Banished - town building colonization survival game

[EQandcivfanatic]

Why not both!

Fair enough.

Anyone who's interested in started a succession game, post, and we'll start setting up a list.

 

[metatron]

Fair enough.

Anyone who's interested in started a succession game, post, and we'll start setting up a list.

Here.

(Yeah, i'll shut up about the school and just mumble disapprovingly into a non-existant beard in my corner).

 

[peter grimes]

I've got the game working (albeit without sound) but I still haven't done the tutorials. So I'm not interested in being on the list for a while.

 

[grandad1982]

I'd be interested in an sg though please don't expect me to be a very optimal player!

How are we going to do this? I have quite a lot of civ4 and civ5 sg experience and one thing I've learnt is that if people don't have similar ideas as to how to the game should run its really annoying.

For example pre turn planning and discussion, report style, in game objectives etc. I'm using my phone to write this so going to stop as its annoying!

 

[metatron]

How are we going to do this? I have quite a lot of civ4 and civ5 sg experience and one thing I've learnt is that if people don't have similar ideas as to how to the game should run its really annoying.

For example pre turn planning and discussion, report style, in game objectives etc. I'm using my phone to write this so going to stop as its annoying!

I was under the impression that this would be totally casual. At least for the first go around.
We agree on a turn order and turn length. People play, post a zoomed out screenshot when they're done. We have some loose exchange about what's going on and what could be done in the near future, but nobody (except ocd me) cares if it gets done in this turn or the next (or at all).

I mean it's not like it's C3C Sid.

If we eventually do a second SG with some tall objective and adverse conditions, that could be a different matter. But i just assumed we'd play a fairly conventional map in the first game. Like valleys with a non-harsh climate, so that everybody who wants to can participate without fear of droping the ball.

 

[EQandcivfanatic]

Well here's what I propose for the SG:

Name: Randomly Generated by First Player (no dispute that way)
Difficulty: Hard (I feel that the game is less interesting with the other difficulties)
Terrain: Valleys
Climate: Mild
Goal: Survival, game is played until the last little guy drops dead.
Turn span: 4 in-game years as "Mayor"
Player List: Order determined by RNG

Other rules:

1. No save scumming or reloads of save games, what happens, stays happened.
2. No intentional drama-making or self-destruction.


Thoughts?

 

[Joecoolyo]

Spoiler :

I asked JC for his save, thinking i could turn around things in a somewhat convicing fashion based on farming (and other) micro managament (i convincingly failed).
He asked me to show him his town if it still lives later, and i suppose i'm doing that now.
As i said: Things didn't turn out as well as i hoped.

Pastures need to be worked to have the animals breed.
To my surprise i found your pastures completely empty. I didn't know that could happen. My unworked animals did just stagnate (with their pop count). I didn't see them die from not being worked before.

I visciously scrapped much of your town for parts, but i kept with the vision of the original Fair Valley as the center.
There were other possible choices for a market based center, but this one was fine. Particularly since i wanted to keep the hospital and that wouldlimit alternatives to something east of the central town, saving some of the workshops but awkwardly placing the town between those hills.
So Fair Valley downtown it was.

Ok...
So i had a fairly reasonable plan:
1. Resize the farms and bring in a few good harvests, while having the population slowly dwindle, stabilising at something like 70.
2. Build a school and a market and rework the town for efficiency.
3. Oh, yeah, and stem the tide against that tool shortage.

I soon realised that #1 was highly problematic and #3 was next to impossible, both because toolless uneducated workers are really terribly useless.
Like any attempt to staff the mine and the smithies proved to be completely futile during the first summer. So i postponed that and focussed on 1. and 2.

That did go, well, not half bad the first year. People where constantly dying from starvation, but breeding too. The first harvest fell short of what was needed but was essentially as good as one could expect. Adult population was at, like, 80 during the winter and the decline seemed to slow down.
I managed to scrap buildings where the market was supposed to go and scrapped some workshops for the needed iron too.

The second harvest however went the way of Atlanta, which catastrophically improved the tools-to-people-ratio (along with the everything-to-people ratio).

So essentially i got to start over.
With buildings instead of natural stone and iron to mine.
Oh and that population was still rapidly loosing the tools it had left, was increasingly unclothed and of course completly uneducated.
But at least the school was up and running and the market was on its way.

Spoiler :

You can see here that i have already resized the farms again (and deleted like two thirds of them) on account of the much smaller population.

From there i spent 5 years essentially getting nowhere. The tool shortage got worse before it got better, even though i commited whatever labor could be spared on addressing it. I really only managed to break free once i had scrapped most of the remaining workshops for iron. The mine was still just ridiculous. By the look of it the untooled uneducated folks working there were playing canasta all day.

Once that was somewhat under control, i started to work on the settlements i was still using to keep myself afloat. West Town first, then North River. I deleted the housing in newtown, because people kept moving back there for no apparently reasons (all economic buildings there had been offline for ages) and Irontown became Ghosttown - completely abandoned, save for a few - still useless - miners and one of the first tooled and educated guys i could find operating the only surviving smithy.
Unfortunatly most of the people surviving Fair Valleys meltdown were - apparently - rather old and kept dying of old age even when provided for.
So even while there where plenty of children growing up, total population remained frustratingly stagnant.

At the end of the twenties all that had finally passed. A well educated population in West Town and North River finally a) grew and b) produced significant surplusses that could be traded and/or invested into revitalisation of the other settlements.

By 42 things look like this:

Spoiler :

River Town has moved its forestry to the other side of the river, the new South Town is operating the economic buildings left over from Newtown as well as two fully filled max sized chicken pastures and some orchards on the other side of the southern hills.
I recently got sheep and there are already multiple max size pastues off screen waiting for them.
River town has it's own port now, with a smithy right next to it. There space for more smithies as well as a mine there (the paused thing).
Popuation is soaring and the town generated huge surplussed in, well, everything. The ports are stuffed with 2000 firewood, 4000 venison and some other stuff.
Those farms haven't been used in years. Hunter's each have only one worker, Gatherer's only 2. In the light of that i was just to lazy to bother with the farms.

On the agenda:

- Expanding the town to the east, revitalising Irontown and finally making use of that quarry.
- Scrapping that pasture there and buiding 2 fishing huts and a third merchat there.
- Increasing the well count from 4 to 7 or 8.​

Stone is the sole limiting factor right now. Hence the third trading post.

But, yeah, as i said: I completely, miserably and unambiguously failed with the hoped for quick turnaround.

Damn you're good at this game. Wish I could figure out exactly what I was doing wrong and fix it, it seems I find my way into the same rut each time. Dwindling stone and iron leads to dwindling tools leads to dwindling food leads to starvation and death.

The reason the pastures weren't worked is because the animals all died when I did work them. One had sheep, which after having 2 workers care for him died after 5 years without breeding. One had chickens, which after 5 years or so also failed to breed with two workers. So I just turned them off.

 

[peter grimes]

I'm hoping the advice I'm finding in this thread allows my little village to survive a few years.

I chose Hard, mountains, medium (is there another parameter? I forget?)

I took metatron's dictum and built a school early on - year 2. I staffed it and waited a whole year for a student to arrive didn't realize that not all babies go to school. Live & learn!

Antilogic posted that gathering can yield a pretty efficient food supply, but I saw deer all over, so I thought I should exploit that too. Hunting & Gathering, just as The Ancients did

Workshop-wise i set up a firewoodery and blacksmithery, as well as a fishery. 4 houses and a storage yard, that's everything for the first 3 years. I made dinner, bathed & cribbed the daughter, cleaned the kitchen and folded the diapers, then checked in on things.

Success! 90% of my population survived the first 3 years. The other 10% was most likely eaten. Not sure, they're dead now and that's all that matters

My resource stocks were exhausted, so i stripped bare another wedge of flat land between the hills and the stream. I laid in a quarry and another hunting lodge, I plan on setting up a tree farm on the area. I made a barn and added a trading post, hoping to trade some leather for clothes. I have a labor shortage, otherwise I'd build a tailory.

I've got 17 adults and 3 toddlers, and lost no one in the 5th winter, the Winter of Cold & Feasts. Feasts because there was still plenty of food in late spring 6, cold because nearly everyone's clothes are threadbare!

So a couple of specific questions :
1. How can I eliminate the Cart? They keep dumping stuff into it (like tools), but when I try to destroy it, I get a tool shortage notification. There's no way that I can see to tell the cart to refuse deposits.
2. When do merchants arrive? And does the dock have to be staffed when the trader arrives? I've got 1 ant sitting there waiting for a trader, but I could really use him elsewhere sometimes. But I don't want to miss the boat!

 

[schlaufuchs]

Quarry/Mine should be one of the last things you build. The labor required compared with the amount of return you collect simply isn't worth it in the early stages of the game. Use it only when:

a) You've exhausted all your above-ground stone/iron
and
b) You're floating enough laborers to operate the mine/quarry fully.

The first of these would probably be to get a coal mine going for steel tools, but that should only happen once you've achieved a stable food intake and have provided most of the other amenities.

The other biggest tip is to keep a careful eye on your resource stockpiles. Keep a stockpile of food equivalent to 100xtotal number of citizens in the town. Gather necessary supplies for new buildings before construction starts. Check your town hall constantly. If you're only rectifying dangerously low resources when the notification pops up at the bottom of the screen it's already too late.

 

[peter grimes]

Now you tell me!

The only areas that still have stone are a very long hike (or seem so to me) from the village. And stone is something my building program waits for. So I went for the quarry. I think open stone is >50 tiles distant. I'm on my phone or I'd link Screenshots.

I've got more surface iron ore for a few years, but timber will be my next bottleneck after stone.

I haven't built a townhall because it seemed a luxury in these early days of scarce worker-days.

Good advice about 100x population for food stores. I'm not close to that, more like 15x.

I'm curious to learn how the population growth works. Does it always trail food supply? Is it non-correlated with food? Is it more about happiness and/or health?

 

[Antilogic]

• Normal difficulty, disasters on
• No buildings and no farming off that island. Exceptions: Bridges and stockpiles.
  (I didn't start on the island so my first building had to be in fact a bridge)
• The initial barn has to be razed as soon as survival permits (summer 3 in my case)
• No Gatherers, no Hunters, no Foresters.
• (incidentally) no Quarry, no Mine (a Mine would have been nice but could have only been placed where the Market is - the other sides of the mountain didn't work - and i really wanted the Market)

90% of the difficulty came from the lack of a forester.

Man, you sure like the tough challenges.

Ok, i'm going to say it:

The people on reddit/banished are complete imbeciles, who at some point must have gotten wind of "scientific methods" and didn't get the memo that those are not very effective as a remedy for, you know, one being stupid.

Quill is ok. He's a completely different species than the reddit morons anyway.

The gems are far and few between on reddit, not going to disagree there.

I think Quill's second LP was where I picked up most of my tricks, but he didn't get too detailed on farming and maximizing yield/acreage so that's a real blind spot I have.

Fair enough.

Anyone who's interested in started a succession game, post, and we'll start setting up a list.

I'm interested but time-constrained, count me as a maybe.

I took metatron's dictum and built a school early on - year 2. I staffed it and waited a whole year for a student to arrive didn't realize that not all babies go to school. Live & learn!

Education starts at the age of 10 and they graduate at 16 or so. Not sure exactly when they get out. So you can get away without a school for the first couple years since the kids you start with are likely in the 1-3 range. At least the ones in my town were.

I don't always have the school ready to go for the first one or two migrant kids, but I definitely get it going by the time the first full generation comes up. Edumacation is important.

Antilogic posted that gathering can yield a pretty efficient food supply, but I saw deer all over, so I thought I should exploit that too. Hunting & Gathering, just as The Ancients did

I've found that gatherers max out around 1,300-1,400 food, and hunters around 1,000 with appropriate foliage. On a per-person basis, they are quite similar in terms of output (as is fishing on a lake--fishing is useless on streams and not as efficient on the trading river).

Where you really rack up the advantage is in food variety--gatherers give you 4 types of food (berries, roots, onions, mushrooms), whereas hunters and fishers only give you 1. Until I can start growing crops and planting orchards, I rely on the gatherer to provide variety and thus keep my citizens in good health.

So a couple of specific questions :
1. How can I eliminate the Cart? They keep dumping stuff into it (like tools), but when I try to destroy it, I get a tool shortage notification. There's no way that I can see to tell the cart to refuse deposits.
2. When do merchants arrive? And does the dock have to be staffed when the trader arrives? I've got 1 ant sitting there waiting for a trader, but I could really use him elsewhere sometimes. But I don't want to miss the boat!

If you give the destroy order, your villagers should move the contents of the cart to another barn or a market if you have built one. There should be a unique marker over the cart indicating your laborers are in the process of emptying it. Only laborers do this work, not builders, so you have to make sure you allocate your people appropriately. I think there is a FIFO mechanism in the way your laborers prioritize tasks, so if you have marked a lot of cutting or surface mining, then the task might not be done for a couple years.

Merchants arrive in an erratic fashion, I usually see one or two per year. I don't know of any way to predict which merchant you will get--sometimes you get a general goods merchant that dabbles in everything, sometimes you get a few seed merchants in a row and you can't get those goods you really want. Special orders really help here, but they only apply to the next time you see that particular merchant.

Traders are only required to move the goods to the market--if the building is unstaffed, merchants should still show up, but you might not have anything to trade.

Quarry/Mine should be one of the last things you build. The labor required compared with the amount of return you collect simply isn't worth it in the early stages of the game. Use it only when:

a) You've exhausted all your above-ground stone/iron
and
b) You're floating enough laborers to operate the mine/quarry fully.

The first of these would probably be to get a coal mine going for steel tools, but that should only happen once you've achieved a stable food intake and have provided most of the other amenities.

The other biggest tip is to keep a careful eye on your resource stockpiles. Keep a stockpile of food equivalent to 100xtotal number of citizens in the town. Gather necessary supplies for new buildings before construction starts. Check your town hall constantly. If you're only rectifying dangerously low resources when the notification pops up at the bottom of the screen it's already too late.

Good pointers. I'd add that when you start to do the coal mining for steel tools, keep an eye on your firewood supplies and make sure there is an excess of it. I ran into a major problem in Ashdown where I was trading out a lot of firewood for seeds--this led to my villagers taking the coal for heating instead of the wood, leading to a shutdown of the industry, leading to a massive tool shortage. Took years to recover from that mistake.

 

[Antilogic]

Now you tell me!

The only areas that still have stone are a very long hike (or seem so to me) from the village. And stone is something my building program waits for. So I went for the quarry. I think open stone is >50 tiles distant. I'm on my phone or I'd link Screenshots.

I've got more surface iron ore for a few years, but timber will be my next bottleneck after stone.

I haven't built a townhall because it seemed a luxury in these early days of scarce worker-days.

Good advice about 100x population for food stores. I'm not close to that, more like 15x.

I'm curious to learn how the population growth works. Does it always trail food supply? Is it non-correlated with food? Is it more about happiness and/or health?

Ah, I cross-posted ya.

Villagers will only procreate if they can move out of their parent's house and start their own family. So only "adult" pairs aged 10-35 or so (or 16-35 if you have a school) can have children. If you have a bunch of 20-year olds living with their parents, you need to build more houses to let them move out and start families. This gives you a bit of control over your growth rate--you can always choose to cap it by restricting your house building. I don't know how happiness or health correlates to it, but I'd suspect poor health slows it down. I haven't observed any correlation with happiness.

 

[Yeekim]

Education starts at the age of 10 and they graduate at 16 or so. Not sure exactly when they get out.

I'm pretty sure it's 18.

 

[Antilogic]

I'm pretty sure it's 18.

I just saw older students when I booted up my town last night. It is definitely not the 16 I posted above.

 

[Arexander]

For those who are still wondering whether to get the game or not, TotalBisquit made a game review about Banished. And I'm not sure whether to link to the video or just imbed it into the post.

Oh well, here goes:

Link to video.

 

[metatron]

Damn you're good at this game.

Thanks for the praise but i really didn't manage the crisis itself well. I should have had clearer priorities regarding what to do while everything is blowing up.

Wish I could figure out exactly what I was doing wrong and fix it, it seems I find my way into the same rut each time.

I have a rather long draft for a guide here (i'm very unsatisfied with the text, that's why i'm not posting it) on that particular phase of the game: Shifting from forestry based camps to a big integrated town.

Here are some tl-dr-pointers:

1. Build a school.
Schould be one of your first major buildings. I build my schools before my smithy, but for conveniences sake just go:
Smithy -> school -> tailor -> market/trader/well (in whatever order) -> lengthy epic gameplay -> more lengthy epic gameplay -> hospital... maybe.
You had way too many workshops.
If you place your workshops well it takes a long time before you need a second smithy and even longer before you need a second tailor. Heck, you barely ever "need" a second tailor before you get into building tailors as an export industry.
Heck, technically you don't need cloths at all. It's not fun not to have any but it's a relatively harmless condition.

2. I'm speculating here: Purely based on the looks of it all your 5 settlements started out quite reasonably, but you added more houses to them later and fully staffed most/all the economic buildings.
You're not meant to do that (many people do, though). All the buildings of the early economy have diminishing returns. That differs quite a bit between buildings:
The fourth guy in a gatherer's hut will still turn a decent profit, just not as much as the first one. Second and third hunters are a hell of a lot weaker than the first one but may still be ok. (The first hunter in a hunting cabin is essentially the most OP worker in the early economy).
3rd and 4th fishers are just terrible. A fourth fisher will barely add 100 to the output of the hut. But he'll eat roughly 100 and consume a tool and a coat and firewood and may have a house that interferes with other economic activities.
If that guy derps of a tall ladder, congratulations: Your economy just got better.

3. I, too, am leaning more and more to the view that mines and quarries are essentially more of a punishment than a default option.
What Owen said, essentially.
Listen to Louis C.K.'s channeled "God" and pick up the stuff from the floor.

The reason the pastures weren't worked is because the animals all died when I did work them. One had sheep, which after having 2 workers care for him died after 5 years without breeding. One had chickens, which after 5 years or so also failed to breed with two workers. So I just turned them off.

That's odd then. I can't explain it.

Man, you sure like the tough challenges.

I like to tinker with the small things. Hence the affinity for additional limitations.
I love the opening moves of a new game and all that.

Ah, I cross-posted ya.

Villagers will only procreate if they can move out of their parent's house and start their own family. So only "adult" pairs aged 10-35 or so (or 16-35 if you have a school) can have children.

Allegedly women can give birth from 12 to 40. And allegedly couples tend to be less fertile the bigger their age difference.
Don't remember where i read that, or whether it's true for that matter.
I thought i had seen 10 year citizens with children in one of my first short games. But it's very possible that those were all fathers.

 

[schlaufuchs]

NI haven't built a townhall because it seemed a luxury in these early days of scarce worker-days.

I didn't notice this earlier, but in spite of the cost, town halls are one of the more useful tools in the game. Basically the most important tool towards being successful in this game is keeping an eye on resources, noticing trends, and working to solve problems before they become problems. If you're getting a popup saying "food stores/firewood/tool reserves are low" then you've waited too long and you're going to be in for a heap of trouble. The town hall provides all the charts and detailed statistics that allow you to more accurately keep an eye on these trends. It will tell you if you're consuming more food than you're taking in. It will tell you how stable your resources are, how your production is doing, and where everybody is. Although the up-front cost is fairly high for a young city, it takes no workers and costs no upkeep. It will easily pay for itself in the long run.

 

[metatron]

Owen, exactly for these reasons i'd advise against getting used to town halls.
You can and are in fact supposed to see these things without one.
And if you get used to building one you don't learn it.

I'd also recommend turning the status icons off.
The same principle applies: Tough it out for a game or two. Then you'll have learned to know what's going on.
(Late game is of course a different matter. I'd not really consider it a useful skill to remember which of like 20 workshops are on or off at any given time).

Edit: On second thought... yeah, if you do farming the way most people do, status icons are definitly useful.
I didn't think about that, cause the way i farm i have to click through all fields and orchards anyway. My bad.

 

[Joecoolyo]

I have a rather long draft for a guide here (i'm very unsatisfied with the text, that's why i'm not posting it) on that particular phase of the game: Shifting from forestry based camps to a big integrated town.

Here are some tl-dr-pointers:

1. Build a school.
Schould be one of your first major buildings. I build my schools before my smithy, but for conveniences sake just go:
Smithy -> school -> tailor -> market/trader/well (in whatever order) -> lengthy epic gameplay -> more lengthy epic gameplay -> hospital... maybe.
You had way too many workshops.
If you place your workshops well it takes a long time before you need a second smithy and even longer before you need a second tailor. Heck, you barely ever "need" a second tailor before you get into building tailors as an export industry.
Heck, technically you don't need cloths at all. It's not fun not to have any but it's a relatively harmless condition.

School was something I did in my first play-through, and haven't done since. My town collapsed because all the replacement workers were getting educated instead of replacing the dying ones. Maybe I should give it another shot then.

And really about the smithies? I don't understand how other players are not going through the tool shortages I am! I placed the second and third blacksmiths because I had a lot of iron sitting around, with an extremely paltry production of tools coming in. I have no idea how to get my smithy to produce enough tools to satisfy my population.

2. I'm speculating here: Purely based on the looks of it all your 5 settlements started out quite reasonably, but you added more houses to them later and fully staffed most/all the economic buildings.
You're not meant to do that (many people do, though). All the buildings of the early economy have diminishing returns. That differs quite a bit between buildings:
The fourth guy in a gatherer's hut will still turn a decent profit, just not as much as the first one. Second and third hunters are a hell of a lot weaker than the first one but may still be ok. (The first hunter in a hunting cabin is essentially the most OP worker in the early economy).
3rd and 4th fishers are just terrible. A fourth fisher will barely add 100 to the output of the hut. But he'll eat roughly 100 and consume a tool and a coat and firewood and may have a house that interferes with other economic activities.
If that guy derps of a tall ladder, congratulations: Your economy just got better.

Alright, sound advice. I'll avoid full employment.

That's odd then. I can't explain it.

I looked it up after it happened. Apparently, animals come in both sexes, and its a 50/50 shot whether or not you get a female. If you end up with a male, or two males, then they won't breed and just die. I guess I just got incredibly unlucky and ended up with all males.

 

[warpus]

The smithy is usually my first major building that I build, because otherwise I usually run out of tools shortly thereafter and everyone dies..

I start building that thing as soon as I see that I have 10 tools or less in storage. It seems to happen early on in the game.. always.