Banished - The Indie City Simulator

[Tundra]

but the town's gone. I'm pretty miffed, all in all.

It's not even an "Early Access" Steam game, which would excuse the £14.99 price.

Any news on forthcoming content?

[Vasari]

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?

I'd recommend at least building your boarding house away from other structures so that it doesn't burn down along with all the houses.

 

On the plus side, so many people died due to the lack of food during the fire that the surviving population could fit into all the remaining houses.

[Gormongous]

I think I am done with this game for now. I enjoyed building up my city a lot and I was even excited for the challenge of surviving the fire, but two things have ruined any hope of that excitement:

1. The pathing and job AI. Townspeople will always inhabit the nearest house to wherever they are when they become homeless and always go to the nearest storehouse when they are hungry or cold. I lost about a hundred people before I realized that I had to use the "destroy building" tool to force people to move closer to a storehouse that was still getting filled by nearby farmers and fishermen, otherwise they'd just path back and forth between their empty home and the empty storehouse before dying of starvation. It also would have helped for me to use the tool on the empty storehouses too, but I no longer have enough people to see if that helps matters even more.
2. The population control tools. Seriously, if the AI won't do anything itself, my best options to force people to move is to trick them with the "destroy building" tool? That's almost as bad as having to use the "build road" tool as a ersatz terrain leveler.

These two things have convinced me that I'm playing an unfinished game. Not broken, mind you, because the systems themselves seem fine, albeit a bit opaque. But if the game's AI cannot adapt to disasters and I can only force it to do so with extremely kludgey tools, something needs a lot more work. By the way, my town's still starving to death. There are twenty-five people still alive, eighteen adults and four children. Twelve of the adults are fishermen, two are foresters, one's a woodcutter, and three are laborers. They all live next to a storehouse fed by the three fisheries. About ten people die of starvation a year. I'm beginning to wonder if the fire somehow introduced a pathing bug, because it's absurd that twelve fishermen can't fish enough to feed twice their number.

 

 

EDIT: Four fishermen cannot feed four fisherman. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he starves to death in a month.

[Tundra]

Extremely kludgey tools

 

Love that word, Kludgey.

 

 

I think I am done with this game for now. I enjoyed building up my city a lot and I was even excited for the challenge

 

Same here, I think ill stop after the next disaster to my large town:

 

Oh - hello - talk of the devil...

A fire has erupted in two stone houses, next to a well, during a rain storm.

Huh.

[Gormongous]

Oh - hello - talk of the devil...

A fire has erupted in two stone houses, next to a well, during a rain storm.

Huh.

 

Yep, it's more or less confirmed on various forums that townspeople do nothing to stop fires right now. The in-game wiki says that lakes and rivers are also used to put out fires, so the fact that literally half my town burned is even more absurd, because I had a pretty cool seed starting on a peninsula in a vast lake fed by a huge river. It was impossible for any of the townspeople to be more than maybe twenty squares from water, even ignoring the eight wells I had built. If the dev does a good job of quashing bugs, I strongly suspect that this will be a great rainy-day game to zone (or zen) out playing, but right now you're on a death timer until fire wrecks your town beyond repair or the AI glitches out in a way that causes a starvation spiral (or, if you're lucky, both at the same time, like me).

 

Also, the guy who is calmly walking into the burning house on the left is the best guy.

[Golden Calf]

I think I am done with this game for now. I enjoyed building up my city a lot and I was even excited for the challenge of surviving the fire, but two things have ruined any hope of that excitement:

1. The pathing and job AI. Townspeople will always inhabit the nearest house to wherever they are when they become homeless and always go to the nearest storehouse when they are hungry or cold. I lost about a hundred people before I realized that I had to use the "destroy building" tool to force people to move closer to a storehouse that was still getting filled by nearby farmers and fishermen, otherwise they'd just path back and forth between their empty home and the empty storehouse before dying of starvation. It also would have helped for me to use the tool on the empty storehouses too, but I no longer have enough people to see if that helps matters even more.
2. The population control tools. Seriously, if the AI won't do anything itself, my best options to force people to move is to trick them with the "destroy building" tool? That's almost as bad as having to use the "build road" tool as a ersatz terrain leveler.

These two things have convinced me that I'm playing an unfinished game. Not broken, mind you, because the systems themselves seem fine, albeit a bit opaque. But if the game's AI cannot adapt to disasters and I can only force it to do so with extremely kludgey tools, something needs a lot more work. By the way, my town's still starving to death. There are twenty-five people still alive, eighteen adults and four children. Twelve of the adults are fishermen, two are foresters, one's a woodcutter, and three are laborers. They all live next to a storehouse fed by the three fisheries. About ten people die of starvation a year. I'm beginning to wonder if the fire somehow introduced a pathing bug, because it's absurd that twelve fishermen can't fish enough to feed twice their number.

 

 

Ya, I got up to about ~375 pop and my desire to keep playing utterly evaporated. Once I had more or less figured out the systems, it didn't really feel like there was anything left. But I'm pretty OK with that - I put in 25 hours for $20, and had a lot of fun watching over my frantic little colony, loving each season change along the way. And I guarantee that, updates or not, I'll end up coming back to play again for a while in a month or two.

 

I'm overall pretty satisfied with the game and, with the exception of the fires, I feel like any wonky behavior on the part of the AI is within reasonable bounds for a group of independent, mostly unmanaged medieval peasants.

 

EDIT: Four fishermen cannot feed four fisherman. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and he starves to death in a month.

 

That quote is gold though lol.

[Entriech]

Tom Chick eviscerates Banished.  http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2014/02/24/cold-undocumented-emptiness-banished/

 

I can't find too much fault with his criticism.  I'll admit that, freed from the initial giddy rush of newness, I'm starting to feel a bit soured on the game.  While initially I praised its limited scope as something that made it more accessible to someone like me, once you get over the hurdles caused by bad AI or lack of information, there's nowhere to go next.  As of late, watching my town, I've mostly been looking over the few remaining pieces of infrastructure that I haven't indulged in yet and trying to decide which one to build in kind of a lackluster way.

 

I also feel like the lack of information helps cover up the mistakes that the game's AI and simulation is making behind the scenes.

 

I still think that the game's impressive coming from a single person as it does.  I don't resent giving the dude my twenty dollars, and got a good 12 hours of fun out of it, and the potential mod tools being developed could extend the longevity considerably depending on scope.

 

Fun bonus knowledge from the comments on that review:  You can apparently make diagonal roads by holding shift and dragging.  Witchcraft!

[TheLastBaron]

Hmm, reading that and also listening to the 3MA episode have made me less interesting in trying this out now. However I still am in the mood for a city builder so now I'm getting mad that Clockwork Empires isn't out yet.

[neonrev]

Mmmmm, the lack of information, the tension of not being sure what the best choice to make, and the slow and tedious pace of advancement are sorta what I like about this game. It turns city builders from a exercise in steadily adding more people, more jobs, more roads into a exercise in desperately trying to protect and shelter people who have very little skill at what they are doing long enough that they can carve out a little place to live in, and the stories of the towns that fail are usually pretty interesting. I'm really not having the problems other people are having re: housing inefficiency and unrecoverable disasters, and maybe that's just and RNG thing, or maybe I'm doing something differently. I notice in a lot of pictures that you guys seem to have dense housing sections, whereas I place housing only at jobsites, and really compartmentalize my production centers, and I never see anyone walking more than maybe the length of a field or two to get to work, (and starvation NEVER happens with food in the bank, I don't even know how that can be happening to anyone.). I guess I don't have much experience at towns of more than 100ish people, but I also don't really think its a game about making a large city, and I don't feel bad about starting over once I get a solid town running without issue for about 5 years without any more growth. 
I sorta think its a game about chiseling away someplace for these people to call 'home' in a really inhospitable environment, without proper tools or experience, rather than a game about making the biggest city you can, and that is a game I have wanted for years, so I'm happy with it. I hope further patches and content can make the game more palatable to people, and I can't wait to see what the modding community will do with this, because it seems like a fantastic base for either a more traditional city building game or a more Dwarf Fortressy/resource management game.

[filk]

It sounds like the game just suffers from being too easy once "solved". It's really common with this genre of game I think. I've had similar experiences in Tropico 3/4 and Prison Architect.

[Gormongous]

Mmmmm, the lack of information, the tension of not being sure what the best choice to make, and the slow and tedious pace of advancement are sorta what I like about this game. It turns city builders from a exercise in steadily adding more people, more jobs, more roads into a exercise in desperately trying to protect and shelter people who have very little skill at what they are doing long enough that they can carve out a little place to live in, and the stories of the towns that fail are usually pretty interesting. I'm really not having the problems other people are having re: housing inefficiency and unrecoverable disasters, and maybe that's just and RNG thing, or maybe I'm doing something differently. I notice in a lot of pictures that you guys seem to have dense housing sections, whereas I place housing only at jobsites, and really compartmentalize my production centers, and I never see anyone walking more than maybe the length of a field or two to get to work, (and starvation NEVER happens with food in the bank, I don't even know how that can be happening to anyone.). I guess I don't have much experience at towns of more than 100ish people, but I also don't really think its a game about making a large city, and I don't feel bad about starting over once I get a solid town running without issue for about 5 years without any more growth. 

I sorta think its a game about chiseling away someplace for these people to call 'home' in a really inhospitable environment, without proper tools or experience, rather than a game about making the biggest city you can, and that is a game I have wanted for years, so I'm happy with it. I hope further patches and content can make the game more palatable to people, and I can't wait to see what the modding community will do with this, because it seems like a fantastic base for either a more traditional city building game or a more Dwarf Fortressy/resource management game.

 

The issue really is that your options diminish so rapidly as the game goes on. When the game starts, you can get food from anywhere and make a viable town out of it. That's cool, I loved it when I picked up the game and I love it now. Still, past a hundred and fifty people or so, the game gets so fussy about your supply chains that any sort of imbalance or disruption starts a death-spiral that is most definitely not fun to confront or correct. I had fun the first twenty years building my city up to a hundred people, I had fun the next forty just keeping it around that number and tweaking things, but the final fifteen trying to push above three hundred was miserable and there's no way around that.

 

In that way, I have to agree with you that the game's sweet spot is building a hundred-person city or so that can go the distance and provide for its population in comfort over the long term. I really ought to criticize the achievements then, all thirty-six of which encourage the player to expand aggressively as if a making thousand-person city is the point of playing. It feels like the developer does not really understand the strengths of his own game.

[neonrev]

Wow, I hadn't looked at the achievements, these are nuts. The production numbers ones don't look out of the world to me , but 900 citizens? I have no idea what the hell that is all about, I always saw the game presented as a small village builder. I'm curious how he decided on those numbers, cause those don't match up with the game's strengths at all, and I see why people keep trying to expand beyond the point of stability and fun. I'mma look back through the dev blog sometime and see if I can find a post about achievements, maybe he's got some logic behind all that.

Edit: Here is a post on the tutorials (another weak point for me) and the achievements. It's more code than design thoughts, but I guess he thinks they're reasonable? This might shed some light on the problem: 
 

A lot of the achievements have population requirements or time requirements. For example, one achievement is to maintain high health for a population of more than 200 people over 10 years. For most people this is somewhat likely to happen as you play, but getting there is tough. You can build a town of 200 people in maybe 5 hours (if no disasters occur and you’re familiar with the game already.) Then maintaining the health of those people for ten years takes at least another hour if the game is running at fastest speed. Now do this for all the achievements….

My guess is that to truly test all the achievements would take me more than two weeks of nonstop play. Instead I’ve been testing them using cheats. Being the developer, I can build things with no resource cost, disable health and warmth concerns, and get people to survive without homes. I can add resources and unlock things you normally have to trade for. This really speeds things along and makes the goals for the achievements attainable in a reasonable time. However when I do use the cheats, I try to cheat in a way that makes sure to validate the attainability of the achievement. Even with the cheats, getting 100% of the achievements took about 11 hours. With cheats! Phew!

[ariskany_evan]

Re: Souring on the late-game

 

Is there a community/city-building game out there that has a really great late-game?  I tend to find that I play the beginning-middle of these games over and over, and I rarely stick around for the late-game.  Either I run out of things to do, or it gets too complicated for me to manage.  

 

Tropico's missions were a great way to get me to try different play styles and give me a win condition, but that specifically skirts around the lack of late-game as the mission usually threw a hurtle in the early/mid-game.  I'm curious to know if there's been a game like Banished, etc. that had a late-game that wasn't just a more complicated version of the early game.

[Gormongous]

Re: Souring on the late-game

 

Is there a community/city-building game out there that has a really great late-game?  I tend to find that I play the beginning-middle of these games over and over, and I rarely stick around for the late-game.  Either I run out of things to do, or it gets too complicated for me to manage.  

 

Tropico's missions were a great way to get me to try different play styles and give me a win condition, but that specifically skirts around the lack of late-game as the mission usually threw a hurtle in the early/mid-game.  I'm curious to know if there's been a game like Banished, etc. that had a late-game that wasn't just a more complicated version of the early game.

 

You'd almost be better off asking whether any long-form strategy game has a good endgame. The answer is no, for me: all city-builders become about micromanaging sprawl, all 4X games lose their interesting moments in the morass of busywork, even Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War games become about expanding because there's nothing else to do.

 

And yet they're still my number-one genre.

[sclpls]

It sounds like the game just suffers from being too easy once "solved". It's really common with this genre of game I think. I've had similar experiences in Tropico 3/4 and Prison Architect.

 

That's a fair point. Any simulation type game is going to lose its allure once you hit the point where your base is sort of running itself. If the game isn't pushing back against the player in enough compelling ways you'll simply lose interest. Like, I'm still waiting for Spacebase to have enough features where it will start to feel like an interesting game because right now when I try it out after getting that early game setup sorted out it doesn't feel like there's much of a reason to do much else.

[sclpls]

You'd almost be better off asking whether any long-form strategy game has a good endgame. The answer is no, for me: all city-builders become about micromanaging sprawl, all 4X games lose their interesting moments in the morass of busywork, even Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War games become about expanding because there's nothing else to do.

 

And yet they're still my number-one genre.

 

Sid Meier's Railroads! I think it's end game is way more interesting than the early game.

 

But yeah, there are a ton of strategy games with bad end games. On the other hand, I'd argue that most games, strategy or otherwise, tend to have bad end games. It's just a really difficult design problem.

[Tundra]

On the other hand, I'd argue that most games, strategy or otherwise, tend to have bad end games. It's just a really difficult design problem.

This is the biggest design problem for my enjoyment of Banished, full markets connected with stone roads, and 100%-educated people continuously starving to death:

[Gormongous]

This is the biggest design problem for my enjoyment of Banished, full markets connected with stone roads, and 100%-educated people continuously starving to death:

 

I'm almost certain it's the way the AI handles the "hungry" state (and the "freezing" state too, but man, does that take a long time to kill a person in the game). They get hungry while on the job, which might be far to the east, then check their home for food, which might be far to the west, then they go to the marketplace, which might be far back east, and then go back home to eat and die somewhere along the way. After your town reaches a certain size, people are just going to die out of sheer travel time between home, work, and shopping.

 

I imagine, if you've got enough give in your system that everyone who lives unsustainably far away from work can die off and the whole town doesn't collapse, it works itself out eventually, but it's still deeply frustrating. Why isn't there an optimization algorithm running in the background to make sure everyone lives a certain minimum distance from their workplace and a storehouse if at all possible?

[Tundra]

and then go back home to eat and die somewhere along the way.

This made me laugh pretty hard!

 

 

people are just going to die out of sheer travel time

 

I thought i solved this by building houses between work and markets, i have no controll over where my Banished live. If i could keep the builders to the outlying buildings permanently would be a godsend, theyre so slow now because they adamantly stay in the old town which is bloody miles from nowhere they work.

 

 

people are just going to die out of sheer travel time between home, work, and shopping.

 

Then they seriously need lunchboxes.

[Tundra]

Oh wow, i was playing Banished with the (combat orientated tracks excluded) Skyrim OST.

It's like they were made for each other...

[Tundra]

Found my problem:

[Security_Tubbs]

The stones are magic. Praise the stones.

[Bjorn]

A simulator with some kind of system where prophets and cults could develop and begin to create weird behaviors in your populace sounds amazing.  As the world manager, if you try to encourage them because you see good benefits, they could run rampant.  If you try to crush them, they could go underground and actually become harder to deal with in the long term. 

 

Imagine if the end game of Banished was that a Weird Rock cult developed, took control of the town and drove out a bunch of non-rock worshipers, resulting in you having to shepherd the new refugees to start another town somewhere. 

[Gormongous]

A simulator with some kind of system where prophets and cults could develop and begin to create weird behaviors in your populace sounds amazing.  As the world manager, if you try to encourage them because you see good benefits, they could run rampant.  If you try to crush them, they could go underground and actually become harder to deal with in the long term. 

 

Imagine if the end game of Banished was that a Weird Rock cult developed, took control of the town and drove out a bunch of non-rock worshipers, resulting in you having to shepherd the new refugees to start another town somewhere. 

 

I think most builder games (whether town or civilization) would be improved by an endgame of an organic, self-generated threat to which the player can respond in a number of ways. I mean, most builder games do have one, but it's usually accidental, like the ever-growing squalor of cities in Rome: Total War leading eventually to an empire in perpetual revolt.

[sclpls]

Oh man, that reminds me of another strategy game with a terrific end game: Imperialism 2. The game naturally evolves such that WWI essentially breaks out at the end of the game. It's brilliant how that happens casually via the mechanics of the game rather than by some sort of scripted trigger.