CrusaderBench: Gemini 4 Argon leads with 62.3

ℏεsam @HesamationOriginally posted 2026.10.15

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introducing CrusaderBench! an independent benchmark I’ve been working on that scores models on playing Stronghold Crusader, measuring their strategic thinking, computer use, reasoning, planning, and handling in-game disasters! Results so far: > Gemini 4 Argon: 62.3 > GPT-6.1 Sol: 56.9 > Claude Opus 5.5: 43.4 > Claude Sonnet 5.5: 37.8 > Muse Wonder: 31.0 THE OBJECTIVE: grow an economy within a fixed time with limited resources. models must figure out how to build an economy, manage production chains, trade resources, keep their population happy, and deal with whatever goes wrong along the way. even a smart model may ambitiously make a strategic decision early on that might ruin the economy. the strategy is 100% up to the model to infer from the game rules and resource prices. everything is up to their creativity and reasoning. the game pauses while models think, so their scores is just based on their strategic decisions and final results, not model speed. it’s so fun to watch models suddenly pull off pro-player tricks simply on their own. meanwhile, some other models like Claude Haiku just give up while they still have time left lol all runs, logs, screen recordings, prompts, and benchmark code are publicly available. everything is OPEN SOURCE. some interesting bits from their reasoning: > Muse Wonder managed to perform WORSE than doing nothing in one game: "I actively destroyed roughly 1,900 of value compared with doing nothing at all." > Gemini 4 Argon actually enjoyed playing: "This is one of the best-designed agent benchmarks I have encountered" > Sonnet 5.5 admitted it wasted time: “I spent about 20 minutes in 2–4 minute waits with no building or trading. In a race, that is the main failure.” > Sol 6.1 was the only model that beat my own net worth score in one game! I was very surprised to see this. NO OTHER MODEL has done it so far. it still lost on the overall score because I grew a much larger population: - Net worth: 10,289 vs. my 9,984 (+305) - Game score: 98.3 (human baseline = 100) I grew up playing this game, locking in so much on old monitors my eyes turned red for school, so building this has been ridiculously fun. I wanted a different benchmark to truly measure models’ strategic intelligence in an actual game, coding and QA benchmarks can often be saturated. it’s still in beta, and I’m planning to expand it to more games and more models (Fable, Astra, Grok, Qwen, etc) check it out: https://crusbench.com

This post quotes another post: “Gemini 4 Argon tops CrusaderBench, ahead of Opus 5.5”