Impressions-Style City Builders?--(Morphed into the "BANISHED" Thread)

[Buccaneer]

While the content and mechanics of this game is right up my alley, I don't think I can play a strategy game without definable or winnable goals. The Impression games had very clear and often challenging set of goals for each mission/chapter. Other resource-centric building games often had an end condition or in the case of Civilization, multiple end conditions. There also have been some games that were more sandbox-like but they also had scenarios that were winnable - even as simple as stay alive or be at a certain pop by X.

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

While the content and mechanics of this game is right up my alley, I don't think I can play a strategy game without definable or winnable goals. The Impression games had very clear and often challenging set of goals for each mission/chapter. Other resource-centric building games often had an end condition or in the case of Civilization, multiple end conditions. There also have been some games that were more sandbox-like but they also had scenarios that were winnable - even as simple as stay alive or be at a certain pop by X.

Then why not play to win a certain Achievement? Make that your scenario!

[Buccaneer]

What would be example of an Achievement? Do you have to be connected in order to do achievements (which I completely ignore in civ and other games)?

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

What would be example of an Achievement? Do you have to be connected in order to do achievements (which I completely ignore in civ and other games)?

Like in Steam and such? For example, one achievement is to survive 50 years with 50 people in a Harsh Mountainous place.


I've knocked out about 20 achievements in my first city, some intentionally, like having 60 miners in five consecutive years, or harvesting one of each orchard, garden, and animal in a year. Some accidentally, like bringing in 300+ immigrants.



EDIT - Are there acheivements for Banished outside of Steam?

[Buccaneer]

Yes, in-game achievements as oppose to Steam or any other connected sites.

[Abe Sargent]

Here are some achievements that seem pseudo-scenario ish

One with Nature - Reach 400 citizens without building crops, field,s orchards, o pastures

Isolationist - Reach 300 citizens without building a Trading Post

Mountain Men - 50 people, 20 years, in harsh, small mountainous map

Uneducated - 300 citizens without building a school

But that's about it. None of the others seem scenario-like in their requirements. Want me to make some?


Abe's Quickly Made Scenarios

Poisonous Toadstools - All of the mushrooms in your area are extremely toxic! You can't use Gatherer's Huts at all! It's also gotten into your ground so root veggies like potatoes are bad. Get to 250 people!


Medical Haven - Your area is well-known as the central medical hub for the region. You have to build one operational Hospital for each 50 people and one operational Herbalist for every 25. When you have 250 well-cared for people, you are good to go!


Acts of God - We trust God here. One, you may not build any wells. After all, we trust that God will keep us safe from fires, and if not, then no well would put out a divine flame. Similarly, you cannot build a Hospital. You must build one operational church for every 50 people, our people need places of faith. Finally, we put our faith in God, not government, so you may not build a Town Hall. 300 God-fearing people is the goal.


Washington State - Man, apples are crazy here! Every body has Apple fever. Can you feel it? It's Apple-tastic! You must build 20 Apple Orchards and 5 Taverns that make Apple Ale.


No Speak English? Only nomads can be used for labor or builders after year 20. Get to Year 120.


Commodities Market - Your town is the central hub of trade for the whole region! You must have a fully stocked and staffed market for every 50 people, three trading posts, and 300 of every trade good available in your Posts.


From Mountain to Steel Magnate - It's Pittsburgh all over again! On a large mountainous hard map, you must have 10 active mines with 200 miners. You must have everyone equipped with steel tools as well.


Vegetarian Wednesdays - Is it that day again in the cafeteria? Without using any meat get to 200 people. Meat includes ranches, fisherman, and hunting lodges. You can trade for the skins and wool to make coats.


Enjoy!

[chesapeake]

Originally Posted by Abe Sargent

Washington State - Man, apples are crazy here! Every body has Apple fever. Can you feel it? It's Apple-tastic! You must build 20 Apple Orchards and 5 Taverns that make Apple Ale.

Don't forget the flannel shirt for every person.

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by chesapeake

Don't forget the flannel shirt for every person.

So chesapeake wants to make the following change to the Apple challenge - you can only make shirts from wool, not leather. Cool cool!

[MrBug708]

Originally Posted by Scoobz0202

MrBug, can you check the pathing that your citizens take from home and work? Maybe they are in the wrong houses and taking too long to get to and from where they need to be therefore cutting into their production.

I figured out what it was. I skimped out on a teacher for almost a generation to get the workers so the uneducated production hit really screwed me on the production

[Lathum]

So torn. Just got home. Want to play so bad but also want to nap.

[Groundhog]

Played this for 8 hours yesterday... yikes.

Gave up on my first city after 20 years due to a combination of poor town layout and the fact that it seems I accidentally set everyone gathering some resource from the opposite side of the map, leaving everyone dying of hunger due to the long, long walk.

Attempt 2 was very short lived as I started out a bit too ambitious and everyone died of starvation.

Attempt 3 is going very nicely in year 18. I'm producing way more food than I need, and the biggest challenge for me seems to be balancing the amount of labour I'm using on food production compared to things like mining, etc. It's very easy to slip out of balance and it can take a few years or even a generation before it shows, usually with not so pretty results.

[GrantDawg]

I started a new village yesterday on hard. It is definitely slower and more of a challenge. It took forever to see any real growth, but I will proudly say I had no starvation deaths.

[Abe Sargent]

In six years, my adult population just free-fell from 335 to 220 and falling, just from population decline. I built about fifteen houses in a few years, and forgot to check. That generation died without me building new houses to replace, and its hitting me hard - I have few children and students compared to what I had 20 years ago. Rough hit.

[Abe Sargent]

In positive nes, the massive death toll gave me an achievement for having a vbunch of graves!

[Abe Sargent]

My adult pop plummeted to 184 before I just got a nomad event. Thanks nomads!


EDIT - Then I had a huge outbreak of Scarlet Fever. Now my pop is even more savaged.


EDIT x2 - Sigh. And now Dysentery!


EDIT x3 - And now ANOTHER outbreak of Scarlet Fever when the last took 7 years to pass!


EDIT x 4 - And NOW Diptheria!!!


it's like God has decided that my city is going to die!

[MrBug708]

What exactly is a nomad event?

[Abe Sargent]

Its when you et a bunch of nomads that want to move into your town all at once. I think it needs a Town Hall to trigger.

[Groundhog]

I'd like to see some sort of law and order aspect built in, especially once the population starts to swell into triple figures.

[Groundhog]

Town Hall is a very important structure IMO for the ability to see the family-to-houses ratios, as well as production/demand graphs.

[Dutch]

Fuck...I bought this and wasted my entire weekend killing little people that wanted nothing but a new life for themselves...thanks a lot!

[Vince, Pt. II]

I caved too. I'm in year 9, started on hard. I've got 56 villagers - 36 adults, 7 students and 13 kids. I'm working the gatherer angle hard, my food production:

2 Gatherer's Huts
2 Fishing Docks
1 Hunter's Lodge

Each is fully staffed. I can't seem to stabilize my food production though - it'll grow up to over 1,000 and then dip right back down to the low 200's over the course of a season or two. Should I just hold off on building more houses? I'd like to be sitting on a few thousand food at this point, but I can't seem to keep it moving upward.

I just finished my trading post, so I'm hoping to get a merchant in to pick up some livestock or seeds - I'd really love some sheep so my tailor isn't sitting with his thumb up his butt all day because the leather takes forever to get in.

Edit: in the minor pet peeves division, why do I have to click an extra button to see what the building I just selected has produced this season and last? Those pop-ups are tiny, and it's not like the production numbers take up that much space. I feel like having all that info on the first page you get when you select a building would be a nice time saver.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

So what's the general consensus on the best places to put a hunting lodge? My current city has a forester/gatherer/hunting lodge set up along a forest, but my hunters are just not producing (2 hunters netted me 200 venison in total).

Should the hunters be somewhere else?

I've got one that was giving me 1k venison with 3 hunters. I think it has to do with where the animals actually move on the map, but I'm not sure. I plopped mine down in the middle of a forest and didn't think about it much before hand.

[Abe Sargent]

Alright, I'm calling my first town when it limped to 100 years. I finished with a pair of achievements.


Now i'm off to begin what i refer to as the Himalaya Dynasty:

Small Map
Mountainous
Harsh Weather
Hard
Disasters On

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II

I've got one that was giving me 1k venison with 3 hunters. I think it has to do with where the animals actually move on the map, but I'm not sure. I plopped mine down in the middle of a forest and didn't think about it much before hand.

My thinking at this stage is that the hunting lodge does not need to be in the forest. I have my herbalist/gathers hut/foresters all setup in the same sphere, but I usually put my hunting lodge just on the perimeter of that. My thinking is that, yeah, animals move across the map, and putting it in amongst the others just takes up tiles that could be trees or food/herbs. It feels realistic to me to still have the hunting lodge in the woods, but I don't know that it makes a difference.

[Izulde]

I've seen animals move across the open plains and be killed for their meat, so Hunting Lodge definitely doesn't need to be in the forest. You just need to watch the map and see where the prancing animals are.

[cartman]

I too have succumbed to the sirens calling me to buy the game. For such a simple premise, the game is surprisingly deep.

I've built a few towns, the first dying off after about 5 years. The next one made it to 20 years, but I didn't build enough houses early on and once the older generation died off, there wasn't enough to replace them.

I've seen some threads detailing that it seems to be important to have no other buildings inside the circle for your hunting lodge. And to look for places on the map where the deer appear to get funneled through a choke point.

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II

Each is fully staffed. I can't seem to stabilize my food production though - it'll grow up to over 1,000 and then dip right back down to the low 200's over the course of a season or two. Should I just hold off on building more houses? I'd like to be sitting on a few thousand food at this point, but I can't seem to keep it moving upward.

I pour workers into food production until I'm at the point where my food is far exceeding demand before I start expanding houses. It's a slower way to play, but after my initial Great Famine experience I prefer to play safe... It's going to be a long, long time before I have the manpower to do some of the more interesting things like mining... right now I need about 4-6 labourers to get stone/wood/iron as needed.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Yeah, I put up a mine and was floored that it had slots for 15 workers. Logically it makes sense, but with all of the other buildings having such a smaller capacity, I was surprised. My mine has a whopping 2 miners at this point. I've actually considered letting it stay abandoned until I can put 7-10 people in it at once. It's only returning 10-ish iron per season so far, though it's only been active for about 3 seasons.

Edit:
I've found that keeping 2 laborers is about all I need at any given time. My blacksmith and herbalists help out enough with labor because they're not always busy that I have plenty of hands free to do things.

[Lathum]

So my wife has now purchased a copy along with one of her girlfriends. All 3 of us in the living room playing our own games. We decided to start all at the same time with the same parameters and see how we all turn out.

Interesting to see the 3 villages develop.

[Lathum]

Question about builders.

Some times they lack urgency. I'll start a building and it will literally take seasons before they even touch it. Anyone know why?

[cartman]

Originally Posted by Lathum

Question about builders.

Some times they lack urgency. I'll start a building and it will literally take seasons before they even touch it. Anyone know why?

Click on the unfinished building. Look and see if there are any resources it is still waiting on. It won't complete the work until all of the resources (wood/stone/iron) are brought to the site. I've had this happen when I get too aggressive on setting up buildings, and have to get the resource stockpiles built back up.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Each building that is pending gets builders assigned to it. You can click on that button and it will lock on the builders in sequence and you can watch what they're doing. Typically when things get untouched it's because you are lacking the materials to start the building and the builders are scurrying around the map trying to locate them. If you have your laborers working on clearing resources far away from the building site, it can take a long while to get construction started.

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by cartman

Click on the unfinished building. Look and see if there are any resources it is still waiting on. It won't complete the work until all of the resources (wood/stone/iron) are brought to the site. I've had this happen when I get too aggressive on setting up buildings, and have to get the resource stockpiles built back up.

That I know.

There are times where they won't even begin building it for a long time.

[cartman]

There is also a way to set a priority for the buildings. I've never had it where the first thing on the priority list didn't start getting built after all of the materials were delivered, as along as I had people assigned as builders.

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by cartman

There is also a way to set a priority for the buildings. I've never had it where the first thing on the priority list didn't start getting built after all of the materials were delivered, as along as I had people assigned as builders.

That's what I usually do but it's frustrating to have builders assigned and they don't even begin clearing the area
For seasons at a time n

[Scoobz0202]

Is it possible that you don't have many laborers? They are the ones that bring resources to the site for the builders to use.

I think

[Groundhog]

If you mark resources for removal, does anyone know of a way to cancel that?

[Vince, Pt. II]

Under that menu tab, the far right option is to clear resource removal orders.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Looks like my first village is going to die a pretty horrible death. Random house in the middle of town caught fire, and it proceeded to spread to EVERYTHING. Both of my storage barns (goodbye, 5,000 food and all of my tools), my trading post (goodbye 1,000 firewood), 80% of my housing, the school, both woodcutters, the blacksmith and the tailor are gone. It's late spring now and we're desperately trying to get a storage barn back up for our foragers/fishermen/etc to try to salvage what we can.

FYI - couple of "known" bugs (well, they're at least reported on the official forum) with fires in general:

-wells don't seem to do anything to mitigate them.
-once a building is ruined, you have the option to destroy it or rebuild it. If you choose to destroy it, then cancel that order, the building pops back to life immediately, ready to be used.

I'm not going to abuse that one, but my Trading Post is back up and running and I'm probably not going to randomly take it down. The building will stand vacant all winter at least while we try to get back on our feet anyway.

[Vince, Pt. II]

I'm not sure if it's because my food production is so diverse, but that fire didn't hit me nearly as hard as I thought it would. Lost 20 people (all to starvation, no one died in the fire), but since my gatherers, hunters and fishing docks are all away from the central building area, I came out ok. It's going to take many seasons to get my population back under natural control (I lost an unbalanced amount of men versus women, so I've got a bunch of middle aged ladies with no dudes to keep them company), but we're pretty stable now and have a ton more food than before (up over 10k steadily now).

Unfortunately my first trader after the disaster had sheep and I couldn't afford any. I placed an order for more from him, so hopefully I'll have re-stocked the trade coffers by the time he gets back.

[mrtourette]

Had a play around with this last night, seems really good. Is there a way to amend the scrolling speed? Was getting quite frustrating with the slow movement when trying to move to different areas of the map. Also as good as the weather effects are sometimes they seriously block visibility of what's going on, are there any real drawbacks to turning them off?

[HarryLime]

Originally Posted by Lathum

So my wife has now purchased a copy along with one of her girlfriends. All 3 of us in the living room playing our own games. We decided to start all at the same time with the same parameters and see how we all turn out.

Interesting to see the 3 villages develop.

This could be a great idea for the FOFC forum

All use the same seed and post screens every 2-3 years to show how each other are developing.. call town Fofcville or something so all on the same page... Would be great to see how each different town developed!

Use Mannings stats for the seed, give it a fofc feel.. (completions/yards/td)

Seed : 450547755
Valleys
Medium
Fair
On Medium for all the other settings...

[Peregrine]

Well I caved in and bought the game - starting it now.

[mrtourette]

Found this very interesting and helpful basic starting template on reddit:

http://imgur.com/bneUA3n

The positioning of the hunter seems to be greatly debated all over the place, some say it's better to be with a planting forrester as denser/older forests provide better hunting while some say that a forrester/gatherer/herbalist hub and a hunter get in each others way if in the same circle and affect the productivity of each other.

[Peregrine]

Maybe you guys can help me with a newbie question - I can't seem to find a quick way to clear my cursor back to the default hand - like if I build a house, it stays on a house when I want to be checking production stats. I sort of figured a way but it takes several clicks and is very clunky - any quick way to do this?

[Coffee Warlord]

Got to year 5 last night on a rather spiffy setup. Stone, however, is a major issue.

[Coffee Warlord]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

Maybe you guys can help me with a newbie question - I can't seem to find a quick way to clear my cursor back to the default hand - like if I build a house, it stays on a house when I want to be checking production stats. I sort of figured a way but it takes several clicks and is very clunky - any quick way to do this?

Right click.

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

Right click.

D'oh!

[mrtourette]

Awesome, that's been bugging me as well!

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

Got to year 5 last night on a rather spiffy setup. Stone, however, is a major issue.

tone is such a balancing act it seems until you get enough people to build a quary.