snowball. In fact, these results belie how truly dominant Asoka was, as there were multiple games where Asoka was a total runaway... only to come in second to either Hatty or Lizzy winning what I call "bullshit culture", where they would switch up the slider at an extremely early date, hide behind their buddies, and win by culture from an otherwise irrelevant position - literally all twelve of their combined victories were by Culture. In fact, if Hatty and Lizzy did not have two cultural traits, Asoka, at least from my eye test, would have won at least a dozen games and had an even higher playoff advancement rate. Just look at the screenshots and/or the game summaries in Appendix A. (Game 3, where Asoka swiped a Diplomatic victory when Lizzy was five turns away from a cultural victory, was pretty satisfying to watch.) To add a cherry on top, Asoka of all leaders had two super fast Domination wins, which should be pretty telling.
So why was Asoka so powerful especially against such elite economic competition and with zero way to pull off any cultural bullshit? At first glance, his position indeed does not look that impressive. He had an overly forested capital with no obvious early sources of commerce, sandwiched between two rather bloodthirsty warmongers. He did have a decent river system, but Lizzy seemed to have an even better one that scaled way better in the long term.
It turns out, Asoka's land was way better than it looked, especially when compared to some of the other spots. While his capital was extremely forest-heavy, the three non-forested tiles consisted of two dry corn and a riverside plains hill. That's three strong early game tiles, a more than good enough foundation especially for building settlers; he was often one of the first leaders to reach an X amount of cities. Conventional wisdom states that AIs struggle with overly forested starts, but as long as there are still good tiles to work, the AIs can handle it. Having Fast Workers certainly helped too. If anything, those forests turned into a boon, as when Asoka teched Bronze Working (which he typically did far sooner than in the Actual Game) he was able to further accelerate his start. Furthermore, once cleared, his capital was situated in a fertile river valley, allowing his high tempo start to scale in the lategame.
Asoka's land advantage did not end there:
Vijayanagara is about as good as it gets for an early city, as it gave an instant city connection through the river, had an ivory AND a plains cow for production, and a dry rice plus floodplains for food (and later commerce). Pataliputra, while a more conservative backline settle, is still an excellent pumper spot, being on a plains hill and having two Animal Husbandry resources, and it would eventually become a powerhouse Moai city. This three city core was an excellent foundation for Asoka to rapidly expand into more high quality cities, both in the jungle (which held a juicy double gems spot) and in the Antarctic:
There are furs and silver for easily accessible happiness, and two excellent backfill spots, one that can share a corn with the cap and claim furs, and another excellent city that claimed a fish and silver. Essentially, Asoka's eighth city would be on par with, if not better than, most of his competitor's fourth or fifth cities. (For example, compare the fish/silver/furs/iron spot with Hatshepsut always having to ruin a gold tile with her second or third city). With all those happiness resources, plus religion (he founded one of the first three religions in nearly every replay), plus tech preferences that steered him towards early Monarchy or the Pyramids for further happiness, Asoka would effectively secure a top two spot for himself by Turn 100 by netting himself an empire of at least eight or so strong, size 12+ cities and being 500 points ahead of the next best leader, much like in the Actual Game which was a particularly ridiculous performance. In a very cramped map that filled up quickly, Asoka's setup turned out to be quite overpowered.
There is still more, as Asoka held all the cards from a diplomatic perspective. One major reason Asoka was written off by the community at large was his central positioning between Cyrus and Kublai. Instead, that should have been all the more reason to support him. It turns out, being next to the two peaceweight screwed leaders is a great thing, and Asoka almost always benefitted in some way from the eventual dissolution of his two Southern neighbors.
Furthermore, concerns about early wars turned out to be null and void. Kublai preferred to tussle with Mansa like he did in the Actual Game, while Cyrus was far more likely to end up fighting Hatshepsut and/or Lizzy; the Persians were also more likely to march cross map to attack Mansa early than they were to poke the Indian bear. (It certainly helped that Asoka was good at spreading his religion to the two low peaceweights, and his best games saw these two serve as unwitting attack dogs until they had outlived their usefulness.) Really, this was a win-win for Asoka, as getting attacked early was actually good for him. When he did get attacked early, he was always strong enough to easily flick away his invaders, and he tended to gain more cities from early conflicts, often from the peace treaty.
Free Religion was, as I had foreseen, a major factor in Asoka's strength, as Asoka would flip to that civic at first opportunity. By doing so, he 1) ensured that he did not have to worry too much about being in a globally unpopular religion (if there was one aspect Asoka was actively bad at, it was spreading his religion) and 2) almost guaranteed an irontight bond between him and Lizzy, who both have the Free Religion favorite civic, meaning that in games where they were the top two leaders there was virtually no way to edge them out. There were also a couple of games where Asoka built Shwedagon Paya extremely early (around Turn 125-130ish) and immediately flipped into his favorite civic, the resultant boost to happiness and science further accentuating his game. Add in the fact that Asoka really is no slouch at teching, and you get the ingredients for an absolute monster on this map. In fact, the most common way for him to not win was for another leader to wish upon a shooting star for a Cultural victory.
Regarding the other leaders: Cyrus was just hopeless here due to peaceweight and his cramped, jungly territory. With the Persians barely registering as a civ here, Kublai was on his own, and it was the most uphill of battles for him to overcome what was effectively a 1v4 situation. The two low peaceweights could not even skate on the religious goodwill of Asoka due to his aforementioned propensity towards Free Religion.
Lizzy and Hatty were the two other viable leaders. This was partially due to having cultural bullshit up their sleeves, but even outside of that, they were relevant players, Hatty due to a robust shrine and wonder economy and Lizzy due to her Financial/Land That Doesn't Totally Suck traits. They also had good access to the most screwed leaders on this map. However, their setup did not quite match up to Asoka's, meaning they had to resort to hijinks to match his win rate. Hatty's land was the flat desert version of Cyrus' jungle problem, and while she usually started fast, if she failed to leverage that tempo to a cultural win or a conquest of Persia her vastly inferior land quality would inevitably cause her to fall behind. Lizzy had the opposite conundrum, as while she scaled really well, she typically started slowly in these games due to a relative lack of foodhammers; she served as yet another reminder that we should be a little wary of flood plain heavy starts when reading maps. If these two were not winning, they had some odds at second place, and ultimately they served as co-secondary contenders, if only due to bullshit culture.
The elephant in this room: what the heck, Mansa? What in the name of Sullla happened to you? If there was one pattern truly replicable from the Actual Game, it was that Mansa Mediocre certainly lived up to that name in this setup. As it turns out, Mansa's land was horrible. There are no redeeming qualities to it, it was just a bunch of dry plains tiles with little in the way of resources and commerce.
Mansa's econ was downright nightmarish from start to finish, and the Mali found themselves stuffed into a boiled yak carcass over and over again, netting the highest First To Die rate despite an extremely favorable peaceweight situation. Even the wimpiest of peaceniks can sniff out weakness, and every leader made sure to take some bite out of him at some point over this set. His "Mansa Moron" war against Lizzy was a real fall-out-of-your-chair moment in the livestream... but as it turned out, the Mali and English fought a decent bit in this set, although the English were the primary instigators of such conflicts. To add insult to injury, Mansa did not have the best metals situation, and there were two games where he was run over extremely early with only Skirmishers and Chariots to defend himself, leading to runaway performances for his conquerors, including Kublai's one win.
Religions were pretty random from game to game, with the only almost-guarantee being that Asoka would found one of the first three (he only failed to do so once); the other five leaders all had at least semi-decent odds at those. All religion really did was impact the first war declarations, as otherwise the peaceweight divide was way too large for religion to truly ever smoothen things over, and these AIs often switched into a later religion or Free Religion to cancel out any bonds. A typical game would see the map fill up fast, with only snowball settles available by Turn 100 - while Asoka leveraged all the factors I had mentioned to establish a stranglehold on a top two spot. The early set of wars would generally see Kublai fight either Asoka or Mansa, and Cyrus fight either Hatty or Lizzy, although there certainly were deviations; Lizzy sometimes fought Mansa early, and Asoka sometimes turned his attention to Cyrus instead.
By Turn 200 or so the dust would settle and there would be 2-3 remaining relevant leaders. The rest of the game hinged on the luck of whether or not Lizzy or Hatty had accumulated enough holy cities (they required a shockingly low amount) to bullshit a cultural win, or if they were either crippled by the earlier warring or did not have the holy cities and thus had to try to outdo a larger and taller Asoka. There were not many wars in this game, with the already low war counter inflated by Defensive Pacts and bribery (you can tell if a leader was bribed by finding a -2 "you brought a war ally against us!" malus), but I would not say these games were totally peaceful lovefests, as even without Kublai and Cyrus to muck things up there was a good amount of infighting between the high peaceweights, especially since two of them could plot at Pleased. A lot of these wars also just stalemated until one party had reached an untenable tech lead, and running these games made it apparent that these ultra high peaceweight builders are not really the most effective fighters.
Onto the individual leader summaries!
Asoka of India
Wars Declared: 24
Wars Declared Upon: 24
Survival Percentage: 95%
Finishes: 7 Firsts, 8 Seconds (51 points)
Kills: 13
Overall Score: 64 points
This set should dispel the myth for once and for all that Asoka is a cultural leader, or a "lesser Gandhi". Not only did he never win by culture (or come close to), but also he won through each of the other three victory conditions multiple times. With just one cultural trait, and against this field, he had virtually no shot of winning by culture, and in many ways that was a good thing as it allowed him to focus purely on development and military. With the exception of an unstoppable Game 7 Kublai snowball, Asoka never faltered on the military end, and in fact secured a top two spot in multiple games by siccing a gigantic Elepult Army (which quickly became Knights and Trebs) at Cyrus or Kublai, or in a couple of instances Lizzy or Mansa. In fact, Asoka often emulated his real life trajectory, starting out as the conqueror of worlds before seeking enlightenment and rejecting violence later on... if he was allowed to, that is, as sometimes he would be dragged unwittingly into a late conflict and lay the smackdown on the unlucky sap who had committed the crime of interrupting his Jedi Force meditations.
With that said, Asoka's weaknesses as a general AI were pretty apparent, especially looking at his 1:1 offensive and defensive war counter. He is just too passive of a leader for someone without the cultural victory option, and while part of this can be chalked up to him being Pleased locked out of conflicts, it was still rather telling that his successes often relied on outside factors rather than his own initiative, whether it was being bribed or Defensive Pacted into conflict or just having other leaders suicide into him. In fact, the most common way for Asoka to miss the playoffs here was for his inactivity to allow another leader to surpass him in score, consigning him to the Wildcard when Lizzy or Hatty won by bullshit culture. His playstyle was not the best, with Asoka partaking in some brazen Willem Gambits that only went unpunished because of his forgiving situation and fast teching, and he also struggled with barbarian activity on occasion.
One major way the real game turned out to be an anomaly was Asoka's insanely fast Spaceship win. Asoka teched decently well, but usually well enough to win around Turn 320-330, which is just not fast enough to go against a cultural push. Hence, his fastest games were actually either Domination or pseudo-Domination wins (which stemmed from Kublai suiciding into him), and one of his space wins came at the late date of Turn 371. To be fair, that was a very bloody game filled with stalemated conflicts. With all that said, this set painted an interesting picture about how a mid tier leader can rise above even some of the top economic leaders in AI Survivor.
Asoka Airhead Award:
Hatshepsut of Egypt
Wars Declared: 23
Wars Declared Upon: 10
Survival Percentage: 90%
Finishes: 6 Firsts, 4 Seconds (38 points)
Kills: 8
Overall Score: 46 points
Elizabeth of England
Wars Declared: 27
Wars Declared Upon: 20
Survival Percentage: 75%
Finishes: 6 Firsts, 3 Seconds (36 points)
Kills: 8
Overall Score: 44 points
These two had identical playstyles, which led to completely identical finish and kill counts. (For the purposes of this discussion I am not counting Hatty's extra second place finish, which came behind Kublai's outlier Domination victory), and one would need more replays to ascertain which leader was stronger, or if they had around equal chances. There were typically three outcomes for these two queens. The first one was they accumulated enough holy cities to win by Culture. While most of their wins saw them go unpunished for dubious cultural play, each did have a couple of more deserving wins, where they conquered someone and/or teched well enough that they probably would have won the space race if they so wished. Lizzy only needed TWO holy cities to go for a cultural win as compared to Hatty's three, but that was counterbalanced by Hatty being better at founding religions while also having shrines and wonders like the Great Lighthouse to bolster her early economy. The second outcome was that they did not have enough holy cities to win, resulting in them continuing to tech into the lategame. This almost always led to either second place or Wildcard relegation, as one would lose to the other's bullshit cultural victory and/or be behind Asoka in all metrics (this was essentially Lizzy's outcome in the live). The third and worst outcome for these two was complete, total irrelevance, or even elimination, which came if they lost the series of early and medieval wars that defined the first 200 turns (which was Hatty's outcome in the official game).
On the military front, both queens had strengths and weaknesses. Hatty's corner position was much safer (especially from Kublai) and she had the best access to the screwed Cyrus, but her land itself was low in production, and there were games where she only had her five or so flat, desert choked cities and proved completely impotent, being First To Die in both of her eliminations. A quick disclaimer: Hatty was generally FAR more competent on the military front and pretty much never repeated her "1100 AD War Chariot rush" style of fighting, and in light of her territory her fighting actually impressed me greatly. The only time War Chariots proved a poison pill for her was if it tempted her to launch an early war without any development, which happened in her two eliminations, both of which were First To Die games. I think she just founded too many religions in the livestream, and could not handle the burden of fighting Cyrus AND building religious infrastructure for five religions; having some cultural competition was good for her.
Conversely, Lizzy's central position afforded more opportunities, but also more risk, and she had a higher elimination rate as a result of occasional dogpiles or being caught in a snowball. In general, she was a real power player on the military front, especially once she got Redcoats. It turns out, Lizzy is actually kind of a backstabber, a fact that has been suggested in recent Discord discussions. There were even some rare instances where she took jabs at Asoka, although fighting India never went well for her. Other than being good at dogpiling, however, Lizzy was not a great fighter, in one instance struggling to conquer Mansa despite fighting with INFANTRY against MEDIEVAL UNITS. All in all, this was a respectable title defense for Lizzy, and I just feel bad for poor Hatty, who happened to lowroll once again in the livestream. These two may have significant weaknesses, but one cannot deny that they will always be contenders given a friendly diplomatic environment. With that said, I now completely understand the general community frustration with Cultural victories. Should researching Divine Right first really be the difference between victory and irrelevance?
Hatshepsut Halfwit Award: Launching a cross map War Chariot rush on Kublai Khan in Game 8, only to let herself get conquered by the Mongolians.
Elizabeth Eejit Award: Voting Asoka the winner through the UN, leaving her consigned to the Wildcard Game, when she was five turns away from winning by Culture.
Lizzy Loser Award: Suiciding into a friendly Asoka for absolutely no reason in Game 15.
Kublai Khan of Mongolia
Wars Declared: 48
Wars Declared Upon: 42
Survival Percentage: 15%
Finishes: 1 First, 1 Second (7 points)
Kills: 13
Overall Score: 20 points
I mean, kudos for trying. Mansa may have been screwed here, but he did do one thing: he locked Kublai into this Game 1 map against mostly high peaceweight leaders just to tell him:
Just like Mansa would get devoured if surrounded by warmongers, Kublai found himself surrounded by a group of much better techers who absolutely hated his guts, and there was little he could do about it, especially when fellow warmonger Cyrus was too weak to be of any help. Now, Kublai is partially to blame for his struggles, as despite having a strong territory base of his own (a reason why he had decent support in the prediction contest), his poor teching abilities were painfully obvious here. This was not a case where he could sometimes brute force his way to a smattering of successes; he was behind the curve technologically from the getgo, frequently fighting Medieval units with Swordsmen and Archers, Rifles with Elephants, Tanks with Grenadiers, you get the gist. There were so many games where Mongolia was one of the largest nations remaining on the map, only for Kublai's Riflemen to blink and find Indian or English helicopters wreaking havoc on their lands. It is exceedingly rare to see a leader only have one pre-Turn 200 death, yet only manage a 15% survival rate.
He did have two successes, but they were outliers that required essentially every domino to fall in his favor. His Game 7 win saw him solo conquer Mansa Metalless early with an (admittedly impressive) Keshik rush, and then use that momentum to kill Asoka and finally have a territory base that could keep up. Even then, he would have lost to Lizzy if she had not foolishly turned up the culture slider (one certainly cannot bullshit a culture win against Kublai), and she was still a few turns from victory when he attacked. His other playoff finish in Game 8 stemmed from the Hatshepsut Halfwit game, and that was also the "Asoka Airhead" game where Asoka went wonder crazy and completely flubbed his expansion, allowing Kublai to stay strong enough to survive with his empire intact. (His one Wildcard finish also saw a more inert than typical Asoka, and that was also Lizzy's strongest performance which allowed her to win fast enough to prevent Kublai from doing anything suicidal.) A better economic warmonger like Hannibal or Gilgamesh might have done a little bit better, and 13 kills but a 15% survival rate is not the greatest look. The book is definitely out on Kublai at this point: he's a formidable leader given a favorable diplomatic environment, but his economic weaknesses get exposed when he is not in the peaceweight majority.
Kublai Klutz Award:
Kublai Kretin Award: Backstabbing Asoka when the Indians are about to murder Lizzy of all leaders in Game 14, then suddenly switching sides and killing Lizzy for Asoka, before deciding to suicide into the Indians anyways.
Mansa Musa of Mali
Wars Declared: 21
Wars Declared Upon: 30
Survival Percentage: 45%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 3 Seconds (6 points)
Kills: 7
Overall Score: 13 points
Literally every aspect of Mansa Mediocre's situation here was cursed, down to his capital which held a ruined seafood. There were no redeeming qualities to his land. It was cramped, it had little in the way of food, hammers, and ESPECIALLY commerce, and moreover, it had a bad metals conundrum, as Mansa Meme found out when Lizzy and Kublai respectively solo conquered him in Games 6 and 7. One could have put Frederick or Roosevelt there and gotten the same results. After all, the Financial trait requires some commerce to actually kick in. These results should not change anyone's opinion about Mansa, because his start was that bad. (Please do not take this as a criticism of Sullla's map selections - if anything, unbalanced maps and low quality starts are good for AI Survivor and tend to make these games far more interesting.)
To be fair, much like in the Actual Game, Mansa always started well, being one of the quickest leaders to get 5-6 cities. Unfortunately, it became apparent that even the Mansa Moneybags Machine could not support such awful territory:
Thus, from a competitive first fifty turns, his game would absolutely crater, and to make matters worse Mansa would usually get embroiled in an early conflict to forever set his game back. "Kublai grinds down Mansa over 200 turns and then dies horribly to Asoka/Lizzy" was a pretty common refrain, and even if Mansa survived that warring, it was typically as a complete husk, just hoping to make it to the end, which, as we witnessed in the real thing, was no guarantee.
In all fairness, Mansa was not TOTALLY hopeless, mainly because he still is Mansa. He actually managed a winning caliber performance in Game 5, where Asoka got hampered by barbarians and Mongolians, while the others fought a series of unproductive wars that allowed Mansa to become the tech runaway, a lead which was further cemented when Mansa backstabbed Lizzy (from a position of strength, mind you). While he ultimately came in second to a Hatshepsut bullshit culture victory, that game did show that Mansa had some semblance of a shot. He also came in second in Game 3, aided by the Elizabeth Eejit throw, and then conquered his way to a third second place in Game 19. Even with bad land, a leader with favorable diplomacy usually has some shot at skating by. One defining trait of Season 9 was how cursed Pool 1 leaders were, but part of this was because quite a few of the Pool 1 starting positions were duds. I shudder to imagine how many brain cells we collectively would have lost if Churchill or Darius ended up rolling this spot!
Mansa Moron Award: Blowing a guaranteed 2nd place spot in Game 18 by trying to attack Lizzy... WHILE SHE WAS IN A DEFENSIVE PACT WITH A RUNAWAY ASOKA.
Cyrus of Persia
Wars Declared: 19
Wars Declared Upon: 36
Survival Percentage: 30%
Finishes: 0 Firsts, 1 Second (2 points)
Kills: 1
Overall Score: 3 points
Someone like Hatty could have made Cyrus' setup work, but not a warmonger like Cyrus. His capital was not a particularly good fit for his starting techs, his surrounding territory had a lot of jungle and was not good enough post Iron Working (the good jungle was near Asoka's territory), and he was in the corner furthest away from Mansa, his only good avenue for conquest. While he had avoided Mysticism for a long time in the live, getting early culture (he did found a religion once in a while) was of little use; even getting Stonehenge Charismatic monuments did absolutely nothing to bolster his game! Occasionally he could leverage Imperialistic to crowd out Hatshepsut and establish some sort of base (which was how he finished second to Asoka in one game), but otherwise he was dependent on the goodwill of other leaders to somehow skirt his way to the Wildcard Game. There is not much else to say here, as Cyrus was screwed the moment his Opening Round field was rolled.
Cyrus Simpleton Award: Immortal rushing his religious ally Asoka in Game 4.
I do not think there has ever been such a massive disparity between community sentiment and the official results. Asoka had essentially no votes for the win (I distinctly remember only Smart Random.Org and I voting him to win, and I only chose him to win through my heart, seeing him as more of a second place leader) and barely any for second place, while he was a total runaway for the First To Die category. Moreover, Mansa was a strong favorite to win, yet turned out to be one of the weakest leaders on this map.
Now, I would not fault anyone for being totally flummoxed by this result, as every sign in the livestream itself pointed to the game being an outlier. The overall perception of the Actual Game was that it was an utter clownfest, and this was mostly correct, as based on the replays, the Actual Game combined a 99th percentile Asoka performance with all five of the other leaders playing pretty terribly. Asoka did a pretty crazy farmer's gambit in the live and went uncalled on it, and thus had a pretty ludicrous economic snowball that allowed him to win an insanely fast Spaceship win. Meanwhile, Kublai fudged his economy and failed to make any dent against Mansa (he was way better at conquering Mansa in the replays), Hatty was beelining Democracy while War Chariots were the core of her army, Cyrus was his usual inert self, Mansa went full-blown Moron mode, and Lizzy also played poorly, atypically avoiding Mysticism and culture for a long time and then suddenly lurching to culture mode when it was way too late (while starving her cities to single digits in the process). However, it spoke volumes about how strong Asoka's setup was that he was not remotely as strong as he was in the live, yet he still was the clear cut best performing leader. The lesson is, we cannot just look at names, and map factors play a major role in combating any inherent AI Survivor talent. I would actually be really curious to see switcharoos for this map.
Click the link above to read full summaries of each individual game!
Appendix B: Switcharoos
I thought the circumstances of this map made it a fascinating one for leader switching, and since I had time I decided to do some experimentation. In particular, I was most curious about Asoka's spot. It turns out, Asoka seemed to be a leader uniquely designed to succeed in this setup. First, I asked Slashin' (thank you!) to run five games with Gandhi in that spot, and the results were interesting: Mansa was much, much, MUCH stronger, winning two of those games. Gandhi was actually not that great, only winning one game by swiping a last minute Diplomatic victory. Turns out, being Peaceweight 10 makes one a little bit more susceptible to getting dogpiled, and many games saw Gandhi face too much early fighting to be viable, while Mansa could have some breathing room, kill Kublai, and contend from there.
I also tried other leaders there, including Victoria, Darius, Justinian, and Napoleon. Victoria and Darius were extremely disappointing and showed why they are middling leaders; Justinian and Napoleon, however, had a couple of really strong games, including a Turn 315 Spaceship win by Napoleon. Not bad for a crazy! However, I think Asoka has some unique strengths in this spot and field that made the spot a little bit better for him than for other leaders. Nevertheless, this was a fascinating map find and I think further switcheroo investigation would be really interesting.
