I bring it up because I know there are builder fans here.
Banished is a sandbox medieval builder. It also appears to be a one-person project. Metacritic’s pro reviews aren’t glowing, but this is a niche game. The user reviews average out to be quite respectable, at 8.7. Comments on it range from “starvation simulator” to “relaxing”. I think it helps if you watch a let’s play or two. The price is reasonable.
Anybody have this one?
I watched TotalBiscuit’s WTF for this game and immediatelly put it on my wishlist. According to him it’s not a city builder really. For starters you may never get past the rinkydink shithole podunk town stage. And it’s really a survivor game. And you will not survive.
I think I undersold the pro critic reaction on Metacritic: it’s 75.
I just saw this on Steam this morning. It looks good and I have added it to my wish list.
I’m playing it and I’m enjoying it so far.
I had to abandon one game because after my second year a tornado came along and killed half my population and destroyed my warehouse with my food and tools just before winter arrived.
I’ve been up late the last two nights playing it. A city builder where the people actually have names and jobs and houses and you can follow them around and see what they are doing … and when they have children, the kids go to school and get a job and if you build a house two young ones might leave home and move in together and have kids of their own … like SimCity said it was going to be.
It’s not a clickfest button-masher – it’s a think-a-while then click then wait and watch a while kind of game. No monsters, no armies, no combat.
Best $20 I’ve spent in a long time. It is on Steam for those who like that, and also available DRM-free from the author’s own site or Gog. I’m gonna play now.
IOW, it’s like Tropico without the politics? Was going to wait for a sale but this sounds worth 20 bucks to me.
Hmm I was looking at this one, too. I just finished “Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons” which was VERY cool, and am in need of a new game. Maybe I’ll pick it up. $20 is a good price.
It looks really interesting and is on my wish list.
However, I am currently in the throes of a Path of Exile addiction, and have barely touched the last 30 games I purchased on Steam. So it might have to wait for the Spring/Summer sales.
That’s what I was thinking when I stayed up way too late playing it.
I like the game, but it doesn’t really have much depth IMO. Once you get your opening down, as long as you don’t get greedy and build 20 houses or accept 50 nomads or whatever you’ve basically won. I have a completely stable growing population of over 150 total people now with more than one of every building after 3-4 hours on my first town. All that’s left is getting the rest of the seeds.
One tip: hard is way, way, way easier than easy or medium. In easy and medium you start with crop seeds, and you will be tempted to farm early on. The surest way to die is to rely on crops early on. Gathering is much more efficient with a small population (it’s actually kind of broken). Agriculture is actually useful, but only once you start exceeding 50 adults or so. 4 gatherers, in a good mature forest, can get about 1000 food every season. A good 15x15 farm with 4 farmers can generate maybe 1200 food, but you only get it during autumn. The tradeoff is that it’s much more space efficient than a gatherer that needs to be off in the woods, and distribution is faster since nobody has to run all the way out to the middle of nowhere to get the food.
Unless you’re in a harsh climate, get food up before houses. If you’re in harsh you probably need to prioritize houses before food, but you’ll need to be prepared to lose a couple to starvation. In my fair climate town (not even mild), the entire starting population survived the first winter homeless.
And that’s a problem. There’s SOME variation in the winters, some will get a little more cold than others, but generally if you’ve survived one winter you’ll survive every winter. (Again, assuming you don’t take 50 nomads or something). Yeah, there are disasters, but if you build multiple villages rather than a giant metropolis and remember to build a well at every one, you’re pretty much immune to a death spiral due to an errant tornado. (Disasters are another reason to not rely on farms early on, your gathering will never falter, but it’s very likely to death spiral if your entire food economy is two farms and you get a blight).
I like it quite a bit.
If you choose an easy start, you can get by with agriculture just fine, at least depending on what seeds you start with. I’ve found that clearing two 15x15 crop fields ASAP is enough to keep your people alive through the first winter, and should give you enough time to get a pasture and woodcutter built by the time the snow starts falling. Just make sure to build an herbalist (after a blacksmith, and a tailor if you have wool) to keep your people’s health up. I’ve noticed that starting with sheep is way easier than starting with cattle; cattle produce some leather when the herd is at capacity, but sheep produce a lot of wool all the time. Not only are wool coats better than hide coats, but it’s easy for a single tailor to produce a stockpile of them so you can barter them to seed traders.
I think I might be done. It’s not a bad game, but I think it needs more to it.
Right now I’m getting some serious #firstworldproblems with my town. I’m seriously overproducing food. I gain 2000-5000 surplus food every year. I kept raising my food cap, but the utility is questionable at this point. My storage barns are overflowing. My 4 markets are all at 60%+ capacity, mostly food. But it’s not like I’m neglecting any other resource – sometimes after a housing boom I’ll bottom out on stone, but it’s not a big deal. I’m always good on logs. Clothes and tools likewise. My people are at full happiness and health. I’m at over 200 people.
So the next step would be to… build a ton of houses for rapid expansion? Accept 100,000 nomads? Make all my remaining dirt roads stone just because? I can’t answer the question “to what end?” I’ve built everything, at this point the only thing to do is making my people-numbers go up. I could aim for the 900 people goal on my map, but it’s a bit of an artificial goal (I recognize the irony of saying this about a game). It says something that I have 20 laborers and I can’t think of a thing to do with them. I could build more farms or another quarry. But then we come back to “to what end?”
There’s just nothing left to see. For all the flaws the new Sim City had, there were interesting dependencies. There was always something I could accomplish. I could look forward to getting up to a city of skyscrapers, or finally building a regional project, or moving to the final tier of high tech industry. I always felt like there was a goal. And everything I did affected everything else, and there was often a real danger about messing up and breaking your city’s economy. But in this game, after I’ve gotten most of the seeds, have a few big pastures, and all my needs are completely satiated, I just can’t figure out what I want to do.
I have a question:
When you build the market you can see a yellow ring around it. Is that the limit to where the vendor will grab resources from another storage, or is it the limit to where people will walk to the market?
Nobody knows for sure, but my best observation it’s the “supply priority” radius. That is, the market will try and stock to feed everything in the radius. So if you have, say, a tailor there set to use leather, that market will try and keep leather in stock, if it’s set to leather+wool, it will keep leather and wool in stock. If houses are in the radius, it will try and keep enough food to feed those houses, and so on.
People will generally try to walk to the closest storage facility that has what they need. I have noticed that storage barns closer to houses than markets will generally stock themselves with food and coats and such, but I’m not sure if the vendors do that or the residents do. I do know for a fact that vendors themselves will travel far outside of the radius to supply goods, so a vendor may go to a stockpile way out in the forest to grab logs for the wood chopper within the radius.
Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. Stayed up until the wee mornings last night getting a feel for the game. Doing an experiment now, going to see how many are left alive when I get home from work tonight.
Question for you all, has anyone figured out how to put out fires? My town caught fire, I had wells placed strategically throughout, but all the people did was wander around with a yellow ? over their head and let my town burn down.
Did you have any laborers? It may be that only laborers can work wells.
I’m kind of jealous. I’ve never seen a disaster that’s not illness or blight.
Sooo… how many?
My experiment failed. I tunes auto updater started 30 minutes after I left and caused the game to lose focus and I had the auto pause when losing focus option checked.