Venice AI doesnt use his Merchant to puppet bug?

Well since the fallpatch came out and i had a few Venice Ais in my games and i always see them playing 1 City challange yolo swag.
Is this a bug? Because before he always has at least 2 or 3 Puppet citystates..

Venice (particularly on Deity, where the AI gets a MoV instead if a second settler) often uses it's first MoV to conduct a trade mission, for gold and CS influence.

Browd said:

Venice (particularly on Deity, where the AI gets a MoV instead if a second settler) often uses it's first MoV to conduct a trade mission, for gold and CS influence.

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Nah i dont play on Deity i play on Emporer.
But why should he choose 30 influence and gold over at least a second City?
Doesnt sound very clever to me.

I think they might, because the AI is weird, send it out to look for a citystate and let it get captured by barbarians.

Just my guess.

Frankly a turn 5 or 10 CS puppet is worthless. No worker, no units, just a naked city. Gold and influence are more valuable at that stage. Human players should think twice about rushing optics for a too-early MoV.

Browd said:

Venice (particularly on Deity, where the AI gets a MoV instead if a second settler) often uses it's first MoV to conduct a trade mission, for gold and CS influence.

Click to expand...

It also does this on King or Emperor at times. If it goes Liberty (or mixes it with Tradition) in particular, Venice often gets his first Mov (instead of Settler) early and allies a CS with it instead of grabbing a puppet. Sometimes it does it with the one from Optics too and you may not see it with a puppet until fairly late (I've never had none at all so far), especially if it has conquered a few of another AI's cities. It's not infrequent to see it ally one or two more CS with the MoV money right after that.

I suspect it might stay that way later because he's already befriended nearby CS or allied them and it prefers keeping those benefits over buying them.

After I've seen it act in a particular way in a game where he bought the 3 CS near him (all allied to Alex whom Venice had denounced) one after the other I've wondered if the Venice/Austria AI are programmed to understand the danger of having CS allied to other Civs close to them and if it might influence their choice to buy/marry them.

I haven't noticed any behavior difference post and pre patch about this. I haven't got a whole lot of AI Venice games as I most often play the civ myself.

Browd said:

Frankly a turn 5 or 10 CS puppet is worthless. No worker, no units, just a naked city. Gold and influence are more valuable at that stage. Human players should think twice about rushing optics for a too-early MoV.

Click to expand...

Yes...and also watch out, sometimes, a bit later as well.... I sent a GMV to one nicely placed CS that had been the subject of much back and forth between the Mongols and Portugal and was eventually liberated...I think for the second time by Portugal....I got to the edge of the CS and with limited line of sight I couldn't see much, but hit the key anyway....only to find that all that was left was a worker...no military units, not much in the way of buildings. If I had been more careful I would have changed my mind.... Well, about not seeing any military units that is...you wouldn't know about the buildings until later....

I don't think this is universally the case - in my last game as Siam, Venice took four City States using MoVs (including one of my allies, Lhasa) and finished the game with 5 cities and in second place on the leader board. (Emperor level/large map)

Not to say that it doesn't happen at all but it certainly doesn't happen all the time and it's not a bug.