Will Venice be an island?

[Sirbab]

There's a thread around here somewhere where people were asking for coastal provinces that aren't blockaded to be much harder to siege. Venice is obviously different because it's an island, but some modifier that makes it significantly harder or impossible to siege defensible provinces with sea access would go a long ways towards fixing this, and not making Venice a special snowflake province.

 

[chriserit1]

i feel like people have missed this picture and in particular the narrows part.
the narrows is most likely a thing like you can move to that location with an army only if you control the sea.

in particular from other maps you can see that the islands in the narrows are all locations (except for the sardinian and messina strait) and it is easy to assume that you will be able to reach those islands with an army without having to relay on navy or there wouldn't be a point to make them narrows while at the same time blocking the movement of the army if there is a navy.

the only narrow which has no island location, or a strait, is venice but let's be real we all know that the narrow exist because it has something to do with venice, and from there it is easy to assume that it exist so that you can't reach venice location without naval control.


the only two things that makes me iffy are
1- modifiers for venice (if it's going to be a marsh it will probably have modifiers which will make it hard to "develop" which might not be the best for venice considering it was one of the most developed location in the world, maybe they could keep it a marsh but have modifiers that counteract that?),
2- i really feel like dogado should be represented as a province, probably having to take pixels from nearby locations to increase the number of locations.

 

[Froonk]

They could have a province type for land masses that are embedded to but not connected to nearby land which makes it difficult to take without naval blockade and difficult to maintain a naval blockade as well, this could cover lagoons, capes, atolls and some small islands close to coast. This could be applied to not just Venice but also some other provinces that historically served as naval fortresses, like those of Portuguese in East Africa, India and Southeast Asia, Dutch in Southeast Asia and China and British in various places. They could make these viable footholds for naval powers in general.

However it must be reiterated and emphasized that Venice is an extremely important state in this time period, especially now that start date has been pulled earlier to 14th century. It's not some minor power that can be treated as an unimportant afterthought or even with less attention than Gotland. It was the driving factor in many innovations, institutions, incidents and events in this period including several pivotal wars. Venice had the state revenue, military power and especially naval power to contend with bigger powers around it especially in 15th and 16th centuries. Venice keeps getting neglected despite its formidable power and impact in the first couple centuries (up to 1580s really) because it became mostly irrelevant in the second half of the game's timespan.

Ironically, in EU4 the second half where Venice is less important is also the period that most players don't play yet this hasn't stopped developers basically ignoring one of the premier powers in Europe in the most played half of the game. It's yet to be seen if this will be different with Project Caesar and whether the 1600s+ will be as popular when now the game starts significantly earlier.