That free culture is excellent with getting new cities up to their full territory.


Financial can be extremely powerful as well, as long as you build the right improvements to boost your gold.

Egypt... eh. Like you said, both their unit and building are obsolete kind of early.

Ethiopia is surprisingly good.

India's Fast Worker can be AMAZING if used correctly- how often have you lost a turn of working because your worker had to move onto a farm or jungle?

I've had good results with Mongolia and Persia, too.



Honestly, most of the civs are perfectly playable. If a civ has an early Unique Unit, you might want to play a bit more aggressively to start, but how you play the game is vastly more important than how you start.



If you want to read some stuff on strategy, along with some interesting insights on the game, check out this site I found a while back- there's some good stuff (ESPECIALLY the Multiplayer section)