Deity Venice

looking for some tips on how to play Venice on Deity, usual game goes like this...

1. Debate between full tradition, or full tradition with a detour to liberty for free merchant of venice

2. if detouring to liberty, use first merchant to establish a cargo ship food route back to capital

3. NC before turn 80 usually, by this time usually have atleast 6 of 8 trade routes, mostly ocean

4. stall out a bit on choices here, mixed success acquiring collosus and usually do a quick construction - horseback riding for circus maximus

5. quick golden age around turn 90

6. additional merchant generation goes towards strategic city states with large armies, or unique luxuries, army is no problem as city state alliances provide neccessary troops

few quick questions?

is buying city states necessary? i find having alliances with them usually pays a greater dividend that buying them outright

how do i keep my culture from stagnating, and my great works from quickly filling...do i have to continually beeline certain techs?

trying to do a culture, diplomatic game...what are the recommended policy choices past tradition...what is the ideal FPT generation to take a stab at piety

do any of you play venice as a warmonger? how does the great galleas stack up as a conquerer?

thanks for any advice

Buying city states for cargo ships.

Never mind, I was thinking you could upgrade a galley to a great galleas but you cant.

Buy a CS with the first MOV and send cargo ships back to Venice. Plant or trade mission the rest until CSs become more developed, then you nice cities with nice units.

Detouring to Liberty for a MoV is not worth it. It costs you three policies and you get a MoV at Optics anyway. And you don't really have the happiness at that point to absorb more than one city state, you pretty much need Circus Maximus for that, or ally a Mercantile CS. Plus, the city state needs a Granary which is doesn't always build first thing up, and border expansion is extremely slow for puppets so you want to wait until they have expanded to whatever tiles needed.

I'm not sure whether you really need to beeline the NC with Venice at high levels. Trade routes, not only yours but also the ones incoming, bring in a lot of science, none of which is affected by the NC. Growing Venice to make it a more attractive trading target helps with that.

You need to buy city states so you can run Cargo Ships with food to Venice. Ones with Natural Wonders (but make sure they are already in their borders, you can't buy tiles in puppets) and unique luxuries are attractive.

I haven't had a game yet with Venice that was suited for warmongering, but Great Galleases combined with Landsknechten should make a good combo to take out coastal cities.

deity Venice is really easy actually, possibly one of the easiest ways to get a deity win. As long as you are OK with diplo victory. And an archipelago map will make it much easier.

do not go liberty. One of your main goals should be to get your capital as huge as possible, since it's the only city you can really do much with. Tradition is a natural fit. Monarchy is just too good to pass up. And you don't really need the free MOV. You get the free one with optics, and you can crank out the 2nd one with the market specialist pretty quickly. You only need 2 IMO.

Why only two? Well you want three cities so you can eventually have an ideology, but any more hurt your science too much. There is the 5% penalty but the bigger factor is that generating MOVs hurts your ability to produce enough great scientists. Venice has low science anyway, and if you want to get globalization in a timely fashion you'll need every great scientist you can get. Two cities sending naval food trade routes are enough to get sufficiently high population IMO.

After tradition you want patronage at least to the science bonus, it's pretty strong in this situation because you can get a lot of allies, and don't have your own cities to generate science. The other important policy is treasure ships, which requires quite an investment into exploration. But it pays off, usually to the tune of over 1,000 GPT. easily enough to make diplo victory a breeze even on deity.

for tech order you want to prioritize anything that provides an extra trade route much higher than usual. 2 free trade routes on deity is a substantial amount of gold. And you can try to build Colossus, it's the perfect wonder for Venice and sometimes doable on deity.

Full Tradition and Commerce is how i go SP, if I'm on an Islands type map I'll open Exploration to get 25% movement on my Great Gallease
Tech writing, & 1 of your lux techs, then beeline BW and try for Colossus
Shoot for NC and then Go Top row to harbors you'll be able to get up a sizable amount of Great Gallaes and a harbor will allow you to hook up with more Civs and get more Science and gold.
I like puppeting 2 CS maybe 3 in the end game for a bit more growth.

You can also send food from Venice to the CS. This lets it grow enough to work those science slots which you got when you bought those universities in the CS.

I just completed a Deity diplomacy win with Venice. I never bought any CS and played the entire game with Venice as my only city.

In the early game the AI did not target me because we did not share borders and they had plenty of room to expand without coveting my land. Having only one city makes a nice "neutral zone" between you and the AI

By the later stages when they were settling cities next to me I had a lot of units to protect Venice from all the military CS gifts plus a few that I had built. The AI all had huge armies but nobody ever DoW me at all. I guess they respected my military enough or they didn't want my land. They fought each other but everyone stayed Friendly with me the entire game.

I agree that a CS ally is much more valuable then a puppet. Those CS helped boost my science, gave me luxuries, military units, culture, food and faith and allowed me to dominate the World Congress which is huge.

I started with full Tradition and then went into Patronage & Rationalism.

I did not pursue religion at all because I wanted AI religion to spread to me for the "shared religion" bonus and making it easier to pass World Religion without making people angry. I also adopted whichever ideology was most influential with the AI. Not having enough cities to build 3 factories I had to wait for everyone to reach the era where ideology is unlocked for everyone but I was fine with that. I never even spent a social point in the ideology, just maxed Tradition, Patronage and Rationalism plus a few in Exploration.

With the insane number of trade routes you get as Venice I was very wealthy. Spent all my time building wonders and buying other buildings and cargo ships.

So basically, buy or complete quests (like establish trade route quest or take advantage of the discount gold cost for influence quests) to ally with all CS. Get world religion and world ideology. Must build Forgotten Palace. From there I won Diplomacy victory on the very first World Leader vote. Never even reached Globalization.

greetswithfire said:

looking for some tips on how to play Venice on Deity, usual game goes like this...

1. Debate between full tradition, or full tradition with a detour to liberty for free merchant of venice

2. if detouring to liberty, use first merchant to establish a cargo ship food route back to capital

3. NC before turn 80 usually, by this time usually have atleast 6 of 8 trade routes, mostly ocean

4. stall out a bit on choices here, mixed success acquiring collosus and usually do a quick construction - horseback riding for circus maximus

5. quick golden age around turn 90

6. additional merchant generation goes towards strategic city states with large armies, or unique luxuries, army is no problem as city state alliances provide neccessary troops

few quick questions?

is buying city states necessary? i find having alliances with them usually pays a greater dividend that buying them outright

how do i keep my culture from stagnating, and my great works from quickly filling...do i have to continually beeline certain techs?

trying to do a culture, diplomatic game...what are the recommended policy choices past tradition...what is the ideal FPT generation to take a stab at piety

do any of you play venice as a warmonger? how does the great galleas stack up as a conquerer?

thanks for any advice

Click to expand...

I find producing more merchants than the free one absolutely uneeded. All you need is one CS so you can send a food ship back home. First they are increasing the cost of your scientists and second - these puppets are rather useless anyway

So rather than going liberty, just research optics after u are done with mining and lux techs.

Instead of having that early golden age, you can just sell these luxes for more gold, and have golden age at times, where you actually make money out of it
At one city, when going tradition you simply cannot have happiness problems, and the puppet doesn't really grow much too.

Piety tree is rather useless, especially as Venice.

I'm going Autocracy Venice in a Diety game tonight, I'll see how well that goes. I personally have had good success with venice as a warmongerer, as by packing all those trade routes, you can save up gold to purchase and pay for a massive army. Commerce and Autocracy also have very good policies in this regard. In addition to this, the great galleass is probably one of the best things to pump out when Venice has some time, with both money and raw production. They are a markedly superior force to normal galeasses, and with effective use of Merchants of Venice to gain secure harbors to repair them at, you can start taking capitals very early in the game, with limited repercussions. This also boosts your economy, which means more units, as far as you dare take it.

Be careful war mongering:
Your trade routes become vulnerable to pillage. Plan carefully.

I won an immortal game as Venice / autocracy recently, and near the end I was triple DoW-ed and only had 4 trade routes left after 10 turns. It was painful.

of course, I still won. Exploration + many submarines with wolfpack and sight +1 is tough for the AI to beat. I only needed a couple of battle ships and such to sail around at the end to help cap a handful of cities.

I ended up with a cultural victory after terminating the three leaders

I'm playing my first game with Venice. I'm not sure when to stop buying CS with my Great Merchants. I bought 3 CS,captured several cities. Used my last one to buy things in my core cities.

NKVD said:

I'm playing my first game with Venice. I'm not sure when to stop buying CS with my Great Merchants. I bought 3 CS,captured several cities. Used my last one to buy things in my core cities.

Click to expand...

most CS are more valuable as allies than as puppets. If you want more puppets go after AI cities.

I usually buy only 1-2 CS with venice to get some food freighters going.

One way is to use all merchants for money.

Build scout/warriors until archery. Build/buy 10+ archers, research construction, and upgrade to composites. Start warring and build trade routes. You'll have lots of money to continue upgrading or buying reinforcements.

Venice on archipelago is... fun.

the only way to loose with venice on archi - is when having some warmongers Close which dont like you for being too small or for whatever other reason and attack u turn 70 and pillage all your trade routes and fishing boats - basicly everythign u built in these turns.

Otherwise ist just click next turn till you win.

tommynt said:

the only way to loose with venice on archi - is when having some warmongers Close which dont like you for being too small or for whatever other reason and attack u turn 70 and pillage all your trade routes and fishing boats - basicly everythign u built in these turns.

Otherwise ist just click next turn till you win.

Click to expand...

Ehm... can you lose on archipelago? You learn something new every day...

Naval AI is still really bad (compared to the land based which is bad by default). Although I see some improvements. I lost a very cool battleship to greek submarine.

thats why i say that only way to loose is if ai for whatever reason decides to attack you before you have had time to build any naval yourself.

But I do think thats very unlickly since ai Aggression got nerfed to Zero.

So its click next turn till you win ..

tommynt said:

thats why i say that only way to loose is if ai for whatever reason decides to attack you before you have had time to build any naval yourself.

Click to expand...

If you had no time to build a navy, then most likely AI had no time to build the navy itself and will just throw all its land units into water to be picked off one by one, which happens every single time. And even if you spawn on the same island with AI, composite rush is a no brainer. You don't even need to build many CBs - CS puppet will provide like 2/3 of the army. So I am still not convined you can lose. But it also doesn't have to be clik next turn for diplo. In my game thanks to Alex I didn't even had to explore the map to meet all the CS, since he allied all of them probably pre t100 - I insta met them by DoWing him. And Monty who on last count had 46 cities. More since then. Siam, Brazil and Poly were completely wiped out and brought back to life just for the sake of it, later Poland and Alex were shown the door too. Like I said - fun.