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[a3den]

Road removal seems pretty high actually (for dirt anyway since it has no materials requirements).

It is,on the other hand I encoutered a few times where building removal wouldn't go past a certain percent and wouldn't progress at all, despite having mass builders and no building task queued. I stalked the builder and they were surprisingly idling, so I guess there's a few bugs here and there.

The "Split" thing from pasture can be a little buggy too I think.

 

[confuziz]

Is she patient? The game can be slow if you don't balance the resources carefully and it's easy to make fatal mistakes that will force you to start over from scratch.

The interface is straightforward and easy to use.

I think she can handle slow games. I wonder how she feels about starting over after failing though. I'll think about it!

 

[Enduin]

Think I hit the wall with my first settlement. Population is hovering at 30 +/- 4 for the last 6 years, I'm at year like year 15 now, and it's hurting me now with constant shortfalls in lumber, iron and stone due to lack of labor. Herbalist as well is coming up very short for some reason barely have any medicine when just a few years ago I had nearly 100 from them.

I'm producing crap tons of food though. Between my Squash, Cabbage, chickens, gatherer, huntsman and fisherman I'm raking in 5k food surplus easy, but my labor is stretched so thin I never have enough people left over for the mines or quarry which have lousy production even with 4 or 5 people. I guess I can shut down one or two of my food producers, probably fishing and gathering, but that only frees up 2 or 3 people. I need to have a bunch of people on hunting and foresting to produce leather and lumber which are always short.

I don't think I'll ever be in danger of total collapse, unless some tornado or another fire comes in and wrecks my shit, but I'm fairly certain expansion would just be way too hard for this current town. I am gonna try and build a town hall and see if I can get some immigrants to come in and bolster my population, but after that it's time for a new town.

 

[Beautifully Shaped Monsters]

This was definitely inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and if the mod tools are great, or the guy making it is willing to continue to improve on it, it could rival it in complexity while maintaining the approachable UI/GFX/

Loving it so far, but I can see myself get bored long term. One of the first thing I would add in the game is resource management, so you could reserve resources, and seed handling allowing you to plant seeds (but be careful you don't eat all your seeds for next season).

 

[Mengy]

Think I hit the wall with my first settlement. Population is hovering at 30 +/- 4 for the last 6 years, I'm at year like year 15 now, and it's hurting me now with constant shortfalls in lumber, iron and stone due to lack of labor. Herbalist as well is coming up very short for some reason barely have any medicine when just a few years ago I had nearly 100 from them.

I'm producing crap tons of food though. Between my Squash, Cabbage, chickens, gatherer, huntsman and fisherman I'm raking in 5k food surplus easy, but my labor is stretched so thin I never have enough people left over for the mines or quarry which have lousy production even with 4 or 5 people. I guess I can shut down one or two of my food producers, probably fishing and gathering, but that only frees up 2 or 3 people. I need to have a bunch of people on hunting and foresting to produce leather and lumber which are always short.

I don't think I'll ever be in danger of total collapse, unless some tornado or another fire comes in and wrecks my shit, but I'm fairly certain expansion would just be way too hard for this current town. I am gonna try and build a town hall and see if I can get some immigrants to come in and bolster my population, but after that it's time for a new town.

Sounds a bit how my village started out, except that I didn't have any crops or animals (started on hard). Sounds like you have two issues:

1. too many people on food. Pull back a few from the quick to recover food sources like fishing or gathering if you need to free up builders or miners, then put them back when you can.

2. not enough houses. This was my problem for many years while my pop stagnated around 40, once I started (gradually) putting down one new house every winter my pop started climbing again.

 

[Enduin]

Sounds a bit how my village started out, except that I didn't have any crops or animals (started on hard). Sounds like you have two issues:

1. too many people on food. Pull back a few from the quick to recover food sources like fishing or gathering if you need to free up builders or miners, then put them back when you can.

2. not enough houses. This was my problem for many years while my pop stagnated around 40, once I started (gradually) putting down one new house every winter my pop started climbing again.

Yeah I definitely think I can cut out the Gatherers and Fisherman for a while. 3 or so on hunting and another 4 on farming and 1 on chickens produces more than enough food.

I have close to twenty homes now and for a bit had kept an extra empty house for new couples. I think my problem was in the early years I had a big boom in population but focused on other projects and let housing stagnate for a few years and so now my population is skewed too much to the old and so every time someone is born at least one old person dies, sometimes two. So there's never enough to replace and surpass the current population.

 

[arhra]

I'm up to nearly 50 years and 400 population on my second town (first one was cut short at around the same point by a crash bug during saving).

It's been mostly smooth sailing, with one major setback at around 30 years in, when my population expansion outpaced my food production briefly, leading to a couple of years with a lot of deaths from starvation:

Had a lucky escape with a tornado, though. Thankfully it touched down a fair distance away from my town, and didn't actually destroy any buildings (although it came close a few times, then veered away at the last minute).

 

[Saganator]

Those of you who are getting bored should look at the achievements and shoot for them. I was at around 60 pop and was thinking, what now? Then I looked at the achievements and it gave me all kinds of goals to shoot for. Right now I'm shooting for the 300 pop achievement. I've already got a few easy ones, like having the entire town with max happiness/health, and having every type of food.

Centralized housing is definitely NOT the way to go. Place your housing near where people will work. Your citizens do a pretty good job moving into the nearest unoccupied house near their work, if you build it, they will come, even if they already have a home, they'll move. The only homes which could be considered centralized are the homes for your vendors and other people who might have a job near the market, like a teacher, priest, or doctor.

I'm currently sitting at ~140/20/20 on my 2nd town on hard, year 45. Taking it slow and steady. I have stupid amounts of food, around 25k, hovering around 300-500 firewood year round with about 1k logs, and I don't usually have much of a stone/iron stockpile due to using it constantly. Currently trying to upgrade all the wooden houses to stone (anyone know if that reduces risk of fires?). So far I've had a couple close calls, 2 fires, one of which took out a storage barn filled with food and firewood, 5 - 6 houses, forrester, and hunters lodge, and a wood cutter. Missed my market, which would have really hurt. Wasn't all bad though, because I wanted to redo that section of town anyways. Had a few disease outbreaks, no deaths, though. Make sure you have a hospital before you take nomads in.

Right now my issue is birthrate. The 20'ish kids/students I've been hovering around isn't cutting it anymore. I was at 150 pop after taking in 20 nomads, I'm already down to 140 just a year or two later. Deaths were all from old age or mining accidents. Seems pretty tough to keep a rising population once you get into the 50-60 range, you pretty much have to take in nomads.

To the people saying once you hit 50-60 pop, you're done, couldn't be more wrong. The game changes at around that point, it goes from being just trying to survive the winter to trying to grow and make your people happy and healthy, while maintaining a positive birthrate, and not over expanding yourself to death. You have to start thinking further ahead in your planning and setting goals for your town.

I was going to post screen shots, but I can't find where they are saved. Input options says Print screen takes one, but can't find anything about where they go. Using non-steam version.

 

[AbortedWalrusFetus]

I had my first town population up to about 100, 100% education, and 100% clothing. A group of 15 nomads came in and I let them join. Within 3 years there was a mass starvation and about 40 people died. The sudden influx of nomads stressed my resources too far and it was disastrous. I was slow to build new agriculture and food gathering resources and things went downhill.

Of course, now that 40 people starved to death I have more than enough food to go around, and plenty of vacant buildings. I just bought 3 head of cattle, so hopefully I can get some good pastures going and things will turn around.

 

[Granadier]

So what is the general consensus for build order with a new village?

 

[arhra]

Seems pretty tough to keep a rising population once you get into the 50-60 range, you pretty much have to take in nomads.

You just have to keep building houses so that kids will move out and start families of their own.

Like I posted above, I hit 400 by about year 50, and that was without taking in any nomads at all. The only major slowdown was when I overexpanded and grew my population faster than my food supply. Nomads can definitely help boost your population quickly (I took in a sizable batch just after that post, and now I'm at over 500 citizens 5 years later) if you've got supplies to spare (make sure you have a hospital though, as they have a nasty tendency to be disease-ridden), but you definitely don't have to rely on them to expand.

 

[TheChewyWaffles]

So the steam forums are talking about a starvation problem bordering on being a bug. Yay/nay?

 

[Pyrrhus]

Is there any way to optimize where the workers live? I've got some houses built near my quarry that I would prefer the stonecutters live in, rather than the gatherers and hunters who work on the other side of the forest.

 

[DouglasteR]

So what is the general consensus for build order with a new village?

Crops > Shelter > Other resources

 

[Frologic]

Crops > Shelter > Other resources

I disagree. Gathering hut>crops starting out.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

So what is the general consensus for build order with a new village?

Hunters and gatherers first

Builds 4 homes, more if they have kids. Expand when they have kids that can move out.

Wood chopper so you can stockpile firewood before winter and forestry services so you have a constant supply of wood.

I tend to make little camps in the woods that have a stockpile, hunters, gathers, forestry, and wood choppers.

Then you need to build a storage unit for food near a river and your forest you are using. Put a fishery next to it.

(I don't usually have that much shit open, lol)

You can make another camping site with your cluster of buildings

Make blacksmith, tailor, and a school. You need to make sure you have everything up and running before you run out of tools and clothing. Tools especially.

After that it is just making sure that you have more food than what you need. Once you are making a stockpile, make more houses.

 

[Mengy]

Hunters and gatherers first

Builds 4 homes, more if they have kids. Expand when they have kids that can move out.

Wood chopper so you can stockpile firewood before winter and forestry services so you have a constant supply of wood.

I tend to make little camps in the woods that have a stockpile, hunters, gathers, forestry, and wood choppers.

Then you need to build a storage unit for food near a river and your forest you are using. Put a fishery next to it.

You can make another camping site with your cluster of buildings

Make blacksmith, tailor, and a school.

After that it is just making sure that you have more food than what you need. Once you are making a stockpile, make more houses.

That's almost exactly how I started my town out. My initial wagon was out in the middle of nowhere, so I walked my people over a bit into the densest patch of wood close by and built a small village in this order:

1. gathering hut
2. four homes
3. storage barn and stockpile (destroy wagon when done)
4. hunter cabin
5. forester
6. woodchopper
7. herbalist

I built all of this in a tight grouping together, and then just let the foresters plant and cut trees, the woodchopper make firewood, while the hunters and gatherers kept us all fed. Worked fairly well, once I was confident it was all stable I ran a road out to the nearest river and started expanding with a fish pier, blacksmith, tailor, and new houses, etc., while leaving the initial forest town off by itself. Other than moving the order around at the bottom a bit I can't see a better way of starting a new village.

 

[Shining Sunshine]

I really hate the ticking timebomb mechanic. Got up to 70 pop, decided to make a secondary town. Building the second town apparently took too long and all my kids aged too fast and my town is now dead.

I can't seem to force the builder job on the closest resident, so the builders take a long ass trip to do like 1% of work and then turn back for food.

A few things they could do to improve the game:
- They need to add something to allow expansions to be easier, like a supply cart for mobile homes.
- Allow control over residence control. I want my youngest folks with their own homes instead of people in their 30-40s. Right now, it seems like older people take priority when a new home is built.
- Implement Job assignments. The game does a good job of reassigning the closest residence to their jobs, but there are issues, as I pointed out in my scenario.

So... mods? mods.

 

[bjaelke]

The caravan is only available on hard?

 

[Corum]

Is it bad that I didn't know this game existed until I saw it on the Steam Top Sellers list, watched two Let's Play episodes and then proceeded to buy it?

I am a sucker for popular games but I like to think I buy good popular games, my last similar purchase was The Banner Saga.

 

[floatingcoffins]

I love this game and my wife has gotten into it as well.

The only thing is, there's no sound for mine. :/

 

[Rentahamster]

Wow, a forrester set to plant trees, a gatherer hut, a hunting hut, an herbalist hut, and a storage barn all in a little cluster together creates a shit ton of food/herbs once the forest is at full capacity.

 

[Cerity]

hopefully some changes are made to food production. Fishing docks just don't seem to be worth it. On the edge of a lake you get to use 50, maybe 60% of it's area of work, and even at 4 people working I haven't seen a season pull much more than 800-900 food. Hunters cabins pull more food plus give you leather and you can increase the food output by placing them further away from villages. Gatherers can pull easy 1800+ in a wooded area, very easy to do if you pair them with a foresters lodge.

Maybe drop it to maximum 2-3 workers or introduce some landscaping tools to be able to increase their area of work. That or lower food consumption and nerf gatherers huts. I don't think I'll be going with fishing anymore until something is done with it, I'd rather keep the area small, expand with another gatheres/hunters/foresters combo.

 

[Prototype Viktor]

hunter cabin op if you place 2 on either side of town by itself in the woods then put gathering huts next to them

 

[Shining Sunshine]

The caravan is only available on hard?

There are caravans in the game?

 

[a3den]

I love this game and my wife has gotten into it as well.

The only thing is, there's no sound for mine. :/

Try to switch renderers (dx9/dx11) or try this fix here.

 

[arhra]

hopefully some changes are made to food production. Fishing docks just don't seem to be worth it. On the edge of a lake you get to use 50, maybe 60% of it's area of work, and even at 4 people working I haven't seen a season pull much more than 800-900 food.

Where you put them can make a huge difference to how much you get out of a fishing dock. They seem to scale based on the number of water tiles within their area of influence (and the number of workers, obviously), so ideal placements are on small islands in the middle of lakes, or on the inside of a tight river bend, like this:

 

[Jintor]

Might give it a shot with non-centralised housing - the only thing it'd really interfere with would be hunting, right?

I don't understand how you're getting so much yield with your hunter huts, I can only get around 600 venison p/season even fully staffed

 

[GusG]

This came out of nowhere for me. What a nice surprise, I can't get enough city builder/resource management games.

 

[smokeandmirrors]

Getting overscan issues with the DX 11 renderer. Anyone else running into that? The DX 9 works fine, however.

I updated the setting in the Catalyst Control Center but nothing.

 

[floatingcoffins]

Try to switch renderers (dx9/dx11) or try this fix here.

That link did the trick. I am in your debt, sir.

 

[Cerity]

Just went through another starvation event, I think next time I'll be getting seeds for farms before I start up any mining.

Where you put them can make a huge difference to how much you get out of a fishing dock. They seem to scale based on the number of water tiles within their area of influence (and the number of workers, obviously), so ideal placements are on small islands in the middle of lakes, or on the inside of a tight river bend, like this:

Thing is with areas like these, is that they're on the rare side. The best most people are going to get are riversides or lake edges.

 

[Jintor]

Irritates me that the food event job is sourced at home. Maybe would be better for citizens to just carry food around with them (that they source from home) and feed when necessary, returning to home to restock if needed.

Or turn taverns into food sources.

Of course job-related starvation isn't a huge issue for me yet because i've yet to breach 50 residents

 

[Frawdder]

Really enjoying this game, been through a few towns now, learning each time I mess it up.

Latest one I had a great start, good location and plenty of room to expand but I took too long to build a school and my production suffered as I tried to expand, starvation wiped out about 15 people in one year as well as years of firewood shortages.

Start again!

 

[Cerity]

Another town, hard, small map, 19 years old, going rather comfortably. Managed to fend off the starvation spiral and normalised back a pop of 50, running a pop of 80 now. Very comfortable once people started to leave school, I've got a stockpile of food at about 8k~, just waiting on traders with actual crop seeds before I start heavily mining again. Managed to pickup cherry seeds but they have a longish turn around.

 

[hiro_x]

I have been playing only for about 7-8 hours and already in my 4th town. First 3 died of starvation since I have been expanding so fast. 4th is now at 10k surplus of food with 45 population. The key is slow expansion and don't play at 10x speed, only use that if you really want to build a structure faster then go back to 2x. 1x can't get anything working for me.

 

[Lingitiz]

Wow, everything was going so smoothly and then all of a sudden it got totally out of control. People dying left and right, food production and wood production too low, and disease fucking things up. Guess I'll start over and try to go a bit slower.

I'm really enjoying the game though. I think it does manage to be less of a pure city builder in terms of tech and actual building options, and instead it's more a survival game, testing how far you can realistically expand before things start to blow up spectacularly.

 

[DirtyManos]

Ugh, my 2nd town, and everything is going great. Have medicine, fully educated, housing, , great food variety, haven't had a warning of low anything in a while.

Cept the town is dying by old age.

Had a peak of around 50, then all of a sudden these people stopped boning or whatever. Pop is slowly dwindling.

GET BUSY PEOPLE, STOP LOOKING AT EACH OTHER FROM ACROSS THE DANCE!!!

Edit: Ugh i gotta accept this town is dead. No nomads or anything have passed by. Most of the pop is too old.

 

[Jintor]

Anyone know at what age digital menopause kicks in? I'm guessing 40s, 50s-ish.

Game should let me build extensions to my town hall so I can issue edicts :<

EL PRESIDENTE~!

 

[SpaceShark]

Wow, I had no idea this was out already! I'd been following its development for a while, but lost track of it recently.

Really glad to read that people are enjoying it, will definitely pick it up next time I need a city builder type of game.

 

[Granadier]

Almost 20,000 user today for Banished.
It's #10 on the top 10 games for the day.

 

[SparkTR]

Has there been any word on future updates? I'd love an expansion or DLC to be in the pipeline.

 

[DirtyManos]

I just don't get what happened....

 

[Cerity]

Well that was great, just had 6 houses, gatherers, foresters, hunters, blacksmith, tailor, herbalists and a woodcutters burn down. Despite having 2 wells in the vicinity and 8 labourers running around. I was able to absorb the loss, had enough food and resources to recover easily. Just very annoying that the wells did absolutely nothing.

 

[Lactose_Intolerant]

I just don't get what happened....

There is a bug if you select stuff to cut down, say a tree in an area you can't get to, your guys will go to the edge of the map and starve. One explanation for that drop, besides you screwing up.

Restarted on a hard, small, mountain map. Oh my.

I'm up to about 80 people or so. Finally got some seeds. The map is crazy how you have to fit stuff in parts of the map you would never try on a normal map.

 

[Skinpop]

got my town to 700 population on hard. more than that and it starts crashing every 5 minutes or so.

Game is fun but it's a shame that the dev doesn't seem very interested in adding features(going by the ama and interviews), he seem eager to move on and treats this as final except from bug fixes from what I can tell. I can understand that but would be a shame with the potential Banished has. So far it's a solid 6.5/10 for me. That's a good game, but lacks variety and depth as well as challenge. The best thing about it is that it has that "one more turn" quality. With polish and more content this really could go so far.

 

[Rubixcuba]

Ohhh some Nomads finally arrived at my town! Have a pop of 100ish and around 5000 food in reserve, not to sure if I want to accept 18 more mouths to feed?
Had a pretty annoying moment when my teacher died and all 19 students changed to workers straight away before I could assign anouther teacher. Was good to them sure but my education rating took a 25% hit

 

[Skinpop]

Ohhh some Nomads finally arrived at my town! Have a pop of 100ish and around 5000 food in reserve, not to sure if I want to accept 18 more mouths to feed?
Had a pretty annoying moment when my teacher died and all 19 students changed to workers straight away before I could assign anouther teacher. Was good to them sure but my education rating took a 25% hit

I got 85 nomads just now before I stopped playing, half of them will probably freeze to death working on a new town quite a bit away from any home/market.

Some strategy stuff(might be considered semi-spoiler?):

A good tip for planning is to pause the game, put out all the building you want in an area, then press the pause button in the dialogue so they don't start building at 50 places. This way you can easily draft out whole villages with supply routes for logs and all that. Then strategically unpause the building to get the stuff build in a proper and sustainable order.

Another tip is to keep lots of stock piles and strategically placed storage houses. My first 200+ town imploded because my firewood supply chain didn't work out.

For growth I try to keep students + children above half my adult population. So with 100 adults I want at least or around 50 + 50 children/students depending on if I'm expanding or stabilizing.

When you're above a few hundred it's very important to have a few hospitals. I had an outbreak of cholera that resulted in 140+ getting sick.

Beware of tool shortage of doom. This happens when you have a tool shortage, and not even the blacksmith has any tools. Everyone becomes like 50% less efficient(from steel to nothing) and your settlement self destructs. A good way to avoid this is to place the blacksmith right by the mine(and stockpile) that produces coal+iron. This way kleptomaniac villagers won't be able to steal all the coal.

 

[Jintor]

Not being able to restrict coal usage is a bummer. I need that shit for steal, stop stealing it to warm your houses you bums

 

[smokeandmirrors]

.