worst ability surely has to be fuehrer teutonicus. so frustrating to sit around attacking a barb camp, only to end up getting no conversion. or, you get a conversion and then your big reward is a brute. it seems like since G&K you can't even farm barb camps anymore, I tried using archers to kill the barb in the camp but then the barbs just stop spawning inside the camp, but instead spawn beside it.. maybe it takes some time, but by that time an AI jumps in the camp and gets the gold for it. the 25% savings on unit maintenance is okay, but it should really be larger and the conversion should be 100%, like it is with privateers. wayfinding is actually a really good UA and it's surprising how low people rate it on these threads, it provides so much early/mid game versatility that no other civ can really match. the only knock against it is that by mid-late game when everyone has astronomy you basically are playing without a UA in many ways, which is just as annoying as when France's UA stops working, only this comes much earlier.
this sounds more like a stereotype black and white way to think, perhaps more relevant to vanilla but not so much for G&K. happiness isn't much of a limiting factor for expansion, i always end up with excess happiness even with the most aggressive city building possible (selling all lux, fast liberty tree settler, building settler, etc). i should note though that i find on most maps if you choose the standard number of players per map there just isn't a lot of room to expand beyond maybe 8 cities MAX, unless you happen to have a neighbour who doesnt like to expand. i find with the set number of players per map there is only so much room to keep expanding, so if i get 8 cities i feel lucky, generally it's probably closer to 6. so this might not count as 'ics', but im not sure how you can 'ics' more than this when the ai generally ics'es themselves and maps have only so much room per civ for expansion. in any event, at 8 cities expansion happiness has never been a limiting factor for me and my cities (assuming decent land) become all equally large.
More cities are NOT increases the GP cost.
One of my favorites. Furor Teuronicus only gives you a unit when you take a barb camp, not just for killing a barb in the camp, though it can give you a unit when you take a camp after killing it with an archer (so without a unit there).
I have always been partial to Viking Fury.