No anarchy on civic changes is pretty powerful, and unless you run a lot of Golden Ages, you’ll be hard pressed to time all your civic changes to coincide with GAs. Even if you do that, you get stuck in a suboptimal civic or civics for a few turns… or if you go ahead and accept the anarchy, you lose a lot of production/commerce.
Consider a switch to Bureaucracy. If you have a capital producing, say, 10 base hammers and 40 base commerce, Bureaucracy will provide 5 bonus hammers and 20 bonus commerce. Since it’s your capital, you can probably assume a Forge, a Library, and an Academy, so the net Bureaucracy boost will be 6 hammers and somewhere between 25 and 35 beakers/coins. If your nation produces 50 hammers and 200 commerce per turn, and a swap to Buro takes 1 turn, then if you have to wait more than 7-8 turns before you get the Artist for the GA, you’re better off just biting the bullet and swapping to Buro and accepting the turn of Anarchy. With the Spiritual trait you can ignore that analysis – and you can spend your Great People on bulbing, trade missions, etc.
The further you get into the game, the more expensive Anarchy is. A swap to Free Religion/Free Speech/Caste System can cost you thousands of hammers and commerce, if you have to endure 2 or more turns of Anarchy.
For me
>Slavery – I just swap when I discover it. Sometimes I’ll wait until my settler for 2nd/3rd city is walking. It's a 1-turn swap and I probably have fewer than 3 cities, so it's pretty painless.
>Bureaucracy – sometimes I have the GA from the Artist that comes with Music, sometimes not. Researching Music after Civic Service can take some time, so if I don’t have another civic swap to make, I may just revolt without the GA
>Org Religion/Hereditary Rule/Representation (if I have Pyramids) – if I’m lucky I can time some of these with the GA from the Music Artist, along with the Bureaucracy swap.
>Liberalism Civics – I try to time these with the Taj, if I have Marble. If no Taj, it’s expensive. Often if I have an Engineer, I’ll burn him for the Taj – 800 hammers is less than the value of hammers + Commerce I’d lose by swapping with Anarchy.
>Free Market/Representation – if possible I like to make these swaps during the Taj GA. It’s hard to time learning both Constitution and Economics within 10 turns of learning Liberalism AND building Taj. So often I have to revolt to one or both with Anarchy.
>Pacifism – always make this swap during a GA, if I do it at all.
>Later civics (Emancipation, State Prop) – usually time these with a double GP GA, or wait until Cristo Redenor (if I get it). But it’s particularly painful to have to wait for a GA before switching to Emancipation, especially if you also have war weariness on the go.
