Banished

[Hashoosh]

In combination with that move, turning down the Herbalists from 2 to 1 seems to leave them enough mature trees to get a solid yield out of the circle. Even at that, I don't need an Herbalist in every forestry circle (although always need one in the first circle), so I tend to put them wherever the circle is most complete for them -- least impinged upon by terrain or buildings. (Sometimes you just gotta take a bite out of a forestry circle!)

The "dedicated Herbalist" idea looks interesting on paper, but you'd need 3 population and a "wasted" forestry circle to set that up. Would those two herbalists put out more herbs than three in the style I use, mentioned above? That would be an interesting thing to investigate. If I decide to try a dedicated Herbalist circle, I'll report what I find. But somehow I suspect that my method will do comparable enough to make the "wasted" circle unattractive.

You don't have to waste an entire forestry circle to set up a dedicated herbalist. I tend to just cram them in somewhere that's suboptimal for my foresters, like in a narrow pass or by a riverside mountain. Plus, you only need 1 herbalist for this, and they'll produce 80-90 herbs a season (that's what I had on one of my more inefficient herb circles). I think that saying the forestry circle is 'wasted' is not taking into consideration that anywhere you have herbalists, you're wasting their own potential output, so why not take advantage of some sub-optimal land for a good that's not usually used in large quantities anyways?

One could argue that my under-staffed approach leaves one in four of my circles "wasted" anyway, but land tends to be in greater supply than people -- and I think the roller coaster of overharvest-then-dry-spell is to be avoided. Running out of log supply can hold up your tool supply as well as firewood, and a shortage of either could send your town over the falls in a barrel.

I usually don't experience log shortages as a function of overharvesting and thus reduced output, but because of over-consumption on the part of my woodcutters. I keep my foresters/gatherers/hunters on 4 each and I haven't seen output drop below a steady level. I think I'll have to pay closer attention to my foresters if they're declining in output periodically, but from what I've seen, 4 is a good level for cutting/planting in a fully optimized location.

I do agree that firewood is a prime trading material. It's top of my list in most early games. Wool coats are wonderful, too, though -- and trading away any food type you have way too much of, for a variety of food types you have little or none of, seems to be a clear winner.

It's not just for the early game. With educated workers you split 4 firewood off of each log (making the potential value of each log at 16 in the trader!). Since trees are infinite, and firewood is fairly trivial to produce in a well established town, it's usually better to trade it over surplus food. Especially since so many merchants don't accept food. I don't understand why they wouldn't, it seems to be that only the food merchants ever want foodstuffs. Isn't the whole point of trade to exchange your surplus for someone else's

But avoiding stone quarries? The surface stone does not replenish. If your town plans exceed the availability of surface stone, there's no choice but to do a quarry. Some stone is available from the trader, but it's never near enough for my needs. Each quarry, if excavated to depletion, seems to support stone houses, stone highways, and all other stone needs, for about 120 to 160 population, in my rough guesstimate. That really isn't very much land consumed, in my view, considering how widely you can sprawl 150-ish townies.

Yeah, it's the opportunity cost of using a quarry. I think their max production with educated workers is around 2k stone, or a trade value of 14,000. That's 'only' 3,500 firewood, which is very easy to get stocked up in your trader. If your trader isn't bringing enough stone I've found that buying up his stock will cause to come for more. That could either be that the trading system is intelligent in recognizing demand for their supply, or that it's a function of population. Still working that one out! 30 workers sunk into a quarry for maximum output, so 15 houses for them (that's 240 non-road tiles), plus the 336 non-road tiles of the quarry is simply, for me, an unacceptable amount of land usage for a building that has a limited lifespan but a permanent usage of land (the only truly limited resource).

Perhaps also my tendency to cluster my mines and quarries as much as possible, and have one or two subsections of the town being dedicated blue collar extraction zones, makes the land loss less painful. I'm not taking a bite out of every area, but rather sectioning off one or two neighborhoods for consumption.

That does work, but if you're planning on running the city for a while, all that land will simply have become non-usable. Plus those houses will have long travel times to somewhere else, once the resource extraction stops being productive. My solution is usually to build more traders as a long term solution, just because I find that the mines and quarries are simply too inefficient compared to the import/export business. But hey, to each their own. I'm certainly not going to try to dissuade you from doing whatever you want with your banishees

I've seen pictures of people who decided to go North Korean style on their resource extraction, finding areas that were sectioned off by rivers and mountains, and then building one bridge to a some boarding houses, mines and quarries. When nomads or sick people started coming, they'd destroy the bridge and send the people into the mines Obviously, that's not very ethical, but hey, at least you aren't going into the food-death efficiency loss spiral that comes with the nomads.

[Hashoosh]

Has anyone tried 2 workers orchards next to houses? I've seen it get 96%+ harvests under ideal conditions (no one is running around for food) and finish just when winter hits. The margin seems paper thing but it seems to work. Similarly, hunting huts seem to be able to get 1000 food with only 2 employees. I don't think I've ever seen more than 1000 for hunting huts with 3 employees. 500 food /worker is quite good.

How big are the orchards? 4x4?

[antisocialmunky]

Full sized 15x15.

[pindicator]

Was surprised to see an article about Banished on NPR. link

[Hashoosh]

Was surprised to see an article about Banished on NPR. link

@!%$ing Galen...

[Sirian]

I'm still playing this game. There's a possibility I'll do a report still, as well; mainly, I need to update my access to warpcore as my friend seems to have rotated in a new security key, and I haven't been able to catch up with him yet.

I also haven't done a whole lot of anything in the past week. My daughter was born on March 10, sixteen days before due date, and it was a somewhat complicated birth. She and my wife are fine now, though, and my ratio of childcare to gaming has been about 40 to 1 this week. (And yes, I *did* have Banished flashes of "so and so died in childbirth" playing in my head for about an hour. That was the scariest hour of my life to date.) ... My daughter squeaks. She squeaks! It's so cute. I'm a goner. All the foes I've vanquished, challenges overcome, feats achieved... but I've been vanquished by a 6 pound infant. Game over.

- Sirian

[Sullla]

Congratulations, Sirian. I have no doubt that you and your wife will be wonderful parents. It's hard to believe that it's been 12 years now since I first stumbled across your writings in the early Civ3 days. Time flies.

[sunrise089]

Congrats Sirian!

[Sirian]

Congratulations, Sirian. I have no doubt that you and your wife will be wonderful parents. It's hard to believe that it's been 12 years now since I first stumbled across your writings in the early Civ3 days. Time flies.

Indeed.

Wait. You mean these aren't the early Civ3 days any more? ... Dang.

Well, no matter. I can still use this icon, even if there's no reason to:




- Sirian

[Sirian]

At about a hundred hours played, I think I topped off my experience. That's not a bad run, though. Twenty cents per hour for good fun.

The only real complaint I have about the game is that the large maps are *too* large for the game mechanics. Trying to fill in the last quarter of the map becomes problematic. Laborers (and farmers and others who sometimes pitch in) cannot pick up supplies, ferry them to the far end of the map, and safely return home in time to eat. You start getting starvation notices even if there's a hundred k food in stores. Then for the last 10% of the map, you're basically dooming whoever gets sent on these construction missions -- so you have to take it in small bites or you can cascade your town into collapse. And you completely stop building new cemetaries, because they're gonna be instantly filled with the bodies of the workers sent to construct them. (It really does get that bad for the final bits of a large map!) Once you stop building new cemetaries (because there's no more point -- no possible way to bury all the starving laborers who will perish in building your next new neighborhood), you lose the happiness effect across the board for having cemetaries, and your town's efficiency is going to drop a peg. This is survivable, but I wouldn't want to bother with filling a large map more than once, just to do it for the challenge of keeping your town balanced through such pressure.

You can, of course, resolve this by sticking to medium or small maps -- if it bothers you. Or play large maps and retire the game when the map is 2/3 full.


So my most recent game is a Large, Mountains, Harsh, Disasters On, Hard -- Seed # 689602605. I've got the map about 98% developed in Year 90, with a stable population hovering between 950 and 1050 (varies with laborer starvation batches), 100% educated (never did accept Nomads), and enough food and fuel to stay afloat. My farms were run at Normal (4 per) until the laborer starvations were happening, and farmers were wasting too much time on labor tasks to grow a full crop. That was around Year 70, I switched the farms over to 6 per. I've got 52 Herdsmen, 228 Farmers, 50-ish Fishermen (most with only one working a fishing station, unless the dock has extra water coverage) -- I have every spot along the lakes and river fished -- about 14 wood choppers and schools, 6 churches. Nowhere near the ballpark of enough herbs, though. I can buy batches of 700 herbs and they just vanish into the population almost instantly.

I had favorable disaster luck early (no fires or tornadoes early, no lethal outbreaks. Just lots of infestations). Kiyalynn played the same map and had an early tornado wipe out all but 4 of her people, so she reloaded from that one. In Year 60, I had about 600 people and she had about 200 and was wondering how I got my population up so quickly, but I am not sure what the difference was. She had some early fires even on the restart though, and one was bad, wiping out over a dozen buildings. She had trouble getting her stone supply going early as well. That *might* have been the main difference.

My recent disaster luck has not been as good. Still no tornado (if one came, it would hit stuff anywhere it went!) but I had three painful outbreaks, including Scarlet Fever that killed several dozen, topped out at 141 infected (I have 5 hospitals, so that actually overtopped my capacity for a bit), and probably infected 300 to 350 total. In the wake of that, my town health has dropped below 4 hearts for the first time, and I don't know if or when it's going to climb back to 4.

I'm not sure how much longer I need to fill in those last 1.8 valleys on the map. It's one year's worth of construction, but between long travel times and worker deaths, it could take ten years or more to finish out -- and I may have to take recovery breaks to avoid slipping into a town collapse.

Anyone who wants to test their Mountain map skills against my benchmark is welcome to give it a whirl. Just launch a game with the same seed and settings. What level of population do you have after 60 years? And how many total years does it take you to develop every last useful plot of land on the entire map, and what's your population at when you get there? Can you make it all the way without any starvation or freezing episodes where your town population collapses and most people die off? What disasters befall you and how much do they set you back?


- Sirian