I noticed the Games You're Most Looking Forward To thread contained a small handful of people who are playing Banished, the addictive town builder sim game that was released this week. I thought I'd just make a thread for discussion here. I thought it would be nice to chat about it with others, trade tips, strategies, and horror stories. Feel free to share links to screenshots of your town. I know I'd love to see those.

Myself, I'm still playing on my second town, Innsmouth. I was doing great until year 8 when I pulled a couple of hunters to do other things, half my wheat crop failed, and then suddenly it was winter and a third of my town was dead of starvation, mostly kids. I'm good on food again but now I'm currently having a firewood issue and thinking of adding another forrester.

For those interested:

Banished on GOG

http://www.gog.com/game/banished

Banished on Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/

The official site where you can also purchase it and seek support if needed.

http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/

Edited to add some links.

wouldn't the best strategy for a game like that be to just not expand ever, problem solved?

I tried to make a thread about this last night. But my wife's tablet was not liking the forums.

It might be a good idea for people to say what difficulty they are playing on as well. I only got to play the game for about forty minutes yesterday. I was playing on the medium setting and made the mistake early on of having everyone in the village gather stone and wood even though we clearly had enough to make houses already. Within the first 10 minutes of playing I had about half the people die of starvation. I had a hunting cabin, a dock, a gatherer's cabin, I had a farm growing corn and an orchard growing apples. I kept getting notices that there was no food and when I looked I had one person assigned to each thing but none of them were producing any food for whatever reason. At that point everyone started dropping like flies and by the time I turned the game off I had two people left. Both female and I was like, "Welp, can't do anything more here." and I turned it off as it was getting pretty late and I knew if I kept going I'd be up all night playing and I had to go to work today.

I am going to try and print out the manual so I can reference it as I play. There's so much to keep track of.

Your population would age and start to die off. It's a constant balancing act. You need empty houses for families to form and new children to be born, but this inevitably causes your population to expand.

Playing on hard. Currently on my second village. First one stagnated quickly because I built my first houses before securing my food supply. Second village going strong at 100+ people.

I think you eventually would have to expand. I haven't played enough to know for sure though.

I figured you needed to have food before housing. I screwed up the first time as I had everyone clear a forest then built a ton of houses, then built the hunting cabin and the gatherer cabin. I didn't build the fishing dock until everyone was starved and by then I don't think any one was healthy enough to catch fish. I thought I could fix it by making a farm.

I'm so dumb. LOL

Trying to stabilize your population is very tricky. If you quit building houses your birth rate will start to decline. If you build too many houses your birthrate will explode.

So far I have been unsuccessful at stabilizing.

Anyway really enjoying this game. Playing on hard with 200+ population so far. Had starvation about 10 years back (too many nomads), but now have 30k food in storage.

Edit: Gathering stations are amazing early on. Almost guaranteed 1000 food production.

Farming early on is a bad idea regardless. Orchards take years to grow, farms are too labour intensive and herds take years to fill out. In a way hard difficulty is easier because it forces you into the proper pace

I'm going to try and play some tonight after work and I'll give hard a try.

From what you all have said, this game sounds like something I'll be grabbing once I get internet again.

Semi-Related: All of you should try out the McDonalds Flash Game a time or two. Gameplay sounds similiar to what you all have described.

Just makes me want to play startopia.

The two are nothing alike, though

I'm playing on medium difficulty on a medium size map in the valley type terrain. I haven't tried mountains yet but I'm sure I will at some point.

Easy/Medium/Hard only affects your starting resources. Once you're past the hurdle of starting with less people/resources/seed crop types (or no seeds at all), which once you're familiar doesn't really take that long, it plays the same. The main long-term difficulty additions are the other settings - Mild weather vs. Fair vs. not-so-fair, Valley terrain (flatter, more space, easier to build on) vs. Mountain, and Disasters on or off.

Somewhat disagree. Don't start with orchards or herds, no. But the max 15x15 seed-field (cabbage, corn, whatever) only takes 4 workers, just like fishing wharfs, and 15x15 produces a lot for your 15-20 people. Hunters need 3 workers, Gatherers need...I forget. 2-4. Of course, most people start with the Gatherer or the Fishing (or both) anyway because they're easy to plop down anywhere/don't need to clear land first, but I start using field-crops the 2nd season (on Medium, where you're still given a couple of those). I haven't bothered with livestock, doesn't seem worthwhile.

I've played about 25 hours now. Been using Medium/Large map and Disaster off while I learn the town mechanics and wonder how hard it is to do 300+ pop. (didn't do tutorial or read the manual, more fun that way). My 2nd town got to 160 people and was doing pretty well/stable as I expanded but my layout was terrible so I started over yet again. 3rd time I already feel familiar with the population, town layout efficiency and food cycles so it's moving quickly and easily.

The main issue with this game is the population growth mechanic, as mentioned by Doubler. Kids who turn into advlts won't have their own kids until they have their own house to move into (with someone else). The problem is how fast do you build houses vs. death rate vs. kid-to-advlt rate vs. the fact at a certain age advlts can't have any more kids. Too slow/not enough kids born and eventually everyone starts dying with no one to replace, too fast and you can't keep up with the food/resource demand of all those kids+growth, hehe. So far seems like 1-3 houses a year works ok for very slow growth - at least when you have no Disasters to deal with.

P.S. - I believe the aging rate in the game is 1 season = 1 more year older - they numerically age faster than the in-game full year.

I've been having really good luck with pumpkins. They yield a lot per season and I usually have a good many left in storage when springs roll around.

Is this available on mobile? This is something i'd check out on the go.

Nope, it's just on pc.

Is it Steam exclusive or is there a GoG/ DRM free version?

Yeah, it's on GoG.

I know which is why its so weird.

Advantage of livestock is that they reliably produce multiple resources. Sheep produce wool, and cattle are probably a more reliable source of leather than hunting. Chickens are easy to keep and produce quite a lot of two types of food, year round.

So my second play through is doing much better. BUT I have a few hunters that just aren't doing anything and there are a lot of deer wandering through the town. How do I get them to actually hunt? I also have builders not doing anything but I suspect that's because there's no wood. I have several wood cutters but can't figure out how to tell them to cut wood.

Woodcutters convert lumber into firewood. You need foresters to produce lumber.

I think Hunters only hunt within their building radius circle. eg, the deer have to be inside the circle for the game to consider hunters to be gathering venison.

And yeah, livestock produce more than food, but I just plop down 2 iron mines (neither fully staffed) and 3 blacksmiths, sell all the excess tools, and buy my clothes and/or leather from the traders. (edit) Which leads me to wonder, if you have two trading posts, will two trade boats show up/does it make traders show up more often? I forgot to try that...

So I'm going into my third season and I'm thinking to myself, "Yeah, this is going great. No one has died or is complaining they are starving." I start building a hospital and as soon as the building gets to 50% EVERYONE IS STARVING. I look at my dock, not doing anything, my pumpkin field is at 80% yield but won't let me harvest it. No one is building anything and I've had one death so far.

LOL

I have to walk away from this now or I'll be sitting here all night trying to save VillaDeTallest.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=230325463

There's a screenie from before everyone starved.

Oh yeah, not sure if it's a bug but I get question marks over people even though they have jobs and are actually doing them.