I have a little over 4 hours logged in Banished now. So far, I'm really, really, liking it. The game exhibits a high amount of polish; the economy and mechanics are solid, the visuals are nice, and there's a surprisingly good soundtrack to boot. The tutorials do a good job at explaining most things, but unfortunately they're not all-inclusive. Things like mines, hospitals, schools, tunnels, and a few other miscellaneous elements are not mentioned at all in the tutorials. They are kind of self-explanatory though so it's not a big deal. Hover-tooltips explain pretty much everything you need to know. The built-in reference manual is also very detailed and helpful.
My first town was off to a bad start and I deleted it not long after starting. On my second town now, and I'm doing great. Here's what I've learned so far:
The first things you really need to build are - aside from houses - a woodcutter, and a hunting+gathering hut. They provide the basic essentials: Food and heat. Firewood will make your villagers survive through your first winter (and all of the winters after), and hunters/gatherers will provide mushrooms, berries, and herbs to eat. Hunters and gatherers are a critical food source early game because you can assign workers and they can start acquiring food almost immediately. Like I said, it's just berries and roots; stuff they pick off the ground and put in storage. Your town can survive on nothing but these for the first little while. It takes a couple years before you really need to start developing crop fields, pastures, etc, etc.
Pay attention to the seasons. The first time around, I made the mistake of building a wheat field before building a hunter/gatherer hut, and by the time it was ready to plant, I realized it was Autumn and it was too late to grow anything. My empty field just sat there all winter while my villagers slowly starved. Oops.
This is even more of a problem with animal pastures. In my second town, which is mostly very successful, I admittedly have an empty animal pasture sitting there with no animals in it. I can't breed animals because I have no animals to begin with. I think the only way you can get them is through traders. So I built a trading post along the side of the river (which takes a pretty large amount of time and resources, plan accordingly), and I waited for a merchant to come by. I had no idea how often merchants come by and how long they stay, so I had to figure it out by trial and error.
Eventually there was a merchant who arrived one Autumn and stayed through the whole winter. He had some cattle (that I really wanted/needed!) but then I realized I didn't have enough items in my trading post to give him in return. Another oops. I had assigned a single worker to the trading post to move goods into it, but I only had 60 logs or something really weak like that. You need to have goods sitting directly inside your trading post for them to be traded. If you haven't moved the goods from your stockpile yet, you can't trade them. I rushed like mad to get my single worker to fill up the tradepost as much as reasonably possible, but it took too long, and I wasn't exactly rich enough to buy the cattle I wanted anyway. The merchant eventually left that spring. Ah well. I will wait for the next merchant, and I will be more prepared next time.
Also... stone. At the beginning of the game, don't ignore harvesting stone. That was another one of my critical mistakes. I cut down mostly trees, thinking that stone wasn't that important, and then I was pretty much chronically short on stone and I couldn't build much. Stone is just as important as wood for buildings - often even more important.
Like I said, I'm on my second village now and I'm already doing way better. It has a populatoin of about 40. I have several houses, a tailor, woodworkers and foresters, multiple stockpiles, a couple of crop fields, an orchard, a fishing dock, a mine, an herbalist, a school, three wells, a trading post, and a couple other things I'm probably forgetting. I'm getting by, albeit modestly, but successfully.
Managing workers is really important. You never have an excess of people. More often than not, you have less people than you actually need to fulfill all the jobs, so you have to think critically and decide what jobs you want your workers to prioritize. For example, my fishing station has room for four fishermen, but for a long time I only assigned a single worker to fish because I couldn't afford any more than that. It was enough to get by though. That's all you really need to do; you just need to get by and survive. I don't think you ever get particularly wealthy in this game. You also don't want to have too much of one thing. Rather, you want to maintain a modest amount of everything. If you have an excess of a particular resource, stock it up in your trading post and trade it with a merchant who might have rare items you don't have yet.
Hmm... I can't think of much else right now. If more tips come to me I'll be sure to post them. Like I said, early game you want houses, then a wood cutter, then hunters/gatherers to start out, in that order. Then maybe a herbalist next, to keep your villagers' basic health in order.
Hunters/gatherers hut, hunter's shack, forester's shack, and herbalists shack all need to be built in the outskirts surrounded by wildelife/vegetation in order to be effective. This should be fairly obvious.
Really really fun game. I'm definitely going to sink some more time in and see how far things go.
After watching Total Biscuit's WTF is video on Banished, I want to play it, but I'm pretty sure its not a relaxing game. Looks like there's lots of micro management, and its difficult to overcome issues that occur. According to TB, a bad harvest, for example, can cause a domino affect. Your blacksmith starves and dies, so your tools start breaking, so now people can't gather resources, so more die, etc.
While TB's videos can certainly be very informative, let's be honest; he sucks at most of the games he plays. I watched his WTF is of Banished and he made some pretty dumb mistakes. He assigned workers poorly. He put his hunters and gatherers in a deforested area, and then he wondered why he wasn't getting any food. His town layout was awful. He also put two stockpiles right next to each other for some reason.
If you want to see some Let's Play videos that are a little more competent, watch
Etalyx's playthrough or
quill18's (haven't watched them fully yet, but I think they know what they're doing). It's not a hard game, and that's coming from someone who normally sucks at these kinds of games. There isn't much micro-management at all. It's just a matter of building what you need to build, harvesting what you need to harvest, and allocating workers appropriately. Always do a little bit of planning ahead and consider distances/locations and all that jazz.
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