Also, I was experimenting with my version of Agrarianism (1 food to farms, -1 hammers to mines and workshops) and I found it quite nice to play with. It essentially provides you with a choice between growth and production.
The game was as the Clan of Embers (Jonas Endain). I had very limitted access to fresh water in my capital so immediately Aristocracy was a no-no. The civic is sub-optimal with the Clan anyway as they tend to prefer City States, which was my choice in this game. Luckilly I had a rice and a corn resource in my city radius so few farms in the early game was ok.
I had a very peaceful start, stuck on a quite large peninsula on my own with no enemies near enough to warrant an early war. For this reason, I went to Agrarianism asap as my capital and surrounding area had many dye and sugar resources. Then I headed to RoK and adopted Arete in conjuction with Agrarianism. This gave me a net effect of +1 food to farms, -1 production to workshops. This was quite handy as this stage of the game as I could grow to my max population cap while still maintaining enough hammers to keep production ok. I then went to Masonry for Warrens, and Construction after. This gave me access to Workshops which provide 2 hammers and 2 commmerce on a standard grassland tile (I had mainly grassland and jungle). Of course using Agrarianism they were only providing 1 hammer and 2 commerce, very mediocre compared to a farm at 4 food.
Anyway, at this stage mmy cities were at their happy caps but continuing to grow so I left agrarianism and replaced a few of my farms with workshops. After all, the yields were now 3 food to 2 hammers and 2 commerce, a lot more balanced. The only other option in that civic category was Conquest, which was useless considering I was converting my farms to workshops and had no intention of going to war just yet. I stayed in Decentralisation for the most part.
This conversion helped fuel my economy in the mid game. I admit that I play on very resource heavy maps, and was in the middle of a jungle so had plenty of commerce resources available. However, the workshops added to this quite nicely, while also providing hammers. I think that if I had added my industry civic idea it would have made for a very viable economy. Anyway, somewhere along the line I also researched Sanitation, which brought my farms back up to four food per tile. Using the production bonus from my workshops, I had built warrens in all my cities and expanded greatly, netting myself perhaps three extra happiness resources, and a few extra from trade. This, plus the three from public baths, gave me a massive bonus to my happy cap.
At this stage, my cities weren't really growing, but running workshops was getting my new cities on the outskirts of my empire up and running at a nice speed, quickly becoming a net gain to my civ. The svartalfar were now building up along my north border, my only land border, closing me in on my peninsula, relations were poor, but I was on route to ogres so I figured I'd be safe from attack pretty soon and took a risk. I went back to Agrarianism.
At this point, the majority of my workshops went out of use, now only providing 1 hammer and 2 commerce (three on a riverside). This of course was a blow to my production. Never mind, I thought, I'll just start converting some of those workshops back to farms, which now produced 5 food per tile. This lead to a nice period of growth, and I started to fill out my cities.
A little while later I got myself some Iron Working, and was roughly 25 turns away from Machinary (this tech provides 1 extra hammer and 1 extra commerce to workshops in my game). I now had Ogres, but I had no source of metal. My start was completely devoid of both Copper and Iron.
Now that I'd grown as much as I needed to, I switched back to decentralisation for extra production from workshops, built a stack of Ogres, and attacked the svartalfar. I captured two cities, one with Iron, and eventually vassalised them after destroying a few more. I then researched Machinary, at which point I felt like I had the choice to either stick with workshops, which would now provide 3 hammers and 3 commerce, or go back to Agrarianism for extra food and another period of growth, and have workshops producing 2 hammers and 3 commerce. I decided to stick with Workshops and had a nice boost to production. I converted a few of my now un-needed farms into more useful workshops.
Notes:
1) If I had used Aristocracy I would have been constrained to Agrarianism to maintain some small amount of growth in my cities. This would have probably given me more commerce over all, but production would have been weak.
2) Upon changing out of Agrarianism, my cities did not starve. However, growth slowed to a crawl in any cities that relied heavilly on farms for their food. Changing back to Agrarianism allowed me to increase my population across the board by increasing the rate of growth substantially.
3) Without Arete, using Agrarianism in the early game is risky. To me it paints the picture of quaint little farming towns, totally inward looking and ignorant of the world around them, woefully unprepared for any serious invasion. I quite like it as an idea, you have to choose between growth or production.
4) Playing with a Spiritual leader, as I was, makes for a very fun strategy of simply changing civics whenever I wanted more growth, or more production. With a non-spiritual leader you would probably need to look more at the long term prospects, in which case you would probably use Agrarianism until you hit Sanitation, then leave it, possibly returning to it in the late game.
5) I'm not sure whether having neo-agrarianism in the late game is good or bad. It is fun though.
6) There desperately needs to be a new early civic in Agrarianism's group that you can use when you don't want Agrarianism in the early to mid game. My suggestion is Industry which would add an extra commerce to workshops and mills, and perhaps give a percent production bonus to cities. This would be available at construction. Alternately, bringing Mercantilism into the early game is an option.
7) Playing a super-city civ or religion would probably influence you to maintain Agrarianism throughout. This is a nice prodction penalty to civs like the Calabim which are currently very stong. Playing with Sacrifice the Weak would probably influence you to stay completely clear of Agrarianism.
8) I think the people who suggested that Agrarianism was the main problem of Aristogracy were right. Loosing one production from farms was a far too insignificant penalty, and not enough to balance the +2 commerce net gain of Aristogracy. On the other hand, loosing one production from the improvements you actually use for production balances it nicely. You effectively have a choice between commerce (aristogracy), food or great people (agrarianism) or production (neither) in the early game which is a very interesting decision to make at that stage of the game.
Thoughts?
I completely missed this post.
, +2 
per Specialist), which is a big boost. I think this may be too powerful - especially in the hands of the Sidar or Kuriotates. The increase to +30% 
should be enough to make the civic more attractive.
