You're looking at resets with different turn counts. They got 2900 turns for round 889 but only 1900 turns for round 954. They also didn't get farmed by players the whole round. For round 889, bushels spike so high that some NPC countries end up stocking tech and military instead. If I remember right one or two techers could often destock before the bushel market crashed. That's why https://www.earthempires.com/ai/889/ranks/139 had such a large victory.

The NPC code has effectively been the same since 2021. Qz only fixed a few small bugs since then.