Best traits

[Will9]

My favorite traits are Financial and Charismatic. This is why I like Hannibal. Financial gives more gold which means a bigger and more sdvanced army. Charismatic gives extra happy and cheap promotions.

[Wiglaf]

Financial gives more gold which means a bigger and more sdvanced army.

I think aggressive is better for this

[Thedrin]

I haven't voted yet. I'm trying to decide what trait to pair with creative; charismatic, organised, philosophical, or spiritual.

[Willem]

Well Financial is kind of a no-brainer. It's always good to get a bit more money being generated in a game. My second choice was a bit tougher. I was thinking first of Creative since this makes it much easier to place cities and grab those needed resources. But I settled on Protective in the end. Getting a defensive bonus is always a good thing for your units to have. I'm partial to Organized as well, for the same reasons as Financial.

[Krill]

Probably SPI and FIN. Financial just lets you grow that much faster, and now EXP has been nerfed it's a nice trait to have, but by no means a no brainer. Spiritual lets you MM to your hearts content. PHI is probably more powerful than FIN, but PHI needs food whereas FIN doesn't (of course a little food is always needed for a half decent city, but PHI needs food all over the place)...

To be honest all of the traits are pretty much balanced for the epic game now, they only need tweaking for the era starts (IMP and SPI get progressively better...)

[Blaupanzer]

FIN definitely. I picked CRE as it avoids hassles with monument-building or if you miss a religion. Seriously considered SPI for avoiding anarchy and religion shot and CHA for the quicker promotions and happiness. Playing FIN/ORG (Darius) at the moment, and he's pretty awesome too.

[Jvstin]

It depends on the game you want to play.

With that said, Charismatic is now more useful because Monuments last longer. Expansive is not quite as nice anymore with the slow down on worker production.

I do like financial, industrious, and creative traits the best.

[JackRudd]

I picked Spi and Phi. Especially nice if you build the Pyramids early.

[lawren65]

I used to be cre and finacial all the way but tried hannibal and will never go back.

Charismatic with an early focus on stonehedge gets solves your cultural border problem + two happiness and easier promotions. I've also gotten used to the great prophet that an early stone hedge generates

[One_more_turn]

Some traits are more powerful/useful at higher levels. Charismatic has fixed number of bonuses and is percentage wise larger on higher levels. If you have only 4 happiness to begin with, the 2 extra provided by Charismatic represents a huge boost.

Due to AI bonuses at Monarch+ levels, human players need a bigger empire to compensate. But city maintenance also goes up dramatically with levels, and rushing courthouses in conquered cities becomes a must. That's where Organized comes in so handy. My calculation shows that Organized provides more cost savings than Financial for Emperor+ levels, and there is the cheap Factory thrown in...

The alternative to bigger empires is to have bigger cities. But human players also face a hard cap here. Philosophical can let you bypass this cap through settled great people.

[Nugog]

Agg and Fin.

Agg really helps early rushes - esp on smaller maps.

Fin is just a no brainer IMO......

[Common Sensei]

Charismatic, Philosophical, Organized, and Creative are the ones I like to use most, so I like leaders that have one or more of them.

[Proteus_MST]

CRE/FIN

[Blake]

Ooooh picking two is really hard.

The top 3 I feel are:

Charismatic
Creative
Spiritual

Charismatic is really the ultimate trait. More happiness means more workers which means more yield of every kind. The Monument buff gives you a no-brainer culture source. Units, of every kind, melee, mounted, siege, naval, air - are just better for Charismatic.

Creative is the ultimate early game expansion trait. Mainly it lets you take your pick of city sites, decide what bonuses you want a city to claim, plonk the city there. 5 turns later you can be improving all the bonuses, this gives you a faster ramping economy. It doesn't matter about (non-creative) neighbors, their culture is pushed aside. Your cities effectively have a defensive bonus for if neighbors get uppity. You rely on a strong early game, but have all the tools to make that strong early game happen.

Spiritual is a trait which is nice throughout the game, but it gets much nicer later in the game where you can do crazy civic flipping. Spiritual is not a great trait by itself, but it complements a "dominating" trait wonderfully. I consider the two best trait combos to be Charismatic/Spiritual and Creative/Spiritual.

The only two traits I consider bad, are Protective and Imperialistic.

[darrelljs]

Traits are best taken in pairs...for example Aggressive/Organized is IMO a better combo than Aggressive/Spiritual, even though Spiritual is overall a better trait than Organized. If you take the top vote getters, I would pair them like this:

Financial with Charismatic (Hannibal)
Charsimatic with Organized (Napoleon)
Creative with Philosophical (Pericles)
Philosophical with Spiritual (Gandhi)
Spiritual with Philosophical (Gandhi)

A lot of it depends on playstyle as well, I'm sure most people would rather play with Brennus, but Napoleon is such an incredible Domination leader, he's really my favorite war mongering leader.

Darrell