Banished - The Indie City Simulator

[Tundra]

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 would like some plot twists that come out of left-field as these games dont typically have a story throughout.

So if i get to 300 citizens or something a filter - akin to say Bio-Infinite tears - now you see the world you built from scratch as maybe some village in North Korea and the troops come in and take all the food, or a flood just wipes everything and everyone.

I wish for this mainly just to see how IGN would cope accomodating something like that in a review

I don't know about the rest of you thumbs but i link games together a la a Brendon Chung Citizen Able universe.

I've linked this to Papers Please and Half life 2 in a romanticism of myself living in the stereotypical Soviet Union esque world

[Gormongous]

This is probably too late for most people to get interested in the game, but I think the 1.02 beta patch notes has an important ending to the saga of unstoppable city fires.
 
 

* Citizens are now more effective at fighting fires and putting them out.
 
* When fires break out, citizens fighting the fire now run at high speed.
 
* Citizens working in an area where a fire breaks out will now be interrupted to help fight the fire.
 
* Fixed a bug that caused non-laborers to not fight fires.
 
* Citizens fighting fires will only be interrupted by sickness, freezing, or starving.
 
* Citizens will now only search for water in an area around the fire. Far inland areas need wells for fires to be fought.
 
* Increased the number of citizens that can fight a single fire to 50.
 
* Increased the area of effect for citizens fighting a fire.
 
* If enough water is brought to a building on fire, the chance of the fire spreading is lowered.
 
* Fixed a bug that caused buildings on fire not to be high priority.

 
So what these items tell me is that, when the game was released, only citizens with no current job would fight fires and only then if they were right next to the burning building and weren't hungry. No wonder the whole world didn't burn!

[neonrev]

It also (supposedly, I haven't had enough time to really check thoroughly) should reduce the number of laborers wandering to do jobs that they'd get to cold or hungry to do on the way there, and it also supposedly makes the AI smarter about eating food when they're hungry, and I think they can get food at more places as well.

From the devblog:

"The last major issue I’m currently looking at before the patch is the ‘March of Death’ problem on really large maps. General laborers end up walking a really long way to do an odd job and starve to death on the walk back. Computing a perfect solution of who should do what takes too much CPU time, so I’m playing with some other heuristics.

What I’m trying to do is prioritize what citizen gets assigned a job based on how far away it is. However there’s a problem with a simple distance limit. It’s possible that something won’t ever get done if the people are far away. So I’m trying to set the distance limit based on how long the job has been pending. That way only citizens within range of a job will do it when it’s newly created, but once a certain amount of time passes without the job getting done, the range will expand allowing someone across the map to try to get it done instead."

And yeah, I like the massive list of changes that had to be made to get firefighting working for real. And this:
"Citizens will now only search for water in an area around the fire. Far inland areas need wells for fires to be fought."
suggests to me that maybe guys can fight fires using water from lakes or rivers, which is super cool.

I also want to share a couple things I've learned in case they're helpful to anyone.

• The boarding house is both a handy and dangerous thing. Right early on, it's probably your best bet for getting everyone housed before the first winter, but after a couple years you NEED NEED NEED to start building other houses, and might even need to micromange families in those new houses by deconstructing them, letting the current occupants leave, and reclaim before it's demolished. If you get complacent, you get an old, old population, and it'll take forever to repopulate the houses such that you have a decent birthrate again. 2 years of boarding house, then make sure most people have their own home. Keep the boarding house around though, even if no one needs it at the moment.
• When either doing that, or even when you're expanding housing in any fashion, if you start to run into serious food or firewood troubles especially in the fall or winter, a last ditch pullback to everyone living in the boarding house might be your only hope. The boarding house will require less food and wood per family in it, its a shared resource once taken there, and it holds more of both. It's a shitty way to recover, but it's saved me from negligent firewood shortages. Watch out for disease though.
• A gatherer's  hut is more effective than the fisherman's hut, all things being equal, but very early on, before you've cleared the stone and iron out from your location in the trees, and especially before you can have two foresters working (one 'planting and cutting' in a separate place and one 'planting only' next to your gather and/or hunter. You can set the planter to cut only for a season or two if in need of wood, but it'll always come at the expense of the gathering.), fishing can be more effective than it seems, due to usually lower distance to the storeplace and the ability of the workers to get  home or warm faster in the winter. You can also, with a moderate fishing force, turn them into farmers in the spring and fall to plant and harvest on time, with just a token guy tending them in the summer, and add ~30% total food production and increase the number of things people are eating. Fishing is also perfectly sustainable so long as you don't overlap their zones, and I try to make sure I have enough locations that each of them only has 2-3 guys at it, which is probably just paranoia, but still. Also, on small rivers, a properly placed fishing shack can function as a bridge.
• Traders want an arm and fucking leg for anything, but even really early on, I have had good results throwing everything I can spare at livestock, especially sheep. 1 guy can tend 12 sheep, and its the only place to get wool, which makes them more valuable to me than cows or chickens. Even if I have to sell basically all my tools and stone and such, in the long term, nothing beats having a herd to grow from the start.

I hope any of that could be helpful to anyone, the wiki's are sadly undermanned.

[Frenetic Pony]

Good news everyone!

 

Your shits not all retarded anymore!