One of the things that really annoys me about Venice is the fact that both their UU and their UB feels boring and/or bad.
The UU feels like an extension of the UA. Without the UA the UU makes absolutely no sense, without the UU the UA is unplayable.
The UU does exactly one thing, it buys city-states, other than that there is nothing special about it. Your towns are the same, your trade-missions are the same. This just isn't a very interesting unit.
The UB pretty much just gives you a better start, giving you the ability to go for early wonders. After the early game the building just isn't very much fun, this is a side-effect of the UB being pre-built, meaning it can't be very powerful. This also feels like something you needed to not get rushed down early on as you can't get extra cities for extra soldier production with the UA.
Anyways, suggesting a minor overhaul of the UA that I feel are going to improve the gameplay, both in singleplayer and in multiplayer. This is not a complete idea and it would need to be adjusted and reworked, it is just something to show my vision of venice.
UA:
- Cities without a Palace can't be annexed, cities founded by you or conquered start out puppeted.
- You can buy/invest in puppets.
- Puppets you control produces an extra x% yields and an extra Y Yields
The idea is that you're able to settle cities, but you still can't control them. This gives you the ability to control monopolies, this gives you an area that you can actually defend while still running a puppet-empire.
Yes the whole Venice idea of having a spread out coastal empire is gone, because spread out just means impossible to defend.
Anyways, the tradeoff for not being able to control your cities is that your cities produce a lot more yields, both a percentual and a static bonus.
The static bonus is so that your puppets will actually get going early on, getting some infrastructure up so that they don't get run over.
The percentual bonus is to counteract the puppet penalties.
These two combined will help you get some gold going (as the trade-route bonus is scrapped) to invest in soldiers (or buildings, but with the puppets having bonuses, that would be as necessary).
The UU and the UB could kinda stay the same way, but I would suggest working on the alternative abilities of the MoV, as they just aren't very special.