This game is good. Review over!
Seriously now, lemme tell you about this little known (possibly to you) city-building survival game called Banished.
Set in the olden, pre-industrialized times, where a "group of people that have been banished, find themselves in need to settle, in a new location" - smack dab in the middle of untouched forests and rich rivers. Or, for someone who previously lived in a town until he was banished, in the middle of nowhere!
This is what i most love about this game; it's close connection to nature and the fact that it stays this way until the end-game, never developing advanced technologies or upgrading into skyscrapers or other high-tech paraphernalia.
This game was made by one person, by the way, and "soundtracked" by his brother if i'm not mistaken. Pretty awesome feat, if you ask me, and very inspiring!
Not a walk-through. Just a small initial tale of what you'll experience, initially in a play-through; a see-through.
We start out by telling our group of banished townsfolk to start chopping some wood and gather some stone and iron found on the ground, so they have shelter for the upcoming winter and don't freeze to death in "year one". We also tell them to collect food found in the forest floor so they don't die of starvation inside a warm house! That would be ironic (you know, from the word iron!)
Having gathered some basic items, and, not every family having their own home yet (townsfolk can warm up a bit going to any neighbouring home that has a fire going), the reserve of firewood which the banished group of people brought with them has been depleted, so, we make arrangements to ensure there's firewood for next year's winter in every home, so people's don't barging into other people's homes to get warm.
For this we build a woodcutter. Preferably near a forest, so the woodcutter doesn't spend much time walking to the nearest trees to fetch wood to chop up.
The townsfolk who don't have any especially skilled profession (laborers) have been gathering and filling up some stockpiles with basic materials, while ordered to clear out an area of the map to allow build room: wood, iron, stone and food found growing in the cleared forest area.
In the meanwhile, builders have been busy building the infrastructure and now we've almost built housing for everyone. Plus, we have a woodcutter which will start fetching wood from the stockpiles and turning into firewood. The townsfolk all rush to the stockpiles to fill their homes with it. These townsfolk are greedy little bastards; pretty much like the toilet paper fiasco when the Corona pandemic hit. They'll take as much as they can, and fuck their neighbours!
Stockpiles should be placed strategically, as Laborers tend to balance the materials found in each and every one of them so that all stockpiles have more or less the same amount of each material that you can place in them. Too many "bad-placed" stockpiles, and you'll see your Laborers spend much of their time transporting materials to stockpiles in places where materials aren't needed, eating up their time when they could be doing something useful instead!
However, while their initial efforts where laudable, not everybody survived the winter, perishing to starvation, so it's of utmost importance that we increase the amount of food which forested areas can yield. For that, we re-assign a few laborers to gatherers and build a specialized building: a Gatherers Hut. Gatherers working from the hut will tend the forest inside the hut's area of effect, maintaining the forest's grounds clean, allowing more food to grow and be harvested from the forest's ground; mushrooms, berries, etc.
It's important not to cut trees in the Gatherers Hut area of effect; the more trees, the more food will grow under the shade of the trees. So we'll have to get our wood for construction purposes from other areas.
With the Gatherer's Hut built, we can only hope they gather food fast enough, so we don't see anymore townsfolk perish from starvation!
Winter is upon us once again, and we will now build a Hunting Cabin in the forest, and assign some hunters; hunters will both bring in food (game) and textiles (pelts from the hunted animals) which we'll turn into clothing, to keep our townsfolk warm during the colder times of the year. Animals tend to exist in non-urban areas, so we utilize the same forested area for the Gatherer's Hut and build the Hunting Cabin there.
While the cold effects of winter on the townsfolk can be mitigated by having them work close to homes (which they quickly pop into to get warm), they'll spend more time working when appropriately dressed and less time leaving work to go get warm. Coats made from the Textiles (pelts) are an excellent way to increase this productivity.
With food production on track and clothing thought about, the townsfolk have now depleted their tools reserve. Every townsfolk uses tools for any job.
And while they can made due with broken tools, working with broken tools is a terrible idea! The time it takes to build stuff increases by a lot, and have a significant negative impact of production yields (for example, farming yields).
Nearly all townsfolk are running on broken tools so we quickly need a Blacksmith who can equip the townsfolk with shinny, new tools.
Where we build specialized buildings matter as most professions will need to gather raw materials. For example, with our Blacksmith, we build it near a hill, where, after our laborers have all but exhausted the ground iron nearby, which is required needed to build tools, we can then build a mine and extract iron from under the ground. Having the Blacksmith near the Mine, the blacksmith can gather iron in no time, giving him more time to spend on actually building the tools.
He'll also need wood, and that is available in the stockpile right in front of the Blacksmith. Something planned ahead. Planning is key in Banished as it will tweak the town's production speed allowing for a faster and bigger growth of the population.
With the blacksmith now making new tools, and thus the very basic needs for a functional society met, we decide to build a Marketplace. Marketplace workers, Vendors, gather every type of consumable resource from all specialized production buildings (for example from the Blacksmith, Gatherer's Hut, etc) and from storages (like stockpiles) and take them to this centralized place, where our townsfolk can easily go to, for all their commodity needs, freeing them up so they can work, instead of running around town, to the different production buildings and storages.
Barns, Stockpiles, Marketplaces (and all other storage buildings), plus all production buildings have resources that townsfolk need. Laborers spend their free time (when not told to do something) taking resources from production buildings to storage buildings, and trying to balance out the amount of resources each storage contains. So, like the Stockpiles, storage buildings should be placed strategically to free up Laborers and increase the town's development.
Much like with the USA, which used to be one giant forest, we've chopped down a lot of trees around our town for wood to build our infrastructure and heat up our wooden houses.
And much like Brazil, without good forest management, we'll soon find ourselves with a shortage of wood for our consumption needs! Luckily for us, our townsfolk don't need to breathe, so consumption our only concern!
Earlier, we decided to assign a portion of an area to allow for forest growth, to aid Gatherers and Hunters in their food gathering efforts. So, for our wood consumption needs we will use that area and build a Forester Lodge which will see Foresters plant trees, creating a denser forest which in turn will provide more food in the area. Along with planting trees, the Foresters will also cut down older trees and maintain a constant availability of wood, for usage, in town.
Some production building have an "effect area". The building's assigned "professionals" will work inside that area, only. These areas cannot be tweaked by the player.
Up until being of age to work, children spend their time doing nothing, idling around town. But some children are now becoming of age and getting put to work as Laborers. With more townsfolk out there needing protection from the cold of winter, it's time to put to use the Textiles our Hunters have been storing and build some Coats, so, the town now has it's first Tailor.
Every townsfolk needs to keep warm, regardless of working or not, so evry single one of them consumes Coats...and Food.. as you'd expect!
The townsfolk are now complaining that these new Laborers are uneducated and therefore do a poor job at their work (townsfolk don't actually complain about this, but educated townsfolk do increase their productivity at work), so we build a School House, which will allow a Teacher to educate children for a couple years after they come of working age, so when then do start to work they can be more productive. Now, educating children means they'll only start to work a bit later in life, so if there is a shortage of workers, going to school will, in fact be a risk for the town's survival! Luckily, we aren't in that situation, so we can afford the education.
As the town grows in population size, the need for food has increased, and as any mayor should do, we increase the food productivity. Living off berries and mushrooms found on forest grounds, and venison brought in by hunters, while delicious as it sounds, is not the best we can do to provide a healthy, varied diet to our townsfolk. So, we next build a Fishing Dock.
Part of the challenge of Banished is to find a way to best organize buildings, placing them as close as possible to an area they serve. In this case, the river is quite far from the town center. What we can do to increase efficiency in this case is place a Storage Barn close by, so fisherman and fisherwomen don't waste time taking fish into town; that's what Laborers are for. Efficiency goal: complete! To further tweak efficiency, we've built a home for the fisherpeople near the Fishing Dock so they don't spend time going from and to work. The downside here is that, all that that barn contains is fish and it'll be quite some time to see the barn contain varied resources (brought in by Laborers), so the fisherpeople will still need to go into town and visit the Marketplace for all their other commodity needs. Herein lies part of the fun of Banished, especially when distances get much further and resources need to be spread out through the region evenly. Laborers can only do so much work before they need to go home themselves, for a bite, and stock up their own homes, as well.
With all the types of food from the region now available in town, and with demands being supplied, it's time we pull some resources together, and open up our little town to outside commerce, so we can trade for more food types and every other resource we could possibly need in the future. For this we inaugurate our very own Trading Post. The gateway to the world. Now we are no longer banished. We are now self-sufficient(ed). As long as we have excess resources to trade, that is.
The trading post will alleviate the need for resources that are in short supply, and clear our storages from resources we have too much of. A win-win, and the gateway to the future!
The game has just begun!
After 200 hours, i'm still playing this game; i have yet to fill an entire region with towns and resources buildings, etc, hitting that "maximum possible population in a single region" goal. But i think it's safe to say i've grasped the concept and seen the challenges.
Whether it's getting some of the tougher achievements or having a region be completely "ruralized", the time i've spent learning how to play Banished well has been a delight.
There is a fair amount of specialized buildings we can build, and a ton more that modders have made, which adds a lot more variety of to the game.
Colonial Charters being the most famous.
While you can quite easily reach that certain mark where you've built every building available (there are no upgrade levels or tech trees, by the way), and have access to all the foods available in-game, i find that the lack of an ever increasing upgrading of buildings or tech trees (there's also no unlocking of buildings; everything is available right from the start) frees me up to just build and expand the town and try to keep it running smoothly.
It's a very zen game. Very chill.
Until it's not. And it's chaos!
Expansion, and keeping population alive is a challenge of balance and a good eye to keep supply chains in check.
Banished doesn't tell you how to play; you have to figure all it's mechanics while you play, and the game does throw curve balls at you, at any moment, possibly spelling disaster to almost your entire population.
For example: if people get hungry, they'll stop working to go and find food, in the closest storage building where food is available. If they happen to be a farmer, food production further decreases, affecting more people. And the downward spiral begins. And then there's natural disasters that can decimate your population without notice. So, it's a game of dealing with unforeseen disasters as well.
I don't find Banished a particularly hard game to play. It can be at the beginning, figuring how the game works, and especially if you don't read the help section of the game. But after you've familiarized with it, it's fairly easy to play.
What i find challenging is the expanding. There is a lot of planning gone into organizing an expanding town, and trying to make all resources closely available to each townsfolk, no matter where they live, so they don't wander for hours to go pick something up - time they should spend working.
There's more to the difficulty other than learning how to play and it's undocumented inner-workings, though. Banished is ruthless, and whether it's by an oversight on our part which results in the lack of an important item, or natural disasters, our towns can quickly spiral into chaos in a blink of an eye.
The new game menu allows to tweak the difficulty, plus, you can ignore the Help section, like i did, and try to build the biggest town you can right from the start, and have fun learning the game while chilling to this chill city-builder.
To further increase the challenge, the game also has in-game achievements, which you can stride for, forcing you to play several new games in order to get them all.
So yeah, i wouldn't say playing Banished is particularly difficult to play. Perhaps it's best described as time-consuming to master with the occasional biblical disaster you have to be ready for. And i'm fine with that. It's a lot of fun.
There's a few useful information panels and tools to help you maintain your town from falling into the dark ages, from production/consumption graphs, workplace/home paths (for each and every townsfolk), storage limits, automated selling and buying from merchants in your Trading Ports, etc.
While there's not much need to micro manage a stable town, it's when you start to expand that things start to get complicated that those panels start to be of utmost importance. And when you should start micromanaging the town a bit more.
Because Banished is not a difficult game to play, until it absolutely murders you!
Maps are randomly generated, and seeded (i think that's the correct way of putting it). This means you can share a map's seed number, and another person will be able to play in the same map. The same goes for online searching good map seeds, for a map that suits your liking.
The User Interface is completely customizable in the sense that you can have as many windows for panels and buildings up on screen as you want, plus you can drag these around to suit your viewing preference.
Playing it blind!
I freakin love this game. Mostly because it's set in a pre-industrialized setting and it stays that way. There's no objectives, no multi-tiered upgrades, nor tech trees.
Only natural trees.
Where the fun lies, for me, is seeing a big town work like clock work, tucked in the middle of trees, as one with nature.
Thanks for reading. I hope you'll give Banished a try if you haven't. If you're into chill city builders with no objectives of upgrades or story, then this game's definitely for you!
Cheers!
