Venice, la Serenissima

I accidentally selected Venice when starting a game and almost abandoned the game when I saw that the only way to expand was by buying city-states.

I am so glad I decided to try it. It is huge fun. I am making money like crazy and can pretty much build any wonder I want.

I chose this game not to buy any city-states but to concentrate on trading with them. (Sometime I will try a game to see how many city states I can buy.)

Anyway, I just wanted to say don't be put off - Venice is great fun.

Yeah, they are fun! I'm playing them right now too.

You should buy at least 2 CS early even if you want to go patronage. The reason being, otherwise you have no way to feed venice with food ships, which is a waste if you don't with all those extra trade routes. Venice will grow 2x as fast and be way better if you do this. Since venice is your main source of science growing it as fast as possible is best. On my current game I now have 5 puppets, all feeding venice, and I'm outstripping everyone in pop and tech on immortal and still have plenty of money. Just bought factory, hydro plant, public school, and research lab in rapid succession hehe.

A few things I learned:

• Since you are building many wonders in your capital the Hermitage is way, way, way better than usual. I forgot about it until the modern era and smacking myself in the forehead when I realized I missed out on about 60 extra culture per turn for years...do not make my mistake.
• Also, if you feed venice with a few routes, you can run every specialist constantly and barely feel it. Makes for a dizzying stream of GP's to plant as tiles and later start burning when it's no longer worth it to plant.
• I took to using my extra gold to buy up all of the third ring, it was expensive, but made venice start grabbing 4th and 5th ring luxes and resources and brought in a lot of extra happiness sources and things to sell. If you do this early it is worth it, otherwise you run the risk of forward-settlers stealing some of your precious 3-ring at worst, or some of the 4th and 5th ring stuff at minimum that venice would have picked up in the Renaissance.
• Open Commerce. Lots of gold boosts, extra happiness on your short luxes, and best of all: the wonder, Big Ben will give you a flat 15% discount on buying everything in your cities for the rest of the game. It will save you thousands and thousands of gold long-run as that's all you end up doing with venice and late-game purchases are expensive 1000+ seeing as the puppets never build science buildings or factories and venice is often distracted by wonders. Exploration is nice too but big ben is King for Venice.

Venice is a blast to play. I admit I wasn't too thrilled with only having one city at first but once you play them you will love them. You reach a certain point in the game where you never have to build a building again because you can buy them all. You can spam wonders because you don't have to build anything else. Plus you use supply ships to ship food back to Venice and get a really big city. I will have to look through my old games but I believe once I got Venice's population into the 70s (on epic). They are definitely a powerful civ!

Looks like they're in trouble in my current game. Their capital is now a puppet. Never seen that before

Venice is weak as an AI. Generally they seem to do well early with science and money. They can be good trading partners. But they always seem to be militarily insignificant. Sooner or later someone takes Venice (usually somewhere nice and accessible on a coast) and then it's doge-gone.

Venice isn't always a weak AI. I once had Venice as ai once and asked him to stop prophet spamming my cities. A turn later he declares war and takes my capital by surprise. Some civilizations just can't be underestimated sometimes.

I'm playing as Venice currently and while I acknowledge the above, I still don't feel the love. Having only one city you make decisions for becomes, for me, quite boring.