Banished - town building colonization survival game

[bhavv]

I just picked this up on the steam sales and only went through the tutorials so far, it looks proper hardcore

 

[bhavv]

Hmm, can anyone help me please, why wont it let me buy these pumpkin seeds? I've got plenty of stuff for sale, and before the merchant arrived it said venison was worth 3, herbs worth 4, and the rest worth 1 but it wont let me trade any of them:

Spoiler :

 

[Malachi256]

He doesn't want any of that stuff (at least that's my assumption based on limited experience). Try different types of commodities - most traders will take firewood, for example.

 

[bhavv]

Yea I figured it out. Check out these tiny farms and orchards:

Spoiler :

Making big ones too early wasnt going well due to a low population, so I just made tiny ones that can be worked by 1 farmer each.

 

[bhavv]

Would anyone like some ale? I should have plenty to share soon:

Spoiler :

 

[EQandcivfanatic]

Would anyone like some ale? I should have plenty to share soon:

Spoiler :

Haven't really seen the point of ale. I've been able to keep happiness up without it quite easily.

 

[bhavv]

My happiness went down to 3.5 so I started making ale and built churches.

I got up to 300+ population, but then all the adults started dying and there weren't enough children / students to replace them and everything failed.

 

[Antilogic]

Ale is great for exporting, especially if you are surviving on imported iron and thus can't regularly sell tools.

And yeah, the seed trader won't accept food for his seeds, and some of them only pay 3 for firewood instead of 4.

 

[bhavv]

Building extra cow / sheep pastures is also good for trading as the wool and leather is worth a lot, or spreading out hunters huts all over unsettled land (deer don't actually need trees to spawn, they just don't spawn in settled areas).

I need to start building houses near my agricultural areas, and at higher populations if you don't keep on expanding housing, your population dies off from old age very quickly. I don't like that you cant set up a settlement and just leave it running due to that.

 

[Antilogic]

You can with a boarding house and some really nit-picky micro-managing. What you have to do is evict old families (especially single old people living on their own), and then there is a chance a new, young family will occupy the house and start having children. The old people will stay in the boarding house.

I'm a big fan of manufacturing alcohol, as you might be able to tell from my prior screenshots. I haven't tried directly exporting leather or wool, I always seem to need one of the two for my tailors but I sell off a few excess warm coats. And loads of booze.

 

[bhavv]

Cool, I wasnt using boarding houses yet. I found this map on Reddit and tried playing it:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Banished/comments/29jfce/just_played_a_great_map_tldr_valley_large/

The central starting island is strong for fishing + trade posts, and the land to south is huge and flat for more than enough farms, orchards and pastures.

But I got to a point where I have loads of empty houses, lots of potential food, but my population just wont grow, and keeps on shrinking from mothers dying during childbirth, or work accidents (no deaths from starvation or cold!!!).

Also I've exhausted all the nearby top stone, and have a quarry, iron and coal mine being built atm, but theres no way I can work those now as you get way too many accidents QQ

Spoiler :

The big field left of the marketplace can also be split into 3 x 4x15 fields to work it with just 3 farmers, which I've found is the most efficient, and 15x13 orchards with 3 farmers

The reserved forested space can hold a row of 3+ 20x20 pastures, and theres plenty more room south of the market for more farms and orchards.

I have everything self sustained atm until I work the quarry and mines, but my population isnt growing. I think I need to get trading posts built before my mines and rely on buying stone with my excess food.

Also for leather trading, if you spam hunters huts you get thousands more in excess than I needed for a population of 300+, and they are worth 10 units each so you can easily afford to buy all the iron, coal and stone that comes by that point in the game.

 

[bhavv]

Ok, that game just wouldn't recover. Year 30+ and still stuck at under 25 workers with no growth happening.

Basic stuff I'm figuring out, that others likely already know:

Early farms = bad. I'm going to start playing on hard difficulty now.

Most efficient crop field size = 4x15 with 1 farmer and right next to a barn / market for 100% efficiency (build a market, surround it with 4x15s of each crop type).

Most efficient orchard is 4x5, due to the spacing of trees being 3x2 tiles apart. The larger you make them, the more space wasted along the axis of 3 tiles per tree. Better to stick 4x5s in small corners around your settlements, one farmer can still clear them even with a bit of a trek to the nearest storage.

Biggest food producers = Gatherers Huts and Hunting Lodge, both most efficient with 2 workers in each. For each extra worker in the gatherers hut, I don't even think I saw a 25% increase in the food output, and there's 0 difference with more than 2 hunters (1000 max venison, and usually getting 800-1000 per season with 2 workers in well placed lodges).

The advantage to crops and orchards is really just adding lots more health, they aren't very reliable.

I don't know what I think of stone houses asap. Its worked well in 3/4 games, then failed miserably in my last one.

I always build a school first. That way I only ever have 1 uneducated worker. I've not yet found the best opening build plan after that other than houses, but it seems that gatherers huts are the best early food source, and placing two of those in the first year, and then adding a hunting lodge next to both in the second year plus two fisheries, each with 2 workers should work well for food (one fishery with 4 workers = 650 food, same fishery with 2 workers = 430 food, and even less gains on hunters and gatherers as noted above).

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Ok, that game just wouldn't recover. Year 30+ and still stuck at under 25 workers with no growth happening.

There are two possible actions that might get you out of that misery:
(1) Reduce the number of available houses to increase the likelyhood of families that live together and breed.
(2) Build a townhall and accept some nomads.

Most efficient crop field size = 4x15 with 1 farmer and right next to a barn / market for 100% efficiency (build a market, surround it with 4x15s of each crop type).

I think you can actually assign even more space. I am mostly using 10x10 fields and they yield 700 food with 1 worker assigned. Biggest problem with small(ish) fields seems to be the single worker: If he is busy with something else during sowing or harvest season, the yield can vary quite a bit...

Most efficient orchard is 4x5, due to the spacing of trees being 3x2 tiles apart. The larger you make them, the more space wasted along the axis of 3 tiles per tree. Better to stick 4x5s in small corners around your settlements, one farmer can still clear them even with a bit of a trek to the nearest storage.

How much does that yield on average per year? Seems a bit like waste of manpower to me...

Biggest food producers = Gatherers Huts and Hunting Lodge, both most efficient with 2 workers in each. For each extra worker in the gatherers hut, I don't even think I saw a 25% increase in the food output, and there's 0 difference with more than 2 hunters (1000 max venison, and usually getting 800-1000 per season with 2 workers in well placed lodges).

Fishermen can also be amazing for the early game if the setup is right (lots of water + nearby house/barn). But gatherer is indeed a no-brainer. Even better: You can make ale from the berries and trade that for other goods.

The advantage to crops and orchards is really just adding lots more health, they aren't very reliable.

Farms are not super efficent in regards of yield per manpower, but they are VERY good in regards of yield per area. A gatherer covers a pretty large area - and as your town grows space and travel distances will actually become a problem.

I don't know what I think of stone houses asap. Its worked well in 3/4 games, then failed miserably in my last one.

Stone houses are a luxury. Early on wooden houses are perfectly fine, better save the stones and get something else for it, like an early trade depot, townhall or market place. Once you have secured a steady source of stone via trade it is, however, a good idea to upgrade houses. It seems to reduce firewood demand quite a bit, which in return means you need less foresters/woodcutters and have more space/manpower for other stuff.

I always build a school first. That way I only ever have 1 uneducated worker. I've not yet found the best opening build plan after that other than houses, but it seems that gatherers huts are the best early food source, and placing two of those in the first year, and then adding a hunting lodge next to both in the second year plus two fisheries, each with 2 workers should work well for food (one fishery with 4 workers = 650 food, same fishery with 2 workers = 430 food, and even less gains on hunters and gatherers as noted above).

Some ways to improve your early game food yield:
(1) Build a forester next to the gatherer, assign 1 guy and set him to "plan" mode. The extra trees should double the yield of your gatherer.
(2) Add a barn + house right next to your gatherer asap. The reduced walking time will also significantly increase yield. The same is also true for fishermen who benefit SIGNIFICANTLY from that.

 

[bhavv]

My dislike of farms stemmed from two mistakes I made:

1) Making them too big early on and lacking the workers they needed
2) When I tried to build them too early on when more gatherers / hunters would have been much better.

Regarding the 4x5 orchard size, its not what gets you the most food overall, but its the orchard size that yields the most food per tile. But with larger single worker capable orchards they become more efficient in terms of food per worker. Im not finding the maximum size crop fields and orchards to be as efficient in terms of both food per tile, and food per worker.

With a 10x10 field and just 1 farmer, dont you get a lot of wasted food by the time it starts to snow?

And I found what happens when you build too many houses:

Spoiler :

Going to try evicting them till they are in the same house.

Result:

Spoiler :

Make me moar babies now!!!

 

[Antilogic]

This size calculator may be useful to you new players, it lets you predict the yield per tile and workers required for fields, orchards, and pastures, plus it tells you how many grave sites you will have in a cemetery of a given size.

I usually assign an extra farmer to each field to help with the harvest before the snowfall ruins the crops, but my recent towns have had a lot of excess manpower because I have been avoiding quarries and mines. You might want to do this starting in the late summer and then pull the extras back into your laborer pool in the winter.

I'm going to have to try exporting leather, it does look like it could be an effective export commodity and it would only require an extra hunting lodge to produce enough for sale.

(And yeah, your early lessons learned are very similar to ours--wait before you go into agriculture!)

 

[bhavv]

Now I bumped it up to hard difficulty, what I'm doing is 6-8 wooden houses per hunter + gatherer node (and 1 fishery per node too).

I actually went and stuck hunter, gatherer, forester (1 worker only, cutting NOT disabled), woodcutter, herbalist, storage barn altogether, left the log cap at 200, and raised firewood and herbs to 5000 to stock up my trade posts. Also I had way too much venison and fish so also fill my trade posts with those.

With the log cap in place, the forests are rarely touched, with less than 1 tree per node keeping the cap filled so the gatherer and herbalist kept working with great potential (2 workers per gatherer and hunter, 1 per herbalist).

One other thing I tried instead of trading leather was making 2 tailors as the leather coats are worth 15 each, so I can keep stocked with with leather coats, herbs and firewood for trading.

Also any ship that had stone I set to custom order stone. Later I'll add iron and coal when I need them more at a higher population.

And pretty much just fill the entire map with forest nodes as the population grows. I could try berry ale as well for trading.

Venison can also be traded for 1:3 crop / gatherer food so you can triple your food stock that way.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

With a 10x10 field and just 1 farmer, dont you get a lot of wasted food by the time it starts to snow?

That really depends more on the weather than worker mood. If snow hits in early winter (as it should with normal climate settings) you will get the full harvest in most of the time, which means 800 food/worker efficiency. It is, however, important that you provide houses and a barn close to the field so that the worker has as little downtime as possible.

And you should NEVER rely on just one or two fields to feed your people. If that one worker takes a tour to the herbalist or lives in the wrong house things can go wrong really fast. That's why I'd suggest to either get several fields when using this method (4-6) or to use bigger fields with more workers during the early game.

And: Thanks for that size calculator!
Quite helpful

 

[bhavv]

There is one thing I'm absolutely hating about this game though ....

I cant get 'Ding fries are done, ding fries are done' out of head forever now

 

[metatron]

1.Early farms = bad. I'm going to start playing on hard difficulty now.

2.Most efficient crop field size = 4x15 with 1 farmer and right next to a barn / market for 100% efficiency (build a market, surround it with 4x15s of each crop type).

3.Most efficient orchard is 4x5, due to the spacing of trees being 3x2 tiles apart. The larger you make them, the more space wasted along the axis of 3 tiles per tree. Better to stick 4x5s in small corners around your settlements, one farmer can still clear them even with a bit of a trek to the nearest storage.

4.Biggest food producers = Gatherers Huts and Hunting Lodge, both most efficient with 2 workers in each. For each extra worker in the gatherers hut, I don't even think I saw a 25% increase in the food output, and there's 0 difference with more than 2 hunters (1000 max venison, and usually getting 800-1000 per season with 2 workers in well placed lodges).

5.The advantage to crops and orchards is really just adding lots more health, they aren't very reliable.
Also: Health is really not very important and a herbalist can go a long way towards compensating lack of diversity in food supply.

6.I don't know what I think of stone houses asap. Its worked well in 3/4 games, then failed miserably in my last one.

7.I always build a school first.

8.but it seems that gatherers huts are the best early food source, and placing two of those in the first year, and then adding a hunting lodge next to both in the second year plus two fisheries, each with 2 workers should work well for food (one fishery with 4 workers = 650 food, same fishery with 2 workers = 430 food, and even less gains on hunters and gatherers as noted above).

numbered for my convenience

1. Farms can be good. They require attention though.

2. The aspect ratio of farms is immaterial. And if you micro-manage farming (which you should) big farms are actually very bad.

3. Wasn't it 5x4? Or am i (by some weird conincidence) always rotating?

4. Yes and no. See 8.

5. If designed and managed correctly they can be reliable enough and relatively efficient. Orchards are essentially the strongest food source in the game in terms of food per labor input (micromanaged), let alone in terms of food per used space.

6. For large towns firewood becomes a significant issue. Stone houses are expensive but it's a one-time cost, while the usage of manpower and space for firewood generation is perpetual.
It's not advisable to build stone houses before you have roughly everything of economic relevance (workshops, markets, wells, trading ports) though.

7. Good for you.

8. Some stuff i wrote back then on the early economy and building outputs:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=522255

This size calculator may be useful to you new players,

It may be useful to me, because i've never done a complete test on pasture sizes.
Awesome!

I still maintain that the conventional "science" on farming is complete bukllpucky for people who want to play a (not so) interactive movie.

 

[bhavv]

I'm not playing any games anymore.

I'm on a gaming fast until my highly expensive new monitor comes at the end of the month. Then I can go crazy with the sheer awesomeness on 2560x1440 at 144 Hz.