melmer

Banished - The Indie City Simulator

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Oh, and laborers place priority on gathering jobs on a first in, first done basis. They'll only stop doing a thing if you remove the gathering selection, and juggling gathering tasks that is unfortunately necessary and painful part of efficient laborer management. It might pay to wait a little bit if you're getting burned out on it being obtuse, I feel like he's going to patch some of the more obvious UI and behavior problems (No idle workers count, no breakdown of why health/happiness are what they are, etc) pretty soon, and that'll help a lot with some of its problems I think. That and modding hopefully being in the near future almost makes me want to set it aside until its more feature rich.

Also, holy crap, IGN gives it a solid review and RPS pretty much pans it? This is very strange. One thing I've noticed is a weird difference in the way people respond to it depending on whether they think of it as a city-building game or a Medieval settlement simulator. Its a pretty excellent survival simulation game, but it really is an absolute crap time if you're looking to approach it like a Simcity or Anno. 

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That's my gripe, lack of stats or feedback.

'Is this  a good place to fish?', 'Why are these people not happy?' 'Where will i get better yeilds?'

It would be great to draw zones where a villager can and can't go, to maximise time to guarantee they follow the quickest path to their job.

They always seem to pick houses the furthest from their job ¬¬

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This looks good, although as always I'll wait for a later release. Still, it's developed a lot more than I was expecting — I initially thought it was a small indie project that'd never go beyond 'tech demo' status.

 

It does seem to be less of a city simulator and more of a town simulator, though. Or at least, a city quite some time back rather than a modern one with all of things I'd expect from such a place. The modern and borderline futuristic nature of SimCity is certainly only of the big draws for me.

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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.

 

Hah! You have the same problem I did. You didn't build enough houses for children to move out of their parents' houses and have their own kids, so now the settlement's doomed. Why there isn't an alert somewhere that tells you there'll be no kids ten years down the line for a lack of suitable housing is beyond me.

 

As far as I can tell, couples have a kid if they live in the same house alone (or with their children) and are both between the ages of 10 (gross) and 30. That's it. It's fully possible to build thirty houses right away and have your town collapse the moment the third generation is born, because there'll be so many mouths that don't work.

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I actually found in the bit I've played that going over the initial requirement of having enough houses for your starting population can put you on a bad path.  It seems like once people move into a house, one of the first things they'll do is grab food/firewood from a storage barn to stock it.  I had a couple instances where I built six houses off the bat rather than five for aesthetic reasons, and ended up with a house with very little food in it, as the other five households had taken most of the food for themselves.  I actually had someone starve to death very early on because of it.

 

So my new approach now is to keep the population low for the first one or two years to build up a big surplus of resources before starting to expand.  That game me enough wiggle room that when I saw I'd acquired too many  hungry mouths, I could shift the settlement over a year towards more food production without losing anyone vs getting down to the point where your food stockpile is constantly running out, and people are interrupting their activities to repeatedly take a few bits of food from the barn to their house.

 

I think I must have been very lucky with my first town to not have run into this issue, but it's definitely happened a few subsequent times.  It feels like there's no a big hope of recovery unless you see the problem coming at you.  By the time your food stockpile is running low, it's too late.  You needed to see that coming for a year to respond.  Similarly the trend of things like logs and iron incoming for tools and firewood, and leather incoming for clothing.

 

Something I've been tinkering with is matching town expansion to the passage of time, never building more than a house or two in any given year.  This has the effect of staggering the children coming out which makes resource demand a little more manageable, and also ensures you have a steady stream of aging citizens.  I feel like within a certain period of time (maybe 20ish game years?) you need to reach a certain sustainable population size or you will eventually run out of people.  Basically at a certain point, old people dying should result in new children being born in their place in a household.  I'm not sure what that population number would be though.  Maybe 80 or 100?

 

I've been having a lot of success building things in grid layouts, the AI seems to path a lot better.  I've also reverted to centralizing storage barns and stockpiles, as it felt like the AI might've been getting confused about stock and priority when I had them more spread out.  Hopefully that ends up being built later, as I like the idea of the marketplaces in game, but in practice they don't seem valuable enough to implement.

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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.

 

Do you have any builders? They're the only ones that can build buildings.

 

 

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

 

God I laughed so hard at that. 

 

 

I actually found in the bit I've played that going over the initial requirement of having enough houses for your starting population can put you on a bad path.  It seems like once people move into a house, one of the first things they'll do is grab food/firewood from a storage barn to stock it.  I had a couple instances where I built six houses off the bat rather than five for aesthetic reasons, and ended up with a house with very little food in it, as the other five households had taken most of the food for themselves.  I actually had someone starve to death very early on because of it.

 

[...]

 

I've been having a lot of success building things in grid layouts, the AI seems to path a lot better.  I've also reverted to centralizing storage barns and stockpiles, as it felt like the AI might've been getting confused about stock and priority when I had them more spread out.  Hopefully that ends up being built later, as I like the idea of the marketplaces in game, but in practice they don't seem valuable enough to implement.

 

Weird, as I was reading your first paragraph, I was going to suggest building a marketplace super early. In my experience, they're super valuable. In the first place, they seem to force equitable distribution or resources to all households within their radius, so I never see people complaining of cold or hunger unless everyone is. It caps out at 12 workers, but I only use 1 or 2 and it works just fine. And second, they end up making trips to get food or tools or clothes more efficient because the people don't have to run to whichever storehouse holds the good they're looking for (which might not be a problem for you if you keep all your storehouses in the center of the homes, but I think that ends up being inefficient for workers dropping of their produce).

 

Anyway, as a general response to several of the last posts, I definitely agree that the game seems to have a pretty steep learning curve at the start before you figure out how to get the basics up and stable. Not sure what to suggest in that department. I think I may have just gotten lucky on my 4th try :\

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Okay, I finally have enough time to write down some thoughts.

 

Things I Love about Banished:

  • The theme works so well for me. A subsistence-level medieval town, slowly growing as you gain more space and more people to do something besides gather wood and food.
  • Options in the early game are great. Do you launch right into farming or do you build up fishing and hunting? Do you clear-cut or build sustainable stuff?
  • Watching my fields grow and get harvested could consume my life.

Things I Don't Love about Banished:

  • ​Though I do love the theme, the setting is pretty sterile. It's always a wilderness with a river, populated by people with gibberish European names. It touches upon medievalism without capturing it, save for the harsh stakes of survival.
  • Options flatten out fast once your town passes a hundred people. You need farms. You need diverse crops. You can have some gatherers and fishermen to spice up the diet, but there's no decision to be made past a certain point, unless you're perverse and shooting for achievements.
  • Taciturn interface makes for magical thinking. Do doctors passively improve the health of your town? How many laborers are optimal? How much do paved roads really improve travel time if the AI pathing still cuts corners whenever possible? What controls hunting/gathering rates in forests? When and how long do you leave fields fallow? Should the theoretical maximum of workers in a given building ever be increased? Why is all useful information about a town hidden behind an expensive and otherwise (mostly) useless building? Okay, the last one's not really magical thinking, but still.
  • God, I hate that one ninety-year-old man living alone in a house at the center of town. That house could have a family in it if he'd just die.

Basically, I think it's a great game that needs a better endgame and a deep usability pass. I'm enjoying it immensely right now, but I'm pouring a lot of my gaming time into satisfying superstitions, which doesn't drive me toward the only goal of "see how large a town can be sustained."

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  • God, I hate that one ninety-year-old man living alone in a house at the center of town. That house could have a family in it if he'd just die.

I have a lovely village that can sort that problem out very quickly.

 

I got far now by making sure the first things i built is a Gatherers hut and a Hunting Lodge. Ample food there was straight from the off.

I Had over 70 citizens with thousands in reserve foodstuffs. With my highly educated populous (A school was the 3rd building i built, seems to stop the kids wandering about eating said food) and 5 nomads turn up asking if they could join my town. I had a Boarding House sitting empty so i thought '5 Nomads couldn't hurt?'

Next thing i know the food has disappeared including reserves, my people are dropping like flies now, down to under 50, im early harvesting everything. took everyone out the mines to farm, fish, and hunt... and STILL those damn nomads take the food <_< :

bKdDbcQ.jpg

 

I've been having a lot of success building things in grid layouts, the AI seems to path a lot better.  I've also reverted to centralizing storage barns and stockpiles, as it felt like the AI might've been getting confused about stock and priority when I had them more spread out.  Hopefully that ends up being built later, as I like the idea of the marketplaces in game, but in practice they don't seem valuable enough to implement.

 

I concur, i have tonnes of wood and metal sitting on outlying deposit areas, and warnings saying i'm out of wood, depsite having stone paths straight to them.

 

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I got far now by making sure the first things i built is a Gatherers hut and a Hunting Lodge. Ample food there was straight from the off.

I Had over 70 citizens with thousands in reserve foodstuffs. With my highly educated populous (A school was the 3rd building i built, seems to stop the kids wandering about eating said food) and 5 nomads turn up asking if they could join my town. I had a Boarding House sitting empty so i thought '5 Nomads couldn't hurt?'

Next thing i know the food has disappeared including reserves, my people are dropping like flies now, down to under 50, im early harvesting everything. took everyone out the mines to farm, fish, and hunt... and STILL those damn nomads take the food <_<

 

The game punishes you so hard for sudden jumps in population, I'm not exactly sure how or why. I had 15,000 food in my storehouse and enough production for a village of twice my current size, which was around a hundred and fifty, but admitting twenty nomads crashed my economy so bad that it took five years just to regain previous population levels. Do they just sit around and eat for a set period of time before they start to work? If so, how can I prevent that?

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Sounds to me like nomads exist specifically to fuck yo' shit up.

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The number of nomads doesn't only include working adults, it can be and is sometimes mostly kids or student aged kids, who will just eat and not work. It's both an infusion of free labor and a huge hit to resources, I try to only take them after the first significant wave of old age deaths, when my population is down, and turn off the school if you're worried about food. If you end up with a bunch of kids or students and no adults, having no teacher puts them straight to work the field, where they BELONG. They are a gamble in a lot of ways, I'm told but have not seen that they can carry diseases from distant lands to infect your population. 
For people having problems early on with firewood and food being spread too thin, try building a boarding house, and then only build enough houses at the jobsites for the people working. Its way easier to heat the boarding house, food storage is centralized and it keeps people from getting homeless to quick. Building the houses at jobsites gradually seems to help ensure that people end up in places that make sense for their job, and you can control early population growth easier that way. You also have a buffer for nomads, and it helps if a couple houses get destroyed by fire or tornado or whatever.
 

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I find it's best not to build a school early on, since it means that children take another few years to become working adults. Without a school, they'll be useful as soon as they turn 10 years old (I think they stay as students for another 6 years?).

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Do they just sit around and eat for a set period of time before they start to work? If so, how can I prevent that?

You can't, it's part of their culture.

It's like that old T.V advert:

                                                'Give a man a fish, and he can feed himself for a day.

                                                But give a man the keys to your town, and he can feed himself forever.'

Here's my progress, callin' it a night!

vmthGDh.jpg

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I like how that in the middle of a disaster, with deaths happening so fast that you can't read them, the event box chooses to remind you that you're low on firewood.

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Oh god fire

 

 

Man fires are horrible.... Do the wells do fucking anything? I put a bunch of them down and a fire still manage to burn down half of my houses.

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So how many dudes and ladies can you fit in a house in Banished?

 

Theoretically six, although a couple has to have a lot of kids for a house to be filled up like that. Usually it'll only be a couple and whatever kids they do or do not have.

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Huh, considering how miserable villages of no resources and starvation everyone describes, I'd have thought people would be content with bunk beds.

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Diseases still completely elude me. I've had illness wipe an entire 70+ person town (with an herbalist and hospital running, no less) in a single year, and yet my 30 naked dudes eating nothing but pumpkins and fish just managed to survive about 70% of them catching measles in the winter, with only a couple of old people and kids dying. What the hell?

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Diseases still completely elude me. I've had illness wipe an entire 70+ person town (with an herbalist and hospital running, no less) in a single year, and yet my 30 naked dudes eating nothing but pumpkins and fish just managed to survive about 70% of them catching measles in the winter, with only a couple of old people and kids dying. What the hell?

 

There's a definite bug (feature?) that people can only die of anything besides old age if they have a house to go die in. If you have insufficient housing, the game will go on forever, albeit in the most pathetic way possible.

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WHY DOES RAIN NOT PUT OUT FIRE? WHY DOES RAIN NOT PUT OUT FIRE?

 

I almost grabbed a screenshot of a villager just standing there, by a well, as the house they were looking at started burning. They stood there for a good two minutes in 1x time. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

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Bahaha did you have enough labourers?

First thing I did was turn all wooden houses into stone houses, had no fires at all during my so far 39 in game years.

Have had 2 tornados though, does anything bad happen if you clear full cemeteries? I've got so many ATM.

Also, the gathering range for the market workers needs to be at leastdoubled or trebled.

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Bahaha did you have enough labourers?

 

I had sixty laborers at hand, because I'd just shut down my two quarries and two mines in order to start a land-clearing project to push my village beyond 300. Thankfully, the fire stopped when it hit the old town, which is all stone, but half the buildings are destroyed and it's started this weird starvation spiral that I can't puzzle out. There's food in the marketplace, food in the storehouse, but people aren't taking it to their homes or eating it. I wish the game would tell me why...

 

 

EDIT: Yep, this town's dead. From three hundred people to thirty in five years, for reasons I am unable to divine. There was enough food, but people kept starving. The best guess I can venture is that people don't move closer to the town center when better housing's available, so once resources were not as plentiful, many people would die in the process of trekking to the storehouse or marketplace and then back to their homes to eat. It feels... really stupid. A town pulling in more food than it consumes shouldn't collapse from starvation, not if the people AI is doing its job.

 

In the end, the crash stopped, either because there's so few people that they can hoard enough food to survive even the long trek home or because I forced them to move to more optimal housing by manually marking every house outside the town center for destruction, but the town's gone. I'm pretty miffed, all in all.

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Is there some incentive to not build things further apart so fire doesn't ravage it all so much? Also can houses eventually be built of something that doesn't burn like a piece of paper?

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