Playing Venice in SP is probably one of the easiest ways to win?

Decided to try out Venice. Strategic balance map. Rerolled a few times to get a decent, not fantastic, start. Immortal difficulty.

This has got to be the smoothest, chillest game of Civ V I've played. The money just rolls in thanks to the trade routes. And your opponents actually like you because you don't settle cities. I've never seen such friendly competitors before.

I ended up finishing the game by diplomatic victory (didn't really want it, but hey) when I was at 91% tech and the average was at 67. This was partly due to simply buying all the science buildings as soon as they became available. I bought out two decent looking city states for puppeting, and simply allied with all the others.