Banished

[antisocialmunky]

Sounds like overheating RAM, you might just need a dusting can and a screw driver to blow the dust out of your computer.

[WilliamLP]

I had a problem like that go away once when I replaced the video card, but it might have been a dust and heat issue there too of course.

[Sian]

actually, an interesting thing i've noticed ... Banished can't be happening on earth ... seasons are way to long ... i had a child (with a distinctive name) born in autumn 17 ... autumn 19 she was 10 years old and started in school

[sunrise089]

Wherever it's happening, apparently seasons are unrelated to years!?

[antisocialmunky]

They age 1 - 1.5 years per season. Just think of it as Westeros seasons.

[antisocialmunky]

Interesting Bug: After a fire, click rebuild on some ruins, then go and cancel the removal of the ruins. Presto, your house is back.

[Hashoosh]

I read through the thread and I thought I'd point out some things I've learned about optimization/building placement

1) Hunters only need flat, non-developed ground in their radius. Forest work too, but every water, mountain and building tile will reduce yields
2) Gatherers are the same as hunters, except there also need to be trees (of any age). I'm not 100% on this, but I think there needs to be trees. They could be completely the same as hunters as well
3) Herbalists are the same as Gatherers but they need mature trees. This is important

The Hunter/Gatherer/Forester combo will net you the most food in the whole game, if they have a full circle of flat undeveloped land allotted to them. Never build an herbalist in this combo, unless you don't to have wood produced in it. It's better to set aside 1 forester hut/herbalist hut in a suboptimal location (i.e. a thin strip of coast) and turn the forester to 1 worker/no cutting.

If you put your herbalist with your chopping foresters their output will be abysmal.

To really the get the most out of your town, you need to have enough houses (x/2 minimum) to staff your food producing areas completely. Travel times are what kill you in this game. For the combo up above, you want your houses to be just outside of the radius so they don't take up workable tiles. So for the first season, you set up ~6 houses and a barn, 1 forester, 1 hunter and 1 gatherer.

Later, when you can build a market do so. The way it works out is that you want your hunter/gatherer communities to be feeding into the barns next to their homes, while the market encompasses all of these barns (spread in a circle around the market). Fisheries and farms should always be built next to homes for their workers, as well as barns.

Industry (blacksmith/choppers/tailors etc...) should go next to the market, with a house for the allotted workers.

Something else I've noticed is that builders/labourers won't build anything until all of your remove resources commands have been completed, so don't use that tool wantonly, or else you'll be watching your people run around cutting down trees in the middle of a housing crisis

Finally, there's the trader. Basically all you need to know about the trader is that 1 firewood = value 4. And you get a lot of firewood out of every log.

This super long post was written with optimization in mind, not necessarily how I or everyone plays. The point of the game is to survive, and there are more fun ways to do that than min-maxing. I personally like to throw orchards (the by-far worst food source in the game for labour/produce) around to make town reeeeal purdy-like.

Oh yeah, mines and quarries are hugely inefficient for the entire game. It's always more efficient to just strip surface resources. Once you run out of those you should have a developed enough town to just trade for iron/stone. Seriously, quarries are one of the worst buildings ATM, because they consume so much fertile land that could be used for farming, gathering or hunting.

Happy Banishing people, and may your sacrifices to the fire god be worthy. Here's something from one of my games that had me in tears. Way to go slugger

[Sirian]

As much as I thought I knew about this game, I learned how little I knew when I went for the Uneducated achievement on Steam.

Kiyalynn has more time to play than I do, and she is the one that was anticipating this game with baited breath for the last three or four months. She's already popped this achievement (and went on in the same game to also get Educated -- now that's an irony!) But it took even her five tries, and she did it on a Mild climate map. I'm trying it on Fair, and wow is it a tough slog. Every worker is less productive than usual, so "basic" things like keeping enough tools and coats around, or laying some stone roads, are a lot more intense than usual. I almost crashed my attempt just from stoning the main avenues like I normally do. Yet how can I not do that, when it's a permanent investment with no ongoing upkeep in the efficiency of my sad little work force? It's pretty much a permanent feature of this variant that I have less than half the number of homes needed to house every family.

There's a lot of little twists to this task, and I don't want to spoil them all. If you think you've mastered the game at this point, try for this Achievement on a Harsh climate map (with disasters on, of course), or a Mountains map.


- Sirian

[Sirian]

If you put your herbalist with your chopping foresters their output will be abysmal.

I don't seem to need many herbalists. Perhaps because I try to supply a wide variety of foods and keep the town health at 4.5+

I turn down the max number on Foresters to 3 -- or lower if the circle is seriously impinged. This prevents overharvesting of the trees, leaving some mature trees always up, and avoids the NASTY problem of inconsistent lumber output.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.


- Sirian

[antisocialmunky]

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.