Seeing that Venice actually works as a forced pseudo-OCC civ makes me wish that the Huns were actually handled the same way. Let the Battering Rams keep their vs. city bonus upon promotion and remove their ability to found cities entirely.
Of course, after getting my hopes up and doing a serious delve as Venice yesterday, I'm somehow finding myself getting completely spanked in GPT terms by every civ I meet. I'm in the early Renaissance and making something like 12 GPT. Not sure where I went wrong.
And start watching maddjinn's LP if you want to learn how to play Venice in the early game.
Bud is right, you got to crank up growth to the max and get the trade going.
bud, so far it is massive growth (he's at size 9-10 with +20 food) in order to fill in all of the future specialists slots. He's also growing into production since that is one of the banes of Venice. Trade routes are also important since they start with 4 and one should take advantage of them asap. One of his routes, though, is to bring in 7 food from a puppeted city-state.