Banished

[Ruvaldt]

Can the wildlife attack you?

The first death in my settlement occurred when one of my hunters was killed by a wild boar.  It doesn't seem to be terribly common, but it can happen.

I'm really enjoying this.  I'm on year 15 with my first town.  I was humming right along with little difficulty, storing up more firewood and food than I could consume for the first 12 years, but then I expanded a bit and I'm on a knife's edge with the upcoming winter.  I think year 16 and 17 are going to be make or break.  No deaths from the elements or starvation yet, but it might happen soon since we're having a hard time getting enough wood for construction seeing as how we now end up burning most of it for fuel.

I noticed that people weren't moving out of their parents' houses when they came of age, which made sense because there weren't spare houses, so at around year 10 I went on a building spree, putting up new houses hoping that they would move out and start new families.  They definitely did that, and I immediately regretted my decision to build so robustly because I suddenly had a lot of young, unproductive mouths to feed and not enough infrastructure to feed them or keep them warm.  The problem is, in order to have any lasting solution to population problems, you have to plan pretty far in advance.  It can take years for a forestry to pay off and in the meantime you have to strip the forests bare to make firewood, which can harm your hunting/gathering/herbalism if you're not careful.  Keeping the town fed and warm is a constant balancing act that takes planning.  I like it a lot.

At first I was worried that the game would lose its luster because it didn't have any big projects to complete.  Children of the Nile and Pharaoh have monuments/pyramids, which I enjoyed building.  Here though, just surviving and creating a system in balance feels like an accomplishment.  Then, once you start building non-essential building like schools, it really does feel like you've completed something special.

[Pennilenko]

I started the last game on easy because I suck. My build order was pasture > crops > orchard > gathering hut > herbalist. Then kind of way off to the other side of my village i designated an area for a forestry service and hunting lodge. I am on year 20 now and going strong. So far one of my fisherman was killed by a falling tree, a hunter was killed by a boar. The most perplexing though is that I have so much food and I still had one person starve to death. I think the villagers didn't like her to  much.

[Pennilenko]

I spoke to soon. Apparently, I did not build enough houses and my entire village just started dying of old age. They weren't making babies.

Pay attention to your households people!!!

[Ruvaldt]

Yeah, you have to build more houses or people never move out of their parents' home and start new families.

[Pennilenko]

Three storage barns full of food and other provisions and everybody is dead except for a single six year old.

[Rendakor]

This sounds like it's right up my alley; I love city builders and hate combat in them. Now the debate is just if I buy it now when I'm playing other things or wait until it inevitably goes on sale. Steam doesn't have another big sale until summer, right?

[Ceryse]

I've been playing on Hard and still having fun. The start is a fair bit more knife's edge than on Medium (one less family and a lot less resources and you start with no seeds) which has been enjoyable. My first attempt at this failed hard due to an early tornado taking out half my population and about 3/4ths of my food production... and all the survivors were males older than 50. Second attempt was much better due to no disasters hitting. Set up a gatherer, hunter and four houses in a nearby forested area before winter hit with only minimal scavenging of surface resources like iron, stone and trees. Then built the forester and herbalist, a fifth house in an open area nearby where my 'town proper' was going to be with a wood cutter to re-stock firewood.

After that I set up another house and blacksmith and tailor in the town proper (almost got the blacksmith up and running too late, as I had about half my people with broken tools when he got into production), then built another forest spoke (each spoke consists of; gatherer, hunter, forester, barn, four houses) that winter, then a second forest spoke two years after that. Got a fishery up and running near the town proper after that and had a really solid base of population and resources to springboard my building for the next decade. Got a number of secondary buildings up, built a few bridges and tunnels, then a second town proper in a different open area for future expansion. By this point I was swimming in firewood (my main trade good because its fairly easy to have a surplus and three fully staffed foresters will do a decent job of keeping your lumber supply up with minimal clear cutting in non-spoke areas) and managed to luck out with my first trader bringing in cattle, chickens and sheep. I like the livestock because they aren't as labour intensive as other food sources and provide secondary goods (except chickens, which simply provide two food goods). Got four of each to speed up their reproduction (which I think was silly as they don't reproduce like that.. more like mitosis as you can buy only one animal and end up maxxed out years later).

Everything was looking good. Years go by, I acquire seeds, start laying out a number of orchards and a wheat field (only crop seed I had show up).. then brain fart. I decide I'll lay down the housing for my new farming community before I get the orchards running. Two years later.. orchards still aren't producing food due to their ramp up time, but my population has undergone a small explosion. My six forest spokes, three fisheries, three maxxed out pastures, and a wheat field are no longer able to sustain the population. Food stocks go from 25k to 15k. 9k. 2k. I'm starting to panic. Orchards come online and I see a small bump.. but not enough. In the meantime I've put up two more pastures for chickens, another forest spoke and a second wheat field and two squash fields from seeds I just got. Looks like this town is going to see famine before everything gets online and harvested. Food hits zero. Then I start seeing the hunger warning symbol. Then the day is saved; a food merchant lands at the docks in early summer. I grab up over 20k food from the merchant, stave off famine and by the time that influx of food is gone I've built up enough food sources to stabilize and then grow my food stocks.

Gatherer's are the best food production in the game, but I'd neglected to remember their production slips a bit as time goes by and that they can't produce enough to feed such massive numbers without agriculture being in full swing.. and agriculture isn't worth it if you can't max out the number of farmers due to the threat of early frosts and losing too much of your harvests.

I don't need this game to have an actual threat to my citizens like Indians or whomever banished them coming to kick my ass.

I'm the only threat they need to teeter on the brink of disaster.

Also; tornadoes suck, but lead to fantastic moments/stories.

[Sjofn]

Three storage barns full of food and other provisions and everybody is dead except for a single six year old.

This made me laugh out loud. Sorry!

[Yoru]

I've given this some more time and I'm finding it fairly easy once I obeyed a few tricks:

- Cluster a forester and gatherer together in a treed area; try to find a spot where as much of the forester's circle as possible is flat, growable land. Staff both fully. Boom, tons of food. Just past the radius of the forester's circle, stick a barn and connect them with roads. Do not encroach inside the forester's SOI and you'll soon be pulling hundreds of logs and food per season, sustainably.

- Stone houses. Period. Wood houses are a trap.

- Blacksmith by end of year 2, tailor by end of year 3. Supply the tailor via a hunter's hut at first. Hunter's huts work best when alone, far away from anything else. Again, barn just outside its SOI.

- Fisher's huts at river bends or promontories; no overlapping. Staffed fully, they're almost as productive per-person as gatherers and far more space-efficient.

- Delay quarrying and mining as long as possible. They eat workers. I'm at 65 people and just started a quarry; still haven't gotten a mine yet.

- Trade firewood. If you're flush with wood, trade whatever the merchant brings, and the merchant will have more stuff next time.

- Try to import as much stone and iron as possible. These are nonrenewable resources.

- Farm fields 7x8 (1 worker), orchards 10x11 (2 workers), cow/sheep pastures 18x20 (2 workers), chicken pasture 9x20 (1 worker) for best yields per-worker. Having lots of smaller fields reduces the pain from infestations. Could go 18x20 if you really love chickens, but they're not nearly as productive a food source as farming.

- Churches, graveyards and taverns are basically pointless.

This game could really use some improved storage structures, though. I'm having to double- or triple-up on barns to keep a comfortable food supply stocked.

[Sky]

- Churches, graveyards and taverns are basically pointless.

[Mithas]

I picked this up last night and put a few hours in. I seem to be doing fine and then out of nowhere, my food stock drops dramatically almost to zero for no apparent reason. I can usually spot a fairly steady decline, but this happened to me twice and really surprised me. Once in winter and once in spring. Is there a reason for that? Am I missing some status message that tells me why?

[Ruvaldt]

It seems that once people run low on food at home they go to the storage area and stock up.  When they do so they grab quite a lot of food at a time.  Same goes for firewood.  It could just be that a lot of people needed to restock at once.  This is pretty noticeable if you build houses in waves because multiple households will restock at the same time.

[Yoru]

Also schools are vital. Get a school up as soon as you've got your basic industries running smoothly. An unschooled farmer produces at most 280 food per year, whereas a schooled farmer produces about 390. With efficient house placement, you can reliably get educated farmers pulling in their harvests mid/late-summer, which seriously reduces the risk of early frosts ruining your shit.

I sort-of take back what I said about taverns. Once you're running multiple trading docks, you can use them to sell ale instead of firewood, which lets up some load on your foresters. Ale can be created by the thousands from a small orchard or 1-2 wheat fields.

[Gunzwei]

Mines can be good early if you can get a coal + iron up nearby your start for steel tools.

I picked this up last night and put a few hours in. I seem to be doing fine and then out of nowhere, my food stock drops dramatically almost to zero for no apparent reason. I can usually spot a fairly steady decline, but this happened to me twice and really surprised me. Once in winter and once in spring. Is there a reason for that? Am I missing some status message that tells me why?

Early snow, too many children, or market/barn problem. Markets distribute food more evenly than a barn does.

[Ceryse]

- Cluster a forester and gatherer together in a treed area; try to find a spot where as much of the forester's circle as possible is flat, growable land. Staff both fully. Boom, tons of food. Just past the radius of the forester's circle, stick a barn and connect them with roads. Do not encroach inside the forester's SOI and you'll soon be pulling hundreds of logs and food per season, sustainably.

- Stone houses. Period. Wood houses are a trap.

- Blacksmith by end of year 2, tailor by end of year 3. Supply the tailor via a hunter's hut at first. Hunter's huts work best when alone, far away from anything else. Again, barn just outside its SOI.
- Try to import as much stone and iron as possible. These are nonrenewable resources.

- Farm fields 7x8 (1 worker), orchards 10x11 (2 workers), cow/sheep pastures 18x20 (2 workers), chicken pasture 9x20 (1 worker) for best yields per-worker. Having lots of smaller fields reduces the pain from infestations. Could go 18x20 if you really love chickens, but they're not nearly as productive a food source as farming.

- Churches, graveyards and taverns are basically pointless.

This game could really use some improved storage structures, though. I'm having to double- or triple-up on barns to keep a comfortable food supply stocked.

Some good advice here, but I disagree on a few points. My forest spokes tend to have; 1 barn, 1 gatherer's hut, 1 hunting lodge, 1 forester's lodge, 4-5 houses clustered together tightly. You lose some effectiveness by having those buildings take up space in the circle of the gatherer's hut and hunter's lodge, but the efficiency gained by having them travel far less to and from the barns and homes makes up for that. Also, by combining the hunting area with the gathering area just makes things far more space efficient on a map scale with minimal loss of production. Also, every second spoke I add a house and a herbalist (only staff them with a single person; fully staffing herbalists are a waste, imo).

Stone houses are better than wooden houses, but I don't start building stone houses until year 4 or 5, after which I never build another wooden house ever again (and gradually I replace wooden houses with stone houses via the upgrade feature). Early on its just too resource and time heavy to go for stone houses, at least on Hard/Harsh.

Taverns are one of the last things I build, more for simply being complete than anything else. I generally have a graveyard island or something; a spoke of land near a town I won't use for anything else, I'll throw a couple graveyards there to prevent the happiness lost when someone dies without a graveyard. Churches get built for the same reason; happiness, and you only need one for every 200 citizens anyways.

I agree on the need for better storage options/upgrades. I usually get annoyed if things are going too well because I get constant alerts of my markets filling up (which usually triggers a massive house building spree).

[Bhazrak]

Apparently villagers fight fires by dropping a bucket of water off at the burning building and hoping for the best. Not sure how helpful it is, as it spread to several other buildings and only seemed to die off when some rain arrived.

[Ceryse]

Apparently villagers fight fires by dropping a bucket of water off at the burning building and hoping for the best. Not sure how helpful it is, as it spread to several other buildings and only seemed to die off when some rain arrived.

The firefighting is terrible, even if you have a bunch of spare labourers and use the prioritize tool on the buildings on fire.

Also; a tornado that takes out all of your students is a bitch. Nearly destroyed my new play-through when my school of 19 suddenly had all 19 die during a tornado (that destroyed nothing and killed no one else! It skirted my entire town, but briefly moved right behind the school...) -- at least the teacher survived. Had 45ish adults when this happened, but only about 8 children. Over the next nine years (which saw me build a town hall earlier than I had planned in the hopes of getting nomads) my adult population dropped to 24 due to old age deaths. Was likely going to see it dip to around ~15 or so adults before I would get any new working adults (I was seriously considering stopping work at the school just to get new working adults) before I finally, in the 10th year I got a group of 12 nomads show up and saved me from a horrible boring 20-30 year span of just waiting for the population to rebound.

[Samwise]

it's a slow-paced simulator, more akin to gardening.

This sounds right up my alley.  Argh.

[Sjofn]

I played a bunch on medium and need to go up to hard, I didn't have any fires or tornadoes or anything! Even though I have disasters turned on!

I might name this next town I build Cougartown, because if it's anything like this last one I played, all the new couples are going to be 16 year old boys paired with 38 year old women (which means they usually only have one or two kids instead of three).

[calapine]

Neither. 62 years and no Tornado

But I could see the point where I would start running out of land. I didn't want to plaster the entire map, so I simply stopped building housing. If the kids can't move out they won't procreate in this game, so I dropped down from ~390 to around 200 inhabitants (due to die off), followed by another rise as soon as the some houses were empty.

Not much left to do now. I'll probably keep this game on fast-forward until year 100 and call it a night. Nice city builder, but could be more complex. Not regretting it for 15€ though.

[Yoru]

I played a bunch on medium and need to go up to hard, I didn't have any fires or tornadoes or anything! Even though I have disasters turned on!

I might name this next town I build Cougartown, because if it's anything like this last one I played, all the new couples are going to be 16 year old boys paired with 38 year old women (which means they usually only have one or two kids instead of three).

Hard doesn't seem to make disasters more common, it's just a slower start as you have fewer people, no prebuilt buildings and no livestock/seeds to start with. Paradoxically, this can make it easier for new players as they're not lured into the farming trap; gathering is far more efficient per-worker early on, produces food continuously, and isn't vulnerable to frosts.

Also of note: trade timers are per-depot, so if you want to go balls-out on trade, build a ton of depots. You can import all the coal/iron/stone you need and pay for it with firewood or (once you have cows/sheep all over the place) warm coats.

Also, revising what I said above: 7x9 is the best size for orchards, and take only 1 worker.

[Rendakor]

So Hard only effects your starting conditions, it doesn't make the game more randomly likely to fuck with you? I just bought this but won't have a chance to play until tomorrow, might just start on Hard if that's the case.

[calapine]

So Hard only effects your starting conditions, it doesn't make the game more randomly likely to fuck with you? I just bought this but won't have a chance to play until tomorrow, might just start on Hard if that's the case.

Exactly.

[Sjofn]

I had my first fire! Before I actually built a well. So it burned down. I had a lot of resources sitting around (I was semi-saving for a town hall) so it wasn't a big deal, because it didn't spread or anything. I also finally had someone die of disease (dysentery!) and an infestation that wiped out my finally-almost-ready-to-start-giving-me-some-goddamn-meat cows.

I find myself occasionally doing random shit like "turn off all my hunter lodges because I have 5000 units of venison lying around and it bothers me."

My biggest town's been 200. There's a bunch of nomads sitting at my town hall, I should probably freshen up my town's gene pool a bit with them. But it's something like 22 of them, and the ones over 10 are going to be dummies. Dummies!

[calapine]

Be careful with letting nomads in. I heard it's very likely those strangers carry filthy infections!

[Sjofn]

I've let them in before, the only issue I have with them is that they're uneducated. They've never diseased my people! My disease outbreaks have all been super, super mild, though. Four-to-six people getting infected out of ~150 is just not very scary, especially when pretty much none of them die from it.

<-- totally daring karma to come fuck with her town

[Ceryse]

The only disaster that is an actual threat is the tornado. My last game had a tornado that nearly put my game to an end in year 81 (and came shortly after two separate fires nearly destroyed my two major population centers.. and all my markets and trade ports) due to some minor damage and the 150-ish souls it claimed (of a total population of 390-ish). Only time I really felt threatened, honestly, as even the threat of a food shortage when I overbuilt on houses wasn't a worry given the food merchant and a minor die-off somewhat beneficial. Fires would be more dangerous if they claimed lives, but until your labourers can actually fight fires of any size even with wells right beside the blaze without it amounting to urinating on an inferno I'd rather not see that happen. The diseases are only an issue if you don't have a hospital. Blights, infestations and the like on farms, orchards and pastures tend to be easily ignored/easily remedied as to be pointless beyond the minor aggravation. Tornadoes, however.. can be a bitch if they decide to waltz over important areas/heavily trafficked areas.

As for nomads.. I usually only accept them under one of two situations; I want a population boost to speed things along, or I need people because I just had a bunch die. They rarely seem to show up during the latter, however. The education issue is relatively minor unless they comprise a large segment of your population.

[Sjofn]

Fire can be pretty nasty if they spread enough. I finally had a big one that tore through and destroyed half my houses (whatever) and my one market (way unpleasant). That was a LOT of goods to lose. So recovering from that was an adventure! Still, no one died, so that still wasn't as bad as it could've been.

[Lightstalker]

Back to back tornados, a 45 structure fire, and a few too many nomads at the wrong time put my last town into a rapid decline at about year 125.  Even getting sufficient food production facilities wasn't enough to stop the fall since post-fire everyone was living in inappropriate places and freezing / starving on their way to and from work.  130k food reserve was not enough and a massive chain reaction of starvations kicked in with 2,500 food remaining (in far flung barns that people were starving on the way towards).  There are definitely some quirks in the AI when selecting where to live and where to go for food.  It is really silly when your gatherers/fishermen starve to death while carrying a load of food to a stockpile.

Not sure I want to rebuild from under 300 population back to 750, not even sure how the AI would handle all the available idle housing / storage / etc.

No matter, needed to restart in order to pick up the no-trade depot and no orchard, farm, or pasture achievements.  The survival equilibrium in this game is dynamic and not stable, you are either always growing at a modest rate or you are hurtling into a death spiral where a bunch of people age-out a the same time dropping your adult population, reducing your ability to generate food, and spawning a baby boom as new families are formed in the homes formerly occupied by the olds.  Those babies and students don't harvest food further exacerbating the harvest shortfall and quickly blowing through your reserves.  I think my open doors policy towards nomads may have been partly to blame - they represented large chunks of population all aged about the same.  Breaking up your cohorts is a big deal to prevent too many homes from opening up at the same time and pushing you onto that deaths->baby boom roller coaster.  The big fire didn't help either, was the first one I've had that jumped roads to keep burninating the country side.

[Lightstalker]

Went ahead and tried to salvage the above town.  750 pop at year 125, 23 pop at year 130, up to 350 before another crash into the teens, up to 200 before another crash, etc. etc. etc.  Each time through I deconstructed a few more houses, the eventual recovery would require gradually adding houses back up from 5-10 through 300 and on a large map where folks will die crossing from one side to the other anyway I just couldn't be bothered to go through with it.

Restarted on a medium map.  Gatherers+Hunting are so much stronger than trying to grow crops, orchards, and deal with livestock.  Hit 900 population at year 203 (on a medium map no less) knocking out the last achievements.  Even on a Medium map it is possible for idle villagers to head for an objective on the other side of the map that will cause them to starve before they get back home (but it is much less common and an annoyance rather than a problem).  I'm not sure I did it right, but I had 14 markets (each staffed with 3) spread around the map and that seemed to vastly improve storage and distribution compared to attempting to place barns near production points. 

With pathfinding and AI as it is, the smaller maps are much easier than the larger maps due to avoiding villager suicides (all resource gathering and distribution is more efficient because everything is closer together / your dudes won't try to drop off resources on the other side of the map from where they work).   Probably 50 hours of gameplay and another 25 hours of letting it run on 10x while I did other things (and 25 hours of forgetting it was at the menu minimized), so worth the $20 if you've got that itch.  I'd like to see it integrated with more of a game, something other than just survive, but probably won't return to it unless something big changes.

[Mithas]

This game has me hooked. It is a fun little city builder sim. So far I find it hard to build at a slow and steady pace. I end up with crashes due to either not enough food or too many old people dying all at once. I panic and then start building houses and then I end up with a wave of children all coming at once. In my last game at one point I had almost 100 laborers in a city of less than 300 people. Everyone came of age at the same time and I just didn't have enough jobs for everyone.

Gatherers+Hunting are so much stronger than trying to grow crops, orchards, and deal with livestock.

I found that to be the case as well, but to me it isn't as fun. It seems like hunting & gathering shouldn't be so consistent. Getting seeds is a giant pain due to trade posts. They seem way too expensive. I think the fact that people can starve simply by walking too far is a little silly. Other than little things like this, I find the game pretty enjoyable if a bit repetitive. Hopefully they add a little more down the road.

[grebo]

Hmm, always keep a laborer in case your old ass teacher up and dies, causing all the students to instantly give up school to become moron workers.

[Reg]

I got caught by that too one time. Killed my city's expansion for a generation as good workers were gradually replaced with bad workers.

[Draegan]

I just bought this since I saw it was on sale for $10.

[Mithas]

I've been playing this a bit again. It now has mod support and there are some interesting ones out there that add a little depth. I'm just not sure the player base is big enough to take it much further.

I think I paid $30 and it was worth every penny. I am a big city-builder person though.