Banished

[Sian]

Having a really good game on #381413320 (medium sized Valleys) ... theres a couple of very good places to fish from, and a long staight mountain which can take 4 mines side by side with no fuss ... only issue is that i appear unable to get a livestock merchant to come by

[Sirian]

These Mountain maps are something else, I have to tell you.

I asked Kiyalynn what was up with my Age 23 "Student". I'm thinking that's a long time to be in school! She thinks they have to spend X amount of "work time" at the school, so those who have long walks to reach school take a lot longer to graduate. Made sense to me, but it's just yet one more problem to manage on a Mountain map, with the town soooo widely scattered.

I have the seeds of a report forming for this my first Mountain game, but nothing ready yet.


- Sirian

[antisocialmunky]

Yes, I was going to mention that. The mountain maps totally change the way you have to play since it actually takes a ton of planning laying everything out. I applied the suggestion of Mrs. Sirian about reducing the full employment levels on most of my buildings. This increased my free labor % to about 10-20% instead of 5%. It really helps in expanding. However, my experiments in using markets on a mountain map were quite catastrophic.

Because you end up with little strung out neighborhoods that follow the farm fields around, you end up with lots of barns filled with food. If you have a market, it will constantly strip food from these barns because they have so much storage space. This can cause catastrophic starvation in the non-city centers especially when you set up a new one. I think my small-moderate sized settlement designs with low agriculture or hunter/gathering economies are going to keep revolving around a central barn + stock pile combo. I'll reserve markets for sprawling metropoli surrounded by fields and only staff those markets after the first harvest.

Also be careful when demolishing lots of houses/barns when you don't have much food surplus. I had 2K of food laying on the ground because I rezoned some houses to make room for the market. Suddenly my entire food surplus went away due to the families moving to new houses and getting all new inventory. Imagine my surprise when my laborers finally had some free time (from building new houses due to the original rezoning) after I had recovered from this accidental Holodomor and I was suddenly up 2k food...

TLDR:
- Lowering the full employment of AOE buildings helps free up huge amounts of labor.
- Markets are inefficient if you have lots of out lying farming communities but increases efficiency of workers if you have a planned settlement with lots of out lying barns. Someone should do some research on break even on markets + the labor they use.
- Don't Rezone large areas all at once unless you want to relocate people like Stalin did.

[Sirian]

My populations always seem to be strung out. I'm not seeing the kind of "empty barn" starvation problem you describe.

On my current mountain map, I am refusing all nomads. All. And my problem is way too much food around. I have all three livestock and multiple pens of each. Actually have as many Herders as Farmers, which is a new one for me. Fully half the farm/orchard locations I've cleared remain unused, and the ones I do have are not running full workers. I've been able to maintain one quarry running nonstop all game long, with between 5 and 10 workers in it. I've only got two markets, but many of my barns are overstuffed.

Curiously enough, when my Markets actually reached near-full capacity on storage, the vendors seem to have started carrying a distribution of goods out to the barns. Many of my barns have stuff in them that is not produced locally. However, I do have one barn that isn't getting that treatment. Maybe it's too far from the nearest market. Not sure.

My population has passed 150. The town is seriously spread out. My "youngin" count seems to running between 45% and 65% of the adult count. I consider anywhere in that range to be healthy. 50% means the population is on the rise, although it always has a small dip again when a batch of elders pass away. But 65% is a baby boom. Don't see that kind of number unless there was a housing shortage that gets fixed.

I'm not really running into any problems in this game. Food and firewood are so abundant, I'm trading them away. Stone income has been the limiter all game long. Can't build faster than the stone rolls in, and perhaps I've overbuilt the food production facilities? Not sure. But I KNOW there's no need to build more mines and quarries when even a large city struggles to fully staff more than one of each without getting into trouble.

Perhaps there is an irony to the mountain map: the enforced slower expansion because of all the distances increased seems to avoid that "always on the edge of disaster" feeling I had with the valley maps. At least for the middle game.


- Sirian

[Ichabod]

Played my first game, starting on hard difficulty. Got to 40 people before my computer went kaput (it's a problem with the computer, not the game). For some reason, my population wasn't growing for a long time (almost no kids were born), even though I had lots of food/firewood/housing and the health/happy levels were 4,5. I'll have to try to figure out what was that about...

Reading the RPS review and the comments on the site, I wonder where those people found that much difficulty in the game... At least in the early stages, it's not so hard to at least keep your town balanced, barring disasters. Maybe people don't do the tutorials? I'm especially disappointed by the reviewer, the guy claims the game is incredibly hard (to the point of being stressful), when it most definetely isn't. And people are probably believing him. How can a professional game reviewer and likely one that does strategy game reviews not get the knack of the game while playing it? I spent less than an hour on the tutorials and they taught me everything I needed to get started, while playing my first map taught me the rest.

Not sure why I still bother to read reviews.

[v8mark]

Played my first game, starting on hard difficulty. Got to 40 people before my computer went kaput (it's a problem with the computer, not the game). For some reason, my population wasn't growing for a long time (almost no kids were born), even though I had lots of food/firewood/housing and the health/happy levels were 4,5. I'll have to try to figure out what was that about...

Reading the RPS review and the comments on the site, I wonder where those people found that much difficulty in the game... At least in the early stages, it's not so hard to at least keep your town balanced, barring disasters. Maybe people don't do the tutorials? I'm especially disappointed by the reviewer, the guy claims the game is incredibly hard (to the point of being stressful), when it most definetely isn't. And people are probably believing him. How can a professional game reviewer and likely one that does strategy game reviews not get the knack of the game while playing it? I spent less than an hour on the tutorials and they taught me everything I needed to get started, while playing my first map taught me the rest.

Not sure why I still bother to read reviews.

I think it's more of a cultural issue than anything else. People are used to having their hands held throughout games, even strategy games - just think of the lengths Civ5 goes to with its various tutorials and annoying popups to avoid overwhelming the casual crowd with numbers and statistics. So when something like this comes along, which basically gives you a couple of short tutorials then puts you into the middle of a game with very little internal help other than numbers, it's tough for some people to adjust. Even the interface is very much a 'build your own' type of endeavour. So I can understand that, and lots of people will agree with him. Plus the piece is entitled 'Wot I Think', suggesting a very subjective point of view.

Incidentally, if anyone who's interested in this game hasn't seen them yet, quill18's videos on Banished are among the best playthroughs I've seen. They can be found here.

[sunrise089]

I'm now spoiled and want to pay only pennies for any non-AAA game, so hopefully you folks will let me know when this goes on sale.

@Terror - I don't have any objection to a game making you feel out the mechanics, but I do wonder if part of the 'challenge' comes from just figuring out how stuff works whether that then makes the game too easy once you understand the process better.

[Gustaran]

@Terror - I don't have any objection to a game making you feel out the mechanics, but I do wonder if part of the 'challenge' comes from just figuring out how stuff works whether that then makes the game too easy once you understand the process better.

That is a concern I have as well, some reviews mention that once you understand the game and get your village working there is not much left to do. However, if I understand correctly, mod support is planned for the future and obviously this could have a very positive impact on the community in the long term.

[antisocialmunky]

Played my first game, starting on hard difficulty. Got to 40 people before my computer went kaput (it's a problem with the computer, not the game). For some reason, my population wasn't growing for a long time (almost no kids were born), even though I had lots of food/firewood/housing and the health/happy levels were 4,5. I'll have to try to figure out what was that about...

Reading the RPS review and the comments on the site, I wonder where those people found that much difficulty in the game... At least in the early stages, it's not so hard to at least keep your town balanced, barring disasters. Maybe people don't do the tutorials? I'm especially disappointed by the reviewer, the guy claims the game is incredibly hard (to the point of being stressful), when it most definetely isn't. And people are probably believing him. How can a professional game reviewer and likely one that does strategy game reviews not get the knack of the game while playing it? I spent less than an hour on the tutorials and they taught me everything I needed to get started, while playing my first map taught me the rest.

Not sure why I still bother to read reviews.

In my current mountain playthrough, I had very little stone so I couldn't build houses for the sustained growth of population (you want your pop to grow at a steady rate). I'm in the same situation as you, most of the women in my village are too old to have kids (yes it models menopause) so the birth rate is abysmal. Just play it for about 5 years and you should have some youngins getting busy with the baby making.

I think the difficulty issue of the game is that it is really easy for the start to go wrong even on normal if you go in without much information. If you are a reviewer and you have a lot of games on your plate to get through so you have to rush, I could see how the reviewer could have gotten the impression the game is harder than it is.

[Ichabod]

Good points all around. And thanks for the link, v8mark. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do any report on the game, because my PC can't handle it. I had issues with the PC turning off when I was running EU IV demo and now, the same thing happens with this game. I think I'll have to get a new PC to keep playing.