Banished - The Indie City Simulator

[Dewar]

Hmm, any newer videos? I remember liking the look of this but not feeling like it had enough depth at the time.

 

Edit: There's some stuff on the steam page, not sure if I've seen it before or not. http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/

[youmeyou]

Tomorrow is the big day, Banished will be released. It's going to be available on Steam in "approximately 21 hours", and I think I'll be picking it up right away. A day one perch, you might call it.

 

Make sure to assign enough fishermen to collect the perch in your day one perch.

[Entriech]

So I bought this earlier today, and have put a few hours into it.  I've been really enjoying it so far.  One pitfall I feel like this game avoids is being complex for the sake of complexity.  The resources your town needs and use are pretty explicit and easy to understand, and the buildings you can build are laid out very logically in the interface.  Having every building unlocked from the get go feels smart.  You won't be tackling the more advanced buildings due to lack of resources, but seeing them there in the interface makes it easier to plan and understand the paths that are available to you.

 

Early on I could see some dramatic errors ending up in a game over, but when your town is small, it actually feels very manageable.  So long as you keep on top of food and warmth, you'll be fine.  The real depth of the game comes from figuring out how to grow your village in a sustainable fashion.  There's real danger in growing too quickly, or not diversifying in your development, and having something critical knocked out from under you as a consequence.

 

In some ways the difficulty curve feels interesting as a result.  You can play a very slow, careful game early on without feeling penalized or like you're setting yourself up for failure later on.  It's only as you try to build out that the game starts to push back on you, and you end up engaged in interesting questions about how to meet your resourcing needs.

 

While I've always admired the Sim City games (barring that last one), I've never quite been able to get into them.  They always scaled up very quickly, and the scope of them was larger than what I feel like I wanted.  By contrast, Banished feels like it hits exactly the right note for me, where even hours into the game I can pan over my village and know and understand how all of the different pieces are interlocking.

 

Given the options for increasing the difficulty (such as starting in mountainous terrain, or in a worse climate) I feel like it has some longevity, especially if the developer adds in the mod support they've been touting for a while.  If you like city builders, or town simulations, or what have you, I really recommend this game.  It's $20 from the developer through the Humble widget, and comes with a Steam key as well.

[Golden Calf]

I've been really enjoying the game so far. I find that even on medium, the game is pushing back against me in satisfying ways.

 

I wanted to highlight an interesting comparison between it and SimCity (2013) - I remember Chris talking about permanence on episode 99:

 

Everything just seems like it exists in a vacuum that can be destroyed at any moment. There's no permanence. There's absolutely no penalty for just bulldozing everything and building more stuff : the vans come in and everything is immediately restored [...] Nothing in this game feels like it has any sense of weight or history, which is what a city is. 

 

I think that by focusing on such small communities, the game is scoped perfectly to deliver that sense of weight and history. Because there are so few actors (you start with five families on Medium difficulty), the game can meaningfully model each person, in a way that SimCity wanted to but never could.

 

In my first city, things were going decently well - I was beginning to trade for livestock and had achieved relative stability - when a fire broke out that I wasn't prepared for. It proceeded to destroy half of my houses in late Autumn. To keep the newly homeless from freezing to death, I frantically set almost all of my people to work on rebuilding, a process which took longer than I anticipated. Meantime, my farms lie fallow and my fishing docks sit unmanned. By the time the townsfolk settled back into their old jobs, eighty percent had starved. I limped along for a little while, but food production had slowed to such a trickle that most of the rest soon followed. In the end, I was left with a 67 year old male fisherman, and a 32 year old male shepherd. Convinced I was unlikely to be rescued by a fleet of Nissan Leaves, I consigned them to their fate and began anew.

 

 

Anyway, I highly recommend the game so far.

[Security_Tubbs]

I've been playing super cautiously. Save for a few fishermen drowning, and just recently a hunter was trampled by a boar, there haven't been any other premature deaths. The game is very atmospheric and as fun as I hoped.

Behold, the cozy Thumbwood, population 38:

 

[Gormongous]

Build them houses, people. Nothing like having a thriving town of fifty die out one by one over the course of a decade because their drowsy god never realized they didn't have enough room for kids to move out and have their own kids.

 

Actually, right now I'm looking at the remaining eight, all at least sexagenarians, each living alone in their own house, and finding it pretty hilarious. Who's going to the graveyard next, Monserra the eighty-five year old farmer or Lett the seventy-two year old woodcutter?

[dibs]

Build them houses, people. Nothing like having a thriving town of fifty die out one by one over the course of a decade because their drowsy god never realized they didn't have enough room for kids to move out and have their own kids.

Oh wow. This would be my weekend if i didn't have plans already. Sounds awesome. I can't recall playing anything where population growth and aging meant so much!

[Entriech]

Yeah, given that children need to hit age 10 before becoming 'adult' and being able to work, you can often run into a situation where your labourers start dropping with noone to replace them, and building houses at that point is futile.  Of course if you build too many houses too soon, you'll drive your nascent town to starvation.

 

There's definitely still some bugs that they need to work out.  In one of my towns I'm just watching my two herbalists carry around inventory in the town.  They refuse to pick herbs or treat anyone.  I assume something's just gotten then stuck and confused.

[Tundra]

I keep getting buggared for everyone running out of tools really quickly, and cant do nout. Good old restarting...

[Tundra]

I keep wishing this was a (good) Fable game, before all the magic. wishing the towns folk would start farting and having unprotected sex etc, oh the hilarity!

[Tundra]

i swear to god everyone was dying of starvation until only 6 fisherman were left then THEY all died of starvation.

Useless fishermen!

[Tundra]

[Golden Calf]

i swear to god everyone was dying of starvation until only 6 fisherman were left then THEY all died of starvation.

Useless fishermen!

 

Ya this happened to me on my third attempt to get a city working. I didn't understand you had to let crop fields lie fallow for a year every couple years to keep them productive, so all of a sudden I was producing almost nothing and most of my ~45 people died. It was winter, and I wasn't going to get crops again for a while, so I set everyone to fish. I guess they weren't that effective because they were starving, and kept interrupting their work to find food or something.... 

 

Fishing doesn't seem to produce that much food anyway. In my most recent town, I built 2 docks just for variety, but get most of my food from livestock and agriculture.

 

 

In all but my most recent city, things seemed to be going well for a while, and then one problem popped up, like a fire, or a food or tool or firewood shortage, and then there was a rapid cascade of failures as I attempted to remedy the first one. It seems that you have to get a REALLY solid footing before trying to grow your population at all, or risk everything going to shit rapidly. I've definitely had to adjust to the game's expectations with this one.

[Security_Tubbs]

i swear to god everyone was dying of starvation until only 6 fisherman were left then THEY all died of starvation.

Useless fishermen!

You didn't have any laborers (at least in that screenshot). I think the fish needs to be carried to the storage barn before it "becomes food".

 

As for the efficiency of fishing, one fishing dock worked by 3 people produced over 1000 units of food per season for me, which is nice.

[Entriech]

Yeah.  Resources go to storage barns or stockyards before the general populace will pull them out to use them as they're supposed to be used.  I think an overuse of barns and stockyards, and a low number of labourers might've been behind my issues with my herbalists.  I get the feeling if you don't have enough labourers for all the porting that needs to be done, it'll press-gang your regular workers into doing it for you.

[Tundra]

I'm keeping labourers (i have to spell "labor" with a 'u' being British, to all intents and purposes) at 5 persons a minimum and still struggling. Having 5 in each mine to get iron ore, with plenty lumber - rest designated to farming - and still falling into the [lack of resources neccessary to craft] void of tools problem:

[Golden Calf]

I'm keeping labourers (i have to spell "labor" with a 'u' being British, to all intents and purposes) at 5 persons a minimum and still struggling. Having 5 in each mine to get iron ore, with plenty lumber - rest designated to farming - and still falling into the [lack of resources neccessary to craft] void of tools problem:

 

I think you might be trying to set up mines too soon. Their yield seems to be lower than just collecting iron from off the ground, until you've picked up most of it near your starting location. Same with the quarry. I think they're supposed to be mid-late game buildings.... though I could be wrong. I've been clearing all the trees, stone, and iron in a pretty large area around my town until I have ~40 pop at least.

[neonrev]

Yeah, I find mines and quarries to be less efficient than plain clearcutting until I have excess labor enough to run them at 60-80% full. I once found more success pouring excess labor into surplus log and firewood cutting, and trading that for iron or stone as often as I could, than the same 4 or 5 guys working my quarry could typically get me in the same interval, but its definitely a crapshoot early on figuring out where the labor is best spent with so few dudes. I'm looking forward to spreadsheet set clearing some of these ambiguities up, there was so much mentioned in development I'm unable to figure out what is mechanics and what is superstition. For instance, I still am not sure if old growth forest is better for gathering and hunting than forests planted by foresters, as that was a discussed feature, but its not explicitly stated anywhere at release. I'll just keep the old grove near the edge of town, with whatever magic bonuses may lay inside.

[Frenetic Pony]

Eeeeurgh.

 

I can already see why this game could be great. But it's already frustrating me to no end at the beginning. I know how much I've stored of everything, but not how much I'm making, which isn't terribly useful.

 

I also don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've got a hunting lodge, I've got hunters assigned to it. There doesn't seem to be any food coming out of it though. I've got a gathering lodge, but it's hard to tell if anyone's gathering even though a pair of gatherer's are there. I get "low food!" warnings, and I've got a pair of farmers, but the farmers aren't doing any damned thing with it at all. There's zero yield and they're never there.

 

I suspect they're building the damnable pasture I set up... or is there a specific job for that? Because if there is then they literally aren't doing anything and my town is starving because of it. I've got the orchard and farm built. I've got farmers assigned, but everytime I try to assign a farmer to a field the (0 of 2) farmers working this field just goes up too (0 of 3) instead of, I don't know, assigning a farmer to work there.

 

I'll come back too it after I figure out what it is I'm even supposed to be doing.

[Gormongous]

Eeeeurgh.

 

I can already see why this game could be great. But it's already frustrating me to no end at the beginning. I know how much I've stored of everything, but not how much I'm making, which isn't terribly useful.

 

I also don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I've got a hunting lodge, I've got hunters assigned to it. There doesn't seem to be any food coming out of it though. I've got a gathering lodge, but it's hard to tell if anyone's gathering even though a pair of gatherer's are there. I get "low food!" warnings, and I've got a pair of farmers, but the farmers aren't doing any damned thing with it at all. There's zero yield and they're never there.

 

I suspect they're building the damnable pasture I set up... or is there a specific job for that? Because if there is then they literally aren't doing anything and my town is starving because of it. I've got the orchard and farm built. I've got farmers assigned, but everytime I try to assign a farmer to a field the (0 of 2) farmers working this field just goes up too (0 of 3) instead of, I don't know, assigning a farmer to work there.

 

I'll come back too it after I figure out what it is I'm even supposed to be doing.

 

I'm going to make a longer post later, but you have to get the town hall built to have year-by-year stat tracking. It helps your efficiency a lot, so I'm not terribly thrilled with hiding it behind a (relatively) expensive building.

[Frenetic Pony]

Ok, I'm done until this is patched.

 

I have to enable work at a field, because it's disabled by default for... reasons I've no idea.

 

I started a new town, planned everything out, it was all going well, stone houses for the first settlers because there's plenty of stone right near the start. A farm, and orchard, a forester... five minutes and my villagers start idling. All of them. They've got jobs, they need to build stuff. There's even resources at build sites, it's just waiting to be built. But all of them are idling, and refuse to do anything else. Maybe they caught the laziness disease.

 

I really want to like it. I imagine I could easily like it. But there's a million little things that make it more frustrating than it should be, and hitting a bug that breaks your town five minutes in... just kind of put me off it for now.

[Tundra]

I'm going to make a longer post later, but you have to get the town hall built to have year-by-year stat tracking. It helps your efficiency a lot, so I'm not terribly thrilled with hiding it behind a (relatively) expensive building.

 

Same reason i haven't (fully) built one yet, that and the school that "helps improve productivity".

Regarding idle workers, i have a problem where i assign individuals jobs and yet they carry on clearing a plot of land...

[Tundra]

I knocked the difficulty down to easy and cant tell any difference other than no one is having children and people dying of old age becomes an apparent problem.

I wonder if birth-rates are linked to happiness. Everyone seems depressed and ill as theyre all on half a heart and half a star. it was a toss-up between using my last resources to build a brewery to increase happiness, or a hospital to increase health.

I chose a hospital.
I staffed the hospital.
No buggar is using the hospital... ah... the hospital worker died of old age.

So my village is like some internment work camp for the elderly.

Guess i'll start over (again)

@NeonRev Then you're a luckier guy than me, i can have 10 labourers and assign 5 only to gather iron and never have any of it in about 7 restarts.

Maybe the game hates me.

[neonrev]

Man, I dunno, not having any of those issues. Maybe try watching some lets plays? I guess I had been watching

lp of it before it was released, and watching him figure stuff out was immensely helpful. The way productivity matters so much on house placement and food storage locale, it helps to see someone figure it out on an individual situation more than general tips, if that makes sense. 
 

[Tundra]

IGN gave Banished an 8.3 (!)

"Nothing less than Skyrim City"