Okay, I started up my little experiment.
215 townsfolk, with 12 laborers unassigned.
Hopefully, I have enough farmers/gatherers/foresters/wood cutters/tailors that food, clothing and shelter will be self maintaining. I’m just worried about the tool usage. Even with 4 blacksmiths going, I am having trouble keeping tools for all my townsfolk. I swear, they don’t believe in recycling.
So, I got this game after reading this thread. Not bad so far. Feels likea struggle keeping everyone fed and so on. My second try, 10 years in I have about 100 people, 22 of them being kids. Hopefully I’ll have enough kidgrowing up to keep ahead of the deathrate that is sure to come.
Seriously, why do people age from 12 to 60 in 10 game years??
Does anyone know if I need to keep farmers and gatherers working during the winter or can I switch them to something else as soon as the harvest is done?
Farmers work as laborers during the winter. Other workers such as miners also work as laborers when their particular product is up to the storage capacity you have set. And builders work as laborers when they have nothing to build.
One potential problem with farmers is that if they are far away from the farms doing laborer stuff when spring or fall comes, they may not make it back to their farm in time to fully plant or fully harvest their crop. Not using the Raise Priority function on big swaths of land far from your farms might help prevent this.
I’ve played a bunch more. Playing with a hard start has been much more of a challenge, but I’ve finally got the ball rolling.
I must say, though, that games like this are the reason why I’m trying to coin the term “town builder”. This game isn’t a city builder, it’s a town builder. The defining feature of a town builder is that each individual resident is tracked. Sometimes, getting from point A to point B in accelerated time causes problems that would never happen in real life e.g. walking 180m, chopping down a tree, and hauling it back to town takes up the entire winter and enough of the spring that the farmers just say “Fuck it, I won’t plant anything this tetra-year.”.
After 8 hours unsupervised, my town was down to a population of just over 50, and they were dropping like flies as I got back home. Poor people and their neglectful goddess.
I think the biggest issue with leaving your town unattended is that people don’t reproduce without houses to move into and raise a family in, so you end up with an age death spiral.
Obviously, it’s possible to counteract this, but you need to be able to micromanage the jobs people are taking because once all the laborers are dead, nobody is replacing people in jobs when they die, so if it’s your food production you’re screwed.
Damn death spiral. In one of my games I was doing great because I made sure I expanded slowly. Too slow, apparently. By the time I realized I only had five children and my adults we in their fifties I knew I would have trouble.
I finally had my first real disaster today: a tornado. I had all my stuff pretty spread out, but it managed to hit the exact vector to take down all my production buildings (blacksmiths, tailor, woodcutter). I had duplicates, spread out, and it hit ALL of them.
It also wrecked the houses near them and killed over 150 people directly. I ended up in this weird situation where I had too many houses, but all in the wrong places. I made an error and decided it would be smarter to rebuild the houses near the downed production facilities (which I also rebuilt), rather than rebuilding the production facilities near the houses. This caused a population boom I couldn’t handle. I ran out of tools first, that’s what ended up killing me. I’m really lucky I wasn’t on a harsh climate, because I could never adequately recover my firewood for some reason, even after I rebuilt my 3 woodcutters which immediately before the disaster was effortlessly fulfilling the needs of 250+ people so well I was using firewood as my sole trade resource.
I had 50k food saved up, and it slowly dwindled down. That year, I shut down my school and put everyone on farms, and went back to 40 farmers, but without tools they barely harvested anything, and thus I had a starvation spiral. I’m down to about 20 people now, but I have a positive food growth. I could probably recover at this point, but I might just start a new town. I’m fairly certain that if I had rebuilt the blacksmith etc in the intact areas I would have easily survived.
Map seed 475953738 is a good one for beginners. Finally got a town past its second winter using a large map with valleys on medium, all necessary resources were a short walk from the barn & stockpile.
Should have started a blacksmith before the trade depot. Started running out of tools during its sixth winter and couldn’t recover from the food shortage.
If you want a map with a lot of easily accessible flat land, try seed 229 on large valleys. I’m managing well on that map with a hard start and harsh climate; I have disasters on, too, but was spared any for a good 50 years.
I can’t bring myself to build a mine or quarry, because I hate this business of it creating a permanent dead zone once it’s tapped out. Fortunately, you can order all the stone you need from the general goods merchant, and he’ll take accept food in trade. It seems that a merchant’s inventory gets larger the more you buy from them; I had once had a boat arrive with 4000 stone! Importing coal and iron and logs and steel tools is handy, too.
I’ve found mines don’t take up nearly as much space as quarries, and presumably will have a smaller dead-zone footprint once closed. But the efficiency and efficacy of both leave a lot to be desired; trading for those items is preferable, but the merchants seldom have much (even if I’ve ordered).
I feel I should mention that there’s a reasonably active Banished subreddit which can have some handy tips, and a separate subreddit for sharing interesting map seeds.
Zombie thread, but I figured being Halloween time, and the fact that I brought a game back from the dead it would be appropriate :).
Stated a new game on all the hard settings, and in year three a tornado ripped through my village. People dying everywhere and as the debris finished falling, I had 3 survivors. Normally, I write this off as a lost game, but I was curious who was left. Turned out I had 3 teenagers, 2 boys and 1 girl.
They all started in separate houses, which is no good, I needed the boy and girl to be together. So I put the house the girl was living in under an upgrade command, and she shacked up with one of the two boys. A year later, I have 4 people. She gave birth to two girls and two boys, and my population was 6 people by year 5.
Slowly, inch by inch, they clawed their way back from the devastation and now at year 46, I have a thriving population of 150, and they all have the same great-great-great-great grandma 
There’s an Adam and Eve mod that sounds fun/difficult.
Just wanted to say that I’ve been following this thread since it’s inception, and when I saw Zyanthia had posted to teh thread, I thought maybe it was to announce that there is a Mac client for the game…
There isn’t.
:mad:
Yet!
Mods are now available from the game’s main menu; one (or is it two?) of these allow reclaiming of land occupied by depleted mines & quarries. A new game needs to be started with mods enabled.
Speaking of mods, a rather large one is going live today: Colonial Charter 1620. It should be up on Steam Workshop later today.
Thanks for that mod link! Talk about expanding the game, it totally rocks And physic class, it rocks.
Got the game this weekend, and I’ve really been enjoying it. But it’s tough as hell – even with mild climate, I’ve been struggling to maintain any population above about 20.
What buildings are absolutely vital, and what order should they be built in?
I started (at hard) by building 2 houses and a stockpile, then a fishing dock, a barn, two more houses, a woodcutter, a gatherer’s hut, a blacksmith, and then I tried a quarry, mine, and forester, with pretty low production for all three, and then a trader. At some point I built another house and a 2nd fishing dock and a herbalist. And I’m surviving, with lots of excess food and reasonable supplies of firewood and tools, but struggling to maintain logs, stone, and iron. A livestock trader came by and I scraped enough to trade for two cattle, which have since expanded to 5 in a pasture, but that’s it. Am I missing anything simple?
Early on, rely on gatherers and foresters for food. I wouldn’t bother with mines/iron until much later; they just make more durable tools, but the regular tools are durable enough for the beginning game.
For stone, which you’ll need a lot of, I just gather the stone (and iron) laying about. If for some reason you got a map with little of those materials scattered around, then that’s a problem.
When I can, I only build stone houses, as they use a lot less firewood.