Okay I'm excited for this now. This may have supplanted Portugal as my first game with BNW (though probably not. I'll still want to learn the new mechanics with a somewhat more standard civ than with the hypercube.) Anyway...
1. I made a t
hread in the general discussions forum earlier today about the player archetypes of Timmy, Johnny and Spike. Venice is absolutely a Johnny civ and absolutely not a Spike civ, so I get the controversy here, but for those of us who play a certain way this looks amazing.
2. I'm curious to see how this (and to a lesser extent Austria's) UA will play with Portugal's Feitoria. IIRC the Feitoria cannot be pillaged, so we could end up in a situation where Portugal is spamming workers to get those placed in every CS they can (which probably Portugal should do as soon as it's able anyway) before Venice takes them over, so that once Venice has control Portugal still receives its resources (though not the double number that they'd get by being allied to the CS.)
3. I think the AI for this could actually be pretty terrifying. As far as I can tell, the biggest issue with the AI in this game is that there are so many options and so many different aspects one could prioritize that the AI simply has too many attractive "bad" options available to it. The biggest thing Venice does is to severely limit its options, which might make it simpler for the AI to exploit. Or it might just have no clue what to do.
4. One nice aspect of the strategy that will develop around Venice is that wonderspamming will have almost no downside (see again a good option for the AI) as failure will basically mean more buildings/units in the puppet states.
5. Coastal start bias is almost 100% here, I'm thinking. The thought process behind the free MoV at Optics seems to be that a.) you'll definitely need a settler by than, b.) you'll need him to be able to embark, and c.) you really should have gotten a trireme or two out there exploring by that point. I doubt it will do anything about being within 2 tiles of a mountain, though. Machu Pichu would be nice but the game isn't going to strain itself to give it to you like that.
6. Again, wonder-spamming is going to be the name of the game, but Big Ben, the Mausoleum and Machu Pichu (if at all possible) are going to be super important here.