The
Guilds civic could use some paring down. It's saddled with some negatives that I don't think are appropriate. If we break it down into positives and negatives, this is what we get.
Positives Negatives
-33% corporate maint +25% city maint from distance
No foreign corporations +25% city maint from numbers
+10% culture -10% science
-10% revolution from distance +10% revolution from foreign nationality
+0.5 gold per Merchant
+50% production of Estate, Villa
Can rush with gold
However, some of these positives aren't as big as they seem. +50% production of Estate and Villa is only meaningful if you are running the appropriate civics (Feudal for Estate, Patrician or Bourgeois for Villa) and both of these buildings consume 1 Citizen, so I find it difficult to really use them. Rush with gold is actually available to EVERY Economy civic between Coinage and Regulated (only Barter/Slavery and Green/Post-Scarcity are exempt) so this isn't that valuable either. I'm not really sure if "No Foreign Corporations" is a positive or a negative; I rate it as a positive only because it prevents you from getting your economy attacked by another civ.
I'm also not sure what the revolution distance and nationality changes are worth either. Right now, I think it's a positive because distance penalties have been raised and nationality penalties are harder to come by early on.
What I don't like is the increase in maintenance costs for cities. I think adjustments in those categories should be limited to Government and Rule civics, with maybe some possibility in Society civics. Hive would probably offer reduced maintenance, but I don't think it would cover every possible category.
So I think we should eliminate the maintenance increases and lower the corporate maintenance adjustment down to -10%. I think of Guilds as always worth switching to in order to get your Gold and Silver back that was lost when using the Coinage civic.
The reason to lower the corporate maintenance is that most of the economy civics change corporate maintenance in some way or outright block corporations. There isn't much of a baseline.
I'd be happy with knocking off the culture bonus and the building production bonuses too. That would reduce the total number of bullet points on this civic. If you go back to BTS, no civic has more than 4 bullet points. Only Environmentalism and State Property have 4, and Free Religion, Mercantilism, and Nationhood have 3. We have multiple civics where the total number of bullet points are in the teens. (I think Monarchy is the worst right now.) Some of this is due to Revolutions and civic buildings. On one level, I can see how it is interesting to work through the implications of every civic on every possible adjustment, but on the other hand, too many of these points and it gets to be really confusing.