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Banished - Medieval SimCity

MoLAoS

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Its pretty interesting. Some people are complaining that its too easy on hard, and some people are having starvation constantly. I dunno, its trivially easy to me since day 1.
 

J_C

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Its pretty interesting. Some people are complaining that its too easy on hard, and some people are having starvation constantly. I dunno, its trivially easy to me since day 1.
Well some people are better at games than other. I'm not an Einstein when it comes to games like this (not a pro in SimCity either), so these games are not easy for me, but I enjoy them a lot.
 

Calapine

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Its pretty interesting. Some people are complaining that its too easy on hard, and some people are having starvation constantly. I dunno, its trivially easy to me since day 1.
Well some people are better at games than other. I'm not an Einstein when it comes to games like this (not a pro in SimCity either), so these games are not easy for me, but I enjoy them a lot.

I am not the brightest candle on the cake either, but playing my first town I restricted myself to 2x speed most of the time and it's pretty easy to follow developments, actually see your little toons grab food, spot queuing or resource issues and then react accordingly. There are some vexing moments, like "I told you to to make a house. There 4 builders assigned and enough resources. Why isn't anyone doing anything?" but if you take the time to watch your citizens it's pretty easy to figure out what the issue (Laborers being busy with other tasks and not clearing the construction site, in this case) is.


The game is fun, BUT I see a serious long term playability issue. After a couple of hours and 200+ citizens there simply isn't much to do anymore. Every possible type of building constructed, seeds bought at the merchants. All houses upgraded to stone. Now it's just expand even more with the same type houses until the map is full. Trading doesn't help, because it's only bartering and everyone (except seeds) can be produced locally.
 

MoLAoS

Guest
Its pretty interesting. Some people are complaining that its too easy on hard, and some people are having starvation constantly. I dunno, its trivially easy to me since day 1.
Well some people are better at games than other. I'm not an Einstein when it comes to games like this (not a pro in SimCity either), so these games are not easy for me, but I enjoy them a lot.

I am not the brightest candle on the cake either, but playing my first town I restricted myself to 2x speed most of the time and it's pretty easy to follow developments, actually see your little toons grab food, spot queuing or resource issues and then react accordingly. There are some vexing moments, like "I told you to to make a house. There 4 builders assigned and enough resources. Why isn't anyone doing anything?" but if you take the time to watch your citizens it's pretty easy to figure out what the issue (Laborers being busy with other tasks and not clearing the construction site, in this case) is.


The game is fun, BUT I see a serious long term playability issue. After a couple of hours and 200+ citizens there simply isn't much to do anymore. Every possible type of building constructed, seeds bought at the merchants. All houses upgraded to stone. Now it's just expand even more with the same type houses until the map is full. Trading doesn't help, because it's only bartering and everyone (except seeds) can be produced locally.

Well, that doesn't have much to do with the post you quoted, but I agree. I think he just got worn out on the amazing engine and didn't have the oomph to add a lot of extra features.
 

Calapine

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Well, that doesn't have much to do with the post you quoted, but I agree.
Ah...I am not good at putting things succinctly. :oops: I was trying to suggest that some people complaining it's too easy and while others have starvations might be rooted in different play-styles (or rather play-speed). The game is not too complex, but does have some peculiarities (like task queuing by workers) which mean that just plonking down some food buildings & a house and then hitting 10x speed with hands-off until next year won't lead to the desired outcome.


Well, that doesn't have much to do with the post you quoted, but I agree.

Yes, that sounds like a good explanation. I am hoping for more content...
 

Torrasque01

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AFAIK he'd like to be done with the game after implementing mod tools. Maybe hire someone else to make content.
 

MoLAoS

Guest
AFAIK he'd like to be done with the game after implementing mod tools. Maybe hire someone else to make content.
His FAQ says he may work on it some more, but he has other goals, too. And since he is now pretty comfortable cash wise, he can do whatever he thinks will be fun.
 

oscar

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How the heck do you split herds? Whenever I exceed the paddock size they're simply killed with no option to split. Do I have to stop working it?
 

DarkUnderlord

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Hunting lodge - One worker (Produces 6-800 food, almost enough to completely maintain your population)
Four houses
Gatherer - Two workers, drop it down to one once you have a surplus
lolwut

If one worker at a hunting lodge produces 6-800 food a year, and you've only got two gatherers and you're getting surplus, then either something somewhere is horribly broken or I'm doing something hideously wrong.

I always start with Fair Climate, Large map, Valley Terrain, Hard. And I can have a gatherer with 4 workers, fishery with 4 and a Hunting lodge with 3 and I've still got people starving. In a village of 12 people. This is early on, right at the start of the game, year 1 or 2. I was originally mucking around on Harsh so I'm wondering if that's it. Presumably fishermen won't fish during winter when the river / lake is frozen (although I think I saw them doing it anyway) and I'm not sure of its effect on hunting / gathering.

(Laborers being busy with other tasks and not clearing the construction site, in this case)
All my labourers are employed in the food industry and they're still dying from starvation.
 

Ashery

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Messages
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Hunting lodge - One worker (Produces 6-800 food, almost enough to completely maintain your population)
Four houses
Gatherer - Two workers, drop it down to one once you have a surplus
lolwut

If one worker at a hunting lodge produces 6-800 food a year, and you've only got two gatherers and you're getting surplus, then either something somewhere is horribly broken or I'm doing something hideously wrong.

I always start with Fair Climate, Large map, Valley Terrain, Hard. And I can have a gatherer with 4 workers, fishery with 4 and a Hunting lodge with 3 and I've still got people starving. In a village of 12 people. This is early on, right at the start of the game, year 1 or 2. I was originally mucking around on Harsh so I'm wondering if that's it. Presumably fishermen won't fish during winter when the river / lake is frozen (although I think I saw them doing it anyway) and I'm not sure of its effect on hunting / gathering.

What's your rate of production per worker? People eat around 100/year, so a single lodge, while not enough to completely feed everyone, will prevent you from bleeding your starting stocks dry while you build your houses and gatherer.

Edit:

How the heck do you split herds? Whenever I exceed the paddock size they're simply killed with no option to split. Do I have to stop working it?

The option should come up when you've got another pasture assigned to that animal but empty. It might be disabled if the pasture you're splitting to is significantly larger, but at that point you'd be better served by moving the entire herd to the new pasture.
 

AzraelDR

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Nov 17, 2013
Messages
14
I strongly agree with the concerns about this game's longevity. I've been playing it the last week on and off, and the only real goals are the achievements. Even those are pretty easy; the Mountain Men Achievement, which requires a maintenance of 50 population for 20 years on a harsh and mountainous map was easy enough for me, and I started that game on hard. Just build a fishing area and a harvester area, then tweak the occupation ratios occasionally. It would have been nice if such achievements had some reward such as a unique building meant to alleviate some of the problems in such a scenario or something.

As it stands, the rest of the achievements are a matter of waiting to meet the requirements, rather than creating an efficient town to fulfill those requirements. The whole fulfillment of building a nice town isn't very satisfying, given the small number of resource flows you are required to manage. The only real challenge lies on the lack of transparency in the production rates, making the player rely more on "feeling" if the town has a stable configuration. I guess playing through the Impressions series (Pharaoh and Emperor in my case) right before this game's release really highlighted the weaknesses of Banished.

The release of modding tools is something to look forward to, though. Hopefully the introduction of something like a rotting mechanic for food is possible, which I feel would make the maintenance of a town more challenging.
 

oscar

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Yes, food spoilage is an absolute must. Surprised it didn't make it into the game to begin with.

Would require some tinkering and balancing of long-lasting foods (grains, nuts, roots) vs quickly deteriorating ones (fruits, meat*, eggs).

*though a smokehouse could make it long-lasting
 

J_C

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I managed to starve my first village to death. But I don't know why? I was pretty early in the game, only hat about 14 adults, 5 houses. I had 1 fisherman's hut with 4 fisherman. And they made hundreds of fish, but all were taken into only 2 houses, while the other 3 starved. What is the logic behind the food destribution?

Also, I don't know why didn't my builders builded my stuff when I set higher priorities for a bridge for example. Some of them went to the site, hit it 2 times, and then went away, idling.
 

Ashery

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May 24, 2008
Messages
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I managed to starve my first village to death. But I don't know why? I was pretty early in the game, only hat about 14 adults, 5 houses. I had 1 fisherman's hut with 4 fisherman. And they made hundreds of fish, but all were taken into only 2 houses, while the other 3 starved. What is the logic behind the food destribution?

As I mentioned earlier, each villager goes through a hundred food per year, so storing a couple hundred in each house isn't exactly odd behavior. The same type of behavior will happen in pretty much any city builder and the solution is to saturate the market instead of trying to keep your town in permanent famine-like conditions.

Also, I don't know why didn't my builders builded my stuff when I set higher priorities for a bridge for example. Some of them went to the site, hit it 2 times, and then went away, idling.

Sometimes people just idle for a bit. For bridges, though, keep an eye out for people walking around the body of water every time they build a tick.
 

AzraelDR

Novice
Joined
Nov 17, 2013
Messages
14
I managed to starve my first village to death. But I don't know why? I was pretty early in the game, only hat about 14 adults, 5 houses. I had 1 fisherman's hut with 4 fisherman. And they made hundreds of fish, but all were taken into only 2 houses, while the other 3 starved. What is the logic behind the food destribution?

Also, I don't know why didn't my builders builded my stuff when I set higher priorities for a bridge for example. Some of them went to the site, hit it 2 times, and then went away, idling.

They might also be hungry, and so will go eat first before resuming building. This can be a problem if the bridge is far away from your cart/storage barn.

Ashery is right in making sure to saturate the market to prevent starvation. I found that the key to early villages is having at least two full food production buildings and just enough housing (about four to five) so that the villagers don't freeze to death. You would have around 10-12 people at the beginning as some of the children will become adults in the first year. That's 4 fishermen and 4 gatherers. The two left can fill the roles of woodcutter, builder and laborer. Build a forester to keep wood supplies streaming in next, and to maintain a forest around the gatherer hut to maximize the amount of onions, roots and berries. At this point, you can already stockpile food back to around 1000, then you can start expanding.
 

Avellion

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Also, I don't know why didn't my builders builded my stuff when I set higher priorities for a bridge for example. Some of them went to the site, hit it 2 times, and then went away, idling.

What was their happiness? Unhappy citizens are really unmotivated and unproductive, so they will idle a lot.

Here is a quick guide that I drew in 2 minutes on how to never worry about starvation again.
l5kp.png
Also, fishermen suck.
 

sexbad?

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sexbad
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l5kp.png
Also, fishermen suck.
I've been playing some of this since I got it as a gift yesterday. What exactly is the penalty of having other structures within that nature circle or whatever? In my current town I've got a pretty good thing going but I have a few houses set up just at the edge of the hunter's area of operation and haven't had any real problems with their yield. Or do you just mean to suggest that players make sure their lodges and stuff are fairly remote?
 

Avellion

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l5kp.png
Also, fishermen suck.
I've been playing some of this since I got it as a gift yesterday. What exactly is the penalty of having other structures within that nature circle or whatever? In my current town I've got a pretty good thing going but I have a few houses set up just at the edge of the hunter's area of operation and haven't had any real problems with their yield. Or do you just mean to suggest that players make sure their lodges and stuff are fairly remote?
The more trees there are, the better the yields from the hunter and gatherers, each building also takes up space which gatherables could grow on.
 

Ashery

Prophet
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Messages
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For those that are starving, I stole this explanation from elsewhere:

If your food reserves run out, people will constantly carry 8 fish etc back home as they're produced. Even if you should be producing a surplus, this can kill a town, as your workers spend far more time carrying food home than they would if they were simply able to carry 100 food at once, thus wrecking their productivity. We like to call this "the food dance [of death]", and avoiding it is vital. On a hard start especially, it's incredibly important to get food production up and and running a surplus early, to prevent your barns spending much time at no food stored.

I've been playing some of this since I got it as a gift yesterday. What exactly is the penalty of having other structures within that nature circle or whatever? In my current town I've got a pretty good thing going but I have a few houses set up just at the edge of the hunter's area of operation and haven't had any real problems with their yield. Or do you just mean to suggest that players make sure their lodges and stuff are fairly remote?

Just slightly reduced output. Taking a couple percentage points of efficiency from each building is a lot better than dedicating each to their own forest as gatherers and foresters both require massive amounts of space. Hunters are a bit more flexible, however, and I often place them in pretty shitty locations that aren't good for anything else; too small for a farm and outside market radii.

Oh, and fisheries most definitely don't suck. They have the best output per unit of area and make for a fantastic famine buffer. Building wharfs and leaving them with only a single laborer will leave you with around 1k food per year of untapped output per wharf, with the single fisherman able to provide you with the information you need to determine which wharf is the most productive overall and thus the first to max out if you need the extra food.
 

sexbad?

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l5kp.png
Also, fishermen suck.
I've been playing some of this since I got it as a gift yesterday. What exactly is the penalty of having other structures within that nature circle or whatever? In my current town I've got a pretty good thing going but I have a few houses set up just at the edge of the hunter's area of operation and haven't had any real problems with their yield. Or do you just mean to suggest that players make sure their lodges and stuff are fairly remote?
The more trees there are, the better the yields from the hunter and gatherers, each building also takes up space which gatherables could grow on.
All right, thanks for the clarification. I was under the impression that you might have been referring to a bug that would drastically decrease yield of stuff if houses were in a hunter/gatherer radius.
 

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
Staff Member
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Messages
28,344
Yeah, still gotta play this some more to understand the mechanics. I got Hunters' Lodges where workers wander around not doing anything. Like they're looking for animals to kill except there's nothing in the area. The animals wander easily out of the zone of the Lodge and the Hunters don't seem to want to follow them too far. I ended up with animals actually in the middle of the clear area that is my town.

Fishing seems to have some secret to it. Some areas do well, others are crap.

And "Fair" climate definitely seems to make a difference on output of food over "Harsh". Harsh seems to be a bitch. Wondering how many of those who are having a cake-walk are playing Hard/Harsh? The only thing Easy/Medium/Hard seems to do is just change your starting resources.
 

Ashery

Prophet
Joined
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Messages
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Yeah, still gotta play this some more to understand the mechanics. I got Hunters' Lodges where workers wander around not doing anything. Like they're looking for animals to kill except there's nothing in the area. The animals wander easily out of the zone of the Lodge and the Hunters don't seem to want to follow them too far. I ended up with animals actually in the middle of the clear area that is my town.

Fishing seems to have some secret to it. Some areas do well, others are crap.

And "Fair" climate definitely seems to make a difference on output of food over "Harsh". Harsh seems to be a bitch. Wondering how many of those who are having a cake-walk are playing Hard/Harsh? The only thing Easy/Medium/Hard seems to do is just change your starting resources.

That's standard behavior for hunters. Regardless of their behavior, though, a cabin with a single hunter will reliably produce 6-800 venison, which is all that matters in the end.

A wharf's maximum output is determined by the amount of water in its radius, but the current arguments are that having nearby housing along with open storage is a huge component of approaching that maximum.

And I'm playing on hard/harsh. Started at that from the very beginning because I'd rather fuck up, fail due to inadequate experience, and be forced to assess how I screwed up than have a game that turns out to be too easy which results in me shelving the game out of boredom.
 

Abelian

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Nov 17, 2013
Messages
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Yeah, still gotta play this some more to understand the mechanics. I got Hunters' Lodges where workers wander around not doing anything. Like they're looking for animals to kill except there's nothing in the area. The animals wander easily out of the zone of the Lodge and the Hunters don't seem to want to follow them too far. I ended up with animals actually in the middle of the clear area that is my town.

Fishing seems to have some secret to it. Some areas do well, others are crap.

And "Fair" climate definitely seems to make a difference on output of food over "Harsh". Harsh seems to be a bitch. Wondering how many of those who are having a cake-walk are playing Hard/Harsh? The only thing Easy/Medium/Hard seems to do is just change your starting resources.
carp_fishing_zps2471ed1e.jpg
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
That's standard behavior for hunters. Regardless of their behavior, though, a cabin with a single hunter will reliably produce 6-800 venison, which is all that matters in the end.
Do you have to put the cabin where the animals are? Because they tend to move from place to place.
 

oscar

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I thought the deer were just cosmetic and all you need is forest. That would explain a bit though.

Even the random events mention boar yet are roaming deer the only source of a hunting cabin's output?
 

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