I'm growing really bored already. Any tips/advice?

Nope.

Set your own long term "achievement" goals (fill up every tile of a Large map, reach 1000 citizens and keep it stable for 20 years, play without using any Fisheries or livestock, etc) is about all I'd have to say. Either one likes ... or obsesses, like me, ahem ... to grow sandbox cities and build build build ad nauseum or one tends to find it grows stale before too long, without anything else to focus on.

How many logs do you get per forest lodge? My lodges range from 100 to 300 in a really good year. Do you use the lodges near gatherers/hunters for maximum efficiency or do you use dedicated lodges? I place houses directly next to the camps with a storage barn for maximum efficiency. My city has a pop of 300, but my food supply has been neglected and is now also dwindling to the 10k in my storage. A few more winters and this town is done for. I think I'll restart this map (really like the start position, lots of materials, a few good fishing spots and a dense forest right at the start) and start with setting up a log industry first before expanding like crazy.

Should one cycle through their hunter camps and gatherer huts? I have about 3 of each, but onely have 2 running and then switch it up every 2 years or so. I vaguely remember something about if you keep harvesting an area, you get less returns.

Is my rotation actually helping or am I just wasting time?

You can see yearly reports of what the building harvested. Maybe you can see the total accumulation of three buildings after so many years, and the total accumulation of switching them every few years for the same amount of time.

I also remember crop rotation would be necessary, but haven't had a problem with it yet.

@FearMe - So far I generally seem to manage about 260-290 logs from each Forester, every year. Assuming stockpile isn't really far away or something. I do the gatherer/forester/herbalist trio (usually only need 1-2 herbalists tho, so not all my foresters have one). I don't tend to place houses or any other buildings/the stockpile right next to the cluster of work buildings, but place them just outside of the circle radius. More buildings within the circle = less area for the trees to be.

@HAL - my limited experience is that you can go through a brief cycle of less production, probably because of the "overhunting" mechanic, but it doesn't last long. Like a year of less, then back to whatever is your average for a while. If you're concerned you can just lower the number of workers where there will be 3 per building instead of 4. Works on fisheries too.

Edit: crop rotation has to do with the "infestation" mechanic that seems to occur randomly and maybe on average, very infrequently. I have yet to see one even with 35 year old fields/pastures. I'm not sure it even happens if Disaster are off, but non-Nomad disease outbreaks apparently can, so likely.

My foresters tend to do great at first, 200 to 300 a season but then drop down to less than one hundred. I've been having much more luck with clear cutting the area and setting the forester to plant only. Of course, I only do this where there are foresters alone.

I just wanted to mention that in my newest town, I started off things by building a boarding house this time. That was the easiest start ever. I had no beginning starvation deaths that I usually get in the first couple of years. You just have to be careful not to let them sit in there too long because they won't have too many babies in there. They'll have two or three but that's about it. If you get nomads, they go right in there to live if there is no house available to them at first, which is kind of nice.

Yeah, I've seen some talk about trying to use boarding houses almost exclusively. That might be curious.

I need to get back to just playing instead of thinking about mechanics. I can get too wrapped up in wondering what they are/why different people think opposite things are true. At some point someone will likely tear the game apart and we'll have concrete data. Or not.

Do you guys keep track of any map seeds that made a map you really liked? I've been idly trying random ones based on dates. The random map generator sure is...random. Some can be pretty cool tho.

This is the one I'm currently using. Large map, valleys. It's really nice. The seed number is 737732586

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=232267106

Was it the one where you grew soy for money or something?

It seemed pretty horrendous, since about 90% of players went bankrupt at a certain time. I think i played it before on kongregate.

I find shutting buildings completely down also helps. This forces all workers to move to a new area that has the same building. I also alternate foresters from cutting to planting every few years. I have multiple foresters in different areas. When one is just planting the other is cutting and I have another that I have clear cut the forest then replant it.

Map: Large/Valley

Seed: 666666

Stare in awe at the single giant Great Lake. Find the spot on edge of map on a mountain which you can use to jump start a (totally useless) bridge that's 331 tiles long. Giggle at the thought. if was a usable bridge, citizens would starve trying to cross it. lol

...still playing, still loving it. The "starvation while walking to remote locations" issue that many report does become an annoyance (even without high populations), but is only noticeable the more spread out you become. Causes a lot of problems/limits strategy and (for me) rather de-motivates to keep on going past the early stages of a map (150-250 people). But there's tons of fun to also be had with starting new Small/Medium maps with difficult starter position situations. I think that's the most fun for me so far. Has the added bonus I can usually do such in one play session of 3-4 hours and the next day I can just start a new map. I play mostly at 5x whilst abusing the pause function and occasionally abuse the 10x speed as well.

Wish you could tell Markets a limit to how much of each resource to attempt to keep stocked, like you can with the Trade Docks. More things to build (mod-kit, where are you) like Clay Mines/Pottery Builders would be cool. Little stuff like that - along with a path-distance AI tweak - would make the game go from darn good to almost perfect.

First http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/forum/discussion/1991/working-on-update-for-1-0-1- if people want to try and give feedback (it's not an official patch yet - mostly bug/crash fixes), but since I'm not having any crash issues, I haven't bothered.

I agree with the path finding issues. I'm now using a different approach on the same map I posted earlier about, and I'm almost at 600 pop. Every winter or so a few advlts die because of freezing/starvation, and a few people are hungry or cold (10 at most). My citizens should be more open towards their fellow townsfolk: if they're hungry, they should be allowed to get warmer in their houses, or take some food. All goods are free at the market anyway.

Ooh, I'm going to have to try that seed. Might be fun to just build bridges to no where might be fun.

I finally succumbed to temptation and purchased this title. Went through the tutorials last night. Began my first village this morning. I knew it would be rough going. But I follow a number of Banished Let's Plays on YouTube so hoped for the best.

I was pwned! Ended the first winter with but two advlts and two children remaining. At that point I threw in the towel. Admittedly, I selected the HARD start option. I somehow suspect a medium difficulty start would have ended little differently.

A large part of my problem, I think, was that I tried to build too much at the beginning, and didn't remember to prioritize. Thus my fisherman's hut didn't get finished until winter had set in. Same with my storage barn. The wood cutter's hut was never completed. I had a gatherers hut ere the end, but by that point citizens were dropping like flies so I couldn't keep it manned.

It also didn't help that there was not an abundance of resources nearby so that laborers needed to travel a ways for building material.

Fun times! Gonna give it another shot sometime today or tomorrow.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ADDENDUM:

What a difference a session makes! Started a new village, same settings as the old one, other than a different seed. This time I made sure to prioritize fishing hut, barn and wood cutter, letting homes come as they may. Am now almost into winter my second year without a single death. Already have the barn, wood cutter and fishing hut plus gatherer, forester, blacksmith and homes for everyone. Have a second fishing hut under construction. Am looking for a good location for hunters lodge and herbalist, but its gonna be tricky to find virgin forest (for the herbalist) within easy reach of the village. I know where I want 'em to go, but am not sure villages can get there due to hills. Goofed and established a crop field then realized that starting on HARD I had no seeds. No biggie. It can sit there unutilized until we get a trading post. I think that's some years away.

18 Mar ADDENDUM:

Alas! My second city is spiraling to its doom. It did great until year 10 or 11. Then, out of the blue, citizens began to starve, sometimes with food in the storage barn. I finally got a handle on that by adding fishing huts and storage out in the boonies so that no one had to travel overly far to reach supplies. But by then my once abundant excess of laborers was down to one, and original settlers were dying of old age. Firewood became an issue. I'm trying to solve that now, but just this past session deaths caused key specializations to dwindle to dangerous levels. (Earlier starvations had depleted my supply of children who would have replaced them.) Not sure where to go from here. I suppose I could abandon one of the further away centers and concentrate on my original core settlement. But that area is low in wood and stripped of stone and iron. (I was about to place both mine and quarry there when those earlier starvations forced me to concentrate on food.)

-Decrepit-

Man this game is brutal! I managed to survive the misfortunes related above, and for a while flourished. Never had any worries over food or firewood. Survived a Yellow Fever outbreak with relative easy, though a fire that occurred in the midst of it set me back a ways. Thought I had it made. Then, during this morning's play session, out of the blue folks began to starve. Lots of folks! Unlike the previous time this happened I can't for the life of me figure out the cause. Built another two fishing huts and a gatherers post. Upped the food limit for those products. Hasn't helped. Gonna have to start shutting down the more peripheral businesses and concentrate on food (and of course firewood, which is still fine) after only one more death (assuming no new laborers come along). I can easily get rid of my third tailor, who exists mainly to make trade goods. A stonecutter and miner can go without causing significant harm. Not sure from there.

The irony is that just last night I got my first two 'awards' (achievements); "Healthy" and "Smiles all Around". They ain't smiling now. Nor am I.

-Decrepit-

I love Trading Posts. They're like lovely super warehouses to store 20,000 units of food

Town's coming along nicely. I just wish I could say no to the nomads as they mess up the supply chains badly.

http://i.imgur.com/u1Kzfw4.jpg

@Decrepit - the food production limit you see on buildings is a universal all-food production setting, not just for the one food type.

Do you have a market? Markets help a lot with centralizing where people go to get their food (the market). Clumps of houses on the outer edges of the market circle, for example, with industry/farming/storage/city buildings both on the outside and within the market circle.

Using only Barns, distance of work places vs. barns vs. housing placement is the key. The more spread out you become, the more unstable/more work this can be to be effective, as you discovered. If citizens start to get hungry, whatever the reason, they stop working as much (they'll idle a lot), produce less food because of it, drop health-hearts, work even less, and it starts to spiral.

I think the general concept people have discovered is about 100 food produced per citizen (not just advlt - per citizen). So approx. 10000+ per year if you have 100 total citizens. But if using only barns might want more so there's a big surplus and no citizen will end up visiting a barn only to find it just emptied by another citizen.

P.S. If you haven't already, build a Town Hall - it has a menu that shows you amounts of food being produced, among other useful menus.

Thanks for the input!

Markets are a sore spot for me with my current village. I wish I had realized their importance and proper usage from the get-go. I didn't add one until my village center was well established. Seems you can't plop 'em just anywhere. Mine seemed to do more harm than good, so I demolished it. Now, when I next create at village center I'll know to plan it around a market. Should work like a charm in that scenario. I hope.

Yeah, relying on barns scattered all over the place is a hit or miss proposition. It can work very well...or not. And yes, I know product limits are universal, though admittedly I often forget to boost 'em after creating new production facilities. I read up on the food / populous formula earlier this evening, and have adjusted my limit upward to account for that. (Yikes! It dawns on me that I forget to adjust it again after establishing a potato field earlier tonight.)

Town Hall? It was on my list of things to do when calamity hit. I had its site already plotted, and was just waiting to build up resources. Likewise with a chapel, though it has lower priority.

I did, btw, manage to survive all those starvations. Little by little I was able to restaff my various production facilities to near pre-starvation levels. Even had nine laborers to play with. Now I'm being hit by lots of natural deaths from aging. I'm struggling to maintain a single laborer, and have already shut down a tailor, dropped a miner, and reduced builders to one. I knew it was coming, but it's still painful to sit through.

-Decrepit-

Progress report:

My little town of Crewer endures. It's had its ups and down, and there is much I've still to learn about successful town design. Here's a capture showing the area around my initial starting location. It's year 66. I've lost a lot of people and am struggling to keep sufficient laborers on hand to insure replacement of essential workers. A number of specialties have seen manning reductions, most noticeable miners and stonecutters. That said, you'll notice I have a handle of food, firewood and other vital supplies, so am likely to recover given time and lack of disaster(s).

http://i.imgur.com/wupb7vE.jpg

The area around the barn nearest the lower of the two woodcutters is where it all began, along with the bottommost fisherman hut and the wood home right above it. As can be seen, I was in the midst of converting wood houses to stone at the time. The clump of abundant trees seen at image top just left of center is the beginning of a forest resource complex. The edge of another such complex can be glimpsed further to the right.

You'll notice a Market laid out but not built. At one point prior to this capture it was fully constructed and functional. It seemed to do more harm than good so I tore it down. I then reestablished its footprint but left it paused. Later on I discovered how useful Markets can be when properly situated. I determined to rebuild mine. BUT...my town center was not created with a Market in mind. Its current location was far from ideal. In fact there were no ideal Market sites at the center. That said, it seemed to me that with a good bit of work I could relocate the Market to a somewhat more acceptable spot. It would mean rebuilding six homes, most of 'em recently converted to stone, and the loss of the plot where my Town Hall was intended to go. But after much agonizing I decided to go for it.

http://i.imgur.com/KwmCGbi.jpg. You'll also notice more animal pastures in the area. My thought here is that the quarry and mines won't last forever. At some point I'll need something else for those folk to do. Barring disaster, one can work animals forever. Plus, coats and excess hides / wool are decent trade items. I originally planned to use iron / steel tools for that purpose, but those are exhaustible resources.

As the Market neared completion fire broke out at the forest resource complex seen in the upper right-hand corner. It was totally destroyed - gatherer, herbalist, three homes. This despite a well being smack in the middle of things. (For whatever reason the populous ignored the well. Either I'm overlooking something or this is an area of play that needs further tuning.) Caused my food supply to drop until things were back to normal, but not nearly enough to worry over possible starvations.

A some point before my Market was functional I experienced the enviable dilemma of running out of storage space in my barns. Well, it was enviable until food began to be left out in the wilds to rot. A visit to my various barns quickly found the issue...they were all full of wool, with no room for anything else! (Okay...a few barns way out in the sticks weren't quite so bad off.) Most of that wool is now stashed at my two trading posts. It will serve as my trade-good of choice until I acquire cattle and can thus make the best quality coast (hides plus wool).

As can be seen the Town Hall is still not built. (Its footprint now rests on the old Market site.) I never seem to have enough stone and iron to spare...my weakness.

Other than slowing converting to animal husbandry and coat production as mines and quarry give out, I've no set plans for the immediate area. I might relocate the cemeteries at some point, but it's not a pressing concern.

BTW, the bulk of my sheep pens are across the river near those crop fields.

-Decrepit-

Crewer has reached a milestone of sorts, hitting the triple-digit year mark. Who would've thought?

http://i.imgur.com/DpAiUQu.jpg. Lots of mistakes here. The chiefest, in my opinion, is building a quarry smack in the middle of a market district. Never should've done that. But then, I didn't understand the importance and proper usage of markets until long after the quarry was in place. Worse, once the quarry exhausts itself (its at the 20% remaining mark) a goodly number of citizens will be reduced to laborer status, not that that's necessarily bad. But with its two mines already closed, my town center loses much of its original purpose. Those mines, by the way, are okay where they are, being outside the market's circle-of-influence. Their only negative consequence is reducing the happiness of nearby residents. This is compensated by chapel, small cemetery, poorly located well, and the market itself.

There's a second market district on the other side of the hill at right. It too has a quarry. But at least that quarry is at the outskirts of the market's circle-of-influence.

I think I've learned my lesson. No more quarries within village/town centers. I've established footprints for two more quarries out in the boonies. It's gonna mean longer travel times for workers and less efficiency, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. (Workers will live inside a not yet constructed market district.)

I'm gonna rely more on trading for stone, iron and coal. I've plenty of excess wool and wool coats to trade. Heck, I've got wool coming out my ears. I'll keep at least one or two mines and one quarry operational at all times so long as its possible, but they will be a supplement rather than primary source.

I still don't have a town hall. Never have enough stone and iron to spare that isn't better used elsewhere.

http://i.imgur.com/r5fKb7G.jpg. There's not much to see. My original forest resource-node is already in place. I believe the lower fishing dock was my initial food producing facility. At the time I thought to establish a crop field below the barn. Didn't pan out because, starting on HARD, I had no seeds until many years later. By that time I'd decided to locate farms elsewhere.

Speaking of farms, here's http://i.imgur.com/oP6klTD.jpg. Also seen is a forest resource-node, my second trading post, and so on. Those orchards are inefficient. They were my first fields. I knew nothing of proper dimensions at the time. It's fixable, but I want to establish more orchards first. This strip of land is almost ideal for farming, being too narrow for forest nodes and/or market districts. I suppose it would also work for mines and maybe a few quarries.

http://i.imgur.com/k73stQ0.jpg. Shown are the footprints for two quarries, two of three mines, one pasture, two orchards, a cemetery (which might be relocated), and several homes. The yellow circle marks the edge of an unbuilt market district. The under-construction chapel is now complete, as it one of the two homes. Additionally, one mine was built, with four addition houses provided for its workers. Between chapel, mine, and homes (I now build stone homes when possible) I exhausted my stone and iron reserves so am forced to slow down.

In between updates I...

• Suffered two disease outbreaks, Scarlet Fever which was nasty and Dysentery which was no more than an inconvenience.
• Suffered a couple of fires, one which destroyed a wood house and storage barn, one which destroyed a wood house and a fishing hut. It seems to me that firefighting is the one broken aspect of the game. Citizens let fires rage even with wells and other water sources close by. Wells remain useful to raise happiness, but don't count on 'em to save burning buildings.
• Suffered the exhaustion of two of my three mines within a real-life minute of each other. Thankfully I had already plopped down the footprint for three additional mines (and two quarries) so unpaused and built one of those.
• Earned three more achievements; Settlement, Lumberjack, Established. I'm one who normally ignores achievements, but I rather like them in Banished.

Enough for now.

-Decrepit-

You really should focus on building a Town Hall within the first 20 years at least. I have no idea what you're building all the time in order to not have the stone/iron for it by then, on a Medium or Large map. On Large maps I often don't build a quarry for ages because there's so much on the ground. Of course...this is partly because I tend to run with 90-100% Educated as fast as possible. At high percentage ratio, Educated makes a huge difference in all production. Your 200+ city could probably use another school.

Anyway, TownHall's don't seem important (the graphs aren't...) but once you have one you'll probably find yourself wondering how you got along without it, mainly for these three info sheets:

http://crimsonkeep.com/wallpapers/data/media/130/banished-00060.jpg

You can keep it pinned and then see total amounts of everything w/out having to click on separate buildings and adding up totals ... and you can view it while also in the trading menu. You can see what the ratio of your houses to "families" is, in order to see if you should build some houses or if it would be pointless because you already have more than enough houses and building more would just start to do weird things with couples. And most importantly, you can see annual food production vs. annual usage numbers, which tells you if you're going to have a starvation problem before long. Doesn't take much at times, for everyone to suddenly be starving and create a terrible downward spiral.

Also, TownHall is the only way you'll ever get Nomads. Which if you're playing with Disasters on, as it seems you are, may totally save your bacon if a tornado or disease or starvation issue wipes out half your town or more.

General advice:

If you're not interested in Nomads, there's no reason to have a Boarding House, especially in the early game. They're terribly inefficient as housing. You don't even need them for Nomads, as homeless people just work and wander around forever until you build them a house. As long as there is at least a single, lonely house for all citizens to run to for "warmth" so they don't freeze to death, and barns to go to grab some food, citizens don't technically care if they have house.

Buildings that have little to no effect on citizens and you can easily do without for ages or even forever if you want: Taverns/Ale, Churches, Wells (just leave more space between buildings), Boarding Houses. Taverns are just useless and their only noticeable benefit seems to be from selling Ale, if you're using orchards.

I hope you've read up on the walking-distance-starvation issue. It can start to be a serious PITA once you start wanting to do any serious expanding. Good luck with your town!

These games are always addictive, but I wish we could get a more natural feel of the layout with new games, at first it's nice but then you start to notice everything looks like a grid. Of course their are many modern designs that have states and agriculture in such things, but i wish natural boundaries such as rivers and mountains had more natural angles and you'd see a bit more ununiformity.

This reminds me of Caesar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_%28video_game%29

I was terrible at that game.