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:
Pacal of the Mayans
Traits: Financial, Expansive (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs:Mining, Mysticism
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Culture, Secondary Growth
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Hereditary Rule
Zealotry: High
Past Finishes: Three Championship losses, three playoff round eliminations, two opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 18
Total Medals: 4 First Places, 5 Second Places 
Total Kills: 9 
Overall Power Ranking: 39 points, 4th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Pacal has a top tier trait combination, with the amazing Financial and the strong Expansive to help him get those Financial cottages up and running even faster. He also gets the Holkan, which helps his early defense, and the excellent Ball Court, which adds a major midgame happiness bonus. Lastly, Pacal gets the below average Mysticism and Mining for his starting techs, which is only useful for chasing a religion out of the gate. At least it has a higher ceiling than the Mysticism/Hunting combo that many religious leaders are cursed with. Pacal is a peaceful economic leader, as he holds a shockingly low aggression rating (2.8/10) and unit-build tendency (4/10) while his flavours are Culture and Growth. He's not as suicidally insane as other peaceniks, however, as he will defend himself and attack leaders he is "Pleased" with. You can usually expect Pacal to pursue an early religion right out of the gate and to try to rack up more religions later on, although with only one cultural trait he's not nearly as likely to pursue a Cultural victory as say Huayna or Mansa. He is one of very few low peaceweight economic leaders however, and indeed the best answer to "what if leaders like Hatshepsut or Darius had a low peaceweight" is probably Pacal. He's not as diplomatically safe as fellow Financial PW2 Huayna in warmonger fields because he has no warmonger respect, but with a base attitude of +1 he does sometimes get more diplomatic flexibility, plus having Hereditary Rule as a favorite civic doesn't hurt. An ideal Pacal game probably sees the warmongers and peaceniks fight it out amongst each other while he sits back and builds an insurmountable tech lead.
Past Performance: Pacal's combination of economic focus and low peaceweight have proven highly effective at moving him through the tournament, and he's one of only two leaders to have reached the playoffs on six separate occasions. Pacal has convincingly shown that he's able to play the economic game and play it well, using that avenue to pull out to an unstoppable tech lead in all of his wins. His second-place finishes have been considerably less impressive, generally coming when he's far behind the winner and somewhat lucky to be advancing at all. One notable exception to this was in his Season Eight opener, where Pacal rebounded from a slow and ill-fitting ultra-coastal start to snipe 2nd place from right underneath Hatshepsut's nose despite being surrounded by peaceniks. That said, when Pacal fails, he can fail hard - there's been multiple games where he was attacked before even connecting metals, leading to very early exits, and he followed up his Season Eight opener by blowing a beautiful playoff start when he foolishly attempted a Holkan rush on Hammurabi's hard-countering Bowmen and almost immediately started LOSING cities. Overall, he has similar strengths and weaknesses to other major economic leaders, but his peaceweight, favorite civic, and a general understanding of when to and when not to attack has allowed him to enjoy the consistent success that most of them have lacked.
Suryavarman of the Khmer
Traits: Creative, Expansive (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs:Hunting, Mining
Peace Weight: 1
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Gold, Secondary Culture
Warmonger Respect: +1
Base Attitude: 0
Favorite Civic: Organized Religion
Zealotry: High
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, four playoff round eliminations, two wildcard eliminations, one opening round elimination
Total Games Played: 17
Total Medals: 3 First Places, 3 Second Places
Total Kills: 12
Overall Power Ranking: 33 points, 9th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Suryavarman has a lot of power packed into his kit even if it sometimes seems to be pulling in six different directions at once. He has the quintessential early game trait pairing of Creative and Expansive, two traits that help to drive expansion and to claim land quickly - indeed it may be one of the best pure early-game focused parings in the game, good enough that it is sometimes chosen ahead of Financial pairings in unmodded Civ4 MP games. Suryavarman's Khmer civ is a bit weaker, with decent starting techs but mediocre-at-best features in the Ballista Elephant and Baray. The Elephant is especially sad - for replacing one of the most overpowered units in the game, it really provides no meaningful difference. At least Sury gets a pull to the essential Construction tech to protect him from too much pre-Catapult warring. As far as Suryavarman's AI personality goes, he has a surprisingly aggressive setup for someone with good economic traits and research flavors (carrying a Gold/Culture pairing). Suryavarman has a high aggression rating (7.6/10), a very low peace weight, and a fairly high emphasis on training units (6/10). However, Suryavarman also positively loves building wonders (8/10), an odd fit for someone with his militaristic bent and expansion-focused traits. He also heavily emphasizes religion in his diplomacy, and can definitely be inclined to found one despite his poor starting techs for religious purposes. Along with the Creative border pops and an ability to plot at Pleased, this is not an easy neighbor to live with. He can be a highly unpredictable leader, either charging into multiple wars or sitting back to construct wonders in peace.
Past Performance: Suryavarman has a long track record of success that has helped him maintain a Top 10 ranking in the leaderboards. He's made the playoffs more often than not, scored points in seven out of eight seasons, and came quite close to winning the inaugural season until his economy sputtered too much. Sury has proven himself quite capable of snowballing ahead and steamrolling his opposition; this is responsible for all three of his wins, and he would have secured a fourth such win in Season Seven if not for a truly remarkable performance by Hannibal on the same map alongside a strange map quirk that was causing Sury to build and maintain a grotesquely large standing army. When things don't go so well for Sury, he's still often able to hang in there, either backdooring second place or surviving to the Wildcard game for another shot. Of course, he's had his share of failed outings as well, struggling economically while still falling into the "warmonger with builder tech preferences" trap, and the most recent season has put a significant damper on his reputation. In his Opening Round game, blessed with a flood-plains start and two rather unthreatening neighbors, he for whatever reason freaked out against the barbarians and crashed his economy by building way too many warriors, all for naught as those grunts failed to protect him from the barbarians anyway. While he survived to the Wildcard Game clinging on to an empire consisting of a patch of Arctic nuclear wasteland, his next game was not much better, once again failing to properly handle the barbarians before being the first domino to fall in his conqueror's eventual snowball. When Sury puts it all together and gets off to a fast start, he is a frightening foe, but he is equally capable of terrible performances that make everyone question his overall viability.
Julius Caesar of Rome
Traits: Imperialistic, Organized (0 culture traits)
Starting Techs: Fishing, Mining
Peace Weight: 4
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Military, Secondary Production
Warmonger Respect: +1
Base Attitude: 0
Favorite Civic: Representation
Zealotry: Low to Medium
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, three playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, three opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 14
Total Medals: 4 First Places, 1 Second Place
Total Kills: 15
Overall Power Ranking: 37 points, 6th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Caesar is given the Imperialistic and Organized traits, a nice pairing as more land = more everything in AI Survivor, and Organized helps Caesar pay for his expansion. His unique items are the busted Praetorian unique unit alongside the poor Forum, but the 8 Strength Praetorian still makes this a top tier combo. Lastly, Caesar has the boom-or-bust Fishing/Mining starting techs. Caesar, more than most leaders, depends on having the right starting resources, as seafood, iron, and precious metals all greatly speed up his snowball, as in his dominant opening game of Season Four. And make no mistake, Caesar's game plan is to snowball. With an above average aggression rating (7.6/10), unit preference (6/10) and military/production flavors, Caesar is far more likely than not to start an early war, and with a neutral peaceweight (4), all opponents are fair game for an attack. However, in early wars Caesar has a serious ace up his sleeve: praetorians. These guys are so strong that they almost break the game, often barging their way through city walls like no other unit can. Caesar depends heavily on an extremely successful landgrab using Imperialistic, an early conquest using praetorians, or both. From there, Caesar's gameplay looks similar to many other militaristic AIs, using his extra land to out-produce everyone else. If Caesar is unable to get his snowball rolling, his poor economic skills and aggressive personality usually mean he will fall behind and get himself killed, making him another feast-or-famine type leader.
Past Performance: Caesar is still riding a high from the early days of AI Survivor, where he was the most feared of the warmongers and scored enough points that, even with nothing in the last few seasons, he'd still be a seeded leader today. While he did win a game in Season Two, the true highlight of his career was an exemplary Season Three where he scored two strong wins, a bronze medal (which was close to gold or silver) in the Championship, and SEVEN kills across the season, one of only two leaders to ever accomplish this feat. That was the high water mark however, and Alternate Histories have since cast doubt on Caesar's Season Three games. Since the Season Four removal of Deity starting techs, he has lost his spark, and these two events may be correlated. Season Four saw Caesar adopt a different approach, going pacifist for a game and succeeding thanks to a lovely starting location, winning another dominant victory but with zero kills. Season Five saw him return to the warpath with modest success - his first second-place finish and four more kills - but it was still a far cry from his earlier successes, and he's come up completely empty in the past three seasons. He's also had trouble with very different fields lately, first being unable to keep up in tech with peaceful groups for two seasons, completely failing in two warmonger-filled games in Season Seven, and then stagnating from a high quantity but low quality start in a more balanced Season Eight field. As a result, despite his high all-time ranking, Caesar is increasingly feeling like a has-been whose glory days are long past. Can he ever recapture that magic, or is his economy simply too weak to reliably compete in the modern landscape?
Pericles of Greece
Traits: Creative, Philosophical (2 culture traits)
Starting Techs:Hunting, Fishing
Peace Weight: 6
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Flavors: Primary Production, Secondary Science
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Representation
Zealotry: Medium
Past Finishes: One Championship loss, two playoff round eliminations, one wildcard elimination, four opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 14
Total Medals: 3 First Places, 1 Second Place
Total Kills: 3
Overall Power Ranking: 20 points, tied 23rd place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Pericles is decent at pursuing a Cultural victory and that has historically been his best avenue to success. Pericles has an excellent trait combination for chasing after cultural pursuits with the Creative + Philosophical pairing, combining cheap libraries and universities and theatres while also granting him the ever-so important double culture trait pairing. He is saddled with bad starting techs and the iffy Phalanx, but the synergy that Creative Odeons provide is easily the saving grace of his Greek civilization. Pericles the AI leader has a peaceful bent in general, with a low aggression rating (3.3/10) and a modest build unit preference (4/10). Pericles would clearly much rather spend his time building wonders instead (8/10), which he'll do with great frequency in each game. Unlike many of the other peaceful leaders, Pericles doesn't place much of an emphasis on religion and rarely founds one of his own faiths. His research flavors are Production and Science, which makes him a bit of a strange bird since he doesn't have a Culture or Religion tech, and this has been a hindrance as Pericles can find himself unable to cash in on his biggest strengths in more cultural leaning fields. Overall, he's a leader who wants to be left alone (and has a neutral peaceweight to somewhat help in that regard) and can become very dangerous if he gets that wish.
Past Performance: Pericles's career got off to a promising start. Both of his first two opening round games ended up being largely controlled by high peaceweight leaders, allowing him to cash in with Diplomatic and Cultural victories, and a second place finish from a more hostile playoff field in Season Two seemed to confirm his aptitude. But then he just kind of... stagnated, scoring a single point over the next five seasons. His failed performances have varied; some really were beyond his control, especially when some psycho named Mahatma Gandhi attacked him early in Season Seven, but there's also been several games where he messed up himself or simply failed to accomplish anything. The Season Six opener in particular saw him gifted a great start, only to lose one of his first cities to the barbarians for an extended period of time and never fully recover. (This was very unlucky as he dominated the alternate histories for that game.) He appeared to hit rock bottom in the Season Eight opening round, where he torpedoed his game by atypically spending his early beakers on a religion despite an ill-fitting start, catastrophically delaying his development. However, despite having Alex breathing down his neck, he somehow survived to the finish and then trudged his way to his first victory since Season Two in a winner-takes-all Wildcard game. Although his position was too squeezed to do anything in the playoffs, perhaps last season can be the start of an Athenian reemergence. Overall, it seems that while Pericles is capable enough to sometimes get it done in a favorable situation, he lacks that special spark needed to be a truly good or interesting leader, in part due to being given cultural tools while having completely non-culture related research priorities.
Qin Shi Huang of China
Traits: Industrious, Protective (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs:Agriculture, Mining
Peace Weight: 2
Declares War at Pleased Relations? YES
Flavors: Primary Production, Secondary Growth
Warmonger Respect: +2
Base Attitude: +1
Favorite Civic: Bureaucracy
Zealotry: Medium
Past Finishes: One troll Championship participation trophy, Three playoff round eliminations, four opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 14
Total Medals: 0 First Places, 5 Second Places
Total Kills: 3
Overall Power Ranking: 13 points, tied 34th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Qin Shi Huang has the unfortunate penalty of carrying the worst trait combination in Civ4 for AI Survivor purposes. The Industrious trait causes the AI leaders to tie up their cities on wonders in lieu of expanding out across the map, while the Protective trait offers virtually no advantage save for "dying slower". Qin's saving grace is the Chinese civilization, with its amazing starting tech combination and powerful Cho-Ko-Nu unique unit that does redeem Protective somewhat. Qin's AI personality is mostly that of a peaceful builder, as he has a low aggression rating (3.9/10), a dangerously low unit emphasis (2/10), and a fairly high wonder emphasis (6/10). This economic setup is oddly paired with a low peace weight and the ability to plot war at "Pleased" relations. This is likely the reason why Qin has outperformed his terrible trait pairing, as being an economy-focused leader who gets a seat at the table with the big baddies is generally a good thing. It's too bad for Qin that he doesn't get more useful traits to pair with his otherwise promising setup - imagine if he had kept his pre-expansion Financial/Industrious trait pairing!
Past Performance: Qin has never truly risen to greatness, most of the time churning out middle-of-the-road performances, not playing really disastrously or sinking his own game (with a couple of noteworthy exceptions), but also never enjoying any great successes. He's managed to complete a few joint conquests to build into decent positions, but that's it - none of his games have seen him really pull out in front or become a dominant leader. One key obstacle that has prevented him from ever translating early advantages into wins is a tendency to avoid vital military techs in the Renaissance Era, something that wrecked his Season Two game that he probably should have won. Qin's ability to easily get along with warmongers (+2 warmonger respect, plus his base +1 relations) has perhaps been his biggest asset, helping him to hang around and secure some second place finishes that he otherwise would not have gotten. With that said, his more recent showings have been more buzzworthy for a variety of reasons. There was his awful Season Six opener where he overexpanded and crashed his economy. He then somewhat redeemed himself with a strong Season Seven opener where he took the majority of cities from an early dogpile and rode that to a competitive second place, and his Season Eight journey to the Championship game saw him execute to perfection a seemingly risky backstab of his religious ally Saladin to secure 2nd place behind Mansa. Unfortunately, his mediocrity has been especially apparent in the playoffs - four appearances, and there is very little to remember about most of them. I guess in the Season Eight playoffs he seized the moniker of "least impressive Championship qualification of all time", where he once again crashed his economy from a bad start before somehow advancing by virtue of being the only leader whose beaches a runaway Churchill did not land on, and, well, he was obviously the imposter among the Season Eight goodie two shoes championship lineup. Don't be surprised if he manages to slip through, but don't expect him to be one of the big movers in his games either.
Sitting Bull of the Native Americans
Traits: Philosophical, Protective (1 culture trait)
Starting Techs:Agriculture, Fishing
Peace Weight: 8
Declares War at Pleased Relations? NO
Flavors: Primary Military, Secondary Growth
Warmonger Respect: 0
Base Attitude: 0
Favorite Civic: Environmentalism
Zealotry: Nonexistant
Past Finishes: Two playoff round eliminations, six opening round eliminations
Total Games Played: 10
Total Medals: 1 First Place, 1 Second Place
Total Kills: 1
Overall Power Ranking: 8 points, 46th place (out of 52 leaders)
Personality: Sitting Bull is stuck with the Philosophical and Protective traits; in other words, the two worst performing traits in the entirety of AI Survivor, although one can argue that Philosophical performs badly because it is foisted on leaders like Frederick, Lincoln, and, well, this guy. Sitting Bull also gets the terrible (for AI Survivor) Dog Soldier - the last thing a militaristic high peaceweight leader needs is weaker Axes - and the Totem Pole, which is like having double the Protective trait. At least he won't avoid Mysticism for ages on end and has above average starting techs, but his overall tools nevertheless leave much to be desired. As a personality, Sitting Bull is a series of absurd contradictions. He builds a lot of units (8/10), doesn't bother with wonders (0/10), and has Military and Growth research flavors. This all sounds like the makings of an aggressive leader in the vein of Ragnar or Alex, and yet, Sitting Bull has a lower than average aggression rating (4.3/10). He simply doesn't attack very often - he can't even plot at Pleased. He also has a high peace weight, preferring the likes of Gandhi and Elizabeth to Montezuma and Shaka. This, along with his traits, largely leads to an AI that constructs a strong military that he doesn't use, and a weak economy to boot, with Sitting Bull struggling to keep up in tech with even the rabid warmongers. It doesn't paint an impressive picture, and as a general rule Sitting Bull doesn't just start in a deep hole; he's unwilling to dig himself out. Even worse is that outside of his peaceweight, he has difficulties making friends in the harsh world of AI Survivor - he does not care at all about religion, he won't join coalitions, he doesn't get any warmonger respect ratings, and his favorite civic comes way too late to matter. Making matters worse is that Sitting Bull LOVES Espionage, and if he survives for a while, a humongous IF, he will often, erhm, poison his relationships with his peers. He is essentially the Karen of AI Survivor, demanding you stay out of his business while snooping into yours at the first possible opportunity. Most of the time, "Sitting Duck" usually just goes irrelevant, antagonizes everyone, and waits to be taken out of his misery.
Past Performance: Heavily armed pacifism has not proved a winning strategy in these games, and there's a legitimate case to be made that Sitting Bull is the worst leader in the entire competition. He's only finished off a single opponent in the course of eight seasons despite his militarism, and his two highlights are losing a space "race" to Frederick and an unusual Cultural win where he somehow steamrolled three more technologically advanced Financial leaders at the same time to claim his one victory (ok, that one was impressive). To be completely fair to the guy, he has gotten a pretty bad set of map draws, frequently surrounded by hostile foes that tear into and cripple him before he has the chance to do anything for himself. However, his performances when this hasn't happened haven't suggested that we've been missing out either, typically featuring... not much of anything. Even games where he starts strong tend to see him eventually fall behind maintaining a large army without properly leveraging his strength. His only good games so far have come together with Frederick, so the two leaders seem to have some bizarre synergy, but barring them starting on the same map, history suggests that neither is likely to accomplish anything of note.
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Check back later for the community predictions shortly before this game begins!
