Notes on the Venetian Variant:

As of today, I added Trading Posts to Venice, Genoa, and Tuscany. Sorry I forgot to add them yesterday. Please download the file again but you only need to replace the 1092EarlyVenice.txt file this time.

I purposely strengthened Venice's rivals, Pisa, Genoa, and Milan so that the Venice player has to focus historically on building a trading empire and not become so quickly a territorial empire.

I gave Venice 5 Galleys specifically so that the Venice player could reach Constantinople right away, as is historical.

I found that as the Venice player, there's really not alot to do so the turns move very quickly.

It seems that building up the Venice province to its' maximum income opportunity is paramount to anything else.

A good idea would be to accept EVERY single alliance that you get offered. At the beginning of the game you are the weakest faction in the game and any real attempt to take Venice is going to be successful. Thankfully I have found that the other factions are more interested in other issues than hitting Venice early on.


Notes regarding general philosophy behind buildings & units:

I'm sure most of you already know this but I thought I would summarize some thoughts on what it means to create buildings in a province.

For example, when you build a Trading Post in a province, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are building just one trading post. Building a trading post, depending on the province, could mean that you are building a network or series of traing posts throughout the province tied together for the common goal of importing and exporting goods.

I see the same thing as being the case with units like Priests. When I build a Priest unit, I look it as though I've created a group of Priests and other religious people that support the Priest for the purpose of preaching and other activities. By killing off such a unit, you are basically eradicating the preaching efforts of an entire group of religious people in that particular province.

Now, this brings up a good point: why doesn't the AI use the fact that you killed off a group of holy men as a reason to either excommunicate you or call upon a Crusade against you?

Certainly anyone that knows his history is aware that one of the galvanizing reasons for the Crusades is that simple pilgrims to the Holy Land were being killed or harrassed by Muslims. This led to the Pope calling for a Crusade. Had the pilgrims been allowed to go there without being attacked, there is very little evidence to believe that the Crusades would have ever had happened.

In fact, one of the conditions of peace between the Crusaders and the Muslims was that pilgrims be given the freedom to visit the holy sites without being victimized.

I encourage thoughts on these notes. Thank you.