After 200 hours this is my rankings from best to worst :

Financial
Aggressive
Organized
Charismatic
Creative
Protective
Industrious
Philosophical
Expansive
Imperialistic
Spiritual

Here's why :

Financial
Out the gate this is a massive boost to your research AND lets you make/take lots of cities fast. Also, it stays useful for the duration of the game.

Aggressive
Rush, rush, rush!!! With this trait you can IMMEDIATELY topple your nearby foe and have a permanent lead with an amazing gem starter city. After that the game is cake.

Organized
A weaker version of financial's boost, BUT you also make lighthouses, courthouses, and factories faster. ALL of which are essential buildings.

Charismatic
Your armies get one or two more levels that make them brutal. ALSO you get three extra happy people for every city (one just because, one for monument (so immediately), and one for broadcast tower.

Creative
That +2 culture means new cities turn into crosses almost immediately, which means you can build without food right next to it. ALSO, library rush! Get that going ASAP and you will skyrocket down the tech tree. And theater and coliseum are there too for some reason.

Industrious
You can get all the wonders you want. Forge is okay, too, but the research for it is too expensive to be a fair trade off.

Philosophical
Just load up on specialists and you can have some MEGA MONSTER CITIES by end game, and universities are nice too.

Protective
Definitely a weaker version of aggressive and charismatic, but can be useful to dig your heels in if you're not a war monger.

Expansive
+2 Heath per city? Whoopty freaking doo! Who cares??? Sick is such a non-issue. It's minus 1 food each. 1! WHO CARES?! It SHOULD be like financial but for food. Granary is NOT important, you grow just fast enough to not have rioters without it. Harbor is nice, but it only matters if you're on water.

Imperialistic
Great generals drop out of the sky left and right as you fight, who cares? And you'll make MAYBE 5 to 8 settlers, again, WHO CARES???

Spiritual
Ugh. Gross. No anarchy? Who are these people swapping civics left and right? And temples. You need ONE temple at mid game and by the time you need more they take a couple turns. Absolute garbage. The only way this would be even CLOSE to good is if it gave you're priests bonuses, it applies to ALL religious buildings, AND it guaranteed spread of religion.

Opinions?

EDIT :
Oh, and Darius I is the best because Organized compounds with Financial. And apothecary makes public health a non-issue.

While Sitting Bull is the worst. Dog soldiers are at odds with Archers on the tech tree, and since totem pole boosts archer as well as protective it's the clear choice. But without and means to expand rapidly it's moot. Complete trash.

While I'm by no means the most serious Civ player, I have lurked on the forums where people who really know their shit on Civ 4 talk and have done my fair share of playing. A few comments based on your list: This is actually a bit more circumstantial than it first looks at first glance. Its only worthwhile if you're cottage spamming or sticking close to the coast, since otherwise almost no tiles actually benefit from this. There are other great traits for rushing; Expansionist and Imperialistic in particular are really good for getting your first worker and settler out earlier. This is a huge economic head start at the start of the game, and unless you get super lucky with copper or iron near your starting city you'll need a second city to start producing military units. Aggressive is still a solid trait, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Cheaper courthouses are amazing, since you can rush them down with slavery on much smaller cities. With the right great person to rush code of laws you can be really expansionist with this. This one really depends on your difficulty setting, as it gets much stronger on higher difficulties. This is very powerful for GP-focused strategies. It doesn't give you very many extra great persons over the course of the game, but what it does do is get you those great people much earlier than you otherwise would have. This is useful for rushing for key technologies. Woah, you are massively underrating this. Granaries are absolutely critical and should be your first building on every city with almost no exception. Every time you use slavery you need the city to recover its population and granaries speed that up. Granaries are one of the most important buildings for improving your economic output. Getting your workers out faster is also massive for your early economy, since cities don't grow while you're building workers but you absolutely need the productivity bonus of upgraded tiles. This is a very solid trait, especially on higher difficulties where health issues can hit smaller cities. It's not how many settlers you have, it's how quickly you build them. You get your early cities out sooner, and your capital isn't stuck building settlers and having its growth paused. It's still a weaker trait and a possible candidate for the weakest trait, but it's not bad. Spiritual is an excellent trait. Even if you're not doing much civic swapping, you're still looking at about 6 swaps over the course of the game. That's basically 6 extra turns ahead of everyone else, which should not be ignored. With no anarchy you can freely switch up your traits And temples are one of the most critical buildings in the game; you can easily build up +10 or more unhappiness from slavery on cities with lots of food output and you need a way to control that. Temple spam is a great solution to that problem, which directly improves your economy and productivity. This is a very solid trait.

I don't want to go through all the traits, however I do disagree with the ranking for especially some of them.

Industrious and Philosophical. These are the top traits in the game. In fact, these are so powerful that it's the *only* trait combination in the game that does not exist.

* Industrious is a gold mine. Keep building wonders with the intention of NOT completing them. You'll be rolling in gold. Not as effective on low difficulties because the AI is too slow to build wonders, but a bit up the tiers it's really good, and you can really rake it in. You also have the added benefit of building wonders faster as well, the ones you want to build, but the main benefit is that it's like printing money.

* Philosophical means faster (and more) Great People as already mentioned by Darvin. What is the implication of that? You can run more Golden Ages. If you also have the MoM (Mausollos something something) for +50% golden age length, and a big empire... dang! It's fun to check out the graphs for empires like this when you toggle the golden age. Of course this is powerful without Philosophical as well, but it does make it easier. And it's especially fast to get that first great person. Which is usually used for a very early Academy in your capital (or another great cottage spot if you want to move your capital in preparation for Bureaucracy). Other uses are various "bulbing" strategies, which mean spending the great person on researching technologies. Can be very useful in Lib races, or when going for a space win. Some even use it in the very early game to "bulb" Math for much improved chops, and then chop out an army and kill thy neighbours.

* Financial is good, I agree. It's a crutch and a pretty good one, especially in a cottage economy, or if you are close to coast, or on Big and Small type maps with tons of islands.

* Spiritual is generally underrated, but it's hard to put it to good use. However, it's very nice for changing civics or religions at will without suffering anarchy, which can mean 2-3 turns in the mid to late game. This really adds up over a whole game. Another fine use of spiritual is to give in to demands from warmongers like Monty or Genghis Khan. 5 turns later you can change out of it again, but you have often prevented war by obeying their wish. Basically for free.

Many of the others are kinda hard to rank precisely. Depends more on game style really, and how well one are able to use them. And on difficulty settings. Pretty much impossible to heavily settle the land on Deity for example. The AI is simply too fast (cheating like a mo-fo)

However, it's universally agreed that Protective is terrible, and bottom of the list. Unless you're playing Always War or multiplayer against humans, it's pretty much a trait with 0 benefits because you will never truly use it. It's like playing with 1 trait. Missed this one, which is too important to not talk about.

This is downright incorrect. The granary is the most important building in the game. By FAR. It means your cities grow much, much faster, which means more specialists, more worked tiles, more of everything, and faster. It means more citizens to whip away for instant production, and it means faster regrowth once you do, so you can whip again (just watch the whip timer so you don't get too many angry citizens).

If we really strip it down, there are only two buildings that are truly necessary in the game. Granary + Forge (and the latter actually only in reasonably long games, because it needs to pay back as well). In coastal cities with sea food you want a Lighthouse as well. And in huge empires (especially if you found some corporations), the Courthouse is essential. Everything else is something you build on a case-by-case basis (and things change in the late game, when you may want factories and such too). But the granary should be the first building you build in every city, unless it's the super early game where you may want a library or monument instead, depending on how you intend to use/specialise the city).

If you take anything away from this thread, it's that you NEED to build granaries everywhere, and fast. I promise you will notice it. Particularly if you have learnt to love the WHIP =)


One of the many reasons I love Civilization 4 is because it's such a deep game with incredibly many ways to play it -- and to play it "right". This isn't like the inferior imposters that came after it. It's a deep and wide ocean, not a puddle of spit. There is so much to learn and so many options available to us, and as the saying goes to just about any question on Civfanatics (please go there and read, I highly recommend it, no matter one's skill level) "It depends" and "Play the map".

Sure, there are some universal truths with only minor exceptions, like the granary is the most important building in the game, and always build a worker first, but for almost everything it really does depend. On map, resources, neighbours, difficulty level, win you want to achieve, traits, diplomacy, and so much more. It truly is a game that is hard to master, which I believe is one of the reasons it is still so popular so many years after its release.

Applause to Pangaea666!

Philosophical and Imperialistic

Increasing Philosophical provides more Great People which gives you the flexibility of achieving instant build bonuses for Wonders so you don't need Industrious.

The merit of increased Generals with Imperialistic allows you to increase military production in some cities and increased training points as well. Starting with ten training points means your military units get three combat bonuses from the start.