Aspects like Austria being ranked so highly is why consentient made his own tier list. Consentient’s ranking is more systematic, and the reasoning for each rating is coherent and transparent. Consentient has just five tiers (any more than that is not really justifiable), and he has Austria as below average. You will still disagree with a few things I am sure, but it is robust enough that disagreements only change the relative ranking by a small amount.Hi guys in my opinion Austria should be lower on the list. But I guess I am just playing them wrong. Please advice!
It sucks in the long run because I am usually only getting a mediocre or worse city location. And usually a lot of city states have the same luxury so I might also run into a happiness problem for a not so useful city. It is also often hard to defend annexed city states in far off locations.
You have to be picky with puppets. My initial tendency with Austria was puppet any CS that I could afford any time they were about to go out of ally status. That does not work well!
Puppet CS that are neighbors, so they are a natural extension of your empire. For remote CS, only puppet those that are working one of the better NW, are in highly defensible terrain, or are getting you a new lux or essential strategics.
As with any civ, CS allies are much stronger than CS puppets! Since Austrian UA requires that CS first be allies, that makes the UA kind of counter-productive! Also, as you observe, Austrian UA is not as good as Venice MoV -- since you cannot use it to snip CS allies from a rival.