I played mostly with builders, I think they could maybe benefit a bit if they could always build districts no matter how low the stability is, right now as long as they can build stuff in two turns and have more than 30 stability they can keep building things like makers quarters, but that mean if you switch from builder your stability will crash and if you later pick builder again you may be stuck at permament 0 stability.

welp i started as an expansionist im in turn 42 and 1 star in ancient era..92 fame.. all the AI is at the next stage or almost there...top AI has 1332 fame...since the begining i explored and hunted..so i dont know how they grew so fast...i ve 1 city and 2 outpost and 18 influence i cant expand faster that this as my influence income is +5... tried the under one banner thing on an outpost an enemy unit came close it reseted so i had to pay again and start the 5 turns to get the place... next turn i merged a unit as reinforcements to the anexation army and it reseted again so i pay again and restart the timer once more im sure his army will come in less than 5 turns and i dont have more money to pay the under one banner...so im ded

I definitively like the new version of Affinity abilites. They do need to be advertised a bit more though - I did't realize the expansionist ability is what let people wander around in my land!

In general, I really like the new changes to affinities, especially the Merchant one and the Expansionist one (neither of which I've played yet but I like in theory and how the latter was used by the AI).

I played builder, aesthete, and agrarian but barely used their actives. I never used the Builder's industry mode, but I think that's more of a personal preference for not losing my already meager science gains. For a similar reason, I never used the Aesthete active: I have plenty of influence already and not enough gold to be willing to trade it away for influence. I don't know if the issue there is that they simply aren't enticing enough or if I just needed to suck it up and lose the science lol.

I did use the Agrarian active a few times, although I don't like that it requires the pop-stealing and grievance-generating since I often play a pacifist agrarian who avoids grievances at all costs. I just want to farm in peace :) That said, I do like the change to a set cooldown, since it used to be too intense when based on excess food and charging every turn. I wish we could get more pop without stealing, or have the choice between 3 pop or 1 pop and 1 from surrounding territories with grievances or something.

Overall I felt like this was a big step backwards in some ways, as I pretty much never used the Aesthete and Agrarian abilities they gave me, I think I activated my cultural abilities overall maybe once or twice in the whole game. Before I was constantly using Mother's Milk and the Tourism Yields, so... not liking the changes, really. Granted part of it was probably because I picked the Harappans in the Ancient era, where I hardly bordered anyone and didn't have the Influence to spare, later on stealing pops would seem much more viable. But I only used my merchant affinity once as the Carthaginians to claim a resource tile, never used my Aesthete ability as the Franks since I never lose influence over my territory, never used Science mode as Joseon because I was already behind on infrastructure and needed that industry/gold, and never used Builder mode as the Siamese because I wanted to keep earning gold and science. All in all, they felt a lot less consequential in this build. The most significant thing was the stability boost from building districts as the Siamese, most likely. Being on the receiving end of the Expansionist one was annoying, not sure I like that change really.

I might've could've used the Aesthete one more aggressively to earn Influence if I'd read it more carefully, though I didn't feel Influence-starved by that point in the game, not sure how much it would've helped. Could possibly be useful at a very specific point in the game, though I actually disliked the passive as it caused me to lose war support more rapidly. Really, I just miss Mother's Milk. I found it a lot more useful than what we were left with.

Well I like the affinities, but my main thing I'm personally not a fan of is that once the A.I. picks a culture it just gets locked out for you. I'd like to see it where there could be multiple cultural iterations in the same Era, sort of as a way to represent different Celtic tribes, or Greek city states, rather than you move too slow and can't pick the culture you wanted to advance to. 

The Agrarian ability does not seem to be generating any grievances, just notifications that the frickin' hedonnausee are stealing my pops

I really don't like most of the affinities.

Aesthete: I really don't understand what the passive does...The active gives influence and influence is only useful in the first era.

Agrarian: This one is nice because you can speed gain pops. The passive is a cursed gift. This stability seems to be temporary so if you quickly look at a city and think "hey I have the stability for a district". When the passive will go away all your cities will instantly have stability problems.

Builder: I'm not sure about the active. Converting your science to industry on one city would probably ruin most of my games unless I'm using this bonus to build more science district. The passive is a cursed gift like the agrarian.

Expansionist: I didn't try it. But in my experience, getting grievances with the AI is almost the same as declaring war. If I want an outpost, I will just declare war to get it instead of going the extra steps. The passive has potential. I didn't try it, can you preposition your troops in someone's territory prior to a war declaration? If that's the case, it's completely unbalanced.

Merchant: In my experience the AI is way better than the last beta at building extractors. You also get money when doing so. So the active is more of a Influence to money converter with a cooldown. But you don't get much money from that... less then a turn's worth of income. The passive is really useless, the cost of buying resources is already pretty low. The bonus income is a cursed gift like the builder and agrarian but way less severe.

Militarist: The active is nice but very situational. The passive is very strong. This is probably the only affinity that I think is at a good place.

Scientist: The active is only useful on cities that you have nothing to build. Way better version of this bonus than the builder's one.

Passive: Completely useless. I played a full game going from science culture to science culture and I could never get to a point where that passive would be useful.

I found a weird quirk with the Dutch UU, the Fluyt. The extra movement from starting your turn in friendly territory instantly goes away when you leave your territory, rather than lasting till the end of the turn. Not sure if this is intended or not, but wanted to point it out in case it wasn't.

Personaly I think that the biggest waste currently for cultures is that it dosn't give you a unique contemporary era country, it give a generic modern country whith some old buildings. The fact that cultures are exclusive is for me also bad, multiples countries should be able to take the same culture, and by combination it craete new cultures. Example, Mycean => greek/chartago/romans => Byzantine (greek byzantine différent from roman byzantine etc.) That way in the End it wont be country X with buildings of X, but a country, unique and different from an another with similar background. One should be able to make Byzantine greek, an other carthaginian byzantine and the two should be different, It an exemple but currently I found cultures to be a wasted opportunity. Affinities are Okay I think, and yes ther is some Op and bad cultures out there.

Progressing through the cultures is really fun and often results in interesting decisions, however there are some issues with some of the traits I encountered, which I want to share.
For context, I mostly play rather peaceful asthetes, builders and scientists.

With scientists I never found myself researching tech from the next era, rendering it mostly useless. Science output and tech costs are just too hard in my experience.
The asthete ability felt really situational... In the early game there are not enough ways to boost influence for non asthetes, resulting in me not really needing it, while influence in the lategame is too useless to play around, resulting in me not picking these cultures in the first place.
The builder ability to gain stability on constructing districts felt really nice and flavourful, however it makes transitioning to a non builder faction rather painful. Its industry mode feels nice to grind through wonders, but I never felt like sacrificing my, already low, precious science for it afterwards.
I see a similar problem with science mode because building science districts comes at such a high opportunity cost that sacrificing even more time/industry just feels bad.
The agrarian population steal is flavourful, but because influence is valuable in the early game, where the ability would be the most impactful, and you often dont border anyone by then it sort of pushed itself into being less relevant than it should.
The expansionist free trespassing passive is weird... In the early game trespassing is less relevant due to much of the map being unclaimed, and later on i was eather in an alliance/open borders or at straight up war with my immediate neighbours that I did not need it.
The merchant invest in deposit ability feels good and is by far my favorite ability in both total uses as well as early-late game relevance.

Lastly, the Joseon trait feels a bit too strong for a passive effect, but that experience could have been situational.

Active merchant ability is really useless, to build an extractor it costs too much influence in the early game when it's needed, in the late game merchants could do it with money and without cooldown.

As for influence to money -> useless, I had 3.5 k income per turn and i could do an action on a cooldown that will give me 60-100 by spending large influence sum, what is the point? If it say gave an additional resource, that would be much more interesting.

The lack of tooltips on what each of the affinity abilities does definitely make commenting on this much more difficult, I did not realize that each of them had a passive and active ability until I visited this thread. But after reading them, there are some that's a lot more ambiguous and difficult to understand their role in the game. For example cultural proximity is a mechanic that I still don't quite understand how it works or how to utilize it. Builder and Scientist active powers did feel pretty powerful and easy to use compared to others from my three playthroughs. Merchant feels a bit lackluster but also difficult to understand why you can build on top of existing extractors or why it would be useful on harder difficulties where the AI had already built extractors. 

The current culture era vs science era tuning being very out of sync also makes the scientist passive a lot less useful, but I think that's a problem of the former rather than the latter. 

One thing I forgot to mention in my comprehensive feedback post:

Because of the changes to quarter construction costs, EQs that benefit from district adjacency have been hit really hard - particularly the great obelisk now that there isn't really justification to build a market quarter over any other district. Anything per pop is strictly better at almost every phase of the game. I'd suggest a rebalance of adjacency for EQs if current production costs remain.

I think the change to the expansionist passive to make the ability more viable was an excellent move. Went from being one of the weakest in my eyes to at least one of the most fun. Gonna play Teutonics a lot!