Banished by Shining Rock Software

Yep been there as well. I am currently running a city with my daughter, and letting her make some of the decisions. I tend to tell her how we should organize buildings to keep at least some efficiency, which was working great. We had a nice city going with around 600 people, then she decided to accept a set of 78 nomads which required us to build another Marketplace to expand to. Less than a year later she accepts a set of 91 nomads. The crash came hard and fast. First ran out of tools, which then crashed food and fuel at the same time. I got it stable again at around 400 people after getting a few lucky traders in a row.

I'm not usually one for reports, but once I've got >400 people, I start looking at the town hall reports, at different time intervals, to keep an eye on my food curve especially. I also find it really helpful to have 2 trading posts, one of which I use more for storage of critical items (like tools), and only sell them when I've maxed the production I set, and what I set as max in trading post. After the great tool shortage of 38, aka "man those freaking nomads break all my gorram tools", I go a bit conservative on them.

On the other hand...I got bored around 700 people and wondered if I could handle taking on 150+ nomads at once. If nothing else, you can get the achievement for filling up graveyards...

Is it wrong I never put the storage barn *in* the forest? I put one right outside the forest, next to houses and lumber/coal/iron yard usually.

Yeah, but who wants to live next to a storage barn? Fortunately I guess your Banished villagers don't really care where they live as long as they don't starve on the way to work.

Roo wrote:

Is it wrong I never put the storage barn *in* the forest? I put one right outside the forest, next to houses and lumber/coal/iron yard usually.

Wrong? No. Just not as efficient. Walking to drop off the food hurts productivity more than the small footprint the storage barn takes up.

Storage facilities in early American colonies were put in houses themselves, as well as in common use buildings usually located among the houses. The need for defense mandated that storage be located near housing, and all within the town's walls. Later, as they grew, the towns built outbuildings, but usually those were for temporary storage, or part of smaller farming or gathering homesteads that themselves could be defended for a time.

So if you were a settler of the period, yeah, you'd definitely want to have storage buildings in amongst the houses.

BadKen wrote:

Yeah, but who wants to live next to a storage barn?

My citizens do, and I, as the player, want them to. Efficiency is key in Banished, especially if you play with hard starting conditions.

MeatMan wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Yeah, but who wants to live next to a storage barn?

My citizens do, and I, as the player, want them to. Efficiency is key in Banished, especially if you play with hard starting conditions.

QFT

I was playing last night on hard and I waited a little too long to transition to steel tools, which last longer than iron tools. As a result, I got to the point where my 50 citizens were eating up my iron tools faster than my lone blacksmith could build them. I had plenty of wood and iron, but my gathered iron was all in a stockpile so far away from my blacksmith that his travel time killed his efficiency.

I had to build a second blacksmith to put out the fire, but managed to get everything under control.

TL;DR
Efficiency is key.

D-Man777 wrote:
MeatMan wrote:
BadKen wrote:

Yeah, but who wants to live next to a storage barn?

My citizens do, and I, as the player, want them to. Efficiency is key in Banished, especially if you play with hard starting conditions.

QFT

I was playing last night on hard and I waited a little too long to transition to steel tools, which last longer than iron tools. As a result, I got to the point where my 50 citizens were eating up my iron tools faster than my lone blacksmith could build them. I had plenty of wood and iron, but my gathered iron was all in a stockpile so far away from my blacksmith that his travel time killed his efficiency.

I had to build a second blacksmith to put out the fire, but managed to get everything under control.

TL;DR
Efficiency is key.

You can always flood your job market with laborers, then delete the far stockpile to push goods closer into town.
The serfs must earn their keep.

I don't want to live in any of your towns. The Market is for providing goods within walking distance of houses. Houses go around the Market, not around Warehouses. Warehouses are for the work sites and buildings.

Buncha slumlords, you lot.

Of course, before your town is big enough to support a market, you have to build slums.

boogle wrote:

You can always flood your job market with laborers, then delete the far stockpile to push goods closer into town.
The serfs must earn their keep.

I didn't have a lot of extra bodies. I'm going for the Uneducated and Isolationist achievements. The lack of education also really tanks efficiency. I'm having to add workers to all the functions to keep my inventories up.

Also, no trading makes for kind of a boring game. I probably shouldn't have tried this on hard. At least I would have had some crops and pastures to build. I don't recall if there's a difficulty restriction on the 'cheevie.

Houses near the market are stone and go to the producers of food and goods.
Slums are for the miners and stonecutters.

boogle wrote:

Houses near the market are stone and go to the producers of food and goods.
Slums are for the miners and stonecutters.

Yeppers. At least once things are big.

I was thinking more the early days, first forest. Question on that then...while it's more efficient for storage to be right next to place where you're getting the stuff, if that stuff is food...how is it getting distributed from the forest storage to the houses outside the forest?

Roo wrote:
boogle wrote:

Houses near the market are stone and go to the producers of food and goods.
Slums are for the miners and stonecutters.

Yeppers. At least once things are big.

I was thinking more the early days, first forest. Question on that then...while it's more efficient for storage to be right next to place where you're getting the stuff, if that stuff is food...how is it getting distributed from the forest storage to the houses outside the forest?

Marketplace workers will bring it to the marketplace closer to the rest of your village. The forest workers should be able to get food from the storage barn right next to them, but they will have to trek to the village for tools, clothes, etc every now and then. Probably pretty similar to real life actually.

Granath wrote:

Most colonies actually do not break down until they are at about 300 citizens. Then the inefficiencies due to poor planning start creeping in and really hurting you. Instead of one house, people will start building 5 or 10 at a time but forget to expand the infrastructure to accommodate those new citizens. Because 10 new houses is not just 10 new citizens. It can quickly become 40-50 new citizens and that is a lot to absorb, especially when half will not be productive for 14 years. Food reserves will start decreasing and the player does not realize it. Then a bad harvest happens and WHAM! everyone starts starving the following spring. Game over. Can you tell I am speaking from experience? At larger population levels it is tough to know when you are on the downward side of the curve and you do not realize it until too late.

So you do not have to worry about min/maxing right off the bat. I just use the quad to know that I have a good solid start at the beginning. It makes the mistakes I make later a little more forgiving.

Well, I managed to recover from my near-disastrous start. Adding a gatherer, a school (after 20 years!), and a trading post helped to stabilize things and lead to slow growth. I started to build up a food surplus, so finally built a Town Hall. I've been able to take in two groups of nomads so far without major impact on my food surplus (about 10K now). The Town Hall tells me that I only have one or two more houses than families right now.

When I took in the second set of nomads, I had 3 fisheries and 3 gatherers, each of which was only half-staffed. Many of the new guys got jobs to feed themselves while I built new houses.

I've expanded across the river to add a bunch of orchards and crop fields, along with a market and all the houses they need. My population is about 250, although lately a number of people have died of old age to bring that number back down. However, I have about 35 students, and 45 children, so I've built up to three schools to keep them all edumacated.

At one point I had placed a hospital, but never un-paused it to be built. Eventually a noticed a little 0-year-old $#!$ running around town spreading dysentery. Up to 25 out of my at-the-time 150 citizens caught it from him, but none died of it. They started to recover on their own after a while, but the last dozen or so made use of the new hospital as soon as it opened.

I'm looking forward to hitting 300.

Roo wrote:

I'm not usually one for reports, but once I've got >400 people, I start looking at the town hall reports, at different time intervals, to keep an eye on my food curve especially. I also find it really helpful to have 2 trading posts, one of which I use more for storage of critical items (like tools), and only sell them when I've maxed the production I set, and what I set as max in trading post. After the great tool shortage of 38, aka "man those freaking nomads break all my gorram tools", I go a bit conservative on them.

I also like having the information from the Town Hall. The population graphs had a nice cliff that shows where half the town starved due to incompetent leadership.

I haven't yet added a second trading post, but do use the current one as extra storage, particularly of firewood and fish.

Hrdina wrote:

I also like having the information from the Town Hall. The population graphs had a nice cliff that shows where half the town starved due to incompetent leadership witches.

The first one is free.
-Middle Ages Marketing Department

Yonder wrote:
Roo wrote:
boogle wrote:

Houses near the market are stone and go to the producers of food and goods.
Slums are for the miners and stonecutters.

Yeppers. At least once things are big.

I was thinking more the early days, first forest. Question on that then...while it's more efficient for storage to be right next to place where you're getting the stuff, if that stuff is food...how is it getting distributed from the forest storage to the houses outside the forest?

Marketplace workers will bring it to the marketplace closer to the rest of your village. The forest workers should be able to get food from the storage barn right next to them, but they will have to trek to the village for tools, clothes, etc every now and then. Probably pretty similar to real life actually.

I was still thinking first forest. It's a *long* time in early game before I have a market place, which is one of the reasons I prefer (preferred?) putting the barn next to the houses on forest's edge, rather than barn in forest (because of lack of market). From that maybe i made wrong assumption...better to have food taken out over more time by gatherers, than everybody else having to go in forest to get food to put in their houses...

or not. I dunno.

Hmm, the market place is one of my very early buildings, but I only have a single person working there (and I will remove them when I'm short on laborers if the marketplace is pretty well stocked). In my experience having that person saving 20 other people long trips can be valuable even from the very beginning.

Roo wrote:

I was still thinking first forest. It's a *long* time in early game before I have a market place, which is one of the reasons I prefer (preferred?) putting the barn next to the houses on forest's edge, rather than barn in forest (because of lack of market). From that maybe i made wrong assumption...better to have food taken out over more time by gatherers, than everybody else having to go in forest to get food to put in their houses...

or not. I dunno.

Resources and labor are just far too tight early game to have a marketplace. I simply build a barn near my first group of houses and rely on my gatherers, hunters, and fisherman to stock it with food. I'd rather have those workers (and laborers) transporting the food than forcing each household to waste precious working time to get their grub on.

I have started to plan out my cities more, though. I build my first houses around a large enough open space where I'll eventually build a marketplace.

I always prioritize building a marketplace fairly early on, once I have the basics (food, firewood, tools, education) taken care of.

BadKen wrote:

I always prioritize building a marketplace fairly early on, once I have the basics (food, firewood, tools, education) taken care of.

I tend to have a bunch of houses around mine, along with at least one blacksmith and one tailor. I've expanded to two new villages from original town center, and each one got a market fairly early.

I'm currently playing a game that has lasted over 50 years (with a gradually growing population that sits at 250 at the moment) and I haven't used marketplaces at all. Instead, I keep building new quads and evenly spreading the new houses between them. When I experimented with marketplaces in an earlier game, they tended to screw up my planning because even just one of them would completely raid my storage barns, forcing most of my people to make longer trips to the marketplace instead of the barns next to them. It's a shame that the player can't control what the marketplaces store.

My expansions always start with a marketplace, to give the worker(s) time to stock it before everyone moves in and eats everything.

Had it for the longest time. Downloading it now (so it can probably sit unplayed because I'm a dolt).

BadKen wrote:

I always prioritize building a marketplace fairly early on, once I have the basics (food, firewood, tools, education) taken care of.

How can you spare the labor? My towns are always heavily labor constrained until I get a batch or two of new graduates.

Oz wrote:

It's a shame that the player can't control what the marketplaces store.

Yeah, the Colonial Charter mod, while excellent, tends to clogs your marketplaces with a bunch of crap. I'd really love a mod that gave you more granular control over all types of storage. But I think I remember reading something that the citizen AI tends to be lazy, meaning they'll just drop off goods and materials at the closest storage spot.

OG_slinger wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I always prioritize building a marketplace fairly early on, once I have the basics (food, firewood, tools, education) taken care of.

How can you spare the labor? My towns are always heavily labor constrained until I get a batch or two of new graduates.

The market is a labor saving device, it really cuts down on the travel time that almost every other villager needs to make to get their needs met. Also, it's very forgiving about having its employees reassigned.

Yonder wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
BadKen wrote:

I always prioritize building a marketplace fairly early on, once I have the basics (food, firewood, tools, education) taken care of.

How can you spare the labor? My towns are always heavily labor constrained until I get a batch or two of new graduates.

The market is a labor saving device, it really cuts down on the travel time that almost every other villager needs to make to get their needs met. Also, it's very forgiving about having its employees reassigned.

True, you can actually start with fairly low amount of market workers and it still works well enough (even 2). You can spot check how things are working, by seeing what houses have in stock vs. market to see how well it's working.

Yonder wrote:

The market is a labor saving device, it really cuts down on the travel time that almost every other villager needs to make to get their needs met. Also, it's very forgiving about having its employees reassigned.

Does it? I mean if I have a barn and a firewood stockpile in the center of town do my citizens have to travel significantly more than they would with a marketplace in the same location?

The early game benefit of a barn over a marketplace is that I have an extra worker to gather critical resources, such as food, or help finish construction projects.

Once your town has grown to the point where you need multiple barns, sure, a marketplace makes sense. But in those early years? I'll take an extra worker.

You're forgetting that not only is the market worker combining things for easy access for all of the other citizens, but they'll also pull directly from storage buildings if the barns are empty. The market workers are basically specialized laborers.

Yonder wrote:

they'll also pull directly from storage buildings if the barns are empty.

Did you mean stockpiles? The barn is the storage building.

Yonder wrote:

The market workers are basically specialized laborers.

But all they do is move goods from barns and stockpiles to the market, yes?. IIRC, they're not like builders or farmers, who will act as actual laborers if there's nothing to build / no farming to do. I didn't use markets much, so I could be wrong about that.

Sorry, I meant Production buildings. For example if the barn is empty they'll get food directly from the Fisherman's hut.