How do we know exactly that Venice is gone as a city-state? Surely we haven't seen a list of all city states?
Edit: So I looked it up and it appears we are basing it off a a new CS having the same color scheme as Venice has. Personally I wonder if people are looking too much into this. The color change could have some other reason and it may just be some random thing because of the build of the game. Lastly, though unlikely, it may just be that CS can have duplicate colors. I suppose I just feel that Venice doesn't feel like the type of Civ they would add ( nor that we need, the region is already very represented). I definitely see now why people are thinking it though.
It's a damn site more complicated than just "the colours". Based off of all changes to city states over the production cycle of Civ V we know one thing for absolute sure:
In all cases where a city state has been given a known colour type combination, it has been a replacement
This has held for every single case. All the changes for city states are well documented and the following similar cases have never led to a city state appearing with a previous used colour-type combination:
1. A city state having it's type changed
2. A known city state being used as a replacement (like Lhasa for Vienna or Budapest for Edinburgh)
With these two being the most common "explanations" people offer. The only way that Venice has not been removed as a city state is if they did something completely out of the ordinary, and having already seen replacement city states for city states we know have been removed (Bratislava for Warsaw and Panama City for Rio de Janeiro), the same patterns are holding exactly as would be expected.
Basically, the chances that Venice has not been removed are very remote based on that alone, but then we have our second lovely bit of information with is the colours of the unknown Civilization. They are exactly (to within compression error) the ones off of the Flag of Venice from Wikipedia, suggesting that it was what they got the colours from. Even in the case that some program used one or both of those colours as generics, the odds of them happening to pick the exact pair of colours as on that Venetian Flag source is still very small.
It is worth noting that the colours on Wikipedia's flag are slightly different to what they should be:
As compared to what Wikipedia uses:
Notice how the symbols are more of a blue in the original, and more purple in the second image, the one that the colours exactly match. One thing worth noting is that the creator of the above flag's SVG on wikipedia specifically notes the colour Venetian Red (#C80815, or
Venetian Red) being used on that version. As can be seen in the version that was linked as the source image, it is clearly darker and more worn, and it is entirely possible that he tried to figure out the correct colours for the flag by altering the image until the red matched Venetian red and then used the other colours as based on that. It would explain why he uses a lighter cream instead of Gold for the borders and that purple colour instead of Venetian Blue.
Long story short though, with these two alone we have two cases where it's extremely unlikely that either alone wouldn't mean Venice. It is unlikely that Venice hasn't been removed and replaced with Riga and it's unlikely that the colours used for the unknown civ didn't come from the Venetian Flag on Wikipedia. Even if you're clinging to the last hope that one or the other is wrong, when looking upon them both together Venice may as well be confirmed.
