Ok...
I'm going to show you my first "real" game. I have played a bit before, but never really past an adult population of, say, 40. I mostly put down neat forest camps, enjoyed the small town flair, built my merchant dock, traded for my first seeds, realised that i had no idea on how to proceed, was unable to, like plan, how i would want to further develop my town and annoyed by the prospect of just trying it out opted to start a new map and do all of the above again.
So, clearly i needed a plan... or a project or whatever...
Then i ran into this excellent starting position on the edge of a fairly large plain and an idea began to form...
The premise:
- I'll build a town with all housing within the range of a single market (if 3/4 of the house's box is inside the circle i'll take it).
- I'll build no mines and no quarries.
- No churches either (redundant, due to lack of mines and quarries).
- This is on a large valley map with climate and stuff on the medium (default) settings. And on hard - i hate it when they want to tell me i have to have a barn in some aweful location.
Please keep in mind that before this i had never actually built a market, or a boarding house or a Tavern or done any farming. Of course i've read up on all those things and watched people play and stuff. Anyway, bear with me.
So here it goes:
Or rather it doesn't because i have to do some major clicking to get a halfway decent name for my town. Apparently most town names fall into one of either category: There are the awefully generic ones ("Fieldtownvilleport" maybe not...) and the possibly inappropriate ("Clinchcocker" - that was an actual suggestion courtesy of the Banished town name genrator).
Anyway, here's one of the early drafts of my initial settlement. It only took my about 20 minutes of further OCD-ing to actually unpause the game (with virtually no visible difference as a result):
Things went well enough and by fall my people have made themselves a home.
The surroundings of the Gatherer's Hut are of course suboptimal, making for a rough few first winters, but i wanted to settle in the proper location relative to where the market is supposed to go later. And tearing the intital forst camp down later to move it would be a horrible waste of, like, 40 stones and therefor impossible, so i thought.
In hindsight that was a very dumb thought.
By year 4 things are finally getting easier with the food and around that time i managed to set up a second functionally identical forest camp. Here's a brilliantly concieved screenshot that does not actually show it.
Soon enough i have a third such camp where people get to walk to their jobs over a neat bridge. And i can finally put down that market, covering all three camps.
My first merchant post is online as well.
I setup a subscription for buttloads of stone and also get my first seeds.
Here you can see my accidental approach the concept of the "good orchard". (5x4 tiles).
I am quite lucky with my mercharts. I get plenty of stone and also my first seeds for farms.
Now, apparently a "good orchard" is virtually alround superior to farms. The orchard requires less labor per year and produces roughly 9.5 food per tile per year compared to the roughly 7.5 a farm produces.
Of course the farm has the upside that it is less prone to having the yield ruined by early snowfall.
In theory anyway.
But the town if growing none the less. The second merchant port is helping with the stone and iron imports.
By now they are offering me thousands of stones per shipment. I have a hard time paying for that, since my export of choice - firewood - faces increasing domestic demand.
The mid game was kinda fun. I got to build more and more workshops (got to sew a lot of them wool coats to pay for my stuff) and could manage shipping the vast quatities of raw materials around the growing town.
Trading post are just fun in general and can also be very nicely abused as super-barns.
Unfortunatly the unfunny part of the game (micro-managing loads of farming) began to creep up on me.
Large streches of mind-numbing clicking through those 5x4 orachards and plenty of farms were briefly interupted by "Fire!".
Too bad there were wells on both side of it and some 200 largely idle citizens to dump on this pleasant interuption.
Had the boarding house (that i essentially built because it looks pretty - never really used it) caught fire at least other parts of the town would have been affected.
Ok... *sigh*
This is where i'm kinda "done" and may very likely abandon this town (the original goal achieved) and play some smaller mountain maps (or something) instead.
Managing the farming is killing me. And i have to expand it, too - my current food economy is unsustainable in the face of the still rapidly growing population.
Essentially, since i don't need stone anymore, the reasonable course of action would be to import wood instead and turn the closer two of my remaining five forest camps into orchard land (already did that with the original camp). That sounds more reliable than straight up importing some food.
Anyway, with a surplus of roughly 700 coats per year and maybe a fourth merchant, this should be managable.
But, yeah, i'm not sure if i'm ready for more damn orchard clicking madness.
I want that island.
So pretty.
Dropping down additional stockpiles can increase the rate at which you can gather distant resources (because your laborers will drop them in a nearby stockpile rather than walk all the way to the other side of town with the stuff), although then you are going to want a road so that your laborers can get that back to town quickly when they need it. I've also started buying stone and coal by selling ale, which Ashdown is awash in. I have at least 400 units sitting in my trade port at all times.
Don't remind me of stock piles. Every winter the first thing i'd do would be to delete stock piles at the edge of the town or out of town to have the whole stuff shipped inwards. Often deleted half a dozen full barns too. Once 200 people had been on that task for like a month i'd save the barns at low percentage and redeploy all the stock piles.
Re: Trading ale. I always wanted to do that. But i always ran out of cherries and pears in a few month. Apparently my people don't like to eat potatoes...
I always had like 200 at each trading port to help whenever a trader would take the stuff (most didn't want to hear anything about it), but it never came close to paying for a shipment of 2000 stones at "order price".
Hm...
That would be 6000 cherries.
I even tried to store my fruits in the trading ports and realease them gradually so my people wouldn't eat them all before the Taverns could use them.
But that didn't really work all that well either.
I suppose my food surplus was just lackluster in general.
I'm curious, how do you guys deal with stone? All the other resources can be seemingly farmed, and stone can too, but it's just toooo slow. I usually end up building a quarry, but even if I have 10 guys assigned to it, the stone just slowly trickles in.. I never get enough and have to send out teams to far away places to stripmine a new part of the map of all stone... So that's not that bad, but eventually all that stone will be gone.. and what then?
I don't know. Trading for it was fun.
It's unreliable at first. But if you don't stick to a silly limitation like i did, you could use a quarry first and later abandon it in favor of trading finished goods for stones.
I suppose it would work even better with tools then with coats.
A few mines right next to one another sure take up less space than a gazillion sheep. And the output is in one place, so you can set up smithies and stock piles right next to it.
Edit: The forum ate my attachments.
Tried to put them in there again.
I hope it still all fits.
Damnit. One is missing and i can't find it in my mess.
My towns always seem to hit a sore spot around 20 years, or 80 adults, whichever comes first. I end up running out of food because I'm establishing mines to deal with stone and iron shortages, and I never have enough people to staff either.
