What is your single favorite civic?

[Krill]

Theocracy...2 promo units are nice

[SirIlya]

Originally posted by Brundlefly
Yeah, Caste System is kind of useless. I value growth and production too much to have too many specialists. Rarely do I have more than 2 in a city..

Caste System has it's uses:

1) To pump out a few Great People fast under a burst of Pacifism.

2) If you are planning on massive expansion before State Property. Any newly conquered city can run enough artists to push out it's borders fast and then switch to merchants so that it is not a drain on your economy. I have found this synergizes nicely with Augustus, who often has the cultural and military capability to expand territory much faster than he can get all the key economic techs to support unrestrained expansion (even with organized). If you have 2x more land than the biggest AI by 1AD, victory is almost certain.

3) It is particularly nice if you are Spiritual, since Slavery is only actually doing something for you on a turn when you are actually cracking the whip. So you go around and pop-rush everything that is ready and then switch to CS while the hatred wears off. Sure, if you are all cottaged up you might not run that many specialists outside your GPP, but with CS you can run pure merchants or pure scientists. And there are always a couple cities that need to push borders, that are at happy cap or that were built for strategic reasons and don't have many flat tiles to work.

4) If you get Pyramids, you can run CS for a stretch to grab a nice tech advantage since a specialist economy will easily out-research an early non-financial cottage-economy while helping you make some great scientists for academies, lightbulbing and for settling. Yes, you are trading future potential for current benefit, but the time-value of getting a few key techs faster can sometimes more than make up for slowing down the eventual maturation of your cottages.

5) Cultural victory.

That all being said, my favorite Civic is Slavery, although late in the game I like Universal Suffrage as well. Sometimes I will run both--who says slaves can't vote?!? :P