It's July 4th. The American votes are probably from the UK. They are venting the loss of their colonies. They invested heavily in settler units and galleons all for nothing.
I voted for the Mongols.
Barbarian huts don't give out money and they automatically settle. I don't know if you have noticed but barbarian huts are usually on resources, so you don't get a settler to move it to a nicer place. So every hut you conquer leaves you with a city in a not so ideal spot, sometimes extremely near to your own capital.
And to make matters worse, you don't get any money or units from the huts, just a not so ideally placed city. On paper it sounds like a very powerful trait, but it comes to a way too high price.
The +2 production to mountains can get rather huge later in the game though...
You get about 300 gold from barbarians in the game
I dont think 300 gold = 9 cites by 0 ad
I understand the part about bad location, but its definitly no the WORST civ
You have more cities to defend and that means if you lose a non-important city, you can lose an important tech. So you lose land that could have been exploited a lot better by carefully thought out city placement.
I guess in the end the Mongols could be a pretty good civ, but you need to have a good map for them with huts being spread out and in good locations. I guess it takes a little extra strategy to make the best of the situation. The obvious benefit has a pretty large trade-off in my opinion, while benefits of other civs don't.
They are good for the one city challenge, which basically means you can only use settlers to found your capital or add people to that capital (read this in another topic).