Thanks for the feedback everyone! I'll review the strategy post this weekend, and see if there are any places where I can include some of your suggestions.
Nice job. it makes me want to play another game as Venice, but I have to go to work today.
One thing you mentioned, but I don't think ever gets stressed enough in these Venice strategy discussions is how to develop the CS after you acquire them. You certainly can send food back to them via trade units and this will allow them to grow big enough to work all those specialist slots including scientists which you can buy for them with all your gold. I have had games where Venice was size 30 and my first two puppets were each size 20. I have grown Venice out to as many as 10 CS puppets before as well.
This is a good point. I'll look through the post and see if there are places where I could elaborate on this a little bit more. The point of the puppets is that they kind of run themselves, but chosing what buildings to buy is pretty important (especially later in the game). I'll think back to what my purchase priorities were and try to update the strategy.
The UU can be useful especially if there is an AI cap next to you on the coast. You will want that tech fairly soon and at that point in the game, you can build and buy a force easy enough.
True, but this is a very specific case. In general, I think the UU is kinda crap.
Whish CS do you choose to puppet? Does one type have any advantage over the others? If you grab some maritimes mid game, they are likely to have several ships out a sea scouting. This can be a big map reveal for you. I'm not sure if that was mentioned.
This is very dependent on victory plans, map, circumstances, etc. Allying with cultural CSs is generally the most valuable, since culture generation can be a challenge with Venice. That's a good point about the Maritime CSs though.
How much gold is too much gold? How much should you be making at t100, t150, t200? What do you do with all of it? Should you focus only on sea trade or use some camels? How does choosing where to send your trade routes effect your game strategy?
Is there such a thing as "too much gold" in Civ V?
The actual amount of gold that you earn will probably depend on how many CSs you buy early, and therefore how many routes you devote to internal shipping rather than international trade.
Sea routes are strictly superior once your capital has enough production to build them quickly. An extra 2 or 3 turns of production time is well worth having
double trade income, food, or production! Of course, how many sea routes you can have is dependent on the map and other conditions.
Looks like you touched on having first city state you bought out form a food cargo ship route. Yes, extremely useful, and I'd do that for at least the next 2 city states as well to get Venice to grow extremely tall.
However I would skip the Carivansary and caravans in favor of a Harbor and Cargo ships. 2X as much gold even if destination coastal city is on the same land mass.
I recommended the Carivansary mostly in the cases where your sea routes can't reach any new trade partners.
I find I get plenty of Great Merchants of Venice as is; no need for faith bought ones (or left side commerce) to get even more; the puppets will generate plenty. In fact, it's sometimes difficult as Venice to get Great Scientists & Great Engineers.
This is a good point, but the double influence and gold from MoV means you can't really have too much of them. CS allies are valuable in all victory conditions. If you go for a faith build, you can use faith to buy MoV (which does not increase cost of great people, as far as I could tell), don't assign merchant specialists, and then allow your scientists and engineers to spawn naturally. I never tried this, so I didn't think to include it in the strategy, but it could work.
there a few important social policies I think worth mentioning for Venice:
- treasure fleets
- merchant confederacy
- treaty organization (freedom tenet)
if you get these 3 policies its pretty much impossible to lose a diplo game. MC isn't even necessary but treasure fleets and treaty org are both very powerful.
Treaty Organization is good, but I generally found that Treaty Organization was never necessary. By the time I had ideologies, I was allied with pretty much all the CSs and had a steady enough stream of MoVs that anytime someone unseated me, I could just spend an MoV and/or buy them back.
slaughterhouse, because I literally spent the last 4000 years bribing as many nations into war with each other as I could afford, there's almost no Civ that has not been denounced by at least 10 other Civs (Venice being the exception, 2 Denunciations) and considering that I disabled all Victory Conditions except for Domination Victory, the bloodbath is not going to stop anytime soon. And once I can finally invest in some personal Autocracy, I'll finally have some fun myself. :>
