My favorites:
1) Morocco
- Everyone wants to send trade-routes to you because of the UA
- The UI helps make deserts viable for settling or puppet-ing, and in some cases, makes tiles actually better than grassland or plains, even (when built on desert/hill and desert/floodplain/river tiles).
- The UU is a good turtling UU.
2) Poland
- UA provides over a full SP-tree over the course of a game, including opener and closer.
- UB synergizes well with the UU, and provides extra gold
- UU is very powerful UU, though it does upgrade to Anti-Tank Gun (a bummer)
3)Zulu
- UB gives ridiculous promos to melee units
- UU is a good UU, but, more importantly, allows you to essentially upgrade spear-pike-rifle rather than spear-pike-lancer
- The UA helps with maintenance in the early game, while it helps with XP boosts for the entire game
These are my 3 favorites. I've already played at least ~150 turns as every new civ, and the 3 above I've played a full-game with and won.
Honorable mention would be Indonesia (UA and UB are both quite useful, while UU is hit-or-miss for obvious reasons). I play a lot of Pangaea, since the AI has always been bad at naval combat and amphibious invasions, though BNW seems to have improved the naval side a bit, so, long story short, Indonesia may simply not mesh well with my preferred map-type and is probably one of the best civs in the game for archipelago and islands maps.
and hit someone, pillage, go back, repeat. And the Ideologies, rapaz, they fill so fast! XD
