Map seed 270854867 is a nice enough area. Plenty of room, starting you on a tongue of land big enough for your starter area. You’ll probably have to make bridges to expand from it. Who doesn’t like bridges? I didn’t get very far, since my people started dying of old age before they’d had enough sex to ensure a future generation. I should have built a tavern sooner. But since someone in the other thread suggested we all try our hand at the same map seed, I figure 270854867 is as good as any other. So hop on into 270854867 and let us know how you’re doing. And don’t forget the tavern, or whatever the heck you have to build to make the little people have more sex.
One thing that I think helps with replenishing people is to make sure you’ve got enough housing. When I look and see four people of working age all crowded into a single house, I start getting worried…
Wait. I can’t just CTRL-C and then CTRL-V that map seed coordinate? I actually have to find a PEN and WRITE IT DOWN?!?!?
I’m seeing some interesting things that for now I’m assuming might be bugs.
I’ve got two games set on Hard going on randomly generated map seeds. The citizens are making a go of it. With a gathering hut, fishing dock, and hunting lodge I can generally get to 700 food in storage, and that’s enough for winter. Everyone seems to distribute goods like firewood fairly evenly.
On this map seed, after year 4 or so it becomes Lord Of The Flies. Different households hyperconsume hundreds of foodstuffs seasonally to the point where the four dudes working the dock simply drop the food off and then pick it up and deliver it to their own houses. Every house uses firewood as fast as my wood-cutter can chop it.
Frustrated, I turned off every building and house. The children all died fairly quickly.
The adults, however, have managed to go 4 years now without eating or shelter and suffering from the cold.
When children grow into adults, they seek out their own house if one is available but if there are no vacant houses they’ll stay and live with their parents. And as you might imagine, people living with their parents don’t get any. It’s a shame there is no age-pyramid kind of graph, even in the town hall. You just kind of have to keep an eye on the adults/students/children numbers and build new housing before the age crisis gets too bad.
Yeah, I managed to get much further by making sure there’s plenty of housing available. I suppose it’s time to read the manual! That stuff is in the manual (i.e. ingame documentation), right?
Anyway, I made it to twenty years on this map before I was hit by what must be Banished’s most powerful disaster: the wave of ennui.
I think the problem Tom ran into is the same one I did. Basically, the Chick Parabola for this game is really high, but short. Once you figure out the balancing act, there just isn’t much to do. Build more houses? Why?
There’s nothing pushing me to do any better than keeping things running. There are Achievements which the developer says should be treated like simple goals, but they don’t really motivate me.
That is the danger with these sort of games…if it all comes down to a proper balance, once that balance is achieved it becomes ‘mechanical’. This is why games such as Tropico, Anno, etc can sometimes be more fun going through the scenarios than free play mode.
Yeah, once you figure out how to manage your community, there’s not a lot here. I started to realize the simple genius of the illusion of emergent property improvement/evolution that traditional city builders have as I went here. With no evolving state of buildings, once you’ve got your economy up and running I found that my peeps needed not a lot of supervision from me. Gentle pushes here and there, sure…but after a while that wears rather thin.
But yeah, the trade and evolving missions in Anno 1404 or the monument building in Pharaoh/Caesar/Zeus/Emperor all come into focus with this design.
What would be nice is some tech progression. I know the developer said he wanted to make everything available from the start because he didn’t like how traditional city builders doled out the goodies, but that kind of progression works for a reason.
Take Tom’s 20-year run in this map. Nothing improved technologically for these colonists in 20 years?
This is year 5, was going well until a sudden starvation episode where I lost a bunch of good people sniff. I’m observing some weird ale production behavior, seems to stall until there is a major wheat surplus. I have hunters out there off-screen and also a herbalist who works part time, only when herbs are low. My brewer and blacksmith have similar lifestyles, as does the woodcutter. I’ve just started building the tailor, to protect against the cold.
Those fruit trees are yet to yield anything, so my people are enjoying a healthy bean,wheat & venison based diet for now.
Crazily addictive game…
I picked up this game last night after reading about it here and in the other thread. Distractedly went through the tutorial, had to go to a school meeting, then came back and tried to play on this seed.
The first time, my people all starved because they wouldn’t build the food facilities. Figured out that I had not told them to chop down any trees.
The second time, everyone froze to death because they didn’t have any firewood.
The third time, they burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
But the fourth attempt seems to be doing fine. Work, my little minions, work!
Would you expect a very small colony of people who are just struggling to survive in the Middle Ages to have progressed technologically to any significant degree?
I’m not looking for a progression from wood cabins to split-level condos or anything. I’m just thinking that there should be more goal-oriented gameplay beyond maintain the balancing act between your colony and the weather.
For example, you can build a schoolhouse to educate your citizens, but why bother? Educating citizens doesn’t really unlock anything worthwhile. It just makes them slightly happier and productive. If you’ve already reached equilibrium between the various needs, there’s no reason to push forward.
I played it for six hours and had fun learning the system, but once that hump was climbed, I just sort of lost steam for this. It feels like playing Tropico 4 in sandbox mode. It just has a harsher start.
Aye, and that’s why the “survival mechanics” stuff I keep reading about immediately turned me off from this game. It looks like there’s fun stuff to do in, say, Rust or Minecraft (which I realize some people might find it odd for me to make equivalent to one another, much less to Banished), but after awhile, I need some additional motivation outside of my own desire to go find and do that stuff! I play games to unwind and relax, so having a bit of a helping hand or a goalpost to aim for removes the need to motivate myself toward my own goals when I don’t feel like it (although leaving that possibility open is fine!).
Mind you, I say this while totally not able to afford the time or money to give to Banished, but I’d like to someday since I love this sort of resource-managing city-builder, but I do hope to learn it grows a little and gains some optional direction between now and whenever I’m available to it :)
