Venice is probably the most fun I've had in a while...

[qalsip1977]

Venice is the Deity king ATM IMO. I tried my first couple of games on King (one of which was with Venice) just to get a feel for things but I quickly realized Venice is really too good to waste on a low difficulty.

I won a Deity game with a Diplomatic Victory just by staying friendly with everyone (luckily I didn't have any warmongers right next door) until World Congress and then I started using my merchants to buy city states. The rest I allied. I think I ended the game with 8-9 of my own puppeted CSs (standard size).

BNW made remaining peaceful in Deity much easier. I simply mirrored what my neighbors were doing policy and ideology wise, left religion alone, and as Venice you don't expand so no worries there. I think the only Civ that wasn't friendly to me was ticked off that I stole his CSs...

 

[Glexarn]

The only thing I hate about Venice is they can't win a Diety game for the life of them. With only one city producing army it gets really ridiculous really fast how much larger the enemies armies will be at all times.

Yeah, this game was sooo hard:

Spoiler :

just kidding it was easy, it would've only been hard if I wanted a good turn time. you might note that I'm still at war with Egypt while sniping Assyria - that's because he fell over so fast he's still in the forced-war turn limit. (8th civ was Brazil, Sweden+India eliminated him early on)

What's the secret? Money!

...and wow, would you look at unit costs with Big Ben+Autocracy+Commerce.

If you're having trouble, just try to be peaceful until the Renaissance or so, and then go kill everyone sequentially (later in the game you can kill 2 people at once). You might have to defend yourself if the Zulu are your neighbor or something, but that applies to everyone, not just Venice.

Be sure to go Commerce - it's the best SP tree for domination Venice, and literally every single policy, including the opener and the finisher, is godly for you.

Prioritize killing whoever built Big Ben, because it's really important.

 

[teqofc]

liberty and Venice are a bad mix, do not get sucked in by the dubious benefits of liberty.

You want full tradition with no detours. Full commerce, consulates and free thought. I usually go freedom, but the other ideologies are also fine.

A 10 year old can win a deity DV with Venice. It was my favorite civ for about 2 days...

What Josh says. Venice was fun for first diety DV win and later for a SV win but it is really an OP civ like Poland which makes them boring.

Fun civs for me are Morocco, Ethiopia, Spain and Aztec. Actually even liking Denmark because of the challenge after reading Moriarte's thread and playing them right now.

EDIT: Sorry meant Inca, not Aztec