Venice- The AI can't manage them at all
I guess it depends how the dice roll and maybe on play style (you might be very succesfull at preventing Venice from getting what the AI is good at handling it). I've got a few games playing Portugal with Venice as the runaway (culture and science) with a huge army/navy to protect its little enclave of 3 cities. In another game he was right behind me until Bismarck got Panzers and finally wiped him out.
For me it's 50/50. Either the AI never manages to kickstart Venice and it's gone or crippled by the mid-game at the latest, or it gets a good start for growth, enough CS in its area for early TR and then good puppets, a tech lead and with all this a pick at key Wonders, and he remains one of the top three civs to the end.
Civs that almost always collapse in my games:
- Carthage: often gets good start, makes bitter enemies early, get chained denounced and reduced to 1-2 cities. She occasionally survive to pick an ideology but is often a civ that never gets one in my games. I lost count of the number of games in which I had to resurrect her to get her WC delegates.
- Celts: go wide and fall behind. Not often wiped out completely but beyond spamming religion they're often the cripple of my games.
- Songhai: they always end up conquered, though some time it only happens late game
- China: often have great starts but then she gets conquered.
- France: too peaceful, tries to go for Culture and fails and stagnates
- Maya: One of the first to be conquered or reduced to a minor civ, usually. In my recent game he had a decent start, then stupidly killed a CS when land became scarce, and made himself the black sheep and lost his capital and his second best city in Classical.
- Sweden: always gets embroiled in bitter conflicts for some reason, is too weak for them and gets crippled by an aggressive civ like Rome early.
Underperformers often include Japan, Russia, Portugal and the Netherlands.
