It looked very nice before the disaster.

Your only constant food source was fish for a few dozen people. I usually put a gatherer and hunting building in the middle of the woods and try to move them back (and add more) as my town expands.

Does anyone know what is best for trading. I wanted some seeds, then the scumbag trader wanted 2500 resources worth of stuff. I had 80 leather coats which got me to 1200, but could barely get passed 1800 with other things.

A doctor is not important to build early. Afaik he only quarantines the sick, and that's not generally an issue before you start taking in nomads.

If you want to keep your citizen's health up you only need a herbalist. Food variety apparently helps too.

Tools, herbs and firewood seem among the easiest trade goods.

This game looks fun. I take it everyone here recommends it so far?

I certainly do. I've been having a lot of fun with it. It can be frustrating at times but it's worth it.

Watching videos of this game almost make me want to play Black & White 2. I wonder why they didn't make a B&W3.

@wonderwombat - steel tools sell seem best to me, but that's if you have the labor for the buildings (don't have to be fully employed). But basically, iron/steel tools and/or the better coats (wool/warm) if you started with sheep and want to go that route instead. Otherwise a lot of the raw, like iron/stone/coal. It's going to take a while to buy one seed. Each iron/stone mine eventually expires/can't mine (have to build a new one) but it takes maybe 20-40 years depending on how staffed it is.

Trading boats: Yup, trade boat for each trading dock, altho they came at slightly staggered times. One, then the other some days later. But 4 per year instead of two. Booyow.

Hospitals: With no TownHall/Nomads it took about 10-15 years before I had a first outbreak, in my 2nd game. I thought such would be a "disaster" and I wouldn't have to deal with them so hadn't built a hospital. I had to cruelly whip the peasants to build one quick, while everyone was walking around spreading disease. Twas built mostly in time.

Where are the long term goals?

It's a sandbox, survival town-building game. There are no set long-term goals, or "campaign." Your randomly-seed-generated map town either fails because everyone dies at some point, or it doesn't and you keep on expanding and expanding to see how big and how many people you can get to before it does fail. Or you start over to try a new tactic.

I feel like steel tools are a little under valued. You get 10 for a steel tool, but you get 8 for an iron tool, and an iron tool costs a lot less resources.

Alright so how does everyone else maintain food once they get 150+ people? I got there and everything just steadily declined. I was able to delay it by building a bunch of fishing docks, gatherer huts, and hunting cabin, but everything still declined. I am assuming it is that when I transitioned to farm more I neglected fishing and hunting/gathering altogether and was not able to have a steady source of food.

Also how many foresters is good around that population size? I had 12 workers and in the winter my legion of farmers would destroy an entire forest somewhere, but that eventually stopped working too...

In positive news, I am pretty proud that I asixually reproduced a sheep. Had it for 3 years and then a second one popped out of nowhere.

It's all guesswork still, but with 180 people I use a combo of all food methods. Fishing (4), 3 Gatherers, 2 Hunters, 3 15x15 each of two crops (6 total) and 2 15x15 of a fruit tree orchard. I should probably replace the orchards with more crops since I don't need any ale, and the berries from the Gatherers seem to count as "fruit" for health-variety needs. I have 3 marketplaces spread out (I surround markets with the main housing blocks for main "hubs") with farms/storage bin near each one, food production limit set to 50k and most of the time yearly food reserve fluctuates 7000-15000k over the year...it's overly excessive but that's what I'm doing/stockpiling for semi-speedy expansion. Should get me to 200 advlts+kids and past.

I put a Forester, Gatherer, and Herbalist cluster together in the middle of some tree area. For 180 people in my savegame, 3 such clusters on the outer edges of your main marketplace/housing areas seems more than enough I put the max logs on Forester to 600 and 3-4 Woodcutters (max firewood at 1000). As long as you're not rapidly building tons of stuff to use up tons of logs at once, it's more than enough....for now.

My third attempt. During my 2nd try I ended up with the 170-190 population in about 25-30 years. This time I'm trying to curb population growth and get a lot of infrastructure/trading in before expanding a whole lot. The large map seed I got this time looks great for a high-population attempt, too. Only caveat is the trade-river is so long that I often only get one trade boat a year. I think I'm going to have to build 3 trade ports to get much trading done.

http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/130/banished-00008b.jpg

(with inventory menus and such)
http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/130/banished-00007a.jpg

Oh and at least when not in Disasters mode, I changed my mind - 1 cattle farm seems good to have around. Still buying wool for the warm coat making, tho. Don't want 20 different types of "farms"...

Actually, the layout was quite terrible. The woodcutter guy had to walk all the way down to the stockpile to drop the firewood off. Then I had another stockpile to the right and he had to walk all the way over there. I think tonight I'm going to start over and make a designated area for the "working" side of the town and then have a residential side.

Is it better however to have all of your plots lined up for construction and pause the building of them and have the builders build one building at a time or should I just have all the buildings worked on at the same time? It was taking my people forever to build things because there were very few people. I'm going to assume it's better to get a bunch of houses up so I can get more people quicker.

i was hyped for this game and i really dig the idea behind it and what it's trying to do but i can't get into it. i don't know why. i've played a good eight or so hours of it and i still don't feel anything for it. i don't find it challenging in the slightest and usually i just get bored long before my town dies of whatever.

i don't necessarily regret buying it but i do kind of wish i'd waited for a sale or something. curious to see what mods will do for it.

One thing I do is that I try not to centralize my town too much. I usually have satellite resource production villages around a manufacturing core. This reduces the distance people have to walk to get to their jobs, and means that a disaster can't wipe out everything in one go.

I think part of the problem with my town is that it's a little too spread out and people are having to walk too far to really accomplish much. My foresters are pulling in less than a hundred logs a season. It's just not doable.

Hilarious video review from Leo of Kotaku

http://kotaku.com/first-they-were-banished-now-theyre-dying-thanks-to-1527981215?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Facebook&utm_source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

Yeah, that's why I often build some houses near my forester/fishing/gathering buildings, or at least sort of in the middle between main hubs and outlying production spots. The game tends to auto-adjust who lives where as much as possible, over time, so a good portion of workers often end up living close to their workplaces before long. The better clothing helps a bit too, so they'll walk farther before getting cold and turning back to sit in their house to get warm, the wussy gits.

Edit: that video is hilarious

It was all going so well, until they decided to stop reproducing. I didn't have enough labourers to evenly spread around each task easily, leading to me neglecting the woodcutter and now they all just froze to death

I still can't quite grasp the having enough people doing jobs thing. I get too ambitious and try to have too many things going on at once. I'm going to restart tonight after work and only concentrate on food and firewood for the first few seasons before moving on to new stuff. I'll slowly build new houses each season. Maybe one per season or something until I have enough people.

VillaDeTallest is no more. I decided to see where the village went. Alas, they made it 7 seasons and everyone died but one. A fisherman, he doesn't realize he's alone. He just keeps on fishing and fishing and fishing. He's moderately happy. I feel bad for him.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=231052339

I just tried a third one for today. I'm just not smart enough for this game. This last time I got into early the 2nd season. Everyone died. I just cannot seem to keep enough food. I had a chicken farm and a fishery and I had a market. I had five houses and no one was fed. No one was doing anything at all. I even tried to stop everything for a season to collect food. Nothing helps.

Tallest, your lone fisherman reminds me of the video I posted above.

I always have a die off during the second or third winter from starvation whatever town I've started. Those hunters and gatherers really seem to be the key to fighting that off. They pull in the most food in the beginning. I had big problems with food hoarders. I watched these farmers bringing harvest in from the fields. They would put it in the barn and then immediately take it out of the barn and back to their own houses. There was one house and that couldn't get food at all. I called it The House of Death because every one who lived in it died one by one from starvation. It seems kind of terrible to watch these people starving while I have my hand buried in a bag of cheetos.

My latest town is at 16 years and I have just over 50 residents. I've been letting them have children very slowly. I've not let the number of children surpass ten at any given time. I still have never built a town hall. Are those things useful? Also, I've tried something different to combat my log/firewood issue. I have three foresters and one of those forests I sent the laborers in to clear cut and set the forester to plant only. Then when the forest is dense, I'll do it all over again. Maybe that'll help.

My 3rd city is up to 170ish again. With a lot of kids. Going better than the 2nd try, I think I could probably eventually have this one be a fairly high pop. map. I'm finding, however, that once reaching about this point that I start to get a little antsy and want to try a new map seed.
http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/130/banished-00018.jpg

@mellowtraumatic - Town Hall is one of the requirements for the potential of Nomads showing up. It also allows you to bring up a lot of info/graph menus about your town.

@Tallest - build order is really important at the start. I haven't been playing on Hard, I know you start with less resources then, but I never build houses initially. I go ... build Gatherer in the forest. If near the water, I might build a fishing wharf pretty fast. Then I tell them to clear some land. Then I build some houses. Then WoodCutter, then Forester. Let it sit through the winter, then a couple more houses. Then Hunter. Then Blacksmith. Wait a bit. Then maybe Herbalist. Wait a bit. Gather rocks/iron. Then a single crop farm like cabbages or beans, at least 10x10, 15x15 if you can manage it. Then a tailor. Then maybe a 2nd forester/gatherer/hunter combo. Maybe a school.

One issue is the "Clear Land/Collect Rocks" commands seems to take high precedence in laborers and idle farmers minds. So if you mark a huge swath to clear, far away, any other build orders are going to be slowed down. So far I don't generally find it good to plonk down a lot of build orders at once. A few houses, let them finish building. A forester/hunter/gatherer combo in the woods, let them finish building. If you want to clear stone, do it a little area at a time, don't mark a 50x50 area all at once. And put a small stockpile close by - when they're done clearing, you can "delete" the stockpile and laborers will shift any resources to the next closest stockpile.

Also:

With Disasters off, the only time "plague/mumps/disease" breaks out is when you take in Nomads. So I don't bother with a Doctor for a long while, just a herbalist to keep those health-hearts up. You don't need a Tavern or ale any time soon, either. Graveyard and Chapel makes them happy too and you don't have orchard production to worry about.

Yeah, I just found the Banished wiki and it says that housing should be close to where the people work. Every town I build I try and keep the two separate. I think that is one of my biggest hurdles. I also notice that a lot of people just stand around doing nothing too.

I tried it one last time last night before giving up. I got around 7 or 8 seasons in and had about 20 or so people. I had a lot of food and wood and firewood. But everyone ran out of tools so I made two mines but they don't produce enough iron. So I set up a trading post and put on order tools and a few other things. But every merchant that came through had nothing that I needed/wanted. That game I had only three deaths. None from starvation. One was a mine collapse, one was a death from child birth and the third was a log cutter who had a tree fall on him. But now there is no food.

I'm going to try again now and use the tips from the wiki. Maybe I can get more than a few seasons.