Venice
- Thread starter void_genesis
- Start date
but they dont replace eic?? Its a replacement of the national monument.
pineappledan
Deity
"Just drop anything that makes Venice unique or interesting"
Give Venice back GP generation; I can't believe people are seriously entertaining the thought of giving Venice, the 1-city civ, extra cities.
Honestly, I'd find dropping Venice entirely more palatable than this. The No Quitters multiplayer overhaul mod disabled Venice years ago because they found balancing Venice simply unworkable.
St. Mark's Basilica is national monument replacement
My mistake, I got into my head that they replaced EIC, but the 3 wonders are separate building classes
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They’re doing much better now, especially since I fixed a unit production bug last version.
chicorbeef
Emperor
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- Dec 26, 2017
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- 1,561
I think the biggest problem for Venice is supply, actually. My proposal is to give supply to the base UNW. With more military they could also defend their TRs a little better.
It's not supply, but rather difficult to maintain a defense on isolated areas.
Thats a problem only for AI
no, it's a problem for players as well. You can't exactly force Supply in puppets unless you invest. Arsenale di Venice, however, compensates for this a lot, but still falters a little bit.
No it is not. Even if you don't build Arsenale. You have ways to deal with it and you have other bonuses (huge bonuses) to compensate. Take a look at my photojournal
chicorbeef
Emperor
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- Dec 26, 2017
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AI can't do that though and that's a bit of a problem.
Edit: Why don't we cut supply from Arsenal's (give it something else) and add supply to the base Piazza? Or give supply on expending Venetian Merchants? I don't know if we'd need to compensate it.
BiteInTheMark
Deity
Gaining +1 supply cap for every used venetian Great Merchant sounds good and not too op. The information for this isnt necessarily put into the UA description, but can be done in the Great Merchant unit.
bigcat88
King
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2016
- Messages
- 743
The initial questions from GitHub was:
what can we do about venice in AI hands without making it OP for human players?
what can we do about venice in AI hands without making it OP for human players?
- it seems they have a problem with money. puppet infrastructure cost is normal, but puppets generate only half the gold. venice has a lot of puppets ... now they also have a lot of traderoutes to compensate, but it seems the AI doesn't prioritize building caravans enough. even if they are in negative gpt.
- they may have a supply problem. at least i see a lot of completely undefendend, relatively isolated puppets. now that may be bad unit positioning on the AI side (and a unique venetian problem because of their fragmented empire), or they simply don't have enough units to go around.
Seems a simple and elegant idea if supply remains a problem for Venice.
tu_79
Deity
You should concede that it would alleviate supply problems.
And now that Venice has no trade route restrictions, it should not be difficult to have AI getting those trade routes online.
Looking at the latest set of comments in this thread from a few months ago it seems like the problems I noticed when playing Venice are the same ones others have noticed for a while. Specifically:
1) a lack of gold due to the nature of puppet gold generation/costs (which seems especially weird given Venice's 2x trade routes)
2) a lack of supply, again due to puppets not generating enough supply
In my specific game I went to an extreme and puppeted 10CSs pretty quickly (only 5 were from normal MoV births, the rest were from an early adoption of TTGOG, Leaning Tower, Artistry policy, and the free one at trading). These 10 CSs were actually pretty ideally placed for defense- 6 of them were on a subcontinent island where they could pool their defenses and the rest were clustered closely to Venice. I should say that I was going the "tourism" route for Venice with my choice of optional UB (tradition/artistry/rationalism/freedom).
However, from the get-go my supply cap was a serious issue. On average I could only have 2 units per city for a lot of the game and only 3 units per city later on (once most of my cities had castles/arsenals up). Obviously I concentrated my forces at strategic locations to maximize my defense but a unit cap of 22-33 or so makes even defensive warfare in a human's hands very difficult, especially when many CSs are coastal and a navy might be necessary. I managed to stave off a few serious invasions anyway, at least until the late game when I think my relatively low unit cap simply made the rest of the world see me as an easy DoW target regardless of the positive modifiers I had groomed.
The gold problem was very surprising to me given Venice's 2x trade routes. It seemed like even when I had all of my trade-routes up and running my GPT was never that high compared to the rest of the civs in the game. This is especially problematic for Venice when purchasing things in their puppets is their only real option. I pretty much never had the gold to invest in puppet buildings and had to save it all for unit upgrades or investments in Venice.
One other issue I saw is that when puppeted CSs with MoV the CS would lose a bunch of its buildings. I would puppet a CS only to see its city combat score drop to 9 and the first building it starts working on being a wall. Looking at the available buildings to the puppet I would see monuments, etc that it surely already had. I imagine this is a bug and I have reported it on github. The puppeted CSs having to slowly rebuild walls exacerbates the low supply cap issue- the units I gained from puppeting the CS would often put me over my supply cap as the newly acquired city wasn't giving me enough supply to handle them!
If I played Venice again I would probably not puppet quite as many CSs (I mostly did so this game due to finding that 6-CSs mini continent and seeing it as too good to pass up) and instead plant a bunch of my MoV for Colonia. Having fewer costly puppets and more Colonia would hopefully alleviate some of the gold problems. However, fewer puppets would mean less "free" science/culture and an even smaller unit cap which I imagine would cause more friction with the AI as they see me as weak. To alleviate this I would probably target as many supply-giving wonders as I could- Himeji, etc. It's not very intuitive to go after those as Venice if you're going for a tourism victory but it seems almost necessary. I actually tried to get Himeji in my game once I realized how low my unit cap was but got beat to it by just a few turns.
I know people have said in the past that Authority Venice is quite strong. In the very early game their unit cap is probably not too low so that's probably their only chance at conquering. However, I don't really see how anyone could reasonably conquer past the early game because no matter how many puppets you get your unit cap is just too low. Aside from that, Venice has very little in the way of military perks to make warfare easier- pretty much just the optional UB that has the combat flavor. If you're able to conquer as authority Venice it seems like you're overcoming some pretty big handicaps. I would be interested to see someone pull that off at Immortal/Deity after the last few months of AI combat improvements.
Also, in basically every game where a Venice AI is present he is pretty much always gone very early on. The AI doesn't have the benefit of a human strategic mind to have any hope of survival from what I've seen. An AI with low unit cap and a spread out empire is basically doomed.
In any case, based off of my game I would probably recommend:
1) fixing the issue where CSs gained via MoV lose buildings.
2) doing something with the supply cap. +1 cap from each MoV might be enough or adding supply to the UB might also be necessary. I think this is the biggest problem- having low unit supply invites the AI to gang up on Venice which has the add-on effect of often taking away all your sweet, sweet trade routes (aside from just outright killing Venice, of course)
3) possibly improving Venice's gold, though if the above two issues were addressed (and if someone uses MoV more responsibly than I did...) then perhaps this would be a non-issue.
1) a lack of gold due to the nature of puppet gold generation/costs (which seems especially weird given Venice's 2x trade routes)
2) a lack of supply, again due to puppets not generating enough supply
In my specific game I went to an extreme and puppeted 10CSs pretty quickly (only 5 were from normal MoV births, the rest were from an early adoption of TTGOG, Leaning Tower, Artistry policy, and the free one at trading). These 10 CSs were actually pretty ideally placed for defense- 6 of them were on a subcontinent island where they could pool their defenses and the rest were clustered closely to Venice. I should say that I was going the "tourism" route for Venice with my choice of optional UB (tradition/artistry/rationalism/freedom).
However, from the get-go my supply cap was a serious issue. On average I could only have 2 units per city for a lot of the game and only 3 units per city later on (once most of my cities had castles/arsenals up). Obviously I concentrated my forces at strategic locations to maximize my defense but a unit cap of 22-33 or so makes even defensive warfare in a human's hands very difficult, especially when many CSs are coastal and a navy might be necessary. I managed to stave off a few serious invasions anyway, at least until the late game when I think my relatively low unit cap simply made the rest of the world see me as an easy DoW target regardless of the positive modifiers I had groomed.
The gold problem was very surprising to me given Venice's 2x trade routes. It seemed like even when I had all of my trade-routes up and running my GPT was never that high compared to the rest of the civs in the game. This is especially problematic for Venice when purchasing things in their puppets is their only real option. I pretty much never had the gold to invest in puppet buildings and had to save it all for unit upgrades or investments in Venice.
One other issue I saw is that when puppeted CSs with MoV the CS would lose a bunch of its buildings. I would puppet a CS only to see its city combat score drop to 9 and the first building it starts working on being a wall. Looking at the available buildings to the puppet I would see monuments, etc that it surely already had. I imagine this is a bug and I have reported it on github. The puppeted CSs having to slowly rebuild walls exacerbates the low supply cap issue- the units I gained from puppeting the CS would often put me over my supply cap as the newly acquired city wasn't giving me enough supply to handle them!
If I played Venice again I would probably not puppet quite as many CSs (I mostly did so this game due to finding that 6-CSs mini continent and seeing it as too good to pass up) and instead plant a bunch of my MoV for Colonia. Having fewer costly puppets and more Colonia would hopefully alleviate some of the gold problems. However, fewer puppets would mean less "free" science/culture and an even smaller unit cap which I imagine would cause more friction with the AI as they see me as weak. To alleviate this I would probably target as many supply-giving wonders as I could- Himeji, etc. It's not very intuitive to go after those as Venice if you're going for a tourism victory but it seems almost necessary. I actually tried to get Himeji in my game once I realized how low my unit cap was but got beat to it by just a few turns.
I know people have said in the past that Authority Venice is quite strong. In the very early game their unit cap is probably not too low so that's probably their only chance at conquering. However, I don't really see how anyone could reasonably conquer past the early game because no matter how many puppets you get your unit cap is just too low. Aside from that, Venice has very little in the way of military perks to make warfare easier- pretty much just the optional UB that has the combat flavor. If you're able to conquer as authority Venice it seems like you're overcoming some pretty big handicaps. I would be interested to see someone pull that off at Immortal/Deity after the last few months of AI combat improvements.
Also, in basically every game where a Venice AI is present he is pretty much always gone very early on. The AI doesn't have the benefit of a human strategic mind to have any hope of survival from what I've seen. An AI with low unit cap and a spread out empire is basically doomed.
In any case, based off of my game I would probably recommend:
1) fixing the issue where CSs gained via MoV lose buildings.
2) doing something with the supply cap. +1 cap from each MoV might be enough or adding supply to the UB might also be necessary. I think this is the biggest problem- having low unit supply invites the AI to gang up on Venice which has the add-on effect of often taking away all your sweet, sweet trade routes (aside from just outright killing Venice, of course)
3) possibly improving Venice's gold, though if the above two issues were addressed (and if someone uses MoV more responsibly than I did...) then perhaps this would be a non-issue.
The easiest way to buff Venice is these options:
- MoV purchasing city-states now receive Rome's ability, keeping all buildings intact (since these are city-states, they shouldn't be any UB clones).
- Expending a MoV now grants +2 Unit Supply like a Great General.
- MoV being instead used as a trade mission now grants City-State Influence like their BNW predecessor
- UB now unlocks 3 lines of gaining gold
- Arsenale now grants gold for killing enemy units(global effect)
- Get rewarded for warmongering, kill more, buy more troops to replace your losses
- Rialto now boosts +5 Gold for Outgoing Trade Routes as well(whereas it only added +3 Gold for Incoming Trade Routes) as long as buffing the Incoming Trade Route bonus to +5(making it really stand out that you should want to trade with Venice for extra gold for you and him)
- Passively if you have 16 active trade routes, you'll receive an extra 80 Gold per Turn.
- Murano Glassworks now grant +1 Gold to Villages and Great People Improvements.
- Empowers villages and Great People Improvements with more gold. Less poverty. More treasury earnings.
- Arsenale now grants gold for killing enemy units(global effect)
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I think that list would do it. I'd only be worried about it going too far. I think you could probably go +1 to supply per MoV if you also have all buildings retained when puppeting via MoV- I think that would be enough maybe. It would be a shame to overshoot is all.
pineappledan
Deity
Maybe MoV could increase flat supply cap like GGenerals/GAdmirals as well?
