Banished

Banished, man... Banished sucked me in for a good three days and didn't let go. You start off with a few simple tutorials to get you acclimated to the layout of the game. The mechanics of the game aren't drastically different from similar titles in the genre but what was compelling about this game were the storylines that unfolded as a result of me not being aware of how the subtle differences could royally fuck you over. This is best expressed with a story of three settlements. This isn't my first rodeo with settlement building, so I thought I knew what I was doing. I was so wrong.

It started off well...I thought. People were housed, clothed, warm, had jobs, but I noticed my population wasn't growing. Nobody was homeless, so I had stopped building new houses. In other settlement building games I've played, the houses evolve as they gain access to new amenities and goods. This home evolution also results in expanding the number of people it can house. This is not how this game works. A wood house is a wood house forever. A stone house is a stone house forever, and one family lives there at a time.

It turns out that children don't move out of the house unless there's a house to go to. And grown ass children don't knock boots and make new children while they're living under their parents roof. By the time I figured this out, I had spent a good long while with this settlement in its current state. The next time I booted the game up, I paused it, and looked at all of the houses I had and their inhabitants. I was in trouble. I had a bunch of houses with 70-80 year old parents and their 50 year old children still living with them. Fuuuuuuuuccckkkk!

I needed young people, but they were in short supply. There was one woman who was 21, named Marlotte. I needed her to move out of her parents' house and find a fuck buddy fast for the good of civilization. Luckily I had one man who wasn't knocking on death's door. His name was Beatricki. He was 37. The average age of everyone else was about 76, their boot knockin' days firmly in the rearview. I built a house and Marlotte moved in. Beatricki soon followed, and they ended up having a girl named Bayley. Hope! Young Bayley eventually moved out of the house, but I needed nomads to miraculously show up for her to have a potential baby daddy. Marlotte and Beatricki had another baby, a boy this time, but soonafter Beatricki was killed in a tragic "giant quarry stone falling on his head" accident. Tragic!

With all young couples gone, I needed nomads...and bad. Just when all seemed to be lost, a young nomad named Ramien showed up. He didn't see nothing he liked apparently and moved into a house by himself. Dammit, Ramien! Years passed, and at age 38, he still wasn't picking up what Bayley was puttin' down, and Marlotte was no longer a spring chicken, so that wouldn't have helped anything.

It was about this time that my aging population started dropping like flies. This caused food supply problems because these old folks had been gathering, hunting, and growing the food that was keeping the plates of this society spinning. Everybody was starving. People were dying, but when all hope seemed lost, nomads showed up! A lot of them! I put them all to work in the food providing roles, but the damage had been done. I was now playing from behind and entering winter with no buffer. To make matters worse, the newly arrived fertile nomads had had a bunch of babies which I was now having a very hard time feeding. Marlotte's little boy was one of the first to die of starvation. Once winter came, I threw all my farmers into hunting roles. Hunting and gathering barely sustained us, and the elderly and new nomad babies fell one after the other, all of starvation. When spring came, I tried to switch some jobs around to get more farmers. But farming takes time. Time that I didn't have. It didn't take long for each house to completely run out of their supply. Marlotte then died of starvation, and that was it. I was done with this place.

I started a new civilization. This time, I vowed to build all the houses. Houses on houses on houses would ensure that there were plenty babies, and I wouldn't get stuck the way I had last round. Well...that worked...but too well. I had plenty of babies, but I had not built the food supply quick enough to sustain that growth. I was pretty much in immediate food danger. I was just eeking by. No one was starving, but people weren't exactly thriving either. Everything was balanced on the edge of a knife, and when a house caught on fire, the balancing act came crashing down.

I had built wooden houses because they took less resources to build and could be built quicker. They were placed close to one another to pack as many of them into the space I possibly could. This became problematic when one of them caught fire... Soon, they all had lit up like Christmas, and everyone stopped what they were doing to try and put it out. The problem is when everybody is playing fireman, they're not gathering, hunting, or growing all that food they're already desperately needing. I gave up on that town before the blaze was out. Onward and upward.

Take 3. I was going to go at a more measured pace this time. Keep an eye on how old everybody is getting, but only add housing when you can feed everybody. Only build structures when you need them, when you have the resources to build them, and for the love of God, put a buffer between structures so fire isn't so devastating.

Keep Gatherer's Huts and Hunting Cabins in places you don't intend to chop down all the trees. While in the midst of the previous two trainwreck settlements, my town's insatiable need for lumber led me to clear the forests around my food gathering structures. Wildlife and woodland edibles don't exactly stick around without the woodland. Multiple times, this made my already strained food situation worse. Putting Forester's Lodges in places where I did need to chop things down ensured that it would at least regrow and resupply me in time.

Even taking these steps, I still had trouble getting enough lumber for building purposes AND for firewood. My current map had lots of creeks/rivers separating the different land masses. I built bridges to hard to reach places that had resources, but when your lazy little settlers are too far away from their house, they take about two licks at a tree and go home for lunch. Slackers. That wasn't sustainable, so I strategically cleared nearby what I needed to clear and didn't raze the earth unless absolutely necessary.

All in all, I was smarter this round. I only took in nomads when I had enough food to keep them alive and I had a job need for them. One time I had 11 nomads show up, and I told them to get the fuck gone because I had just barely made it out of a lean winter.

After that, I beefed up farming, adding more fields. I had a shit ton of fisherman and farmers, hunters and gatherers. At one point I was producing too much food to even remove it from the field. As Banished doesn't have any programmed objectives, quests, or levels, your goal is to simply survive as long as possible. I had reached a point where I felt in control of my civilization, they had more food than they knew what to do with, and I felt like if I kept playing, it would essentially be more of the same. I decided my end goal was to get my total population to 100. I was at 61 adults and 20 children at this moment. To give you some context, my first settlement...you know, with all the old people, stagnated at about 20 people. My second trainwreck started going sideways about 10 people deep. Getting to 100 was a significant improvement.

Every time I would get to 99 people, someone would die of old age. That was the biggest difference of this playthrough, most of my deaths were because people were so old, they had turned to dust. There were a couple quarry workers that got crushed to death, and a hunter that was gored by a boar, but those were outliers. No more starving people. No more death by human popsicle.

Soon, I made it over the hump. 100! I felt accomplished. Then I decided to sit and watch it for a little bit longer. Someone immediately died. Then another. "Don't care, I already reached my objective." Then disaster struck. Tornado time in my pristine town. Death. Death. Death. Building destroyed. Forest destroyed. More death. More destruction. It moved across the map leaving a trail of fuck your shit. Once it roped out, I was down 20ish people and many necessary structures.

Don't care. I completed my goal. Goodbye Banished. You were 17 hours of fun. No more, no less.