Banished - gameplay discussion

[LadyCrimson]

I had lots of empty pastures. At first they weren't actually assigned, but I did assign them later and it didn't help. I checked on the official forums for anything that might relate, and apparently the pasture has to be large enough to house at least 10 animals. Mine are all sized to hold 6-8 - it's because it fits into my layout more neatly. No matter - the livestock traders finally started showing up again...after I built two more trade docks...so it's all good now.

 

309/63/71 (and going up rapidly) now. I have 165+ Families but only 107 houses. Poor guys, I stuff them into those shacks like sardines. I shall be expanding North (upwards) first. The two pockets up there should get me to 700-800 adults easy. Then I'd still have the whole rest of the map (pic).

 

The map seed, btw, is all 9's - Large/Valley, 999999999. Great for messing around in.

 

[Gfted1]

Egads LC, what kind of monster are you to not have a brewer?

[LadyCrimson]

For the first 35 years I didn't even let them bury their dead or practice their religion, either. I'm a cruel, heartless taskmaster. No rest for the peasants!

[LadyCrimson]

Come my many peasants, the harvest is over. Just because it's snowing doesn't mean you get to lollygag around!

Hm, about 130 of you free, that might be enough. Over here, now. Way over here.

 

Yes, that's it, work harder! Faster! I must expand my kingdom of wooden shacks!

 

What? You're hungry and cold? That's no excuse, where are you all going?

You won't make it back, your AI sucks and you'll die anyway, just work till you drop!

...Fine, leave then.

 

Don't want to say I told you so, but ... I told you so. Waste of good work time...

 

And thus my town is made from the bones of cruel and needless death.

Maybe I should feel a little remorse, but...nah. I got more work that needs doing.

 

 

...while the walker distance AI is stupid/frustrating, it is rather amusing to observe, at times.

[Malcador]

I get the sense that Candyland isn't really a nice place....

[Humanoid]

By the standards of the game universe, it totally merits its 5-star happiness rating shown there.

[LadyCrimson]

The frustrating thing is that the distance isn't even that far - not like I sent them to the bottom edge of the map, not even close.  I guess the cold saps them sooner,  too. But they get hungry and the AI demands they have to walk all the way to their "own house" to get food. They walk right past markets and barns full of food and ignore it. On the way back, they get cold, so they walk to/stop at a random house for a second for that, then start walking back to own house for food again, and don't make it.

 

It's hilarious when there's a huge line of them, tho, snaking the road/hills back to main town. Almost as fun as slapping imps. Almost.

[LadyCrimson]

I reached 500+ Adults (700+ total eats-food citizens). Yay? But I expanded too rapidly (I getz impatienz) without building enough food infrastructure and the 200+ kiddies (more born constantly!) are scarfing the larders bare. I could reload an hour-earlier save and fix it easily enough but meh ... think I've had enough of this city for a while. Maybe on flat maps you could get 1800+ if you had the patience/organization of the devil. More if you reduce dependance on Gatherers/Foresters buy trading for firewood/food.

 

A composite pic - which is really frakking hard to do, and it's still off kilter. Even tried a panorama composite program and that didn't help much. And it doesn't look as pretty when totally top-down viewed. Oh well. It's just town areas, not whole map.

 

Time to try a new map seed - 20140227  <---this one looks pretty awesome for a 300-500 town in that huge middle space.

 

 

 

Starvation Explosion imminent....

 

 

 

[Malcador]

Watching that, I really have no idea how to layout a town.  Was my problem in Caesar where I made some truly horrible areas (in 3 it was fun to have slums by design...you need cheap plebe labor rather than rich patrician layabouts)

[LadyCrimson]

I don't have awesome designs or anything - I just go with the idea that houses should be spread out in order to always have workers close to workplaces as the AI shuffles them around all the time. My main problem still figuring out how much food to produce. I don't find the Town Hall figures helpful - "food produced this year" doesn't seem right. Felt like in Caesar games it was simple to eventually figure out how many farms or clay pits etc. per 100 people, or whatever, but Banished feels more obscure, partly because you can make the farms various sizes.

 

But it appears, however much "grey" is on your mini-map, the brown (food) should be 4 to 5 times as prevalent. I always overflow with food at 300-400 pop. but then start to fall behind. I get tired of building nothing but farms and forget ...

[LadyCrimson]

After 60+ hours, multiple maps attempts etc., the initial shiny is wearing off but still loving the game. But after a long while, you do start to feel like the game could use a little more ... something ... besides the food vs. population vs. walker-death struggle. Entertainment happiness requirements, for example. Or more user-controlled trader options (land trade? Having to do something - like achieve a town size or happiness or fame level - to open certain trade routes vs just building a trade dock=instant access to all trader RNG options?).

 

Tips and things:

 

----For orchard farms, I've discovered the size I like best is 13x13. With crop fields size doesn't actually matter much, but with orchards it's the best size for the way the trees grow - certain orchard sizes you'll have an "empty" tile row, which equals wasted space. I make the crop field size the same for layout symmetry.

----Most of the time, 2 workers on even a large a crop/orchard works just fine, no need to waste 4-6 workers on them. Occasionally 3 if distance, or with orchards seems to help with speed of replanting trees that go "bad" over time.

----Beans vs cabbage, corn vs wheat, doesn't matter. This makes buying lots of different seeds from traders rather pointless outside of the farming achievements. And the cost of buying the seeds is the only financial challenge. Which brings up that the trade aspect to the game is really underwhelming, unless you've decided a self-challenge of trading for a lot of stuff instead of producing it yourself. But trader mechanic isn't interesting.

 

----I don't see much walker-speed difference between the plain dirt road and the resource-cost stone road. Maybe it's bugged. Sometimes they seem to start to speed up a little but then go back to dirt-road speed...anyway, seems inconsistent. Waste of stone seems to me.

 

----if you mark a graveyard for demolishing and then quickly "reclaim" it to cancel the demolish order, it'll read as being empty and you don't have to build a new one (the headstones will remain). Most likely a bug, but I'm taking advantage of it since it's mad-silly how many graveyards you need (and the space) before you've even reached 400 population....

----Same concept - you can "demolish" full barns, wait for workers to empty it of the food, then "reclaim" the barn before it's actually torn down, to try to move food to different areas. Stocking distant trade docks and then releasing the food again, same thing.

 

--Hunter buildings don't need to be in dense forest land to produce 800+ venison a year. If there were deer around when you placed it, even after you chop everything down and build houses around the Hunter hut, it'll still produce food/leather. There are still "ideal" spots for Hunter's huts, but if you're tight on space (small maps), they're cool that way.

 

--I've gotten over my dislike of orchards because of Small/Mountainous maps, were there's barely land to support much Gathering...starting to find orchards more useful as the "fruit" category producer in terms of land use management, despite their occasional PITA aspects.

[LadyCrimson]

NEEDZ BIGGER SCREEN PLZ

 

...actually you can make the GUI even smaller but then it's unusable as far as font readability is concerned.

 

700+ citizens again, food production ok, starvation-march-death problem very minimal so far, but I can't seem to get the new house/birth/death rate balance right in this one. Every time I get close to 500 Adults, I have a massive old-age die off over a single year that's a numerical setback. But they keep having more and more kids, so ... eventually it might work, right?

[LadyCrimson]

So at about 900 Citizens playing at 10x speed on my rig starts to get edge-scrolling stutter and slight start/pause jerks once in a while. 5x speed is still fine tho. Impression I have is too much stockpiling of resources is main cause of fps loss/lag (too many barns for 500k food, giant full stockpiles everywhere, etc.). Keep that low enough and high pop. to 1500 can be manageable fps wise .. for a while.

 

Anyway ... 900 Citizens is the last population achievement, so enough of that. Still irritating feeling like you have to constantly build new houses etc. Endless expanding = less sandbox and more pressure-rts, unless 15 years later you want to see everyone die with no one to replace but Nomads. So next goal - a smaller town that's actually stable, if you walked away for hours and hours. It might be doable, smaller town.

 

Tip: Don't give citizens Warm Coats. Feels like they = more starve-walk deaths because they don't get cold as fast so walk further/starve. Then again, it means you'll see a lot of workers get to a work site, bang their hammer once, then turn around and walk away again.

 

I'd post town pics but really, they all start to look the same after a while, so just the stats/map.

 

 

...and also ... beef, it's what's for dinner. (cow pastures take forever to fill-up, but then you get all that leather which is awesome for  trading...)

 

[Malcador]

Bah, can't even store the beef properly, useless villagers.

[Humanoid]

Isn't that how you make beef jerky?

[Malcador]

4000+ population - http://imgur.com/gallery/bg6F9/

 

Not me, but impressive.

[LadyCrimson]

4000+ population - http://imgur.com/gallery/bg6F9/

 

Not me, but impressive.

It's definitely impressive numbers-wise, but that sort of thing always makes me wonder ... how high a pop. can they get while still making a town that looks like ... a town? Most I've seen so far is maybe 1500-2000ish.

 

But yeah...even doing it via trading for most food etc. (notice there's almost no brown on the mini-map), I'm surprised you can get that high without the PC screaming to a halt. lol. Maybe they're all idle laborers, sitting in their houses.

[LadyCrimson]

Early this morning I discovered that when you first start a map, you only have to have one house built, so workers can go to it when they get "cold." If no house at all, they all freeze to death 1st winter and that's it. Anyway, I liked that because I can build the one house, build a Gatherer, then just have my original 10 or so workers clear a giant area of land/plan with less buildings I may have to move once I have a blueprint laid out. Because I'm a planner. Like this:

 

"Hm, cool looking map, with that river bend/islet. I bet that would make a good trading center."

 

"Am I over-thinking this stage, you think? .... nah."

 

"Now to see if all that planning pans out..."

 

 

...an hour or two planning (not just that center area in pic, but all around it too), couple hours of letting it run at 10x while unpausing the build-orders on things from time to time as population/resources grow. The planning is definitely my favorite stage.

[Malcador]

I never did that kind of planning, still stuck in my ways thinking that I can only build a structure when I can afford it (materials and people). 

[LadyCrimson]

I remember planning a lot in Casear games too ... laying out roads and houses and such in pause. Just not quite that much at once. Or I'd place things to create the spaces for them re: road layout then delete the buildings before unpausing.

[JadedWolf]

So, I had this little tools shortage...

 

 

... that turned into a bit of a food shortage.

[Malcador]

Ah, the joy of system failure

[JadedWolf]

"With all due respect sir, the tried and tested way to cross the river would be to take the bridge..."

 

"Yes, well, I expect some brainless herd animal would take the bridge, yes. Are you a brainless herd animal?"

 

"Well, err... "

 

"Of course not! We're not brainless herd animals, are we corporal? We're sheep, we're rebels. We do things differently! So we swim across the river! Everyone, follow me! One, two, one two! Hup! Hup!"

 

[Bryy]

I want this game but would like to see more of a second and third act.

[Malcador]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/09/banished-mod-support-is-on-the-way-says-developer/

 

Mod tools forthcoming, huzzah and so forth. Can't wait to see how many peple will try to shoe horn combat into the game.