Banished by Shining Rock Software

I think your citizens will still use a marketplace even if you have nobody working in it, meaning that you can build it, assign some people, stock it up and then move them in and out while you monitor the level of various goods in the marketplace.

Fun little city builder, but I'm glad I got it on sale. I feel like I've gotten everything this game has to offer after building my first town to a couple hundred people in a few sittings.

Finally got around to this game and am enjoying it. I feel like my town is stuck with no ability to grow as I keep building houses, and people just keep moving into them from other houses, so my population stays the same and production of iron and stone is too slow.

Also, I've had some real funky repeatable windows blue screens associated with just this game. The game display would go black and freeze where I could switch to the desktop, but never get the game to display again, but it would act like it was overlaid and not let me interact with other windows behind it. If I forced it to stop and relaunched, it would blue screen right before the full screen part launched. It did this 2 or 3 times. I ran 2 passes of memtest and then verified my game data and it did not give me issues during the last play session, which lasted much longer than before when it would crash. And that's after a few rounds of Titanfall. I wonder if I should be worried about the HDD.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

I feel like my town is stuck with no ability to grow as I keep building houses, and people just keep moving into them from other houses

That's how the game works. As new houses are built, one young adult male and one young adult female will move out of their parents' house and into the new one. This new couple will then have children, who will eventually become young adults and continue the cycle (as long as new houses kept getting built).

That's one of the things I love about the game Mr.T--the small scale. There are mods which increase the resources if you're so inclined.

As for reliability, it's always been rock solid for me. Truly impressive for a one-man team.

MeatMan wrote:
mrtomaytohead wrote:

I feel like my town is stuck with no ability to grow as I keep building houses, and people just keep moving into them from other houses

That's how the game works. As new houses are built, one young adult male and one young adult female will move out of their parents' house and into the new one. This new couple will then have children, who will eventually become young adults and continue the cycle (as long as new houses kept getting built).

The trick is to avoid building so many houses that your population expands faster than your ability to feed, clothe, and warm them.

Hrdina wrote:
MeatMan wrote:
mrtomaytohead wrote:

I feel like my town is stuck with no ability to grow as I keep building houses, and people just keep moving into them from other houses

That's how the game works. As new houses are built, one young adult male and one young adult female will move out of their parents' house and into the new one. This new couple will then have children, who will eventually become young adults and continue the cycle (as long as new houses kept getting built).

The trick is to avoid building so many houses that your population expands faster than your ability to feed, clothe, and warm them.

Made a little tricky by the fact that the population growth lags your input (building more houses) so much, enticing you to build more new houses at one time than you can really support.

Yonder wrote:

Made a little tricky by the fact that the population growth lags your input (building more houses) so much, enticing you to build more new houses at one time than you can really support.

Oh man, those houses are so hot. With their pouty windows and their sloped roofs. I just want to see more and more, I can't help myself. The population just keeps growing and growing, people going in and out of the houses, in and out, in and out, more and more until the population EXPLODES with a ...

I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

BadKen wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Made a little tricky by the fact that the population growth lags your input (building more houses) so much, enticing you to build more new houses at one time than you can really support.

Oh man, those houses are so hot. With their pouty windows and their sloped roofs. I just want to see more and more, I can't help myself. The population just keeps growing and growing, people going in and out of the houses, in and out, in and out, more and more until the population EXPLODES with a ...

I'm sorry, what were we talking about?

We're talking about the mess you need to clean up now. And by mess of course I refer to the great die-off that will probably kill your town in 50 years.

Bad Ken! Bad!

So evidently in the town I was building, there were a few key deaths in my food production as all of a sudden a massive die-off started happening due to starvation where I had never had food issues before and I got to the point that I was down to barely enough to produce food and firewood.

And I had just finished up construction on a new hunter/gatherer area, too. I think I'll load up the save from before that night next time... If this wasn't my first playthrough and I had lost them while paying closed attention, I might roll with it, but this all happened and I didn't notice at first until it was too late.

Got the urge again last night, so I started a new game with an Adam and Eve start. Before I knew it, I'd played for two hours. My village is up to 6 working adults, 3 students and a couple of kids. Most of that time was played at 10x, but beginning with only two villagers the game progresses extremely slowly. Still, such a great game.

We won't discuss the incestuous nature of this type of population building.

D-Man777 wrote:

Got the urge again last night, so I started a new game with an Adam and Eve start. Before I knew it, I'd played for two hours. My village is up to 6 working adults, 3 students and a couple of kids. Most of that time was played at 10x, but beginning with only two villagers the game progresses extremely slowly. Still, such a great game.

We won't discuss the incestuous nature of this type of population building.

Not at my desk so can't check, but is that an option in the vanilla game or is it a mod? Sounds cool.

kergguz wrote:

Not at my desk so can't check, but is that an option in the vanilla game or is it a mod? Sounds cool.

It's a mod. Looks like you can get it from a link in this reddit thread.

Banished is $4.99 on GOG for the next ~11 hours. JUST. GO. GET. IT!!!

So bad at this game I managed a complete wipe. Went to 0 citizens. Had a mass death event when food became scarce right as a merchant rolled into town and everyone froze and starved right after that despite cleaning the merchant out. Maxed at like 79/30

I think I'm gonna start over.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

I think I'm gonna start over.

I think you don't have a choice with 0 citizens.

Joking aside, I fully encourage you to try again. I'd even suggest watching a video or two for starting tips. Once you get your colony to a self-sustaining point, which doesn't take too long, you can breathe easy and focus on the other great aspects of Banished.

I've been replaying a lot of Cities: Skylines over the last week or two, and while doing so, I've had a growing urge to also replay Banished. Seeing a new post in this thread is probably the thing that makes me actually fire it up again.

Now to go find a nice map seed.

Banished is a terrific game, I really enjoyed it. But I just can't get it to run now, it crashes on start-up every time. Any suggestions for a similar game to try? The Anno series is fun but I like the simplicity and setting of Banished.

For small games like Banished, I'd delete and re-install without giving it a second thought. Can backup your savegames first I'm betting, but if you're looking to start a new one...just reboot that puppy.

Hmm. Now I'm getting that yearning for the Zen part of Banished. I did the achievement thing. It's just relaxing to turn off all disasters and just...build. Putter around. Maybe plant a few orchards...

Oh good grief I'm an idiot. Thought my drivers were up to date but nay! So that fixed it. I did download a little early access called HearthStone in the meantime that looks really fun....

Docjoe wrote:

Oh good grief I'm an idiot. Thought my drivers were up to date but nay! So that fixed it. I did download a little early access called HearthStone in the meantime that looks really fun....

I assume you mean Stonehearth, not HearthStone, since I think the latter is firmly out of early access.

There's some discussion about Stonehearth in the Agent-Based Sandbox games thread, and the last post on it was here.

HearthStone is out of early access already??

Yeah you're right, I got my Hearths and Stones backwards. Looks like an interesting game, look forward to digging into it!

Well, I stayed up til 2 am after watching a tutorial. Now I have a town with maxxed wood, firewood, tool, and food. Stone, and iron are still in short supply as I am running up a wall of available labor. Since my houses are packed, I'm assuming that's the issue and am trying to remedy that. I also doubled most of my max resources and am contemplating pushing the limits much further before starting the next big development area.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Well, I stayed up til 2 am after watching a tutorial. Now I have a town with maxxed wood, firewood, tool, and food. Stone, and iron are still in short supply as I am running up a wall of available labor. Since my houses are packed, I'm assuming that's the issue and am trying to remedy that. I also doubled most of my max resources and am contemplating pushing the limits much further before starting the next big development area.

Building new houses is how you control population growth, and therefore the increased drain on resources.
Building a town hall gets you fancy graphs.

After all this posting I played an hour or two on my isolationist town, just enjoying the relaxation of it all.
Once you are past the "will I kill everyone phase" this is the chillest of chill out games.
I also notice myself building bridges and fishing industries more aggressively early on. And tunnels.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Well, I stayed up til 2 am after watching a tutorial. Now I have a town with maxxed wood, firewood, tool, and food. Stone, and iron are still in short supply as I am running up a wall of available labor. Since my houses are packed, I'm assuming that's the issue and am trying to remedy that. I also doubled most of my max resources and am contemplating pushing the limits much further before starting the next big development area.

Like boogle said, your population won't grow until you build new houses. When you build a new house, a young adult male and female will move in and start having children. It's a little odd, but the game considers 10 years of age to be the point when a person changes from child to adult, at which point the person enters the labor pool and is capable of having their own children. I'll also mention that when you get to the point of building a school, when a person reaches age 10, he/she will become a student for a few in-game years before entering the labor pool. The advantage of this is that educated workers are more productive and efficient than uneducated workers.

The school is vital to progress. An uneducated labor force leads to a death spiral of broken tools and resource shortages. Miners won't be able to get enough iron needed to make new tools and the blacksmiths won't be able to make tools fast enough to meet the demand.

https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...

Yeah, I watched a few tutorials. The first one was a 1st year video that said build a school right after a very few essential buildings and then a blacksmith not long after. I now have 6000 food (capped).

This game is my zen.