Could Venice be the most absurd civ for a early science victory?

[fallout3dc]

I'm thinking about their ability. First, they have the highest coastal start possibility in the game. This would obviously be critical. They can also buy out city states and get 2xs number of trade routes. I'm really considering that could be far more absurd than Babylon or Korea for science as Venice could grow so quickly with the tradition path and cargo ships, as city-states have a coastal start bias as well. Could it be possible to have Venice as a size 100 city by turn say 210? And launch the rockets by turn 215? I haven't played them before because they seemed too boring for only one city, but this could be killer here. Has anyone tried this before?

 

[justaquestion]

I played as venice on a few occasions. You can get a big city but I've never had science like that. I always viewed them as a good diplomatic victory civ. Never seen AI venice go hard with science either. but idk. maybe someone else experience is different

 

[joncnunn]

I've never seen Venice even reach size 50 in my games.

Also, I actually find Venice SLOWER for a science victory than generic civ. Each and every Great Merchant of Venice is one fewer Great Scientist due to shared counter.
I also recall there being a 25% science cut for puppets.

Babylon in the hands of the human appears fastest, with Korea a very close second.

I actually recall my longest time to victory in Civ V ever being as Venice.

 

[Ryika]

From my experience, Venice generally struggles with Science later in the game. I manage to get enough Science to keep up with the AI, but that's about it. Puppets don't produce much science and a single city just doesn't do that much - and even reaching 100 pop in a normal game seems... absolutely insane. You can't spam food trade routes, because you'll have 3, maybe 4 cities that can send them to Venice, you can't really convert gold into science (the patronage-bonus just doesn't add that much), so overall I don't see how Venice could be useful.

 

[budweiser]

If you want good science you need to send food to the puppets so they will fill the science slots.

 

[Uzael36]

I haven't played many games with them, but what I recall is they held their own for the first half of the game, but they slowly started to lose steam. They weren't far behind from what I recall other civ's doing, but I think I lost ~20 turns as a result of their 1 city rule. I was swimming in gold, however.

 

[GoStu]

There's soft limit on the amount of science you can squeeze out of a single City. After a point, your dedicated food trade routes could have added dozens of citizens to a few other cities instead of putting one more fatty in Venice.

Say you get Venice to size 60. You don't have any more Scientist specialists, you've long since run out of any Jungle tiles you had, and likely every tile in Venice's radius is being worked. Go put those citizens in other cities and they can go be Scientists, or work Jungles, or really anything more useful than being a Venetian hobo.

 

[Fish Man]

If you want good science you need to send food to the puppets so they will fill the science slots.

Ha, good luck getting them to grow. They'll just work luxes and merchant slots all they if you do that.

 

[Uzael36]

I planned to try that in future Venice games. To get them off the gold tiles, you have to remove the merchants and put farms everywhere you can.

 

[notyourtypical]

It's not that you can't do it, but there's no reason to. Consider:

Since you only have 1 city, but a large number of city state allies, you put 3 points in Patronage to get scholasticism. You also finish commerce for 6 points. Also tradition for another 6. Now you need at least 2 in rationalism. Further, you really don't want to generate GS. What about ideologies? Well, if you are going domination you pick autocracy. Culture? Freedom. Science? Not order, because you don't want to build 6 parts in Venice, so freedom. And if you go freedom and are picking your 6th tenet, do you take buy parts with gold and slog the entire tech tree, or treaty organization, tech the short path to globalization and use your 16 trade routes and MoV to win an easy diplomatic victory?

I guess you could do science as Venice, but it's the worst option in every way.

Edit: one city that you can reliably focus on GS production.

 

[Acken]

I'm thinking about their ability. First, they have the highest coastal start possibility in the game. This would obviously be critical. They can also buy out city states and get 2xs number of trade routes. I'm really considering that could be far more absurd than Babylon or Korea for science as Venice could grow so quickly with the tradition path and cargo ships, as city-states have a coastal start bias as well. Could it be possible to have Venice as a size 100 city by turn say 210? And launch the rockets by turn 215? I haven't played them before because they seemed too boring for only one city, but this could be killer here. Has anyone tried this before?

No, there's a many things holding Venice back compared to those civs.

1. Science isn't 100% capital centric. A good mountain expansion will provide easily 15% of your bpt even with no food help.

2. Going all out on food to the capital requires as many puppets as you have routes. Each puppet increasing science costs. A probable better approach is to use some of them for gold or feeding puppets.

3. Getting these puppets is more complicated than just producing settlers. You either need a merchant or conquer them. Conquering would require a lot of hammers going into an army and besides the optic merchant, you can't really afford to generate merchants rather than scientists if you wish to compete in a SV race. A lot of the science in a SV comes from GS.

4. This brings us to 4. where venice unable to control puppets specialists will generate a few less GS due to having less cities (due to the counter always going back to 0). Or worth, start generating merchants and engineers.

5. All these 4 points are why Venice is probably worth at science than a civ like Danemark with no bonus toward SV. Then you add the real SV bonus like babylon, korea, maya or Poland. These civ do not trade off the ability to make cities to get their insane bonuses.

6. . You cannot build multiple wonders at once. While this is a below deity things, being able to make 2 wonders in 2 cities is a big advantage towards having normal cities.

No, I know it sounds good and fun but Venice just cannot compete in a straight race. Being able to make strong additional cities at 15% or 20% of the total output, generating GP points, just straight beat getting more trade routes.

 

[danaphanous]

You can get puppets to work science specialists. Problem is they prioritize gold slots beforehand so you need to get the population up high and use up the terrain or make the slots more valuable then the rest of the terrain (heavy ice example). Going freedom to make specialists higher value encourages puppets to use science and gold slots. I did this this and fed Venice with 5 food ships from my puppets and won a decent science victory on immortal. They seemed actually a bit slower then a normal civ though, I had to really, really try. I think this is because puppets take a 25% science penalty or something, I read.

Venice, However, was a science monster. Even with 5 puppets nearing 20 pop. 55-pop venice was yielding about 3/4 of the science in the empire. I outpaced AI in tech rate midgame But I stalled out in the information era which is why venice finished late. Techs were still 9-10 turns as opposed to my experience of 5-7 turns on a good game with a normal empire. Most of the information era was scientist spam.

I think the main thing that keeps them from being dominating is that you are limited as the routes until later because of being short on MoV. I think to really get venice high in pop you'll need to warmonger to get cities early and not wait on MoV for each one like I did. Then you can get food routes up far earlier. Also, that science penalty for puppets really kills, you need even more pop to make up the difference. I failed to roll a mountain start too, and I'm sure Venice is far better with that kind of start. Got stuck with 130% boost to science rather than 180%.

 

[phillipwyllie]

The problem with puppets is they always have a gold focus and thus work the merchant slots. I don't know can you sell building in puppets as Venice?
On Deity Venice can catch up very quickly with routes to other civs but eventually you will run out of steam.

If you want a quick SV then Babylon all the way as the quicker you get to Education the quicker you generate GS and thus the quicker you get to Scientific Theory then Plastics.