[BNW] Venice Mod

[DonaldJTrump]

I love the idea of Venice. It is very unique. Unfortunately its handicap is too extreme and makes it the worst Civ in the game (especially when playing against humans). Venice strategy ultimately relies on city-state alliances, money, and purchasing.

I would like to make a mod which gives Venice the following bonuses and makes it truly unique and more competitive Civ to play as:

• Venice cannot build settlers, Venice cannot annex cities.
• Venice can purchase units and buildings in puppetted cities.
• Venice gets 100% of all puppetted cities science, culture, and faith production.
• Venice can purchase units and buildings in puppetted cities.
• Venice gets the "Merchant of Venice" instead of the "Great Merchant."
• Venice gets a free Merchant of Venice upon researching Optics.
• Venice gets double the number of trade routes.
• Venice gets a free caravan each time it gains an additional trade route.
• Venice gets the entire Commerce social policy tree upon researching Currency.

Explanation for my choices.
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For Venice to be competitive in the game it needs Patronage and Commerce. It needs city-state alliances and it needs a lot of money. It is really really hard to buy up a large army on just money alone. Since Venice has only one city it is difficult for it to mass produce an army, and at the opportunity cost of giving up wonders/buildings. Venice cannot waste time constructing many military units and it cannot spend time constructing caravans. It needs to have the freedom to construct building/wonders in order so that it keeps up with other civs.

Venice is already behind in science. It can catch up partly from science gained from city-states. Therefore, it needs patronage. But if Venice goes patronage then it cannot go commerce, since then it loses rationalism. Rationalism is an absolute must for Venice considering that it will be significantly behind in science. Therefore, after getting Tradition the only option for Venice is to either choose patronage or commerce, but not both. The entire free social policy tree of commerce is to make up for the massive handicap that Venice receives.

The social policy structure for Venice will be as follows. First, go Tradition. Second, put two or three points into Patronage before researching currency. Third, after reaching Currency get the Commerce tree. Fourth, finish up the Patronage tree. Fifth, continue into Rationalism.
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I would love to make this mod. But I do not know how to. I also rather not learn because of time management. If any of the experts here can help me make this mod, which I imagine is not "hard" since it does not require you to create any features that Civ does not currently have, then I can reward you in some way, like a steam game, or a few, or some other way for your help.

This is an interesting mod that I am sure many of you would like to play around with to see if it is over-powered or just right for competitive play.

 

[formerdc81]

I might include this in my mod (which is intended to rebalance the game under one set of rules for both PvP and PvE) but your current proposal seems a bit bad...
A) From a design perspective, if any civ's gimmick makes them suck, you should buff the gimmick, not give general buffs because general buffs make gameplay more bland, makes the code more based on exception cases (which makes bugchecking harder), and is more likely to create serious balance problems (because gimmick civs play by a different set of rules as all other civs and allowing them to have the best of both worlds makes them OP but a bland gimmick + no compensation makes them useless). The problem is, many developers try to fix any problems created by big changes with equally big changes in the other direction, and that's even worse design because the process often results in deleting the faction's gimmick or a rework of a game feature available for all factions (like Policy Trees) just to make it acceptable for Venice. To see how badly this can go wrong, see how DotA2 dealt with Techies.
B) CiV, especially multiplayer vanilla CiV, is very very focused on the trad->rationalism AND food->science metagame. Why shoehorn all other Civs to fit that mold? Wouldn't it be better to rebalance all the weaker Civs to assymetrically counter that playstyle?
C) With that established, let's focus on what Venice historically was good at. Commerce, navy, exploration, influence peddler. Venice rarely overpowered her enemies by brute force, but subverted their cultures and bribed their leaders and financed their enemies. In that case, why not do something like this...

• Venice cannot build settlers or annex cities. Any acquired cities can only be puppetted.
  
• Venice can purchase units and buildings in puppetted cities.
• Venice gets the "Merchant of Venice" instead of the "Great Merchant."
• Venice gets a free Merchant of Venice upon researching Optics.
• Venice gets double the number of trade routes. Each Trade Route increases MoV points by 1 in the city the trade route originates from.
  
• Venice gets a spy starting in the Medieval Era. (Yes, this means Venice ends up with the same number of spies as England.)
  
• Each Venetian spy in another player's city reduces that player's happiness by 2 * Spy Rank.
  
• (Speculative) MoV can now move in another player's territory without Open Borders or DoW and can use their "takeover" button to steal 500 gold (upgraded to 1000 with Entrepreneurship) from other players. If this steals more gold than the enemy currently has on-hand, the city and all the player's units within its territorial borders now belong to Venice.

 

[Rob (R8XFT)]

Moderator Action: Moved to Civilization Design Resources, which is a forum for ideas for civilizations which the author isn't in a position to mod themselves.