Man City v Barca of course! Should be a great game…
It’s kinda weird,after watching many LPs of Banished i think that i won’t have any difficulties. Would be fun to get my ass kicked though:P
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I’m really enjoying Banished. One of the biggest reasons I am enjoying this game is that it is difficult. Too many city building type games are way too easy. I don’t think these type games should be as difficult as T&S was during the first versions. In T&S you would work at your settlement for hours and hours, and then get raided by MOB’s and die off. It would always get difficult after many hours of work with no warning. That is an example of bad game design, in my opinion.
Banished however is an example of excellent game design. It is very challenging, especially if you play difficult and start off with fewer citizens and only a handful of resources. The difficulty however is apparent immediately and helps you learn how to build your settlement properly. On difficult setting you will probably have to start over once or twice after you get a better understanding of how to prioritize your work. But you don’t need to invest hours of time before you realize you are on the wrong track. The challenges in the game are constant, with the exception of winter. You have to constantly provide food and shelter, and then slowly provide more and more types of resources and services as your population expands.
I love the fact that there is no tech tree, or “guided path”, you don’t need to build one building before another. If you want you can start by building a mine as the first building in your settlement. Not a very good idea to have people living outside while they work on building a mine for days and days, but you could do it if you wanted to. They would probably starve to death before they finished it however. This true sandbox style of gaming is very refreshing.
I haven’t tried the tutorials, but from their titles I’m sure they go a long way to teaching you what buildings to prioritize. The other enjoyable feature is that your labor resources are very limited. Deciding how many people to have doing each type of job is very critical, and can be the cause of your demise if you’re not careful. Too many people gathering resources, as apposed to food collection can cause starvation. Too many specialists and not enough labor will slow down the expansion of your settlement to a crawl. Finding an optimal balance is one of the things that makes this game great.
It’s truly amazing that this game was created completely from the ground up by one individual. He is definitely quite a talented fellow, and whatever company he left to start this has certainly lost a valuable resource. This game is one of the most polished games I have seen. The interface is very well designed and not lacking in any way. So many triple A titles I have seen in the past few years fall very short in this department, with very limited options, no configuration, etc. Banished has it all. Many different ways to do things, keyboard shortcuts, screen buttons, and different mouse actions. All the keyboard shortcuts can be configured. There are several reports to help you monitor the health of your settlement, and every single window can be pinned so you can keep the ones that you want to watch on screen. I leave my stockpile and barn inventories up so I can watch my resource and food levels.
I was looking forward to this game for quite a while and am definitely not disappointed. Lets hope that the guys at radiant have a few spare hours to try this game out. Their game is quite different, but very similar in allot of ways. I would love to see the difficulty in Stonehearth to be something very similar to Banished. There are no MOB’s in Banished so the difficulty comes from pure survival. Stonehearth is supposed to have many baddies to worry about so it shouldn’t be too hard to manage basic survival (food, shelter) as that would make it very difficult to also manage defense. But overall it should be challenging and as @Tom has mentioned in several live-streams, it should be possible to lose.
Just my thoughts after playing the game for a couple hours.
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wow, thanks for putting this together… very helpful review! 
here’s another … 
WALL OF TEXT!!! Run for your lives!!!
Streamed it for 2 and a half hours. Tried playing on hard 2 times, failed horribly. Normal is okay and I’m doing very good.
Starting with almost no resources is very difficult and I love it. I developed feelings towards my little village when I played on normal while hard was a bit too insane so I had no time to develop any connection since my people starved to death too fast.
Looking forward to the modding tools and see what mods the game will get!
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NO.
Things are going well right now, they’re fishing, hunting, gathering.
Trees are being felled, stone is being mined, buildings are being built.
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cowers in fear of the almighty Geoffers
You say this, however I bet when you turned there was fire everywhere and a couple of cases of cannibalism going on. You broke Rule #1: Don’t look away for a second.
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At least @Geoffers747 went to sleep… I’m not sure what time but he did.
He broke the rule @Smokestacks. He broke the rule.
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So, I thought things were going well, turns out you need to build more houses for your villagers to reproduce … I ran out of people and the last of them are now slowly dying.
Time to start again! I do feel like I’m learning more and more each time, it’s such an addictive experience!
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I’m in an endless circle, get new people, not enough food, half die. Have enough food, get more people, not enough firewood, half freeze to death. Have enough firewood and food, get more people, out of firewood and food, forester too slow, people die again. Goddammit
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I played the game all yesterday on medium so therefore I had an orchard and fields to start and let the game crawl at 1x just so I could watch the dynamics between what I did and what happened to my people. Today I started with hard and ran it at 5x. So far so good at year 7, but I just built a trading station so my folks are bound to die in droves from the plague I imagine.
One thing I did notice is that I can easily control my population if I only build 2 or 3 houses a year. People don’t have kids even if they’re older, as long as they don’t have their own house. I can imagine the population explosion that can occur down the road if you let the little dears have their way. I did wonder, however, if crowding could become an issue with the spread of disease. Also I made sure to leave a gap between all of my buildings to keep fire from spreading rapidly from house to house. (not that I had any, mind you) I assumed it was a fitting precaution.
As soon as I figure I have enough of a breadth of purchased resources to get by I’ll nuke the trading post. I consider it a liability.
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Ha, after failing miserably the last two attempts by not building houses quick enough I seem to be doing reasonably well at the moment.
A great tip I picked up is to build a forester and turn off their ability to cut down the trees, then place a hunters lodge and a gatherer building next door to the forester and they will benefit greatly from being surrounded by woodland.
I think I gathered around 1500 food in one season this way … it might take a few years for the planted trees to grow but definitely worth it, I’m supporting a population of 30 with just this.
apologies if I gave you faulty advice! it was the main takeaway from an LP where the guy had built twice the number he had planned, and had his citizens spread themselves too thinly (and consequentially horde food among those who made it to the storehouse first)…
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No faulty advice! I overstretched myself and didn’t build them quick enough which resulted in freezing to death!
It’s all good though! Current village has around 5k food (should probably expand) 1k food, and a stable amount of firewood, tools, and clothing.
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It seems like you all are having a lot of fun with this game… maybe I’ll have to get it in the future…
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Has anyone here played Anno 1404? I loved that game for a while, over 60+ something hours, and it looks really really similar to the gameplay of Banished. Actually it looks better than Banished, perhaps with less crop/profession diversity but more “event / activity” diversity. Even the way Banished highlights the grid placement is similar to Anno (thou granted there aren’t many good ways of doing it other than the way they did it, so it’s hardly stealing. It’s just good convention).
I had planned on jumping on Banished right away, but having spent all that city-building honeymoon on Anno 1404 I’ve come to the end of my “let the game simulator run for 10 hours building a peaceful city with no other content” phase, so-to-speak.
Has anyone here played a lot of both games, and if so, can you compare?
I actually plan to play Anno very soon, stay tuned for another month I’ll be able to let you know 