Financial: due to how it boosts so many different sources of commerce, the trait almost applies as a net 50% economy bonus (that slowly slides down to about 20% or less later) over a civ without it all things considered. You have to leverage it actively though: cottages, windmills, settling coast, etc. The ramifications are huge, and the power of this trait only grows the longer game goes and you develop more land, working more tiles. Commerce lets you do everything better except land grab, and in my mind most of the other traits' building bonuses are attempts to get ahead of Financial before it booms to a true monster. Great at any time of the game, but a late game monster. In my mind it is without a doubt the *best* trait overall even if it's not the absolute *strongest*, as it is very easy to apply and helps out anything. Well, unless you play a map with deliberately unfavorable terrain, and even then, you'll be doing better than a civ without it with the right improvements! Not much else to say about it: it's good! The only trait that feels like a
perk and not a
trade-off to me. Note that while Financial is not exactly interchangeable with Organized, the specifics about Organized means it saves you a lot of expenses you might rack up through certain actions like war, specifically gaining cities, and for a warmonger Organized is a great substitute for Financial that requires less effort (just build courthouses in your newly captured cities, save a ton on upkeep+civic costs from the new population!).
Organized: Some important infrastructure boni for setting up in the early game, a bit of ease on your expenses. I see that a lot of more experienced players don't like it, probably because of the bias towards war in the metagame and what that entails (whipping reduces population = lower civic cost as one example, financial is better at floating a strained economy, etc. ). The civic bonus indeed is most effective the faster you expand and grow and diminishes much later when inflation starts happening, but there is a large window before that when you are both obtaining more total population by any means (expansion, war, growing) and unlocking better, more expensive civics before your expenses plateau and/or you reach State Property, which kicks this trait in the balls. Cheap Lighthouses: good for going coastal strats, whether as Darius or not, as they are pretty much a requirement to work coast for a benefit. Cheap Courthouses: even at the low level I play, these are probably the best thing about the trait. Maintenance costs can cripple you readily, I hear they're even worse on higher difficulties, CoL is a fairly early tech depending on how you play. These let you war and keep cities more readily or help prevent prematurely ending your campaign due to costs. Cheap Factories: *if* you are going space race or absolutely have to fight a modern war, they're okay I guess. Much more mileage can be gotten out of Industrious' cheap forges though, and by the time you can get factories, they aren't exactly prohibitive in the cities that can actually benefit from them: no need to build them everywhere if you don't have to. Overall I like Organized (it's my favorite trait actually) because it's always at work for you all game, and the bigger you get, the more it helps similar to Financial -- in a way. The drop off towards the later years doesn't mean it isn't still helping you out, but I'd rather take even the health or happiness bonuses at the point that cities are trying to grow as big as possible, while Financial would be helping the economy better than Organized ever could alone. At least it pairs well enough with any trait because of the passive cost reduction. Darius' combo of both Organized and Financial has a
monster economy though!
Expansive: My former favorite trait, after understanding the game more (specifically what to prioritize, diplomacy and tech bulbing) I dropped it as I'm not a heavy warfaring type of player. The name is deceptive, as the trait is a general early power booster and doesn't necessarily help only with expanding (Imperial is that one). It's also a
huge warmongering trait. At face value, you get some extra health, and speed bonus in setting up some important infrastructure (granaries+workers). Big whoop, right? You might grow some more a little bit faster. Well if you understand how important whipping is and how much more efficient granaries make that, you suddenly see that the cheap granaries is a massive leg up on another civ without it. You can get them in place faster, whip anything you want earlier, and press that advantage into a huge snowball effect. You even get to spend less time building your initial workers before Pottery/Bronze Working! The quintessential trait to getting a war machine off the ground. Later on, when you get into the post-heavy whipping stages of the game (which may be never for some players!), your cities can grow approximately an extra pop each before unhealthiness caps them, as happiness rarely restricts a city later on after Drama and even then you don't have to even think about touching the culture slider until mass Emancipation starts happening unless you are embroiled in a game length war whipping your hands to the bone. It has obvious synergy with another war-focused trait, but it works well enough on its own too if you just want a general whipping advantage for building infrastructure, expanding, etc.
Charismatic:Another trait I used to like a lot more for the wrong reasons (my favorite leader was Washington because, well, 'Murica!). The early game happiness can be a very real help when you get into the whipping stage, as happiness is a much bigger detriment to max city size than health and it helps offset this. Even if it is so slight in magnitude, relatively it's quite large (+1 happy when you have a cap of 4 or 5 with no luxuries is huge...) Whipping essentially stacking unhappiness in the city when abused too much is softened a bit. Your cities can get an extra pop before they HAVE to whip or starve. Etc. Etc. Biiiiiiig early game advantage for a slavemaster. The faster promotions is where it's at though, and the trait's strongest advantage by far, and why it is the warmonger's best overall trait IMO. Later promotions having their costs reduced is so much more valuable than the GGs from Imperial IMO and pays off more in the long run than Aggressive. This is the trait you want if you plan to war all game, not just rush. The later bonus to broadcast towers is literally a non-factor (who cares with Drama?) but you could probably pull off some wonky Stonehenge tie-in with a Stone start or De Gaulle to get more whipping done.
Aggressive: This trait screams "RUSH!" This trait supports "RUSH!" Cheap Barracks + your first promotion on the most common attacking units early game for free? Pumping units that can earn their 2nd upgrade for free earlier than any other civ? Pretty cool! A match made in heaven for those with a more bullying approach to their opponents. The drydocks are kind of eh (are you really going to build that many, or not use Theocracy or Vassalage in their place?). The only downside to this trait is that it's not even better for early game aggression by promoting mounted units instead of gunpowder, but oh well. I also understand that on higher difficulty, it's kind of hard to push the AI around early on without very favorable circumstances, for what it's worth. Pair it with another warmonger trait like Expansive or Charismatic and you can be extremely dangerous. Hell, Shaka and Boudica ARE extremely dangerous, though apparently Genghis sucks. Clearly the power of the trait falls flat as the game goes on beyond keeping your promoted units around, but as I feel early game advantages are much more game defining, this is an acceptable price and you can only blame yourself if you don't leverage it to get your some of of those highly promoted units to hang around for upgrades later.
Imperialistic: This one is an oddball to me. Faster GGs make it support a warfaring strategy well (assuming you make good use of the Generals and don't squander them) but the Settler speed makes it the fastest expanding trait in the game, even quicker than Expansive. Unlike most of the other traits too, I don't feel like this trait ever gets any weaker or stronger based on the length of the game. Sure, you can no longer expand after a point, but the more you develop your land/build your infrastructure or the more cities you take by force, the more lucrative your empire becomes over time anyway, making this loss moot. The Great General earning speed is good for combat of any era, war happens at all stages of the game after all. I have come to appreciate it this trait more as I have moved from the "peaceful builder" newbie phases and started becoming more comfortable with aggression and war in general, as the GGs can really turn an offensive push into a overrun by injecting a ton of XP into a stack, or simply making it easier to create super-medics for your stacks. I'm a compulsive fast-expander too (habit from RTS games) so I like that part of the trait too. Overall though, I don't think this trait isn't that powerful alone, and depends a lot the one it pairs with. For instance, Catherine with Creative+starting with Mining is the best land grabber in the game, Joao can spit out cities faster than anybody else by pairing with Expansive AND starting with Mining, Cyrus benefits from fighting wars successfully more than anybody else, Julius Caesar and Victoria can quickly set up large, sustainable empires, etc.
Creative: Like Expansive, this trait is about getting off the ground quickly and it helps with that in chiefly two ways: border popping 5 turns after you settle (well, on normal speed anyway) means you can grab land very fast and shut the AI out before they can get their grubby hands on it. You can also settle every city with the full size of the BFC in mind from the outset, unless it absolutely imperative to hook up a strategic resource ASAP. The cheap libraries let you pursue a quick tech advantage for whatever end: trading, getting an early war tech or simply jumping ahead in the tree to get something else faster like Liberalism. Even if a city cannot generate much commerce before cottages mature or without a commerce resource, as long as you can sustain 3 population on one tile with a food resource, you can earn 7.5 beakers and eventually bulb a tech. I found this trait very useful for the border control as a brand new player and after that I found it useful to keep teching after I would cripple my econ through too much expansion
The trait is
so much better if you can get the Pyramids one way or the other and run early Representation, so that should always be a part of the plan if possible in the back of your mind. Every city running 2 scientists would earn 15 beakers for only 3 pop, or the equivalent of 5 commerce per tile at that size, totally independent of your slider setting. Such an amount is like working a fully mature non-financial river Town tile before applying civic/tech bonuses. And again, it's independent of any commerce the city earns and thus your tech slider, though the library will also increase any beakers earned through commerce that the city does earn via any source. I don't really think the already dirt-cheap theaters or rarely needed colosseums really deserve mention.
Industrious: Lets you build wonders faster. I hear it thrown around all the time that it more or less lets you get your first pick of a certain wonder. In personal experience, tech choices and your plan at the moment dictate whether or not you can get a wonder or not more so than the advantage of this trait, similar to how having Stone or Marble does not guarantee you getting Stonehenge or the Oracle if you have other things to accomplish (okay, the Oracle is a bad example, but still). Still I find it handy for grabbing those wonders that can't be sped up any other way like Great Lighthouse or the Apostolic Palace, especially since there might be a race for these if you don't beeline or refuse to chop. If anything, it means I can get my favorite few wonder combos with some certainty when I have a start/civ with the techs to go that way: Masoleum of Maussollos+Taj Mahal, Oracle-->Colossus, and simply making sure I can absolutely get the Pyramids or Kremlin before the AI if I go for them. The cheap forges are likewise a great part of the trait, boosting productivity in stages earlier than the factories of Organized and tying directly into fast Colossus or Engineer bulbing strats even without having to rely on the Pyramids.
Philosophical:+100% GP points. To be honest, I put these following three traits last because I don't like them and haven't really tried to leverage them. I understand the extra GPP helps you get the first couple faster and like anything that can snowball, but I haven't been able to really play any maps where I successfully pulled off a GP farm with much success. I just tend to use wonders + Golden Ages and focus on free GP from techs to achieve this, and there's always Pacifism in the religion civic tree doing the same thing for cities with the religion. I also don't know why you'd pick a rigid civ-wide trait towards something that will only help a city or two max, from the way I understand GP generation strategy, though it's better than nothing. Pacifism is pretty much the only other civic there I'd consider other than OR as I don't like FR because the diplomatic benefits are too useful to manipulate AIs and I don't like the inflexibility of Theocracy either. It seems like it has some tie in with Creative for speeding up some GS or GAs for bulbing though.
Spiritual: I see the obvious diplomatic advantages of being able to swap at will, especially religions, and the cultural victory implications from being able to spam temples. Shwedagon Paya and the Pyramids both look very important to getting the most out of this trait, as well as spreading religion. In fact, I think this trait is probably the best one for either cultural or AP diplomatic victory (which i have done successfully quite early a few time before). However, of all the traits except perhaps Philosophical, I can find more excuses to marginalize this trait than any other. Major civic changes can be cut down with careful planning, and Golden Ages help you switch. If you are sufficiently busy doing something, like embroiled in war with your science slider to 0%, is a turn or two anarchy even THAT bad? Once you start racking up tons of turns of anarchy maybe I could see it, but I rack up maybe 3-6 total for a whole game, ever, and a lot of that is dependent on how far it goes and the timing of golden ages among other things. Religion spreading to control the diplomatic atmosphere isn't hard, and the best religious civic for that matter IMO is the first one you unlock, OR, which consequently makes those temples and cathedrals easier to build. For that matter, temples aren't exactly expensive to start with if going for cultural, and a Financial civ could do that extremely well regardless of cathedrals unless you are spamming as many religions as you can. I have never needed this trait to ever pull off Religious Leader, only careful teching/an opportunistic bulb and monopolizing as much of the share of the AP religion as possible. Theology conveniently comes with founding of a religion to leverage to this end if you get it first. Etc. Etc. Perhaps it's just way different on higher difficulties and I need some enlightenment. By all means, please correct my thinking, I'm here to learn.
Protective: Okay, this one I know sucks. Outside of a specific rush with the Chinese I know about but never tried or maybe spamming Sitting Bull super Longbows to buy time in a specific frame, it just doesn't seem worth it for one particular reason: defending in cities is subobtimal in the first place. Not least of all because you can't choose exactly when/where to engage. Enemy stacks are much easier to check with offense/counterattacks; they don't get defensive bonuses when they are out trekking around either, so you'd better be taking advantage of it and go hit them! If you don't already have a ton of cultural defense built up it's really not going to slow down an opponent bringing powerful/a lot of siege. If you can't muster to check an enemy stack, a city isn't going to stop them anyway and you're better off either wearing them down through guerrilla attrition tactics or regrouping deeper in your own territory while they waste time fighting what forward forces you have. The elephant in the room is that you shouldn't ever have to fight a defensive war in such a way in the first place if you control the diplomacy correctly or are the aggressive warmonger yourself. I understand that it's harder to do these things as the difficulty goes up, but it likewise makes this trait even more useless because you can't offset the massive advantages of the cheater AIs with it alone.
depending on resource luck. Universities are later still (sometimes), but PHI makes them more viable as buildings plus confers the GPP advantage very fast and helps open some tech window timings that are otherwise not available.
for 5-10 units all over the place, the prospect of having 5 galleons loaded with amphibious units, even junk like maces, is terrifying. Whatever you don't defend...burns, and they won't lose much 
