Please suggest adding the most famous maritime empire in history. That would make the most sense adding them, since the Venetians owned a lot of colonies in the Mediterranean Sea and they were a powerful maritime empire and merchants. Most of their wars were against the Ottoman Empire and later against Austria & France which brought an end to their empire.
Seeing this civilization would be a cool stuff and very unique, since afaik no other strategy game had the Republic of Venice so far in their games, except Knights of Honor which was my most favourite RTS followed by AOE and Cossacks where they also were available as a civilization, but they weren’t that deep like whole AOE series is with each nation having their unique units and buildings.
venice the CITY is famous but not the venetian navy, and wasn’t really that important past the initial start date of the game.
id argue denmark with actually strong navy and an overseas empire is actually more important even as a maratime nation, not to mention it was important in the entire periode, not just the first 100 years or so.
or while were at it their betrayal of the byzantine empire. honestly they never performed that well in those wars, the siege of candia is probably the most famous venetian military conflict in the periode and venice wasn’t alone.
its very doubtful venice would get a unique set of buildings, their most famous land unit is oddly enough also already ingame as a mercenary: the stradoit.
also what would realistically be their point? another mercenary faction? tho this time with an actual lag of real venetian unique units unlike germany and sweden which at least have some unique stuff.
They should add Italy as a civilisation and make you choose between “home cities” somehow.
This way Venice, Milan, Genoa, Naples and Rome could be the same civilisation.
Therefore, I am convinced that both Germans and Italians should have the same Age Up system. They had both united in the 19th century, and before that they had been divided into many many states that were so rich and powerful that they earned them an almost immediate rank of global power upon unification.
In the case of Italians, civs, I don’t see any other way to add them to this game. Separate civs for each of the larger Italian states such as Venice, Tuscany or Papal States are nonsense. Italians did not have empires equal to German states such as Austria or Prussia. If the Austrian and Prussian civs did not appear, then a few Italian civs should definitely not appear.
Let the Italian civ also not repeat the error of the Germans civ, which is mediocre. It would be nice if with the addition of the Italian civ we would get some corrections for the Germans civ.
Either huge changes for the Germans civ, or the Austria-Hungary civ & Prussia civ + key changes in the Germans civ.
In fact it fits into both games… the Venetians in the period of aoe 3 fought against the Ottomans between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth century…
Italy and Germany don’t need to share the same system but they could.
Italy could either focus on the Renaissance Italy with many independent Merchant cities or on 19th century reunification.
I like the idea of giving Italy a consulate like the Asians but you choose cities instead of foreign countries and you pay with coin instead of export.
I would like to see something similar to the italians from NE. Where they need cards (C states) to train more vills and build more TC, each one giving crates, units, bonus…
Venice would be a great addition to the aoe series, but it would fit inside the aoe2 or aoe4 timeframe.
In the aoe3 timeframe, Venice was an indipendent and diplomatic important states for some time, but not enough to justify making it into a civ. I would much rather see an Italian civ with the US state sistem which also includes Venice instead.
If you are interested though, I’ve made several Civ design for aoe2 and aoe4 of Venice, feel free to check it out (although the aoe4 design is outdated and will soon receive a massive change).
Actually, Venice still had an important fleet even at the moment of his downfall at the hands of napoleon, although it was mostly dedicated to protect merchant convoys.
