Mercantilism: most useless civic?

[calyth]

No, it gives you an automatically assigned free specialist who doesn't eat and don't add any unhappiness or unhealtiness. Very nice!

Crap, meant to say Caste System, not Merchantile.
But point taken

 

[kazin9]

I've found every civic to be useful, but you really have to pay careful attention to how you're playing, and where your civilization is, in terms of development.

I think you can work a mercantilism phase into your game, combine it with the right combination of other civics and wonders, and you can have--as others have mentioned--a powerful great person factory. Or four.

With the Sistine Chapel, it's an automatic +2 culture per city. Wonderful.

Once you create the Statue of Liberty you can drop Mercantilism.

 

[panzooka]

why drop merchantilism when u have liberty statue?, it adds another free specialist

 

[dh_epic]

Two free specialists in every city is something fearsome.

 

[kanitatlan]

A key issue for mercantilism is the average size of your cities. If you have been expansionist (in strategy not leader trait) and have lots of relatively small cities then this will make it more valuable. The benefit is proprotional to the number of cities. Other civics have benefits that are proportional to the number of citizens available to do things. I have no idea where the cut off is but it would explain why many people think it is a good civic to have when you first get it but no so good later. This will simply be a result of their cities getting larger.

On an earth world it may be a good civic to use during the colonisation boom as the bonus is particularly beneficial to the new small cities.

 

[panzooka]

and it also means citys found on thundra/desert can actually work
2 free specialist with +2 culture from sistine chapel, and +3 beaker from representation.

it encourages you to build more cities, which is a good thing if u run a large empire

 

[Mazruk]

Excellent thread guys - I'd always skipped merc because I'd concentrated on its cost (no foreign trade) without fully exploring its benefit. Thanks for highlighting its uses