Civ4 AI Survivor Season Six: The AI-Mazon
![[Image: survivor6logo.png]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ4/Survivor/S6/survivor6logo.png)
Introduction
Well, here were are again folks. Spring has rolled around and with it the beginning of another season of competition for our intrepid Civ4 AI leaders. This will be the sixth time in all that we're embarked on this venture. Back in Season One, I was still figuring out the format and running everything via forums posts at Realms Beyond. It was a bit of a rough process even if it was still fun. For Season Two, I switched over to Livestreaming the matches in real time, and that made things infinintely more fun for everyone with the viewers getting to comment on the action in real time. It's not an exaggeration to say that the running commentary on the Livestream was often much more entertaining than whatever the AI leaders happened to be doing at the moment. Season Three saw more refinements to the process, with maps selected ahead of time and blindly assigned to the leaders for purposes of fairness, and online straw polls/predictions recorded before the matches and included in a series of written previews. Season Four initiated the adoption of the correct starting techs for each civilization along with the implementation of a second AI-controlled observer civ so that we could watch the voting in the Apostolic Palace without fear of a religious victory taking place. Season Five ditched the Apostolic Palace and saw the largest turnout yet in terms of the community. Aided no doubt by the COVID-19 pandemic that left many people working from home, Season Five of AI Survivor exploded in popularity to reach an average of 250 contest submissions and hundreds of viewers tuning into the Livestream. At its height, I was averaging 150+ viewers across the length of a seven hour stream and topping 250 viewers at its peak. Will it even be possible to improve upon those numbers this year? Let's find out!
![[Image: survivor6-0-1.jpg]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ4/Survivor/S6/survivor6-0-1.jpg)
The basic tournament structure will remain the same from past seasons. The 52 AI leaders in Civilization 4 get randomly sorted into eight opening round games, half of them with 6 leaders and half of them with 7 leaders. Two leaders will advance to the playoff round from each match, the winning leader and the non-winner with the highest in-game score. AIs who survive the match but do not advance will get one final opportunity to make the playoffs in a Wildcard game played after the opening round matches. The Wildcard game has had as many as a dozen leaders and as few as six leaders in past years and it can get a little bit weird as a result. (The Wildcard game is also the only one that we run with Raging Barbarians turned on, and yes, we have seen an AI leader lose their capital city to the barbs!) This creates our field of 18 leaders sorted into three playoff games of 6 AIs apiece. Finally, we feed the top two leaders from each playoff game, the winner and the highest scoring non-winner, into a championship game and crown an overall winner of the competition.
For Season Four, we tried out a seeding system akin to what the World Cup uses when drawing teams into its groups. This proved to be a big success and we'll be continuing it for Season Six. The top eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 1, and the next eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 2. Each of the opening round games will have one leader drawn from Pool 1 and one leader drawn from Pool 2. The remaining 36 AI leaders in Civ4 will be unseeded and can be randomly drawn into any opening round game. Here's a list of which leaders fall into which category:
![[Image: survivor6-0-2.jpg]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ4/Survivor/S6/survivor6-0-2.jpg)
![[Image: survivor6-0-3.jpg]](http://www.sullla.com/Civ4/Survivor/S6/survivor6-0-3.jpg)
AI leader rankings are based on our customized scoring system of past performances; click here for a link to the full ranking as of the end of Season Five. AI leaders score 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. While this is a purely arbitrary system, it seems to provide an effective metric for evaluating prior seasons of the competition. The idea behind the seeding system is to stop the top AI leaders from hitting one another in an opening round "group of death" match while still preserving the random draw element that makes this event so much fun. Choosing to pick pools of leaders ranked 1-8 and 9-16 is of course another arbitrary decision but there's some logic to having one top leader and another secondary leader in each of the eight opening round games. Going into Season Six, we had a tie for the last Pool 1 spot between Suryavarman and Charlemagne, which the Khmer leader won by virtue of having a better performance in Season Five. There was also a three-way tie for the last two spots in Pool 2, with Zara dropping out thanks to his zero point stinkbomb last year.
The game settings will continue over from the last Civ4 AI Survivor competition. We use Deity AIs to speed up the overall pace of the game and reach victory results sooner. The map script is the default Pangaea, designed to keep all of the AI leaders in close contact with one another. Prior to the Season Three competition, I went ahead and tested out some games with Continents or Archipelago setups, and they just didn't work that well. The Civ4 AI doesn't really know how to run naval invasions, and there were lots of wars that just did nothing because the AIs couldn't reach one another. They need to be on the same continent from what I've found, and Pangaea works well enough for that. We use Normal game speed and Standard sized maps, with the one exception of dropping the sea level to "Low" setting for the games with 7 AIs to create a little more room for the extra competitior.
For the game options, the biggest effect on the gameplay is turning off Tech Trading. I'll repeat here what I wrote in the setup phase from past years: "When tech trading is left on, the AIs tend to stay bunched together with no one ever getting too far ahead or falling too far behind. With everyone fielding the same units, it becomes difficult for the AIs to attack one another successfully, and generally makes for less interesting games. But when tech trading gets switched off, all of the AIs have to sink or swim based on their own research efforts. This spreads them out much more widely on the tech tree, and once the laggards fall a full generation behind in military tech, they tend to get swallowed up by their more advanced rivals." With tech trading removed, we frequently see some AIs fall an entire era or more behind in technology, which prevents would-be conquerers from ignoring their economies and trading their way to tech parity. A balanced approach tends to work the best in these games, with alternating periods of warring to expand followed by peaceful consolidation. Woe to those who fall behind in military tech in this competition - it nearly always ends badly. We've also increasingly noticed the different research preferences of the various AI leaders in recent years, with the warmongers overly obsessing on military techs and some of the peacenik AIs refusing to pick up Rifling even as they're dying to foreign invaders. Turning on tech trading would remove this important aspect of the competition and make the overall setup a lot less interesting.
Otherwise, we turn off Vassal States to prevent the AIs from surrendering to one another. If they can vassal when losing wars, hardly any of the AIs ever get eliminated, and that's boring. We want to see bloodthirsty games! No escape, no mercy. We also turn off Events because they're kind of a Single Player thing, and the AI doesn't understand what they do. Similarly, we turn off the goody huts to prevent unwanted prizes from getting handed out to the AIs. We've been moving towards a less random and more standardized setup for the past few years and this seemed like an obvious next step. No more cases of someone getting lucky and popping a critical tech out of a hut on the first turn of the game - now they need to research their own stuff like everyone else. We also use Aggressive AI to spice things up and increase the number of wars. The big thing that Aggressive AI does is remove a flag that will stop the AIs from declaring certain wars. Normally they will not attack someone who has more than double their military power. Turning on Aggressive AI removes that check in their coding logic. This leads to occasionally suicidal war declarations based on diplomatic relations, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to see!
The biggest change for Season Five was the removal of the Apostolic Palace (quite literally; I deleted the wonder from the XML files on my local computer). The Apostolic Palace had been the most controversial aspect of prior seasons from a gameplay perspective, with the AI civ that controls the Apostolic Palace often using it to shut down literally every invasion launched against them, or forcing everyone in the game to declare war on some hapless target. The argument in favor of the AP was that it introduces a wild and unpredictable element of chaos into each game which could be a lot of fun to watch. The argument against the AP was that a single wonder shouldn't have such a massively disproportionate effect on the rest of the gameplay, and in particular, it shouldn't become a magical shield that could shut down all aggression for hundreds of turns on end. I decided to run a poll question asking the community whether they wanted to see the inclusion of the Apostolic Palace for Season Five and the community voted decisively to remove it by a greater than 2:1 margin. The general consensus following the end of the season was that the gameplay had improved noticeably by leaving it out of the competition. We will not be bringing it back anytime soon.
New Changes for Civ4 AI Survivor Season Six
There are a couple of minor tweaks to the format for this season. First of all, we're changing up the climate setting once again, largely just for fun. The first four seasons of AI Survivor used "Temperate", "Arid", "Tropical", "Rocky", and "Cold" climates for the games just to test out all of the default options. Since we've explored all of them at this point, we'll go with "Tropical" to fit the season theme of the AI-mazon. (I continue to be able to make puns involving the season name and the word "AI", we'll see how much longer that lasts.) We'll also continue to use the "Choose Religions" options so that we can avoid getting Buddhism and Hinduism as the dominant religions in every game.
The biggest changes for this season are on the organizational end. In contrast to past seasons, I'm planning to hold the draw for all of the opening round games at the same time, on Livestream two weeks before the first match begins. I'll pick out all of the maps for the games ahead of time and then we'll fill in the leaders from the initial draw. This is largely being done to help save time during the season; by drawing the leaders and prepping the maps before the season starts, I won't have quite as much work to do on a week-by-week basis. I'll also be able to post the previews for all eight opening round games immediately following the draw to again save time and let the community get an early look at the upcoming matchups. Aside from helping to cut down on some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into AI Survivor, doing the early draw will allow allow us to implement a new community feature:
Fantasy Civ4 AI Survivor
Yeah, we're going there. A number of people have asked about instituting some kind of fantasy feature in past seasons and I think we're finally in a position to make it happen. Here's how it's going to play out. The leader draw will take place two weeks before the first match of the season. I will post all of the opening round previews (and the leader-less map previews for the playoff games) so that everyone has time to study the upcoming games. One week before the start of the season, I plan to hold an auction draft on Livestream with a group of other community members as we bid on which leaders we want to fill out our fantasy AI Survivor teams. I think that this would work with as few as four or five other individuals but my preference would be to get seven other people for a league of eight fantasy teams. We'll run through the AI leaders and see who can put the best team together for the rest of the season. Then, based on how the auction turns out, I'll try to put together a "daily fantasy" style contest for the much larger group who couldn't take part in the auction draft.
If you're interested in taking part in the auction draft, here's a bit more information:
* Scoring will be based on our standard AI Survivor points system: 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. The further that the leaders on your team make it, the more chances they'll have to score points.
* Unlike the normal AI Survivor points system, players will also score 2 points for having a "First to Die" leader on their team. This should make the bidding much more interesting!
* There are no "positions" to worry about or a limit to the number of AI leaders that can fit on a team. Whether to have a small handful of favorites or a large group of underdogs is a choice that fantasy participants will have to make.
* To take part in the auction draft, participants will need to be available for 2-3 hours starting around noon (EST) on Friday, 30 April 2021. You will also need to join the Sullla Discord channel and a microphone is strongly preferred for voice communication.
* This is open to anyone interested who can be there for the live draft. I will feel free to give preference to longtime AI Survivor community members though; for example, noted superfan LinkMarioSamus has a spot if he wants it.
So far, I have confirmed signups from Mythradorri, walloper, and antisocialmunky along with interest from rekenner and Euaxps. I'm limiting the Livestream draft to no more than eight people (including myself) so please let me know soon if you're interested and can make the time slot. Community members are also free to set up their own snake pick draft or run their own auction draft if they can get enough people together. I'll keep track of the fantasy teams and we'll see who winds up having the best season once the games start! We will also still be running our normal picking contest each week; see the details below for those who are unfamiliar with the process.
Watching and Following Season Six
Games will be Livestreamed on my Twitch channel linked below, with most games starting at noon local time (east coast of North America) on Fridays. I will archive the recordings on Twitch and try to post them on YouTube in smaller chunks for those who have trouble accessing the Twitch videos. I'm also soliciting help once again in putting together the written reports on the games that took place, in the same fashion that we've done for the games from past seasons. Several folks pitched and submitted written reports for Season Five and it was a blast getting to see different spins on how the games played out. It will be a huge help if the community can continue to help shoulder the burden of doing the written reports and allow me to concentrate on streaming and administering the games. Anyone interested in volunteering to help out again?
For those who are new to our event, we run a picking contest for each game that serves as the biggest driver of interest in AI Survivor. We ask contest entrants to pick:
* The winning AI leader
* The second place AI leader
* The "First to Die" AI leader
* The victory type of the winner
* The victory date of the winner
* The total number of wars in the game
The closer that the pick gets to the correct answers, the more points that it scores. We track scores for both individual games and the overall competition so there's always a chance to win an individual round even for those who missed earlier matches. The picking contest system will continue to use a Google Forms submission, which was a massive timesaver in recent seasons as compared to originally compiling forum posts. The current bracket will always be visible online, and I'll do my best to update it here on my website, on my Twitch page, on the Sullla Discord channel, and at Realms Beyond. We'll have a forum discussion thread there, of course, which I'll link on this page once the competition has started. Scoring remains the same from past years, with points for first place, second place, first to die, victory date/type, and total number of wars. I went through the suggestions about different potential scoring goals after the last competition, and none of them felt like they would work as well as the current system. With points for the top two AI spots along with victory date and number of wars, we had scoring drama right up to the end of most every game, even when the winner had long since been determined. Check out the links below for more information on the scoring contest and how to submit your entries.
With all that said, here's a big list of the relevant links that follows below. Enjoy the new season of AI Survivor!
Main Season Six Webpage
Sullla Twitch Page
Sullla Discord Channel
Civ4 AI Survivor Season Six: Leader Previews
AI Reference Guide from CivFanatics
Complete AI Survivor Archives
Next Game: Opening Round Game One
Schedule: Season Six Leader Draw, 23 April 2021 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Six Fantasy Auction Draft, 30 April 2021 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Six Game One, Starts 07 May 2021 at Noon EST
Fire away with your questions. This should be fun.
Introduction
Well, here were are again folks. Spring has rolled around and with it the beginning of another season of competition for our intrepid Civ4 AI leaders. This will be the sixth time in all that we're embarked on this venture. Back in Season One, I was still figuring out the format and running everything via forums posts at Realms Beyond. It was a bit of a rough process even if it was still fun. For Season Two, I switched over to Livestreaming the matches in real time, and that made things infinintely more fun for everyone with the viewers getting to comment on the action in real time. It's not an exaggeration to say that the running commentary on the Livestream was often much more entertaining than whatever the AI leaders happened to be doing at the moment. Season Three saw more refinements to the process, with maps selected ahead of time and blindly assigned to the leaders for purposes of fairness, and online straw polls/predictions recorded before the matches and included in a series of written previews. Season Four initiated the adoption of the correct starting techs for each civilization along with the implementation of a second AI-controlled observer civ so that we could watch the voting in the Apostolic Palace without fear of a religious victory taking place. Season Five ditched the Apostolic Palace and saw the largest turnout yet in terms of the community. Aided no doubt by the COVID-19 pandemic that left many people working from home, Season Five of AI Survivor exploded in popularity to reach an average of 250 contest submissions and hundreds of viewers tuning into the Livestream. At its height, I was averaging 150+ viewers across the length of a seven hour stream and topping 250 viewers at its peak. Will it even be possible to improve upon those numbers this year? Let's find out!
The basic tournament structure will remain the same from past seasons. The 52 AI leaders in Civilization 4 get randomly sorted into eight opening round games, half of them with 6 leaders and half of them with 7 leaders. Two leaders will advance to the playoff round from each match, the winning leader and the non-winner with the highest in-game score. AIs who survive the match but do not advance will get one final opportunity to make the playoffs in a Wildcard game played after the opening round matches. The Wildcard game has had as many as a dozen leaders and as few as six leaders in past years and it can get a little bit weird as a result. (The Wildcard game is also the only one that we run with Raging Barbarians turned on, and yes, we have seen an AI leader lose their capital city to the barbs!) This creates our field of 18 leaders sorted into three playoff games of 6 AIs apiece. Finally, we feed the top two leaders from each playoff game, the winner and the highest scoring non-winner, into a championship game and crown an overall winner of the competition.
For Season Four, we tried out a seeding system akin to what the World Cup uses when drawing teams into its groups. This proved to be a big success and we'll be continuing it for Season Six. The top eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 1, and the next eight AI leaders based on past performance will be placed in Pool 2. Each of the opening round games will have one leader drawn from Pool 1 and one leader drawn from Pool 2. The remaining 36 AI leaders in Civ4 will be unseeded and can be randomly drawn into any opening round game. Here's a list of which leaders fall into which category:
AI leader rankings are based on our customized scoring system of past performances; click here for a link to the full ranking as of the end of Season Five. AI leaders score 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. While this is a purely arbitrary system, it seems to provide an effective metric for evaluating prior seasons of the competition. The idea behind the seeding system is to stop the top AI leaders from hitting one another in an opening round "group of death" match while still preserving the random draw element that makes this event so much fun. Choosing to pick pools of leaders ranked 1-8 and 9-16 is of course another arbitrary decision but there's some logic to having one top leader and another secondary leader in each of the eight opening round games. Going into Season Six, we had a tie for the last Pool 1 spot between Suryavarman and Charlemagne, which the Khmer leader won by virtue of having a better performance in Season Five. There was also a three-way tie for the last two spots in Pool 2, with Zara dropping out thanks to his zero point stinkbomb last year.
The game settings will continue over from the last Civ4 AI Survivor competition. We use Deity AIs to speed up the overall pace of the game and reach victory results sooner. The map script is the default Pangaea, designed to keep all of the AI leaders in close contact with one another. Prior to the Season Three competition, I went ahead and tested out some games with Continents or Archipelago setups, and they just didn't work that well. The Civ4 AI doesn't really know how to run naval invasions, and there were lots of wars that just did nothing because the AIs couldn't reach one another. They need to be on the same continent from what I've found, and Pangaea works well enough for that. We use Normal game speed and Standard sized maps, with the one exception of dropping the sea level to "Low" setting for the games with 7 AIs to create a little more room for the extra competitior.
For the game options, the biggest effect on the gameplay is turning off Tech Trading. I'll repeat here what I wrote in the setup phase from past years: "When tech trading is left on, the AIs tend to stay bunched together with no one ever getting too far ahead or falling too far behind. With everyone fielding the same units, it becomes difficult for the AIs to attack one another successfully, and generally makes for less interesting games. But when tech trading gets switched off, all of the AIs have to sink or swim based on their own research efforts. This spreads them out much more widely on the tech tree, and once the laggards fall a full generation behind in military tech, they tend to get swallowed up by their more advanced rivals." With tech trading removed, we frequently see some AIs fall an entire era or more behind in technology, which prevents would-be conquerers from ignoring their economies and trading their way to tech parity. A balanced approach tends to work the best in these games, with alternating periods of warring to expand followed by peaceful consolidation. Woe to those who fall behind in military tech in this competition - it nearly always ends badly. We've also increasingly noticed the different research preferences of the various AI leaders in recent years, with the warmongers overly obsessing on military techs and some of the peacenik AIs refusing to pick up Rifling even as they're dying to foreign invaders. Turning on tech trading would remove this important aspect of the competition and make the overall setup a lot less interesting.
Otherwise, we turn off Vassal States to prevent the AIs from surrendering to one another. If they can vassal when losing wars, hardly any of the AIs ever get eliminated, and that's boring. We want to see bloodthirsty games! No escape, no mercy. We also turn off Events because they're kind of a Single Player thing, and the AI doesn't understand what they do. Similarly, we turn off the goody huts to prevent unwanted prizes from getting handed out to the AIs. We've been moving towards a less random and more standardized setup for the past few years and this seemed like an obvious next step. No more cases of someone getting lucky and popping a critical tech out of a hut on the first turn of the game - now they need to research their own stuff like everyone else. We also use Aggressive AI to spice things up and increase the number of wars. The big thing that Aggressive AI does is remove a flag that will stop the AIs from declaring certain wars. Normally they will not attack someone who has more than double their military power. Turning on Aggressive AI removes that check in their coding logic. This leads to occasionally suicidal war declarations based on diplomatic relations, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to see!
The biggest change for Season Five was the removal of the Apostolic Palace (quite literally; I deleted the wonder from the XML files on my local computer). The Apostolic Palace had been the most controversial aspect of prior seasons from a gameplay perspective, with the AI civ that controls the Apostolic Palace often using it to shut down literally every invasion launched against them, or forcing everyone in the game to declare war on some hapless target. The argument in favor of the AP was that it introduces a wild and unpredictable element of chaos into each game which could be a lot of fun to watch. The argument against the AP was that a single wonder shouldn't have such a massively disproportionate effect on the rest of the gameplay, and in particular, it shouldn't become a magical shield that could shut down all aggression for hundreds of turns on end. I decided to run a poll question asking the community whether they wanted to see the inclusion of the Apostolic Palace for Season Five and the community voted decisively to remove it by a greater than 2:1 margin. The general consensus following the end of the season was that the gameplay had improved noticeably by leaving it out of the competition. We will not be bringing it back anytime soon.
New Changes for Civ4 AI Survivor Season Six
There are a couple of minor tweaks to the format for this season. First of all, we're changing up the climate setting once again, largely just for fun. The first four seasons of AI Survivor used "Temperate", "Arid", "Tropical", "Rocky", and "Cold" climates for the games just to test out all of the default options. Since we've explored all of them at this point, we'll go with "Tropical" to fit the season theme of the AI-mazon. (I continue to be able to make puns involving the season name and the word "AI", we'll see how much longer that lasts.) We'll also continue to use the "Choose Religions" options so that we can avoid getting Buddhism and Hinduism as the dominant religions in every game.
The biggest changes for this season are on the organizational end. In contrast to past seasons, I'm planning to hold the draw for all of the opening round games at the same time, on Livestream two weeks before the first match begins. I'll pick out all of the maps for the games ahead of time and then we'll fill in the leaders from the initial draw. This is largely being done to help save time during the season; by drawing the leaders and prepping the maps before the season starts, I won't have quite as much work to do on a week-by-week basis. I'll also be able to post the previews for all eight opening round games immediately following the draw to again save time and let the community get an early look at the upcoming matchups. Aside from helping to cut down on some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes into AI Survivor, doing the early draw will allow allow us to implement a new community feature:
Fantasy Civ4 AI Survivor
Yeah, we're going there. A number of people have asked about instituting some kind of fantasy feature in past seasons and I think we're finally in a position to make it happen. Here's how it's going to play out. The leader draw will take place two weeks before the first match of the season. I will post all of the opening round previews (and the leader-less map previews for the playoff games) so that everyone has time to study the upcoming games. One week before the start of the season, I plan to hold an auction draft on Livestream with a group of other community members as we bid on which leaders we want to fill out our fantasy AI Survivor teams. I think that this would work with as few as four or five other individuals but my preference would be to get seven other people for a league of eight fantasy teams. We'll run through the AI leaders and see who can put the best team together for the rest of the season. Then, based on how the auction turns out, I'll try to put together a "daily fantasy" style contest for the much larger group who couldn't take part in the auction draft.
If you're interested in taking part in the auction draft, here's a bit more information:
* Scoring will be based on our standard AI Survivor points system: 5 points for a first place finish, 2 points for a second place finish, and 1 point for each elimination of another leader. The further that the leaders on your team make it, the more chances they'll have to score points.
* Unlike the normal AI Survivor points system, players will also score 2 points for having a "First to Die" leader on their team. This should make the bidding much more interesting!
* There are no "positions" to worry about or a limit to the number of AI leaders that can fit on a team. Whether to have a small handful of favorites or a large group of underdogs is a choice that fantasy participants will have to make.
* To take part in the auction draft, participants will need to be available for 2-3 hours starting around noon (EST) on Friday, 30 April 2021. You will also need to join the Sullla Discord channel and a microphone is strongly preferred for voice communication.
* This is open to anyone interested who can be there for the live draft. I will feel free to give preference to longtime AI Survivor community members though; for example, noted superfan LinkMarioSamus has a spot if he wants it.
So far, I have confirmed signups from Mythradorri, walloper, and antisocialmunky along with interest from rekenner and Euaxps. I'm limiting the Livestream draft to no more than eight people (including myself) so please let me know soon if you're interested and can make the time slot. Community members are also free to set up their own snake pick draft or run their own auction draft if they can get enough people together. I'll keep track of the fantasy teams and we'll see who winds up having the best season once the games start! We will also still be running our normal picking contest each week; see the details below for those who are unfamiliar with the process.
Watching and Following Season Six
Games will be Livestreamed on my Twitch channel linked below, with most games starting at noon local time (east coast of North America) on Fridays. I will archive the recordings on Twitch and try to post them on YouTube in smaller chunks for those who have trouble accessing the Twitch videos. I'm also soliciting help once again in putting together the written reports on the games that took place, in the same fashion that we've done for the games from past seasons. Several folks pitched and submitted written reports for Season Five and it was a blast getting to see different spins on how the games played out. It will be a huge help if the community can continue to help shoulder the burden of doing the written reports and allow me to concentrate on streaming and administering the games. Anyone interested in volunteering to help out again?
For those who are new to our event, we run a picking contest for each game that serves as the biggest driver of interest in AI Survivor. We ask contest entrants to pick:
* The winning AI leader
* The second place AI leader
* The "First to Die" AI leader
* The victory type of the winner
* The victory date of the winner
* The total number of wars in the game
The closer that the pick gets to the correct answers, the more points that it scores. We track scores for both individual games and the overall competition so there's always a chance to win an individual round even for those who missed earlier matches. The picking contest system will continue to use a Google Forms submission, which was a massive timesaver in recent seasons as compared to originally compiling forum posts. The current bracket will always be visible online, and I'll do my best to update it here on my website, on my Twitch page, on the Sullla Discord channel, and at Realms Beyond. We'll have a forum discussion thread there, of course, which I'll link on this page once the competition has started. Scoring remains the same from past years, with points for first place, second place, first to die, victory date/type, and total number of wars. I went through the suggestions about different potential scoring goals after the last competition, and none of them felt like they would work as well as the current system. With points for the top two AI spots along with victory date and number of wars, we had scoring drama right up to the end of most every game, even when the winner had long since been determined. Check out the links below for more information on the scoring contest and how to submit your entries.
With all that said, here's a big list of the relevant links that follows below. Enjoy the new season of AI Survivor!
Main Season Six Webpage
Sullla Twitch Page
Sullla Discord Channel
Civ4 AI Survivor Season Six: Leader Previews
AI Reference Guide from CivFanatics
Complete AI Survivor Archives
Next Game: Opening Round Game One
Schedule: Season Six Leader Draw, 23 April 2021 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Six Fantasy Auction Draft, 30 April 2021 at Noon EST
Schedule: Season Six Game One, Starts 07 May 2021 at Noon EST
Fire away with your questions. This should be fun.
But first we need to do the leader draw for the opening round games, which will take place this upcoming Friday. I'll post the individual game previews and the picking contest entry form for the first game as soon as we know who's going to be taking part in it. Looking forward to seeing some of you on the Livestream in two days!
