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

[DaddyTorgo]

Originally Posted by mrtourette

There's a great thread on the subreddit about how these sort of games turn you into a heartless dictator. WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE TAKING A BREAK? GET BACK OVER THERE AND GATHER ME SOME WOOD UNTIL YOU DIE OF ALD AGE!

Fuck you.

I just looked at the subreddit, decided the graphics were on-par for what I would expect/desire, and now I'm thinking I'll have to pick this game up.

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Coffee Warlord

From what I saw on reddit, dimishing returns on farms is a myth that never made it into the final version.

Interesting - I thought I had seen this multiple times, where older fields seem to produce less and less, but maybe it was just years of bad weather.

[GrantDawg]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

Interesting - I thought I had seen this multiple times, where older fields seem to produce less and less, but maybe it was just years of bad weather.

Bad weather, unhappy farmers, or something else. That is my only beef so far with this game, really. Sometimes it is hard to find a reason for production drop-offs.

[MrBug708]

I cannot figure out how to use markets effectively. I used one pretty well and even a second, but the third one really tanked my economy where my town is dying off due to starvation. I feel like I have plenty of food dispersed evenly throughout my town to the point where I should have plenty in reserve no less.

I have my houses centered around the markets mostly and I have resources dispersed around those (crops, livestock, hunters fisherman). The routes are short for each market yet my town is hemorrhaging people

Any ideas?

[Vince, Pt. II]

I have yet to try a market, but it seems that markets are surefire ways to starve your citizens if you don't keep them well staffed with workers.

[Fidatelo]

After keeping tabs on this thread the past several days I caved and picked up the game last night. I've only played the first tutorial so far but I look forward to watching my own villagers starve over the coming days and weeks!

[Groundhog]

Hmmm my experience with markets is different to you guys. I have one market smack bang in the middle of my houses, and have had no issues - only 1 person working there.

I finally hit 100 people in my latest town and yup, wouldn't you know, along comes a cyclone. Yikes. Took me back to 62 workers and destroyed a lot of my more pricey buildings.

[Radii]

I haven't built a huge city yet but I do have one with four distinct expanded ares (three of them hunting/gathering/forestry, one has two trading posts and some farmland/pastures). I've been able to set up two markets, each one covering the housing in two expanded areas, and have had no problems getting goods to people. For a long time I only had three vendors total, I bumped it up to 5 total vendors for the two markets with the most recent expansion since it is a little further away.

[Radii]

I got my city up to what I would define as 6 expanded areas today, I finally reached a large lake that was a long ways across the map where I could set up four fishing huts, and designated a mountainous area in the southeast corner of my map for mines and quarries, I don't have those running yet but started building up the housing nearby to support the workforce. I'm up to four marketplaces and I think I have 16 vendors now.

I hit 200 adults/250 total people, I had a brief food scare at some critical point of expanding, I had 20,000 food in reserve and saw it quickly drop to 15,000. I started a huge effort to produce more food (built four more farms and found a place to squeeze in 2 more fishing villages and set up another gatherer/hunter that i was planning but wasn't prioritizing). My food reserves got as low as 3000 before I got it fixed, its going up steadily again, whew!

I've been lucky with disasters, I've had a number of tornadoes hit but nothing destroyed yet. No fires, no harvests destroyed by disease, etc. It took me awhile to get going, but I'm really happy with this one! I'm really hoping to fill up the map completely and see how many people this area can sustain.

[Peregrine]

I had a fire but luckily it hit kind of an outlying area and only burnt down three buildings. Still enjoying the game but not sure I could get to 200 people - once I build all the types of buildings I start getting bored and want to move on to the next village.

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by Peregrine

I had a fire but luckily it hit kind of an outlying area and only burnt down three buildings. Still enjoying the game but not sure I could get to 200 people - once I build all the types of buildings I start getting bored and want to move on to the next village.

This is how I am. I am at 70 people and kind of bored.


r.e.the market. What is the tangible gain from it? I built one but never staffed it with with more than 3 /12 people.

[Peregrine]

As I understand it the market has one main function - to centralize the stuff stored in all your storage barns. Personally I never had a lot of far flung storage barns so it didn't seem so useful, but once you do it would save your people a lot of time.

[Vince, Pt. II]

My village is basically made up of a bunch of satellite housing clusters, so I'm not sure exactly how much a market would help, if at all.

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by Vince, Pt. II

My village is basically made up of a bunch of satellite housing clusters, so I'm not sure exactly how much a market would help, if at all.

That is ho mine is laid out as well

[Coffee Warlord]

Mine's one massive centralized housing district, with the resource production facilities feeding it. I've never had a problem with marketplaces.

[Lathum]

112 adults in my village, plenty of iron and logs, running 2 blacksmiths and I am 50 tools in the hole. Does that make sense to anyone?

[HeavyReign]

The combination of a decent sized fire and a tornado running through the middle of the map has brought my first village to an end. I topped out around 500 people total with around 450 probably being sustainable. After the disasters I'm down around 250 people and not looking to incrementally rebuild as the trader brings enough stone.

[B & B]

Originally Posted by Lathum

112 adults in my village, plenty of iron and logs, running 2 blacksmiths and I am 50 tools in the hole. Does that make sense to anyone?

1. Make sure you aren't trying to build Steel Tools, which also require Coal.

2. These Blacksmiths spend much time running around to get materials, I always build a stockpile next to them.

3. They also have to run the tools to the storage barn, which if its a hike away can take more time.

4. Lastly, if you have a bunch of workers in the quarry or mine, I think they use the tools up much faster than others.

[Groundhog]

Eek, had my first starvation crisis last night in my current town. It started from a mass tool shortage that led to a reduced harvest, that further hit my populace:food ratios that had begun to slide a little. Really really need to keep an eye on that graph once you start to mass expand on people, through either births or nomads. D'oh. I was up to 180 people, then dropped well below 100...

[Peregrine]

Originally Posted by Lathum

112 adults in my village, plenty of iron and logs, running 2 blacksmiths and I am 50 tools in the hole. Does that make sense to anyone?

Make sure you don't have any tools stored in your trading post - I had an issue with that for a while and was able to release the tools from there and solve the crisis.

[Lathum]

I have solved my tool problem by basically trading for them. I harvest a bunch of wool and leather and trade it for tools. Seems to be working well enogh.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by B & B

1. Make sure you aren't trying to build Steel Tools, which also require Coal.

2. These Blacksmiths spend much time running around to get materials, I always build a stockpile next to them.

3. They also have to run the tools to the storage barn, which if its a hike away can take more time.

4. Lastly, if you have a bunch of workers in the quarry or mine, I think they use the tools up much faster than others.

Great advice.

Originally Posted by groundhog

Eek, had my first starvation crisis last night in my current town. It started from a mass tool shortage that led to a reduced harvest, that further hit my populace:food ratios that had begun to slide a little. Really really need to keep an eye on that graph once you start to mass expand on people, through either births or nomads. D'oh. I was up to 180 people, then dropped well below 100...

Also, make sure your citizens are educated. In my current game, I waited a few years to build a school and it almost killed me. Uneducated workers were working my fields and my harvests began to plummet. Luckily for me I had an overproduction of food, so I weathered the storm and now I'm back to having 10,000+ food in storage.

[Fidatelo]

I'm up to year 18 of my first village. I've had two points where my town basically reset itself: at year 3 I had built up to about 17/2/11 when about a half-dozen adults starved to death over the winter, and then in around year 8 or so I worked my way up to 28/6/7 but didn't focus enough on food and ended up losing dozens of folks to starvation over the next couple years, reaching a low point of 8/1/4 in year 10.

Things seem to have stabilized and in the 7 years since I've edged back up to 15/3/4. I've made a concerted effort to bank way more food then ever before, and I'm not building anything new until I have the current infrastructure humming along at max capacity for 2-3 winters without any massive consequences.

One thing I find strange: the people age at a faster rate than the town. It seems as though they age about 1 year per season. That feels like a curious decision to me, and sort of bothers me.

[BYU 14]

OK, you bastards broke me down THANKS

This is a really cool game and after my trial run (starvation crisis year 3) and a bunch of single people living alone in houses, I am ready to start again and think I have a good plan now.

This is going to be a time sink for me...

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Fidatelo

I'm up to year 18 of my first village. I've had two points where my town basically reset itself: at year 3 I had built up to about 17/2/11 when about a half-dozen adults starved to death over the winter, and then in around year 8 or so I worked my way up to 28/6/7 but didn't focus enough on food and ended up losing dozens of folks to starvation over the next couple years, reaching a low point of 8/1/4 in year 10.

Things seem to have stabilized and in the 7 years since I've edged back up to 15/3/4. I've made a concerted effort to bank way more food then ever before, and I'm not building anything new until I have the current infrastructure humming along at max capacity for 2-3 winters without any massive consequences.

One thing I find strange: the people age at a faster rate than the town. It seems as though they age about 1 year per season. That feels like a curious decision to me, and sort of bothers me.

The age thing isn't curious at all. If you had accurate aging, the game would take forever or the seasons would pass in about 5 seconds, which would ruin the impact. Really, there's no other good option if you think about it.

---

It's up to year 35 for the town of Gleede. We have 300+ folks, three separate town centers (marketplaces), two churches, stone houses for everyone, two mines, one quarry, 4 docks (one produces 1,700 fish/yr by itself) and everything else you could want. We have cherry and peach orchards producing the sweetest fruit you've ever eaten and our crops are corn, wheat, beans, pumpkin and potatoes. We have beef, mutton and chicken and there's more venison than you can shake a stick at. Three woodcutters keep us warm in the winter and our sustainable management program gives us plenty of wood, berries, mushrooms and other delectable bits.

Well, that's the news from Gleede, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

---

Of course, one well-placed tornado in South Gleede would destroy a good portion of the farms and pastures...but that never happens, does it?

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by Fidatelo

One thing I find strange: the people age at a faster rate than the town. It seems as though they age about 1 year per season. That feels like a curious decision to me, and sort of bothers me.

Age and years are arbitrary numbers, who is to say 1 full year in Banished land isn't 2 full years in the human life cycle?

[mrtourette]

Yeah the age thing confused me at first, it makes sense that they age quicker but only now I know. I assumed at the start they aged one year every year, and it caught me out a few times when I suddenly realised I had couples too old to reproduce before I expected it.

[Coffee Warlord]

Broke the 100 adult cap last night. I still only have one residential center (that's jam packed full of houses), which I'm going to need to expand to a second soon. Not because I'm running out of room, but because I'm running out of jobs to assign these guys to!

[BYU 14]

Doing my first play through and got up over 40 in 8 years and things looked solid, then the mother of all famines hit.

In one season I went to 18 residents, 3 of which were too old to reproduce, and a bunch of single residents. Luckily the town teacher is a bit loose and has had 2 kids out of wedlock back to back years and two of her students had a kid too

Currently at 22 in year 12, but it is a struggle. I am currently juggling several residents from farmers in the spring/summer to hunters/fishermen in the winter. Right now it is just a matter of eeking out an existence keeping everyone fed.

This game is a challenge.

[Thomkal]

For you Banished fans, PC Gamer has done a 25 year "time lapse" photo essay with one of their attempts to play the game:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/03/13/ba...harsh-winters/

[B & B]

Saw this review and laughed, wanted to share




A 10-year-old girl claimed a house to herself and managed to hoard the whole town's food until everyone else died

10/10

[Buccaneer]

So everyone has burned out on the game?

[sabotai]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

So everyone has burned out on the game?

Don't know about anyone else, but yeah, pretty much for me. It's a basic game, not a lot of replay value. However, I paid $20 for it and Steam says I played it for 31 hours, so I'd say I got my money's worth. And I'm sure I fire it back in a few months, especially if some DLC is released.

[EagleFan]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

So everyone has burned out on the game?

Not yet but I have been taking it slow because I could see it being a potential burn out game.

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

So everyone has burned out on the game?

Similar for me too. I put in 35 hours, ran a few places, knocked off more than 75% of the achievements on Steam, and now I've moved on. I'm very happy to turn $20 into 35 hours of gaming, with the potential for a lot more. This game is very well developed, and I'd happy to pick up some official DLC or some unofficial mods here and there to play with the engine.

[Blackadar]

Originally Posted by Buccaneer

So everyone has burned out on the game?

Not entirely, but I have slowed down a bit. The game is great at what it does, but it is ultimately fairly limited. Supply chains are short, there are no "prestige" buildings and you can achieve a point of equilibrium pretty easily once you know how. That being said, I got more than my moneys' worth already and when the mod kit comes out this game will probably get a new life with additional buildings and resources.

Still worth every penny I paid.

[flere-imsaho]

Anyone still playing this? Enjoying it?

I'm seriously considering buying a copy of Windows 7 and running Boot Camp on my Mac so I can play this and/or Age of Wonders III.

[Coffee Warlord]

Black summed it up perfectly. It's a great game for what it is. You'll get your money's worth and then some out of it. But, it's limited, and there's just not enough to it for the long term. I do have some hopes that the modding community goes nuts with it.

[Groundhog]

Yeah, I had a blast with this for about a week and a half, but once you get past the early-phase of the game and learn to balance food and population, there's not a whole lot to do, and very few reasons to start again once you have a successful town.

[Dutch]

I had to uninstall it in order to stop playing it.

[flere-imsaho]

First major update out (1.02). Changelog:

* Citizens are now more effective at fighting fires and putting them out.
* When fires break out, citizens fighting the fire now run at high speed.
* Citizens working in an area where a fire breaks out will now be interrupted to help fight the fire.
* Fixed a bug that caused non-laborers to not fight fires.
* Citizens fighting fires will only be interrupted by sickness, freezing, or starving.
* Citizens will now only search for water in an area around the fire. Far inland areas need wells for fires to be fought.
* Increased the number of citizens that can fight a single fire to 50.
* Increased the area of effect for citizens fighting a fire.
* If enough water is brought to a building on fire, the chance of the fire spreading is lowered.
* Fixed a bug that caused buildings on fire not to be high priority.
* Fixed a major slowdown in large towns when fires break out.
* If citizens are already walking to get food at a distance location and become starved, they’ll now interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn.
* If citizens are working far from home and become hungry, they’ll eat food from their home as if they brought food with them. This will not interrupt the current task. If no food is available at home they will interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn.
* Because citizens can eat from home when far away, they can better deal with freezing, and visit a warm place when needed.
* Fixed a bug that caused citizens not to warm up when eating at home in some cases.
* Citizens now won’t be assigned far away tasks without a specific profession (pickups, gathering, clearing, etc) unless the tasks have been around for a long time, or haven’t been assigned to someone local. This keeps citizens far away from walking across the map in most cases.
* Citizens now limit the distance they’ll walk in the winter when it is very cold.
* Tombstones now decay in 4-6 years instead of 13-17.
* Existing tombstones have had their decay time reduced by half.
* The trading post volume was been increased to 60000. This allows larger auto purchases to occur without overflowing storage. Existing trading posts need to be removed and replaced for this change to take effect.
Here’s the rest of the changes already posted:

* Mouse buttons now obey system setting for flipped left/right buttons.
* Input options now allow binding of mouse actions.
* Input settings can now be bound to any of eight mouse buttons.
* Fixed a bug that cause meat and other resources to show up in the corner of the map.
* Fixed being able to pop a building back into existence after being damaged by using the cancel removal tool or reclaim button.
* Fixed grave count on cemeteries when it is marked for removal then reclaimed.
* Fixed crash at trading post when trading, dismissing trader, and then selecting a custom order.
* Fixed a bug that allowed auto purchase to over fill the trading post.
* Fixed a bug that caused cycling through laborers to show children and students.
* Foresters no longer cut down orchards.
* Fixed water showing inside merchant boat.
* Builders will no longer walk the long way around to the other side of a bridge or tunnel when constructing it if it’s more than twice the distance to the closer side.
* Fixed building pause icon staying up when a building completes construction after pausing construction.
* Fixed a bug that caused starving or freezing people to get stuck in a loop doing the same job over and over if no food or warmth was available to resolve the starving or freezing issue.
* Fixed a bug that caused pending roads to not be cancelable if they were under a tree, rock, ore, etc.
* Fixed a bug that caused roads to be unremovable.
* Fixed a bug that caused areas to be unusable after roads were removed in certain cases.
* Dirt roads can no longer be quick removed by zoning over them with stone roads and then removing them. They now revert back to dirt roads and work has to be performed to remove them.
* Placing stone roads over pending dirt roads no longer cause unusable areas.
* Disasters are now disabled in tutorials.
* Fixed several spelling and grammatical errors.
* Fixed crash in audio streamer due to missing thread synchronization.
* Fixed a crash that occurred if a video card doesn’t support sampling from a depth texture.
* Fixed a bug that caused very wide screen displays to calculate an incorrect FOV.
* Windowed mode now allows resizing of the window.
* Window position is now remembered and restored on game shutdown/startup.
* Graphics initialization now has better error handling and exception recovery.
* Added a game launcher that allows changing video settings if the game doesn’t display properly on startup.
* The game launcher only shows if an error occurred, on first time startup, ctrl is held on startup, or /launcher is on the command line.
* Added selection of refresh rate to graphics settings
* Added selection of graphics adapter to graphics settings.
* Save games now check for truncation and crc validation to make sure save games haven’t been corrupted.
* The scene shown on the background of the main menu now has better error checking in case the file has become corrupt. If the file is corrupt it will show the original scene that the game shows on first time startup.
* Files are now created in a temp directory and are moved after writes complete. This stops partial files from being created if a thread crashes while a background thread is performing file I/O.

[Fidatelo]

I wish they had addressed some of the problems with fires.

[Coffee Warlord]

Be nice if he got around to released the modkit, or at least documented how some of the data files were stored, for modders to get to work.

[Dutch]

Originally Posted by Fidatelo

I wish they had addressed some of the problems with fires.

haha, yes, but now I want to re-install it....must.restist.the.urge....

[jaygr]

Talk about flash in the pan. I couldn't get enough of this game for a week or so then bam, I haven't fired it up since. It was really fun while it lasted, though.

[Groundhog]

I could Google this myself, but did a modding community ever emerge for Banished and add more functionality?

I don't think I've ever gone from "just one more turn" to "uninstall from Steam library" quicker.

[Izulde]

Browse Banished Mods

[Vince, Pt. II]

Originally Posted by jaygr

Talk about flash in the pan. I couldn't get enough of this game for a week or so then bam, I haven't fired it up since. It was really fun while it lasted, though.

It seemed to me like the whole game was figuring out how to survive. Once you got the generic formula down, you could survive anything, and it wasn't really difficult, just busywork to expand.

[Izulde]

For the price I think most, if not all of us, bought it though, I think we got our money's worth.

[Vince, Pt. II]

Yeah, more an observation than a complaint. I enjoyed it for what it was worth.