So the populist 'negative' trait is completely broken. +60% food from trade can create a loop to infinitely feed your cities. To explain, once you hit around 200 population, your base trade value is around 15, and with 20 trade routes (easily doable with techs and civics) that means 300 base trade. With civics and buildings you can get that food trade bonus up to 100%. However for each size increase of your city beyond 110 or so, you gain a +1% increase to trade value, meaning you get 3 extra food per population point growth which is enough to feed a citizen. Populist should have a 25% food from trade bonus at best, and it would still be quite good.
Furthermore, I find that merchants have been seriously neglected. There are no wonders or civics that really affect them, and the financial trait with 1 extra commerce per merchant is worse than the 1% bonus to gold from philosophical from artists. Not to mention there is a wonder that increases the commerce bonus of artists to 2, meaning there is very little reason to actually assign merchants to a city unless you are aiming for a great person to establish a corporation. Speaking of which, I couldn't find any techs that provide a great merchant (either that or they happened so rarely I didn't notice).
It should also be noted that gold isn't that great as a resource. Sure you can hurry production, but production in cities becomes so rampant it's difficult to compete with using gold for that purpose and you can only hurry one building at a time. There should be some way to dump a ton of gold into a city at once and make it construct multiple buildings, like production can, or perhaps there should be a toggle to double production at a cost of 2x the gold for each production.
Finally, engineers are simply too good. Even when I tell the city to focus on research, it still picks engineers over scientists.
On a less specific note, the traits are completely out of whack. Some affect the long game, while others affect the early game, and some simply aren't that good at all. For example spiritualist is just a major penalty, given that the only real reason for great prophets is to construct holy cities, and the empire receives a seriously happiness malice for each non-state religion. This should instead provide a 2% gold bonus for each religion in the city. The leader is spiritualist, not fanatic. Industrious is perhaps the best trait, outside of populist, as it affects the long game with trade routes and production bonuses on high production tiles, and the early game with wonder production (should be a 20% bonus instead of 50%) along with starting bonuses to beginner quarries.
Other than that, this was very well designed. Wonderful Job!
I really found I needed to think carefully about what buildings I constructed and what techs to research, and I had to fill up all my cities with cops and medical workers once I hit those population highs.
Stars with "+1 Strength".
. I prefer to see how massive I can get my cities and experience the entirety of the tech tree. I chose the most broken leader available (basil) and an currently aiming for population 400 cities. The only thing that would make Basil even more broken is if expansionist was replaced with progressive. Industrious, progressive, and populist is hands down the most powerful combination in the late game. There is actually still an AI in my game, that is vastly inferior to me, that I am just letting survive for reasons I don't really understand. It would be better if I just conquered him and played past the win condition, as he refuses to give me the only opium on the map, for reasons that I find utterly stupid (I'm winning too hard).
