Mercantalism was never meant to be a long-term civic. But when the AIs unlock it they usually switch to it for a while, whereas free market gives you an extra trade route, so until severals AIs with OB switch out of mercantalism you're either not missing much or anything at all by running it.
It also comes a time where great people are still important, so your GP producing cities might make them a few turns earlier.
It's usually not worth the civic switch imo, unless you're spiritual obv or built the mids.
Still I probably use mercantalism a heck of a lot more than I do free market
@Blitz
Even with a small empire you don't get that much more gold with FM than SP, if any at all. There are three things to consider that are relatively small and it's very human to just round them out or not account for them in estimating value.
- The extra trade route is overvalued. People will look at their biggest city and the top trade route and see like +8 from Persepolis and get really excited and say +8g per city, 8x7 = 56 gold zomg! Or they will take an average of the trade routes for the average city if they're smarter. But really trade routes estimations are a bit more complicated, and you should be probably taking the bottom trade route -- and A LOT of the times that bottom trade route isn't a highly priced foreign trade route, and some of your smaller cities might have no sweet trade routes at all.
- Upkeep, as already noticed FM is medium upkeep, state property is low. Again this will just mean a few GPT so we usually just don't take it into consideration, but it adds up.
- Maintenance from distance to palace. Again we assume this to be 0 for small, non-overseas nations or insanely high for large empire, but it can be a misleading dichotomy and even with a small empire getting rid of all maintenance cost from distance is a decent chunk of gold, and it saves you from dumping hammers in awkward buildings like courthouses / forbidden palace.
So even in a rather ideal set up, the peace-time economy focused civic will net you only a bit more commerce than SP. Even if you are loathe to build workshops, the +10% production should alone outweigh that consideration. After all even if you aim to be completely peaceful, than you're either putting those hammers in investments or directly into wealth / fail gold....
So this is why even in a situation the game designers clearly meant for free market to be better than SP it isn't, unless you go corporations. And then it may pass up SP, very very late into the game.
Also there was a discussion on having to swap out of caste as soon as the first AI switches to emancipation. That's hogwash. That's why you don't build your cities up to your happy cap. That's why you don't run bad ocean tiles. And if you're building a lot of workshops you city probably won't be growing super big. And beyond tempering your city growth there's many ways to get happiness at that point in the game. I suspect people don't maximize resource trading to their full benefit, like trading health resources 1 for 1 for happiness ones, going for the resources that give double perks, or just trading A to gives you two copies of B, so you can trade your first copy of B for C.
It's honestly rare for me to switch out of caste until very late, after all the AIs have it and I've already fought 1-2 breakout wars.
@ Thor a lot would make sense from a game balancing perspective. The problem is the makers tried to keep the economics civics historical. Namely there was no major economic thought (debatable for sure) until mercantilism, and in game time it wasn't that much longer until free markets became popular. So if you push free market up it would make mercantilism even more awkward, and you'd have to push that up, perhaps even more ahistorically.
I do think it's a bit weird that mercantilism doesn't give a bonus to domestic trade routes -- as that was kind of the purpose. I also agree FM having higher maintenance than SP is silly. Finally environmentalism is really, really bad. The main problem is caring about the environment hurts you and benefits everyone. So it seems really weird to me that you don't get an opinion modifier for enacting it. Also having +25% corp costs (while makes a little bit of sense) is ridiculous when 2/4 four civics ban corps, and free market gives -25% expenses.
I think something like:
Mercantilism +50% internal trade route yield at medium.
FM at low
SP at high
Environmentalism: +0% corp expense, +2 diplo opinion modifier and maybe even +1 global health.
from trade routes than you'd lose to high maintenance... that's why FM is better for smaller empires and SP better for larger ones!
)
penalty is too high for whipping. Caste system hyperdrives the workshop but it's an odd situation to be able to stay away from Emancipation at the point of researching Communism and even if I can, it won't last long afterwards. I used to do the Caste/SP combo for workshops when I was playing Noble/Prince, but once I got to Monarch/Emperor, it became much harder to keep 
without Empanc that late in the game.
/turn. Additionally, I wouldn't call courthouses "awkward buildings". Any building that mitigates 50% maintenance, gives 
points and access to a specialist is pretty good in my book and worth building if you have a small empire. 
multipliers (just had an Emperor culture victory with Asoka where I only built 2 Stupas and no other cathedral type building). Usually, you put those high multiplier buildings in the city with the best 
bonus to workshops would be what you use to expand. You would almost always use draft/whip. At that point in the game, if you take time to slow build an army, the AI will be much harder to dislodge.
