Banished (PC) (City Builder)

[Salodin]

So I tried a couple new games, learned its best not to keep food production at 100%, if you do then when you expand your town you'll already be behind food needs and your people will still be breeding full force. Best to be at 50-75% and raise it as you need it to keep from having your pop explode too fast.

You also have to take the elder population into account when building houses. No point in building new houses if you have a few grandparents about to kick it. I'm trying to keep my families 1-2 below homes, with food production at 75% while slowly expanding and switching from hunting to raising cattle and sheep.

[Cichy]

so I guess it's pretty common to have a disaster around 50 people. I had an outbreak of cholera luckily I had a Hospital but still 3 people died

[BaneTheBrawler]

so the hardest part of starting a new game, for me, is deciding the general layout of my new city. how to design the initial core, planning where i'm going to expand, etc.

in the course of working on that, it occurred to me to wonder if maybe a boarding house would be a decent choice for the first housing structure. How/what exactly do they work/do? I assumed they would form a sort of buffer/hotel type deal for when houses burn down or something, but I've never built one so I dunno.

edit: oops, words.

and yes, it's the one next to stone house. i haven't built any stone houses either.

[tyven]

i havent even seen that as an option. im guessing its the choice next to stone house? has anyone even built stone houses yet? around what population did you upgrade?

[Arkanna]

Boarding houses are large, temporary housing for times when you get a bunch of homeless people all at once, like when nomads arrive or when fires burn down your real houses. They don't work as long-term housing because people living in them don't have children.

[tyven]

i feel like an idiot asking this but do you start with seeds or tree and if so is there a way to check and see aside from just building a farm?

[BaneTheBrawler]

hmm, boarding house may indeed be a decent first-housing choice, then. i just lost one of my laborers to childbirth within like 5 minutes of building my first house. no herbs, no doctor. although, i'm not entirely sure those would help with childbirth deaths. wiki only mentions diseases. anyway, i'd have liked to have at least had a graveyard before my first death... so i'm thinking delaying the start of my growth a little bit may not be a bad thing.


anyway, i've worked myself into the inability to play. i keep trying to get everything about my city just perfect, and ultimately get bored when I can't. I don't do random placement very well. I think I'll go read for a while and try again later.

[Lucavi]

i havent even seen that as an option. im guessing its the choice next to stone house? has anyone even built stone houses yet? around what population did you upgrade?

I use nothing but stone houses now, but it took awhile to get to that point. I spent years building up food and stone reserves while slowly expanding my population and accepting nomads to fill gaps in work coverage. Once you have all of your core structures built that require stone, you can then begin to build nothing but stone homes so long as you have a decent amount of people working the quarry. I hit the "ready for anything" acheivement simply by spending about 7 years doing nothing but stockpiling everything. I did nothing but trade excess goods for additional different ones (its easy to get whatever food you're lacking by trading venison or other meats for it) and pumped stone out until I had around 650. From that point on, building anything you need to build is effortless.

[tyven]

do stone houses hold up better against fire and tornados?

[Lucavi]

I'm not sure about that, honestly. Someone else may have more knowledge on the subject. I haven't had a tweeester or fire yet, but ive had plenty of disease.

[BaneTheBrawler]

filthy nerd

[tyven]

I'm not sure about that, honestly. Someone else may have more knowledge on the subject. I haven't had a tweeester or fire yet, but ive had plenty of disease.

the second i finished upgrading my first stone house a fire broke out, every home and most of my infrastructure destroyed, including the stone house. apparently having a well every 3 buildings is now enough. im tempted to play this game with disasters off because I keep getting absolutely wiped out by fires

[Salodin]

Stone houses require over time less firewood to stay warm, saving you logs. Doesn't seem like much when forresters are awesome, but that's less time chopping wood, less time transporting it to storage, less time transporting it market, less time transporting it home. It adds up.

[BaneTheBrawler]

well, my first attempt at starting with a boarding house failed. i only had two builders, and by the time they built the gathering hut they ran out of time to work on the boarding house. fortunately i saved, so i'll try again later with more builders.

[Kaelan?]

Stone houses are mostly useful to save firewood, so you have more available for trading. Larger initial investment to build them, but they'll save you plenty of resources down the line. Keep in mind that converting wood to stone still has you pay the entirety of the cost of a stone house on top of what you paid for the original wooden house, so building them as stone in the first place is best if you can afford it.

i feel like an idiot asking this but do you start with seeds or tree and if so is there a way to check and see aside from just building a farm?

You can only check those once you've built a Town Hall, it's shown in the last tab. You start with seeds on easy/normal, but not on hard. They're generally not too useful to start with as by the time you should start building farms you'll already have the ability to build a trading post. You might get a slight edge from not needing to spend resources on a trading post right away...but that's about it.

Few extra findings from trying to optimize stuff:

* In general, for optimal production you should have workers live as close as possible to workplaces and food/resource storage. This is also why better coats are important, less travel time = more work time. Also, educated workers always produce more. If you have buildings consistently producing less than they should, this is probably why.

* Farming
Farms produce based on size. You can't have fractional workers, so you should always have farms of whatever the maximum size is for the given number of workers you want on it. Optimal sizes seem to be:
- 1: 8x7
- 2: 8x14
- 3: 12x14
- 4: 15x15

In general, each worker seems to handle an area of ~56 (arbitrary game units). Farms produce 7 food/area, or 392/worker. I prefer having several 1-worker farms, to make it easier to change the types of crops, as well as making infestations harder to spread (they spread more readily between adjacent crops of the same type). Orchards should work the same way, but they seem to produce a lot less food (less than half most of the time), take more time to start up and are in general more volatile so I haven't spent a whole lot of time messing with them.

* Herding
A max size 20x20 pasture only requires 2 workers. At that size, you need 20 cattle, 25 sheep or 66 chickens before you can start producing food (though I think sheep still make wool before that?). Herding is a lot less consistent than farming, and I'm not entirely sure why. I'm guessing there's some random factor in the animal reproduction rates that affect how much you produce year to year.

Sheep: Around ~1400 Mutton and 90~96 wool per year. I've seen the Mutton production go as high as 2120.
Cattle: Around ~800 Beef and ~24 leather per year. As with sheep, I've seen the beef production go up to 1160 at one point.
Chickens: I've never actually tried a full 20x20 chicken pasture, but the half-size one I tried produced 372 eggs and 166 chicken per year.

Actually a bit surprised that sheep produce more meat than cattle.

I also noticed that a much smaller 10x15 Cattle pasture with only 1 worker and 7 cattle still seemed to produce about 760 beef / 22 leather per year, making it just as effective as a full sized pasture, which is a bit weird. I haven't seen the same with sheep - those seem to always produce a lot less in smaller sizes. Not entirely sure why this is. The optimal size for herding might be less than the max and might be different for different animals. Or it's a bug?

Regardless, cattle and sheep are even more efficient than farming in terms of food/worker, but they take up more space and only provide two different types of food (whereas farming can get you about 8).

* Gathering
Takes 4 workers to produce ~2000 food/year, split between 4 different types. Better food/worker than farms and provides constant food throughout the year, but takes up a huge amount of space (they seem to be ~60 units across, so about 2800 units^2 total? that would be like a 53x53 size farm). The most efficient way of getting food early on, when you're short on workers, need immediate food production and have tons of room, but outdone by farming an equal amount of space when you have more workers available.

* Hunting
Output seems to be pretty random based on (random?) animal movement in the game. From what I've seen, you tend to get anywhere between 400~1000 venison/year, usually around 600~800, in addition to 24 leather. At 3 hunters per cabin, even at their best they're still not as effective food/worker as farms or sheep herding. The upside is you can build them in the same area as gatherers, which effectively makes Hunting+Gathering a single 'unit' of food production. When you take that into account, you're actually getting 370~400 food/worker total, which is actually pretty good. They still take up a ton of space, though.

* Fishing
Takes 4 workers to produce anywhere from 300 to 1200 fish a year. Even at the highest numbers I've seen, they're still the least productive food source. The only benefit is they take up very little space. Probably only useful when you have a surplus of workers and a shortage of farming space. Making them early game seems to be a waste of valuable workers who could otherwise be hunting/gathering/farming somewhere.

The way to go for food seems to be:
Crops > Sheep Herding > Hunter+Gatherer > Cattle Herding > Fishing/Orchards

Though priorities may change depending on availability of workers, space and food variety. And...that's all I got for now!

[tyven]

good info, thanks.

Im guessing there is no way to remove dirt roads?

[Waraji]

good info, thanks.

Im guessing there is no way to remove dirt roads?

Remove Road tool, next to Cancel Removal tool.

[tyven]

Oh derp thanks

[BaneTheBrawler]

if you lay down a road and it crosses some resources, then cancel it before it's built, the tiles under the resources won't be cancelled. someone will come by and knock the tree down, then build the road. only then can you remove it. bit wonky, but yeah.

edit: also, with 4 builders i managed to complete the boarding house in time. it's working quite well thus far... and my citizens just had two babies, so they DO reproduce while in a boarding house. I guess they're not shy.

edit2: make that three

[Grey Jorildyn]

Lost my first good town around year 70-something with 330/19/59. Took in some nomads and food/tools got a bit out of hand and people began starving left and right.

Oh well. I was running out of room on the map anyway and things were not laid out very efficiently. Learned a lot and definitely gonna do better next time.