Civ4 AI Survivor Season Nine Game Six: Alternate Histories

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Hello folks. This is Sulla here. We have a special video. This is an emergency alternate histories for game six which took place this past week in season 9 of Civ 4 AI Survivor. This is something I've done in the past when there has been a game where I couldn't wait. I had to play out alternate histories for the game to find out what would happen if we replayed the map. If you're new to this concept, we do this after the season's over normally for each game. We will go back. Someone in the community will replay a game 20 times and see what happens if we just replay the same map over and over and over again. Would the map play out the same way? Would the same leaders win? Would different conditions play out? Blah blah blah. And the idea is by replaying the map 20 times in these alternate histories, we can get a better sense of what leaders are strong, which leaders are weak, what was typical about the game we saw, what was weird or unusual, etc. In the context of game six, if you watch the video recording, you guys probably know I was very frustrated that Gandhi had ended up winning. There was this sequence of events that just seemed like every lucky break kept going in Gandhi's favor over and over again and it was very frustrating. He when he was about to get conquered by Meth Mad, suddenly Brennus attacks Meth Mad from the other side. He somehow magically manages to get like three additional holy cities from Isabella despite having a small army and Brennus seemingly doing all the work. Right when Brennus could attack him again, no, now Bismarck attacks Brennus from the opposite direction and now Brennus has to go fight Bismarck.

[00:01:27]And it all culminated in Gandhi squeezing out a cultural shortly before he was about to die. He probably would have been maybe not dead, but he would have lost one of his legendary cities in probably the next 10 turns. He was collapsing pretty quickly at the end of the game.

[00:01:41]So anyway, kudos to Gandhi. I mean, it was a it was a good well-played game from him, but it also felt like he was super lucky. So I wanted to know was he really lucky or was I just misreading the map? Maybe Gandhi was actually a lot stronger than And thought. I have definitely been wrong about this before. I went back and did this for a Darius game in the previous season and I was just totally wrong. I thought Darius had been the strongest leader on the map. He was not at all.

[00:02:05]So, sometimes I find out I'm wrong.

[00:02:07]Well, let's go ahead and take a look at what happened when I went back and replayed the map. I'm going to put my spreadsheet where I track this stuff on the screen. All right. So, the first replay of the map had Meth Med win the game, which is funny because he was the first to die in the game that we actually saw, followed by a Brennus win, another Brennus win, Shaka, Brennus, Isabella, Montezuma, Meth Med. Okay, Gandhi did win again for a change, then Isabella, Brennus, another Gandhi win, and then Brennus, Brennus, Meth Med, Brennus, Brennus, Brennus, That's a lot of Brennus on here. And finally, an Isabella victory on the last game that I did. So, uh summary of this, Brennus won 50% of the time. He won 10 of the map replays that I did. And if you look at uh the screenshots that I had of this, I should have had this queued up. Just give me a second. I do have them all in the screenshot folder here.

[00:02:59]Uh a lot of these Brennus wins were pretty dominant overall. This is the Meth Med victory, but then a Brennus space race, another Brennus space race, Shaka winning by domination, which is hilarious based on the game that we watched, a Brennus cultural victory, Isabella winning. This is a Montezuma domination victory. Uh another Meth Med win, Gandhi won by domination. Yes, this did happen in one of the alternate replay one of the alternate histories, Izzy. And then This is where the big Brennus run happened. Brennus by domination, the other Gandhi victory, Brennus by domination, Brennus by domination, Meth Med by space, Brennus by culture, Brennus by domination, Brennus by culture, Isabella by culture. Okay. So, uh what in the world was happening in these games? Let me try to break it down. This is the big spreadsheet that goes through kind of all of the various stats in the game.

[00:03:48]There were a couple of things that were really different about the game we saw as compared with the game that um that took place when we when the game was replayed over and over and over again.

[00:03:56]The first one of these is Shaka was a lot stronger than what we saw in the actual game and I can pull up a screenshot of what we had in Oh wait, I haven't I haven't gone through all the screenshots from that yet. Maybe I should have had this all queued up a little bit better.

[00:04:09]But where is the one Here it is. Here's the screenshot I took while the game was going on.

[00:04:13]Shaka was very weak in the game that we saw. He only got three cities. He never got past three cities. That was extremely unusual. He was never and I mean never that weak again in any of the other games I played which was very odd.

[00:04:26]He tended to do much better. Typically he was about the same strength as Bismarck. Most games he was either able to get more cities down here south of Montezuma or he actually managed to get cities in between Monty and Bismarck in like this river valley a lot of the time. For whatever reason in the game we saw he only ended up with three. Now that's partly because Montezuma got a holy city here. In a lot of games Monty put his first city over in this direction and it was not a holy city all the time. I'll talk more about the religions in a minute. But for whatever reason Shaka got stuck on a low city count and that was really impactful in terms of how the game played out. In most games Shaka was stronger. In most games Bismarck was weaker and this meant that Bismarck tended to get rolled up pretty quickly in a lot of these games either attacked by Shaka or attacked by Monty or attacked by Brennus. Bismarck was actually first to die significantly more often than anyone else.

[00:05:18]And when Bismarck was gone early that meant that Shaka and Montezuma could in fact run across the map and attack other targets and the number one target that they tended to go after was Mr. Gandhi over here. It was very common for Shaka to run across the map to attack Gandhi or for Montezuma to run across the map to attack Gandhi. It didn't happen in every game but it happened a lot. And in the games that we watched the entire first 200 turns or whatever Montezuma and Bismarck spent the whole game attacking this tiny little rump state that was Shaka and then they eventually eliminated him. That did not happen in like any of the other games I played.

[00:05:56]So, that was very very unusual in compared to the other games. Okay, religion. Religion was extremely unpredictable on this map. When I replayed the map, the religions did not fall in the same way at all. It's unusual because most of the time when you go back and play the map, the religions tend to break in more or less the same way. There might be some small variation. This map was not like that. There were four different AI leaders who wanted to go for a religion.

[00:06:19]We had Gandhi start with mysticism, Isabella start with mysticism, Montezuma start with mysticism, and Brennus start with with mysticism. All of that combined. So, Gandhi would found one of the two religions in almost any game. I think there was one game he didn't get one of the first two religions, but he almost always got one. And then the other religion was pretty evenly split between Spain, the Celts, and the Aztecs between the three of them. I believe Brennus got the religion the most often.

[00:06:45]It was maybe like 40% Brennus, 30% Montezuma, 30% Isabella would get that other religion. So, this played out very differently and then how the religion spread was also very random from game to game. In particular, um Mehmed and Brennus both do not declare war at pleased in Civ 4. So, both of them if they spread religion to to one of their neighbors and then they both converted to the same religion, they tended to become pleased with one another and then they wouldn't fight each other. So, like if Mehmed could convert Montezuma to or uh if Brennus could convert Montezuma to his religion assuming Monty didn't found his own religion, the two of them could actually become pretty good friends and then work together to run over the map.

[00:07:23]But uh alternately, if they had different religions, they'd be at each other's throats. And so like the game had a lot of variability from game to game. Uh this I think is manifested in the fact that if you look at the elimination rates, no one survived more than about 2/3 of the time. So, Brennus was the top leader. He still died in a third of these games Um and then Mehmed was also one of the stronger leaders. He still died 40% of the time as well. So, nobody had like an 80% survival rate. No one had like a 90% survival rate.

[00:07:52]Everybody had significant odds to die in this game. It was It was pretty random from game to game and religion played a huge factor in this. So, there was much more variation from game to game largely due to religion than in a whole bunch of the other histories that I've run. That said, Brennus was still the top AI and pretty overwhelmingly so. I mentioned that he survived to the finish in about two-thirds of the game and he was top two in every single game that he survived to the finish. And that included what was it? 10? Yeah, 10 out of 20 games he was the winner, which is pretty impressive. A score of 82 in the alternate histories is a very high score. We have seen some games go over 100, but that seems to be pretty rare.

[00:08:30]80 is a very very high score. So, he was the dominant AI on this map. If I go back to the screenshot here, his most common way of snowballing in this game was to actually take out Isabella. They tended not to like each other because they usually had different religions and very frequently he would just go west and eliminate Isabella and then he would snowball off that way. He also could sometimes partner with other leaders. So, there were some games where he worked with Montezuma. He also went east after Bismarck a decent amount of time.

[00:08:57]Remember, Bismarck was weaker than we saw in the game on live stream a lot of the time. There was one game he went after Montezuma. Once in a while he would go after Mehmed, but not that often. So, he was definitely the dominant AI in the game on live stream, he actually lost a settler to the barbarians. Yeah, that was pretty big at slowing him down. He was faster in most of the other games. As you can imagine, he was down an entire city compared to where he would have been normally. He was definitely better and he was still a very strong AI in the game we watched, too.

[00:09:25]Um he also did not attack Mehmed very often. Now, they did sometimes. That was one of the big events in the game we watched, Brennus attacking Mehmed. I can go find the screenshot a little bit later on.

[00:09:37]That was one of the big big turning points in the game that we watched was Brennus declaring war on Meth Nad, which really swung the outcome. But, that ended not to happen. Oh, I was already past it. Oops, a little bit earlier in here. Here it is. Well, capturing the first city in any case. We'll just keep it on the screenshot.

[00:09:55]That did not happen in a lot of games.

[00:09:56]Again, both of them are very similar peace weight leaders. Sometimes they shared the same religion. They actually did share the same religion in the game on live stream, at least at the at the time that the war declaration took place. So, while they did fight occasionally, it wasn't that common. And in the games where they didn't fight, that was very bad news for for Gandhi.

[00:10:13]He actually just got straight up rolled by Meth Nad in many many many games.

[00:10:18]Meth Nad would just fight Gandhi, and Meth Nad would just win. He was just stronger in the straight up 1 v 1. Or if he wasn't stronger, well, this happened. This is the column for the amount of times someone else declares war on you. Gandhi started nine offensive wars. He was attacked 66 times, leading to his 90% elimination rate. I mean, the field was just stacked against Gandhi. He was the only high peace weight leader in a field full of low peace weight leaders. And he also founded his own religion in every game, and he didn't do a great job of spreading it beyond his borders.

[00:10:50]Occasionally, he'd get some spreads, but not that many. So, Isabella typically had her own religion, which Gandhi didn't practice on his northern border.

[00:10:57]Brennus often had his own religion, not practiced by Gandhi. To the east was Meth Nad, who as it was at the exact opposite end of the peace weight spectrum, and had massive border overlap with Gandhi. Meth Nad would declare war on Gandhi in almost every game. I think he declared war on Gandhi in like 17 or 18 out of the 20 games.

[00:11:15]And before turn 100, almost every single time. So, Gandhi just took an absolute beating. And as you would expect for someone who gets dogpiled this often, he wasn't able to survive. So, Meth Nad's best games came when Gandhi got run over. Meth Nad's wins pretty much all came this game this game this game. They pretty much all came when he took out Gandhi and just like absorbed India's territory and then ran over the map and snowballed from there. Problem for Mehmet was his central starting location just meant that he tended to get uh snowballed on or backstabbed from different directions. Uh he just had like too many neighbors over and over and over again. He could get attacked by Brennus, he could get attacked by Gandhi. Those two would fight almost every game. Montezuma backstabbed him a lot. Sometimes even Isabella would fight him, although that was less common. Uh so just too many enemies on too many sides. If he didn't get attacked, he could be strong, but it was a little bit of a tricky spot.

[00:12:04]Still, Mehmet was the second strongest AI on this map. I mean, if you look at the the overall stats that I put together at the end, he did win three times, four runner-up finishes, he had 17 kills. I mean, he was pretty clearly the second strongest AI.

[00:12:16]Uh amongst the other leaders, so I already mentioned Gandhi just dogpiled too many times. He needed a miracle not to get run over by the other AIs and the game we watched kind of had that.

[00:12:26]Isabella, um she basically suffered from the same problems we saw in livestream.

[00:12:30]If she didn't get one of the top first two religions, and she only got one of the first two religions like maybe a third of the time, she just chased after the monotheism religion way too aggressively and that slowed her development by a lot. She would almost always found the third religion if she didn't get one of the first two and like, you know, diving that deeply down the religious tree when you don't have like agriculture or mining tends to be a bad idea. Uh she was also bothered by these barb cities and like barb cities didn't pop up in these exact spots, but this area here did have barb cities in almost every game, at least one or two.

[00:13:02]So she really was hampered by the barb cities. This little pattern where she has four cities here, that was very common. She would often get stuck on four cities for a while. There was the rare game where she actually could um either like get the early religion so she didn't have to waste time going to monotheism or games where the barbs didn't pop up on her borders. That did happen rarely and she actually did win three times. So like it wasn't preposterous for her to win in games, but she didn't really play well with others. She wasn't a good ally religiously. She didn't really get a religion to spread very well. Like you can imagine if there's a holy city here, but there's another holy city down here, and another holy city over here, and another holy city here, it's just tough to convert many people to your religion.

[00:13:41]So, as I said, she didn't really play well with others. She didn't ally very well. She was a little bit like a religious Toku Gawa in that sense. And so, she died a lot and her overall record wasn't great. She only had three kills as well, which is a sign that she wasn't really fighting and winning wars if she only had three kills. So, a bit of a long shot, but it did happen a couple times.

[00:14:01]Over in the east, I did just want to mention briefly. I talked about how Shaka was stronger than what we saw in the live stream game a lot. He just expanded better and he was very good at running over Bismarck, which is why he actually ended up with the most second place finishes. He had six different runner-up finishes, which considering his starting position was not very good, is honestly pretty impressive overall. I think he actually made the most of a kind of an underwhelming start in this game. And so, he actually ended up with the third most points in score, although he was close enough to Montezuma that it was probably a small sample size bias.

[00:14:31]Either one of these could have been higher than the other. Uh Monty was very similar score-wise, but he actually did not play the same way. Whereas Shaka was pretty smart about the wars he picked as far as Shaka goes. I mean, Shaka did start 68 wars, but he didn't get targeted that much. Only was attacked 16 times. And Shaka actually didn't get eliminated that often. He only died seven times, which is pretty impressive for his situation. Uh Monty had a better starting position, but Monty was also a lot dumber, if that makes sense. Monty fought a lot. He got attacked a lot. He fought a lot.

[00:15:02]He got eliminated a lot. He got eliminated two-thirds of the time. And a lot of these deaths were just really dumb. He didn't have to die this many times. Over and over again, he suicided into the leading AI for no reason whatsoever. So, I think Montezuma's idiocy kind of wasted what was a legitimately a pretty good starting position. Like he had this flood plain spot with like he was like in this really nice river valley. I think he could have done a lot better. I think he it was an underwhelming performance given the situation he's in. The fact that Monty got outscored by Shaka is just ridiculous. His starting position was so much better than Shaka's, but the downside is it's Montezuma leading the Civ. He's an idiot. He has no idea how to play Civ 4 and he kind of wasted this. I think if you swapped Shaka and Montezuma, Shaka would have been very strong in Monty's starting position and Monty would have just been like completely useless. So they graded out evenly, but that does not mean they were equally good leaders.

[00:15:52]I think Shaka played a much better game.

[00:15:54]And then finally Bismarck, Bismarck was awful on this game. Bismarck was the correct pick for first to die. He died nine times out of the 20 games. No one else was even close. Gandhi also died like in almost every game, but the difference is Gandhi would last a lot longer even though he was getting dog piled. Like if you look at Gandhi's elimination dates, a lot of these are after like turn 200. Like this is after turn 300. Look at Bismarck's elimination date. This is the turn when they were eliminated. Bismarck has a lot of eliminations before turn 200. Like he was dying fast in these games. It's an underwhelming leader. Bismarck's not a very good leader tied to the German Civ, which is not a very good Civ in Civ 4 tied to a starting position that wasn't very good. The starting position was very heavy on forest tiles. Hold on, let me go back. I can show up. Actually, never mind. I don't have a screenshot of his starting position right here to show. But here we go. This is probably the best I can do. Very very heavy on forest. The AI does not do great with forest tiles in Civ 4. They need to kind of chop them down and they often struggle to do that. So he did not play this start very well at all and he actually got rolled by Shaka a lot as I said earlier. Shaka actually killed him in one game before he even got to iron working and hooked up this iron, which is kind of ridiculous.

[00:17:03]But yeah, it was a bad game for Bismarck. I would say if you picked Bismarck to top two this game, that was probably not the best read of the map because Bismarck was just not a good leader in this game.

[00:17:13]All right. Well, some concluding thoughts about this. The reason why we do these games is it's really interesting just to see like how is the map supposed to play out? I put that in like air quotation marks. You can notice that even though Brennus was the strongest leader in this game, he did only win 50% of the time. Like that's pretty good in a seven player field. If one Civ wins seven 50% of the time when there's six other competitors in a seven AI game, that's actually pretty dominant.

[00:17:38]Um but there were still the other 50% of the games where he didn't win. Like you can see there's a lot of variability to how these games play out. We obviously got one of the games where he did not have things go as well. I mean he still did come in second place, but there's just a lot of variation. And like even Brennus, the strongest AI, he did die one in three games. He didn't make it to the end. So that's part of the point is look, there's like a lot of variation in these games. There's a lot of randomness. It's hard to say sometimes if there is a right or wrong answer.

[00:18:04]That said, I did want to prove that Gandhi was lucky and I was right.

[00:18:09]>> [laughter] >> I said it on live stream, this guy was lucky. I said we're going to re- go back, we're going to replay the map 20 times, he's going to win two or three times, and that is exactly what happened here. So if you picked Gandhi to win this game, I'm not going to say you're wrong. I mean he did win on live stream.

[00:18:26]I am going to say that was a very high risk high reward strategy. You were the person who went all in pre-flop in poker with like a pair of jacks, which is infamous for being a hand that gets you in trouble.

[00:18:37]And it just it worked out. You hit what you needed to on the flop. Um but I will say it was a very very risky strategy and it's it it was not consistent in any way, shape, or form.

[00:18:47]All right. Well, so I spent about 10 hours this weekend working on this, collecting the data. Was I really petty enough to do that just to show that Gandhi was lucky?

[00:18:57]Um maybe.

[00:19:00]Anyway, I hope that you found this to be an interesting exercise. There is a written version of this up on the website if you want to dig into more detail and look at the graphs and whatnot. Uh until then, I hope you guys all have a great week. I will see you back later this week for game seven of Civ 4 AI Survivor. Let's hope things are a little bit less wonky that time. Until then, take care, folks. Bye-bye. See you soon.