Banished

[PRC]

Saw that there are a few people here playing this.

Anyone have any tips or strategies so far?  Here are few things i've found:

Villagers age by seasons, 1 season = 1 year. 

Educating villagers takes 6 years (seasons) and starts at age 10.  I wait to build my school until the first round of kids are 5 or 6 then put a teacher in when they're 9.

I've read online that educated villager's improve productivity by 50%.

If you release your teacher (or the teacher dies) when they have students all the students will "adult" immediately but they'll be uneducated. 

Put fisheries in spots that have the most water coverage.  If you can put them out at the end of a point on a lake where they cover river and lake they will do much better than just on the river side.

That being said about fisheries, I find that gatherer's give better and obviously more varied production.

Having multiple food types keeps the people healthier.

Having a forester cutting and replanting trees in the same forest as your herbalist will hurt the herbalists production... they need thick forests.

One problem I haven't really gotten good at solving yet is elders taking up housing.  Once the kids have moved out the old timers just stay in the house taking up the space and preventing young couples from moving in.  This causes low birth rates and you get these lost generations where you have depopulation occurring.  This is the only thing I've found in the game so far that has been a real problem and thought, this needs to be fixed in a patch.  The only real solution i've found so far is to just keep building new houses, a few every year, but that has to be paced properly or else you'll get these population booms that you can't keep resource production up with because the kids suck up so many resources.

I've started to put a forester, gatherer, and hunter all together in the same spot so their areas of effect basically overlap.  Gatherer's and hunters require a dense forest but it doesn't seem to matter if they're old or young like the herbalist seems to.

I haven't found a good farm / pasture size yet.  I think i'm tending towards keeping it 18 tiles square or less and only having one farmer on it. 

Buying new seed types from the merchants costs 2500 in goods value.  Not every merchant accepts every good but they all seem to take tools and firewood so having those on hand is good.  Unfortunately stocking those goods is hard because firewood and tools are so damn important.  Venison is another good value product to stock in the trade port.

Hold down shift to build diagonal roads.

Once the game becomes moddable i'm sure we will see a shitload of new buildings and other content come available.  Looking forward to that but the challenge for modders will be not adding something that shifts the balance of the game too much...  Right now everything seems so perfectly balanced that I wouldn't want to see something get added that upsets that. 

[Grey Fox]

Put a house or 3 with your GHF camps.

Wood needs a stock pile, not a barn.

[PRC]

Put a house or 3 with your GHF camps.

Wood needs a stock pile, not a barn.

I haven't put houses with my GHF camps, but that's an interesting idea. 

This could also be where markets they see their value.  If you put a barn next to your GHF camps for instance then the GHF villagers will stock the barn and your market vendor will be the guy to go and collect all those goods.

[FunkMonk]

Took me a few hours to realize the importance of markets. At first I just built barns and stockpiles that people walked to. As my town grew, people were walking longer and longer distances and goods were getting choked up in distribution. Plopping a few markets down solved that problem. Having multiple vendors for each market helps keeps it stocked for your growing population.

Also, make sure you have a lot of laborers on tap at all times, otherwise it takes forever to get things done.

[Iormlund]

Initially I set up my towns in such a way to end with a central market serving cutters, blacksmith and tailor, and two or three sets of houses at the edge of different forests where traditional HGF combo are built.
As I expand I'll simply add more vendors and boroughs, served by their own markets. I'll also upgrade paths to stone, which really makes a difference in distributing stuff.

My main problems are usually having too much food reserves taking up storage space and lack of stone (I'm not too fond of quarries for pure aesthetic/OCD reasons).

[crazy canuck]

I made the mistake in my early games of not being very selective in the remove resources command and as a result my labourers were mining ore when they should have been cutting trees or stone.

[FunkMonk]

Fire just destroyed a couple houses, a gathering hut, and a forester lodge. Luckily it was out in the middle of the woods and didn't spread to the main town.

I enjoy the aesthetic of this game. My town grows organically. A city center developed slowly from the original settlement, and smaller communities devoted to fishing/hunting/gathering/forestry/mining/farming developed away from the main site, with houses nearby so those workers wouldn't have to walk across the entire town to get to work. Slowly, the central town, with its blacksmith, tailor, woodcutters, and other main town activities, is growing to meet the 'spokes' of the smaller communities, which are also growing larger to meet the demands of the entire village.

I've since discovered though that trading puts the game in easy mode. Just trade high profit items like firewood or ale for a ton of food, wood, or whatever you need.

[crazy canuck]

I enjoy the aesthetic of this game. My town grows organically. A city center developed slowly from the original settlement, and smaller communities devoted to fishing/hunting/gathering/forestry/mining/farming developed away from the main site, with houses nearby so those workers wouldn't have to walk across the entire town to get to work. Slowly, the central town, with its blacksmith, tailor, woodcutters, and other main town activities, is growing to meet the 'spokes' of the smaller communities, which are also growing larger to meet the demands of the entire village.

Yeah, I like it a lot more than those early city builders that required x to be within y number of spaces of z or all would be lost.  Here you pay with greater or lesser efficiency.

[Bluebook]

So what is the point of the game? Is this just a medieval version of sim city?

[PRC]

So what is the point of the game? Is this just a medieval version of sim city?

It's a city builder but it has way more of a survival angle for your villagers.  You have to build and collect food & resources / produce food & resources that are going to get you through the Winters. 

[PRC]

Took me a few hours to realize the importance of markets. At first I just built barns and stockpiles that people walked to. As my town grew, people were walking longer and longer distances and goods were getting choked up in distribution. Plopping a few markets down solved that problem. Having multiple vendors for each market helps keeps it stocked for your growing population.

Also, make sure you have a lot of laborers on tap at all times, otherwise it takes forever to get things done.

Yeah, markets also appear to redistribute goods.  So if you have a barn near your outlying areas but no blacksmith out there... the market vendor will bring tools and other useful items out to that barn so the villagers out there won't have to travel farther to get them.

[Alcibiades]

It's interesting....but I kind of get bored without any purpose later on.  Hit a population of 300 and am kind of feeling restless with it, no real aim to go for after you're at that point.

[fhdz]

It's interesting....but I kind of get bored without any purpose later on.

Yeah, that's kind of what happens in sandbox games.

[garbon]

It's interesting....but I kind of get bored without any purpose later on.

Yeah, that's kind of what happens in sandbox games.

I'm not sure about that. Generally one can come up with one's own sense of purpose/direction. That was my concern about Banished right now was that it wasn't deep enough to necessarily allow for that yet.

[FunkMonk]

Yeah. It's still keeping me involved after 20 hours, but I play on slower speed settings and take my time with these sorts of games. I'm still not at 300 people on my first real successful village.

I think I'll go for the obvious goal of population first. After that I'm thinking themed villages. I like to think of my towns as perfect little 19th century utopian socialist paradise. 

Later I'm planning on building a Soviet mining gulag. Mines and quarries everywhere and the only food comes from simple gatherers and whatever comes in on the trader ship. If people die of starvation, well, that's sorta the point of it.