Banished - town building colonization survival game

Save file is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/iipi9rmdfk620ya/Pete1.sav

@Antilogic: I feel uncomfortable extending deadlines because the people who met the deadline didn't have the knowledge that it might be extended. So no.

But I'll do another challenge this week.

@All: I'm likely to be terribly busy the first part of this week, so don't expect me to finalize the stuff from the last challenge until Thursday or so.

Suggestions for the next challenge are welcome!
 
Okay, I just checked the save. Some comments:

(1) Increase the production limits! You can never have too much stuff in reserve. Gradually increase it as your population grows. If you ever use farms you should have 1-2 years of food consumption as a reserve - otherwise a series of bad harvests with expanding population will result in a famine.

My suggestions for your current situation:
5000 food
500 wood/stone/iron
1000 firewood
200 tools/coats

(2) Build more houses and storage barns. Ideally each food producer should receive 1 storage barn (later 2) + 1 house directly next to him. Also designate decent sized stockpiles (5x5) next to any ressource producer that needs to store them (forester, woodcutter, quarry, mine).

My suggestions for your current situation:
Build a barn and 2 wooden houses next to the fisherman. Build a storage barn and 2 houses next to the southern gatherer. This should increase efficiency significantly, allow you to store more food and kickstart pop growth.

(3) Set your existing foresters to 1 max worker and "plant only" mode. This will vastly increase your food production from gatherers. If you need wood, you can just manually order some trees to be cut down. Later on I'd suggest you place another 1 forester + 1 woodcutter + 1 house in the small valley north east of your northern hunters lodge. This one can be set to 4/4 to produce enough wood for your firewood production.

(4) Due to the map size I'd strongly suggest to rely on trading to import stone and iron (and later on wood). Designate LARGE stockpiles around your trade post (I'd suggest at least 100 tiles, 200 is certainly better). Expand south and place another 4/4 forester + woodcutter on the west bank of the river. Use firewood to buy stone and iron. Once you have seeds (I'd suggest wheat as your first pick) start expanding to the big valleys in the North East and South East and establish small farming communities. Use breweries to turn your wheat into ale and use this as your main trade good.

(5) As for your current food situation:
Try to reach the big island in the lake and put down several 1 fishermen + storage barn + wooden house combination to supply your population with food as it grows.

(6) Build one herbalist in either of he forester areas to make sure you get herbs for your population. If you can manage to get a surplus with him use them for export. Don't forget to get a hospital later on (I'd actually build it before the town hall) - diseases can kill a LOT of people.

(7) Other stuff:
Don't use stone roads that early in the game. Dirt is perfectly fine. That stone is better used somewhere else.

Due to your lack of children. I'd suggst to get 6-8 houses early on (once you have the basic stuff up) to allow at least some reproduction. Your population will decline quickly in the next few years. Get houses ASAP. You even might want to suspend schooling to get them as workers.

Always build one or more extra buildings for the following professions once your initial village is stable: woodcutter, blacksmith, tailor, school, herbalist. This will allow you to react to the increasing demand during pop growth. Backups are also handy should you effer suffer a crisis (fire, tornade, etc.).

Your trading post was build a bit too early. You do not yet have any decent trading good production chains up. The stone would have been more useful for other stuff (e.g. bridges).

If you have build the townhall to get nomads: Don't. It is very costly and while the statistics are useful later on, at this stage you are still able to guess consumption. Also nomads are (iirc) uneducated, so they are way less efficient than your own population. The only time you should accept them if you lost many people to a disaster or have a pop crisis (which is the case here, but could have been prevented by building 4 more houses).

The northern gatherer is placed in a pretty bad spot. Half of the area of operation is blocked by mountains + rivers, so the output will be pretty low.

Placing your fishermen huts in the right spot is very important. Each square of water you can get into his area of operation will increase output significantly. The fishermen north of the trading post would probably have been 30% more efficient if you had placed it 5 squares to the south. In general you should try to get at least 50% water in the AOO. They also benefi the most from directly adjected storage barns and houses.


I'll upload some "modified" (played) version of your save to demonstrate the expansion stuff + a few of my towns to show you how I build/organize things.
Give me an hour or two for that.

EDIT: Okay, played for more two decades. You will need to micro the houses to overcome your population shortage OR finish the town hall to get nomads. Otherwise your pop will stall for the next decade or so (and in that case it would actually be easier to just start over from scratch).

Here are some saves with expansion recommendation and other cities from me that might give you some hints how to organize stuff:
https://www.mediafire.com/?8cos169rjrrsj93
 
Okay, I just checked the save. Some comments:

(1) Increase the production limits! You can never have too much stuff in reserve. Gradually increase it as your population grows. If you ever use farms you should have 1-2 years of food consumption as a reserve - otherwise a series of bad harvests with expanding population will result in a famine.

My suggestions for your current situation:
5000 food
500 wood/stone/iron
1000 firewood
200 tools/coats
I had the production caps because I thought that with a small population, where each citizen had to wear many trademen's hats, I needed to efficiently switch them out of professions once I had enough of a resource in the bank to afford the time investment in another resource. Run-on sentence, but that was my thinking. I've taken your advice and increased the limits, but not quite as high as you suggested :shifty:

(2) Build more houses and storage barns. Ideally each food producer should receive 1 storage barn (later 2) + 1 house directly next to him. Also designate decent sized stockpiles (5x5) next to any ressource producer that needs to store them (forester, woodcutter, quarry, mine).

My suggestions for your current situation:
Build a barn and 2 wooden houses next to the fisherman. Build a storage barn and 2 houses next to the southern gatherer. This should increase efficiency significantly, allow you to store more food and kickstart pop growth.
I got the barns built and added a couple of stockpiles. I added at least one house, I can't remember if I did two.


(3) Set your existing foresters to 1 max worker and "plant only" mode. This will vastly increase your food production from gatherers. If you need wood, you can just manually order some trees to be cut down. Later on I'd suggest you place another 1 forester + 1 woodcutter + 1 house in the small valley north east of your northern hunters lodge. This one can be set to 4/4 to produce enough wood for your firewood production.
Never knew that about "plant" increasing Gatherer yield. Makes sense, clearly. I'm now leaving between 2 and 3 foresters in Plant mode, setting them all on Cut when I need to replenish log stock.


(4) Due to the map size I'd strongly suggest to rely on trading to import stone and iron (and later on wood). Designate LARGE stockpiles around your trade post (I'd suggest at least 100 tiles, 200 is certainly better). Expand south and place another 4/4 forester + woodcutter on the west bank of the river. Use firewood to buy stone and iron. Once you have seeds (I'd suggest wheat as your first pick) start expanding to the big valleys in the North East and South East and establish small farming communities. Use breweries to turn your wheat into ale and use this as your main trade good.
I threw a few items into the trading post to see what their values are. I can get 8 for herbs, 15 for Leather Coats. I'm going to try to use Leather Coats as my main trade good. This means that I'm cycling a worker from one profession into Tailoring, then back out once the leather supply is dry. 1 Wheat seeds cost 3000, so it's going to take me a while to get up that high.

While I was banking Coats (and, mistakenly, Logs), I had the opportunity to buy Sheep. I went for it, bought 3 sheep, which is now up to 5. Their Pasture is only big enough for 6, so I don't know if it's really going to result in much of an industry. There isn't much flat land around, so I have to consider if the wool is worth it.

So far no trader has been able to trade or sell me stone.


(5) As for your current food situation:
Try to reach the big island in the lake and put down several 1 fishermen + storage barn + wooden house combination to supply your population with food as it grows.
Not sure if you saw this in my save, but I had gone through and laid in a half dozen fisheries, then set them on pause. I tried to get more than 50% water tiles - a couple of them had more than 70%. Obviously this is a long term plan.



(6) Build one herbalist in either of he forester areas to make sure you get herbs for your population. If you can manage to get a surplus with him use them for export. Don't forget to get a hospital later on (I'd actually build it before the town hall) - diseases can kill a LOT of people.
Did the herbalist in the southern area and he's drawing quite the surplus. I'm skimming off 50 herbs here and there for export.

(7) Other stuff:
Don't use stone roads that early in the game. Dirt is perfectly fine. That stone is better used somewhere else.

Due to your lack of children. I'd suggst to get 6-8 houses early on (once you have the basic stuff up) to allow at least some reproduction. Your population will decline quickly in the next few years. Get houses ASAP. You even might want to suspend schooling to get them as workers.
The stone road was sort of an experiment. At the time I only had the northern production area, so I wanted to see how much faster people would walk along it. I'm loathe to suspend schooling because of the inefficiency everyone whines about. If I only have 8 workers, shouldn't I want them to be as efficient as possible? I'm sure there's a point of inflection where the loss of a worker from the pool (the Teacher) results in an overall loss of productivity, but I wouldn't know where to begin to tease that math out of the game. For what it's worth, I've played through another 10 years, keeping the Teacher, and so far I'm still going.

Always build one or more extra buildings for the following professions once your initial village is stable: woodcutter, blacksmith, tailor, school, herbalist. This will allow you to react to the increasing demand during pop growth. Backups are also handy should you effer suffer a crisis (fire, tornade, etc.).

Your trading post was build a bit too early. You do not yet have any decent trading good production chains up. The stone would have been more useful for other stuff (e.g. bridges).

If you have build the townhall to get nomads: Don't. It is very costly and while the statistics are useful later on, at this stage you are still able to guess consumption. Also nomads are (iirc) uneducated, so they are way less efficient than your own population. The only time you should accept them if you lost many people to a disaster or have a pop crisis (which is the case here, but could have been prevented by building 4 more houses).
Good advice. I think I'm up to 7 houses now? with a population around 11. It's sad to see that in one house it's just an 8 year old girl living alone :sad: Poor thing. At least she's in school with another kid, so hopefully they're friends.


The northern gatherer is placed in a pretty bad spot. Half of the area of operation is blocked by mountains + rivers, so the output will be pretty low.

Placing your fishermen huts in the right spot is very important. Each square of water you can get into his area of operation will increase output significantly. The fishermen north of the trading post would probably have been 30% more efficient if you had placed it 5 squares to the south. In general you should try to get at least 50% water in the AOO. They also benefi the most from directly adjected storage barns and houses.
I moved the fisherman and you're right - the output is much higher. In fact, I'm generally feeding my population with only the single fisherman and a single gatherer.


I'll upload some "modified" (played) version of your save to demonstrate the expansion stuff + a few of my towns to show you how I build/organize things.
Give me an hour or two for that.
I haven't yet taken the time to check these out, but I did download them. Thanks! :hatsoff:

EDIT: Okay, played for more two decades. You will need to micro the houses to overcome your population shortage OR finish the town hall to get nomads. Otherwise your pop will stall for the next decade or so (and in that case it would actually be easier to just start over from scratch).

Here are some saves with expansion recommendation and other cities from me that might give you some hints how to organize stuff:
https://www.mediafire.com/?8cos169rjrrsj93

What do you mean by micromanaging the houses? I'm getting about 1 birth per 18 months, so at least that's something. But clearly I need more kids. Thoughts?
 
Spoiler :
attachment.php

12 adults
16 children

1.3̅ children per adult


Tried to do better at later dates. Failed to do so.


I have to admit that i got distracted and have barely touched Banished in like 10 days, because i got wind of the fact that EU4 finally makes some sense (when people moan that game mechanics are tough on them that's usually a good sign).

In my estimation the winner here will either do 12/1/17 or some such by virtue of luck or go through some comlicated motions to kill adults of in quarries or with disasters.
I'd love to share any deep insights into mating mechanics and how to do fundamentally better than 50% children in an actual town (past year 2).
But i have no such insights.
I'm sorry.

I am also unable to properly input a vinculum by use of a keyboard. :mischief:

Spoiler :
B3024D31EF2B50EB030108083AF780934F5F8DCC


My current town's pop graph. Gah, I wish it was easier to read, I can't tell the exact number of kids I have to adults, though I could swear at points it got quite big.


Ok, sorry for the delay here. Clearly I'm not very good at planning for unexpected last-minute projects! :lol:


I took a screensnip for Joe's graph and counted pixels. There were two areas with a close ration, but the year 14 was higher. In my pixel counting, each pixel came out to 2.5 people, based on vertical position of the baseline and the vertical position of the 250 population tick mark. (0 = px279, 250 = px178) (note that the pixels are in reverse order from the population, since MS paint counted pixels starting at the top of the screensnip, not the bottom. Math is the same, though)

In year 14:
adults @ px259
kids @ px272

So, subtracting these positions from the zero at px 279, we get
Adults = 20px = 50
Kids = 7px = 18 (rounding up)
Ratio of .36 kids per adult

:trophy: Metatron wins, likely due to a nice seed. [Heh.]


There haven't been any suggestions for another challenge yet. No ideas?

There was also talk about a succession game.... :mischief:
 
What do you mean by micromanaging the houses? I'm getting about 1 birth per 18 months, so at least that's something. But clearly I need more kids. Thoughts?
You can upgrade wooden houses and then halt the construction.
This will kick out all inhabitants and assign them to other houses. Once that is done you can cancel the upgrade to re-open it.

This can be used to kick out old widowed people that occupy a full house alone and instead allows you to move a new family in to allow breeding. But remember that this makes you a horrible person. :p

The thing with birth ratio is that your pops age at 1 year per season (iirc), so unless you manage to create new families your stagnation in that save will continue for a long time. I let it run for 20 more years without intervention and never managed to increase the actual pop size (might have been bad luck, though).

And:
Glad to be of service! I wish all the best for your current (and upcoming) settlements!
:king:
 
I got some serious hours in over the weekend. My daughter is moving more to independent play, which means I can resume playing more regularly (especially when my wife is working!)

I'm around year 50 and I've got a population of ~28. So I'm doing something right! I started a wheat farm, forgot to assign workers a couple of times, lesson learned ;)

I've got a food stash of about 9000, I'm stable with my tool and fuel production, and I've started slowly establishing a couple other development areas.

All in all, the advices have worker :thumbup:

I opened some of your saves yesterday and poked around. I also "earned" a buttload of achievements. Thanks, I guess? Feels like a hollow accomplishment.

I was shocked at how far you people have to walk on their daily commute. I thought it would be smart to site housing close to workplaces, but I see you have clusters of housing served by a market. What's a good rule of thumb for determining the maximum distance for people to walk? A market is a pretty big investment, so it doesn't make sense to plop them down to serve fewer than a certain number of folk - 8? 12? :dunno:
 
Sorry, I haven't followed the thread recently but I played a bit over the weekend and my town of New Marion (where I am not building any mines or quarries) is nearly up to 800 people! I want to get back into the game discussion, so here I am.

Regarding markets: they make a lot of sense once you have a lot of labor-intensive industry nearby to provide jobs for the people living in those houses. If you are doing mines and quarries, or if you have a lot of fishing and farming on the outskirts with a couple solid housing blocks in the middle, markets work wonders.

They also employ vendors that go out to barns and stockpiles to bring back food, firewood, tools, and clothing--it improves food variety and makes the market a one-stop shop for all your people's needs.

Early on, though, I don't build markets because a couple of barns are close enough to the housing to supply them, and there's not a lot of variety except from the gatherer, which will be stashing all its food production in a single barn anyway.
 
So in regards to markets, I find they are the cornerstone of any long-term strategy and building, and I like to get the first one up ASAP.

At the moment I'm running a town that has a population of around 350 people, and I've think I've figured out the most efficient model for maintaining a larger town, and it's 100% market-centric. This town in particular made it to 250 people by year 30, and despite a major fire and ensuing chaos that destroyed the entire heart of the town and brought my population down to a mere 40, I'm back up to 350 by year 60 in game. This has made me a firm believer in that the market is the most essential building a stable town can have. For those interested, here's how it's been working so far, with the market at the core, and then surrounding layers of build up.

The Core: The Market, the heart of the city, this is also where I put my Town Hall, though mostly for appearance reasons than out of practicality.

Layer One: The Housing District. Immediately around the market, and this means the entire area within the yellow boundary line of the market, is where ALL of my housing is located. At the moment this is housing for all 350 people, and is mostly cheap wooden houses, though I've begun replacing some with stone as the resources become available. As I learned to my regret, make sure there's plenty of wells around too. No other buildings besides residences should be in this area for the greatest effect. With a fully staffed market, I am having no trouble keeping all homes well supplied with food and firewood. Depending on the geography of your map, you may need to have some varied types of other buildings in this area, but the focus should be on houses, and house alone.

Layer Two: The Industry and Civic Centers. Immediately outside of the market's yellow line, as close as you can fit it to the houses, should be your Churches, graveyards, blacksmiths, woodcutters, etc. By being in this layer, they are close enough to houses to be quick commutes, and the labor intensive operations of quarries and mines will need a lot of nearby houses to be the most effective. By having barns and stockpiles in this layer, you will make it easy for vendors from the market to haul whatever they can to the Market and centralize your assets.

Layer Three: The Farmland. Once again, you want this to be squished as closely as possible to Layers One and Two, possibly even overlapping with the other. As you purchase seeds and livestock, increase the farmland as much as possible, using every square of space between you and layer three. Keep fields somewhat small when possible to reduce the overall amount of labor being used.

Layer Four: The Gatherers. Layer Four is the most essential for keeping your people alive, as it also acts as the emergency backup if a catastrophe occurs in your main population center (as it did for me). From Layer Three, you must extend out in a spoke-like fashion, creating Hunting/Gathering Camps. These camps include a Forester, Gatherer, and Hunting Cabin (with Herbalist as an option if you really need it. By this point, these can be a long ways away from your city heart. Still, with enough spokes, even the lousy commute time can be mitigated to an extent.


Anyways, that's the setup that's really working for my town, and I'll post a picture when I get home today to demonstrate.
 
Interesting, EQ. Does this mean that when you first setup a town you place the gatherers far from the city center - or do you set them up closer at first, then dismantle and move them further out?
 
Interesting, EQ. Does this mean that when you first setup a town you place the gatherers far from the city center - or do you set them up closer at first, then dismantle and move them further out?

Well, dismantling was my plan at first, but as it turned out, due to fortunate geography, in the case of this town, I've only dismantled one, and I could have probably kept it. When I first did my setup, I created one of the gatherer compounds like I laid out to start with next to the automatic clearing that all towns get. I used the clearing itself for my stockpile (so the stockpile would be created automatically without needing to clear trees) and first few houses. The market was actually the next structure I built, further south, making sure that the market radius did not overlap with the gatherer/forester/hunter radius. After the market was built, I was able to create the spokes that followed from there. I'll post a picture later illustrating the whole concept.

It's a pretty solid strategy I think, especially if you make sure that there's plenty of storage barns in the more distant layers. The Market makes sure that everything is centralized in the good times, but if you get hit by a really nasty disaster as I did, the storage barns are there as a backup. The Trader can act as a useful backup too for things like Tools and Coats, if you keep it further away from the city center as I did.
 
I try to mentally outline where I want my city core (I follow a similar arrangement to EQ), and then set up my early buildings largely in line with that. I'm going to have to dismantle one of my forest RGOs and move it further out, though, so m planning wasn't perfect.
 
My biggest problem these days is finding things for people to do. I've got about 15 surplus laborers, and my mines and quarries are full, as is everything else. I'm also starting to suspect that I may be nearing a point where further extensions onto my spokes may be too far away from the housing district.
 
At least you have mines and quarries. I have tons of excess laborers (up to 30!) to the point where I'm building "inefficient" larger farms and staffing the full six to maintain employment. I seriously need to look at all my routes because I'm starting to get really inefficient.
 
Spoiler :

kmszP9y.jpg



All right, the above is the heart of my city. Due to frame reasons, all of the spokes can't be seen. Here's the key to what you're looking at:

1. The Market Itself.

2. The Housing District

3. The industrial areas (note that there is overlap with the housing)

4. The farmland (once again, overlap with industrial)

5. The blue circles are the RGOs as Antilogic puts it. As you can see, the northern one has been slowly getting encroached upon by housing and farms. That was the first RGO I built, and is likely the next one to be destroyed in favor of more farms and quarries.

6. This marks my original starting spot.
 
You have packed your housing district efficiently--I am building around the large river and a lake and I couldn't have been as efficient.

But I'm here to rant. Because I have three trading posts, with multiple requests to always bring iron to multiple merchants. I'm playing without mines or quarries, so I'm completely dependent on imported iron for my economy. Would anyone like to guess how many ships have shown up carrying iron in the last 7 game years? Seriously, anyone? I'll give you all a big hint, it's between zero and effing zero. I've mined most of the surface iron on the map, with only a small patch behind two small rivers in the far corner of the map that would require multiple death marches to obtain because of the massive tool shortage I am facing (coming up on 300 and still rising!).

All I get are food merchants, and I have nearly 120k stockpiled before the autumn harvest. They are completely useless.
 
When I was rebuilding, I too had a tool shortage, and agree with your rant. Almost every single baot that came in had either food I didn't need or seeds/livestock I couldn't afford. After the crisis abated after about 10 years, a ship FINALLY came in with steel tools and iron. Real pain in the ass. I wish the merchants knew basic ideas of supply and demand, and were able to fulfill demand without special order.
 
Even putting in special orders, sometimes years go by without a boat that gives me what I want. I've had resource merchants, where I have specifically requested coal and iron, only bring one of the two.

I finally got a boat with 200 iron, and with a small surface iron patch I missed I was able to reduce my tool shortage to around 30-40, and then finally, over a decade later, I got a big iron shipment. I'm building at least two more ports to get some insurance, but my town has suffered for years. Expansion pretty much stopped during the shortage and I don't have a lot of new births, and given a prior static period I'm going into a sort of demographic crisis (number of working adults dropped from around 650 to 520, starting to recover). No death spiral, starting to get new growth, but this still hurt.
 
Even putting in special orders, sometimes years go by without a boat that gives me what I want. I've had resource merchants, where I have specifically requested coal and iron, only bring one of the two.
Do you have multiple trade posts? I think you have to request the specific goods at every seperately (so if you do at A but he arrives at B he will still have default random stuff).

Apart from that I always thought that buying something (even if it is only a small amount) does vastly increase the chances of a merchant returning next year. Anyone else got a similiar feeling?

...and, yes, the random nature of the merchants first appearance can be a bit annoying.
 
Yeah, I have 4 now (3 before), and I had special requests set up at 2 of them. The third did not receive a resource merchant, it was getting seed and livestock merchants repeatedly so I could not request anything.
 
Since were ing about merchants, I'll share mine. I have an order in with every merchant that I see to Purchase stone. Resource merchant arrives, 0 stone. 4th time in a row.

Lesson: don't rely on merchants for anything.
 
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