Banished - gameplay discussion

[Malcador]

Wow, you guys weren't kidding about the nomads, I let 32 in and while the population boom was nice all they did was overbreed and now I can barely feed my people.

[Sarex]

Wow, you guys weren't kidding about the nomads, I let 32 in and while the population boom was nice all they did was overbreed and now I can barely feed my people.

 

Never stop producing food, I learned that the hard way.

[Malcador]

Yep. Never hurts to have too much. I guess all those uneducated nomads wrecked productivity as well as spiking demand. Will have to learn how to make good layouts as well, current town looks inefficient

[LadyCrimson]

Anyone else have the "problem" of reaching a certain point in a map and then wanting to start over on a new map? In terms of pure "city building" (I still haven't bothered with Disasters) I'm finding reaching a stable, well stocked town of 200-250 or so pretty old hat now ... and I do want to get to the very high pop. marks that supposedly become really difficult to maintain. Yet I keep starting over. I guess at the moment it's more fun to try a new map...that early struggle in the beginning.

 

What I hear about high pop towns (over 700-800) is that one big hurdle is there seems to be no limit to the distance which laborers etc. try to go in order to do a task. Thus you can have multiple market hubs and housing all over the map, but when build or clear land etc. workers from everywhere try to march to the spot, with a lot of them actually starving to death before getting there or getting there/back again. Which makes it difficult to keep growing the population to get even higher population numbers. Maybe that's put me off a bit on high-pop goals. It's fine if it's tough because of lack of space for food/resource production or something, but if it's mostly because walker-AI has no distance limit, that's kinda...irritating. And stupid.

 

Anyway...reaching 500 would be a nice middle ground - 2-3 housing/farm/market hubs. But for now, I just can't seem to stop starting over.

 

Current town (97 pop with lots o' kids). Tried to make something less haphazard than usual, but it still turns into something not so elegant. Compared to some, I suck at making "pretty" towns.

 

(click for bigger)

[Gfted1]

That's a pretty large graveyard you have there.

[Sarex]

That's a pretty large graveyard you have there.

 

That is where she keeps the hobos...ahem... I mean nomads.

[LadyCrimson]

  Occasionally whilst playing this game, I wish I could slap the peasants like I could slap minions in Dungeon Keeper....

 

 

Speaking of graveyards, I read/learned that gravestones do eventually disappear to make room for new ones, so one doesn't absolutely have to have more than one. But I'm not sure if rate of headstone decay is fast enough to keep up with a huge population death rate.

[Sarex]

  Occasionally whilst playing this game, I wish I could slap the peasants like I could slap minions in Dungeon Keeper....

 

 

Speaking of graveyards, I read/learned that gravestones do eventually disappear to make room for new ones, so one doesn't absolutely have to have more than one. But I'm not sure if rate of headstone decay is fast enough to keep up with a huge population death rate.

 

Depends, if you have a quarry then you need another, if not then one should be good to about 100 population.

[LadyCrimson]

If 99% of your population is educated, quarries/mines don't kill them off very often. But yeah, that's what I was thinking ... at some point even "old age" deaths come fairly rapidly, sometimes in waves depending when you build houses.

 

Another thing - no graveyard/full graveyard, I can have max stars of happiness, then someone dies. If their spouse (or whoever) is unhappy for it, I seem to lose half a star. And it stays that way until that spouse actually dies themselves. Even if I build a Tavern after, nothing makes the half-star loss go back up. Am I imagining this effect or ... ?

[Sarex]

If 99% of your population is educated, quarries/mines don't kill them off very often. But yeah, that's what I was thinking ... at some point even "old age" deaths come fairly rapidly, sometimes in waves depending when you build houses.

 

Another thing - no graveyard/full graveyard, I can have max stars of happiness, then someone dies. If their spouse (or whoever) is unhappy for it, I seem to lose half a star. And it stays that way until that spouse actually dies themselves. Even if I build a Tavern after, nothing makes the half-star loss go back up. Am I imagining this effect or ... ?

 

Hmmm, haven't noticed that, but build the graves close to homes and you should have increased happiness.

[LadyCrimson]

I have discovered ... Deer Island!

 

[Malcador]

Are Orchards worth the time ? Not seeing much return from them.  Also, my people drink a lot of booze. 200 units of ale I got from a trader were gone in 3 months or so

[IndiraLightfoot]

Alright, all your talk about this game sounds like great fun, almost like good old Populous without the gods (except yourself), so now I've bought this too. Let's see how many serfs I get to run down into oblivion.

[LadyCrimson]

Are Orchards worth the time ? Not seeing much return from them.  Also, my people drink a lot of booze. 200 units of ale I got from a trader were gone in 3 months or so

They're less productive per space than crops. They do fill out the "fruit" requirement of diet-happiness, but you also get that from Berries, and you can buy fruit from traders if you desire. You can have max happiness without ale (or buy the ale). If orchards go bad it takes a long time to replant/be useful again. I do tend to like to have one orchard just to supplement the Berries in case Gatherer's have a bad year. That said...while some people like them and find them useful, I'm not terribly fond of them. In bigger towns when I have lots to trade with, I start just buying extra Berries.

 

They can, however, serve as fine decorations between houses and in town squares, via miniscule farms.

[Malcador]

Ah ok, well I guess I'll tear them down and replace them with farms or pastures.  Micromanaging the pastures is fun, have one for breeding and one I'll just slaughter all of once they are full for the meat (well at least for cattle, sheep produce that wool I never seem to have enough of for warm coats). 

 

Speaking of coats, talk about crappy workmanship, they need to be replaced every 3 months it seems based on consumption. 

[LadyCrimson]

Have you tried chicken pastures? There's a thread about how their sound effect is so annoying, even at 30% Effects sound setting,  that people delete their chicken pastures just so they don't have to hear it. Now I have to try them to see what the fuss is about.

[Malcador]

I have them near my iron mines and quarries. At 10x speed a beautiful symphony of clucking and clanking.

[LadyCrimson]

Hiho,hiho, it's off to work we go.

 

...after yet another Large/Valley map where I once again got restless after getting near 200 population, 50k food stored/multiple markets etc. in 4-5 hours, and the only thing left is to really push outward to expand, I've decided that perhaps what I really prefer in this game is not high-pop goals but the beginning, on Medium or Small maps. The struggle at the start when you have almost no workers and have to cajole everyone to breed so you can reach the point where it's finally, firstly stable. Especially when the game starts you in a less than ideal spot so it's tougher to get going, like on narrow strips of land between two rivers (pic) or almost hemmed in by a ring of mountains.

 

 

While there's satisfaction in getting a thriving town to a certain point, my brain becomes a bit mushy when then having to think about repeating the process outside of your original 2-3 markets, 3-4 forester/gather rings. Especially with the way citizen AI works, with having no distance limit in which workers will travel (away from their homes) to clear land or build a hut for you, meaning they starve on the way back or don't get back in time to farm. It feels like a poor mechanic result vs. challenge and becomes more noticeable the more spread out you get. I think if you did it very slowly and carefully, without using "main town" hubs but a series of overlapping market circles and clumps of houses on the edges of each (instead of the center) you could avoid too much of the "starvation worker" syndrome, but it'd be very slow/a pain. And the storage barns do NOT have enough space for stockpiling for big expansion pushes, especially since you can't tell a barn to only accept certain somethings, so you end up with massive amounts of the darn things in clusters everywhere.

 

Eventually the town sprawl gets uglier and uglier (even for me, who never builds "pretty towns" to begin with) and gets less satisfying, unless you're just a pure numbers-goal sort.

 

I love the sandbox nature of the game and that, like most of these game, there are many different designs/playstyles to succeed. It definitely has that "start a new map, blink and it's 5 hours later" effect. I'll continue to play/enjoy it for a long time, but it could use a few tweaks re: later stages on Large maps. Like that silly starve-distance-AI, custom storage-orders, etc. Also, in spite of the speed bonus, what's the point in building roads when the citizens hardly ever use them, except where forced to because you've practically paved everything and it's the only option?

[LadyCrimson]

And the storage barns do NOT have enough space for stockpiling for big expansion pushes, especially since you can't tell a barn to only accept certain somethings, so you end up with massive amounts of the darn things in clusters everywhere.

 

Speaking of storage barns .... (not my pics) Someone was experimenting with reaching a million food and how many barns required. I question the legitness of the methods used - I smell Cheat Engine or something to be able to do in 58 years, even with trading for the food, but who knows, might be possible - either way, it's still freakin' hilarious. Plus now I know that 999999 is the highest you can command workers to keep producing food, although then you can go higher via trading for it. Haha.

 

The status menus pic: http://i.imgur.com/6KEeywW.jpg

 

[Malcador]

Had a bit of a scare running out of food but huzzah, finally have my village in a decent state

 

 

[LadyCrimson]

48 Foresters? Selling a lot of firewood?

 

...I've always focused on selling excess iron tools and hide coats, because I don't like taking up so much land for forestry (iron mines take up a lot less land), but this map I tried the firewood thing for a bit. I actually think the forester/woodcutter/firewood should be altered, because it feels very unbalanced re: ease of trade, compared to anything else. Maybe that was intentional, tho.

...I'm trying a new Large/Valley map that seemed ideal for a very large city. Going very slowly, trying to achieve my desired layout plans - eg, my landscape is littered with big yellow "pause" symbols as I design things before building them. Went so slowly that I lost a lot of people one early winter by not focusing enough on food vs. my layout, heh. But survived that and now looking good. Another day or two and maybe I'll post a composite of it. Not going for mega population, just a large one with a balanced layout.

[Malcador]

Well, that's a case of having people with nothing to do, and I was finding that they were chewing through firewood FAST, so kinda crashed down a production chain for that. I could upgrade everyone to stone houses, but stone production is abysmal for me right now. Also some of the foresters I have just plant to grow trees for the gatherers and herbalists to work on (I think that's a good idea but might be wrong)

 

Think I will restart.

Edited March 3, 2014 by Malcador

[LadyCrimson]

Yeah, I think some do like having some foresters just plant, for various reasons. I haven't played with that much since I tend to be a minimalist re: the gatherers and such.

 

Only over 300 citizens (230+ Adults) tonight, so no composite map. Expecting pop. to rise fairly fast/steady at this point but guess it's still going to take me a while. I'm really liking this map, hoping what I'm doing will be stable enough for 800, perhaps. Got room, but as always not sure how far I feel like planning expansion. I'm still liking my current method of scattering clumps of houses vs. concentrated population centers. Could bite me in the butt later, of course...

 

Current main area: the reason for empty pastures is after the first boat or two, I haven't seen a livestock merchant in 20 years. Do have sheep, they're not in the pic. Traders are driving me nuts. Can't figure out how to split a pasture, either, to try to make them grow that way. Even at full capacity the Split button stays greyed out. Maybe it has to be a certain tile-size.

 

 

[Malcador]

Wow, you know how to lay a town out 

[mute688]

Can't figure out how to split a pasture, either, to try to make them grow that way. Even at full capacity the Split button stays greyed out. Maybe it has to be a certain tile-size.

 

Do you have an empty pasture to split the herd into?  I thought it split the pasture, but it splits the herd into another pasture if you have one empty.

Edited March 3, 2014 by mute688