AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Subtitle: Wry is a smug asshole about pretend farming

Let's talk about it.

For someone like me, who played WoW for like three years SPECIFICALLY to play the auction house, and who has made a solemn vow never to get into EVE so that my family can dream of seeing me again one day, Banished is perfect. It is brutal, unforgiving, complicated, and long. I am pretty good at it.

Good enough that I designed a city over the course of a few hours, let it run overnight, and came back to find that out of 250 adults, 148 didn't have to work at all, and I had 180,000 food, with 100% happiness and health, an education rate in the 90%s, over 1000 stockpile in raw materials, 150 each of tools and good clothes, and an average lifespan tipping readily into the 90s. To be fair, it was with the Colonial Charter mod-expansion, that adds at least four times as many occupations and a lengthy series of tiered production lines, more animals, more intense challenges and more needs. To be unfair, I've also played the core game on hard mode in harsh climate and ended up with the same results, eventually. (A... few more tiny imaginary people might have died, though.)

If you're struggling to get your city off the ground in this game, let me impart some of my terrible, pretentious advice!

On Mild, Fair, and etc. maps (including any mod climate that will allow crops to grow at all) a single farmer allowed to start farming as soon as Early Spring arrives can effectively manage an 8x15 field by themselves, for most crops. Some fare better than others: beans, parsnips, celery, strawberries, corn, wheat, hemp, cotton, and so on grow very quickly. Squash is more stubborn, etc.

This means that in a city of nearly 200 people, if you want to be needlessly productive and sink raw food into production lines, you MIGHT need 25 farmers... maybe. Coupled with two gathering huts, and one hunter's lodge, you'll never need to worry about food again, by which I mean your food will climb by thousands every year and it will only shrink in response to freak occurrences like early frosts or natural disaster. If you want to guarantee that every field in every climate hits near 100% yield, drop the field size to 4x15. In the off season, all your farmers will readily work as laborers, too. This applies even in the core game.

In the latest Colonial Charter mod, the easiest and fastest way to make sure you have nice, expensive things to trade without having to give up things like stone, firewood, or food, which your people need, build between 2-4 apiaries and stock them with beekeepers, then build a chandlery and start making lots and lots of candles. By the time you're ready to think about investing in expensive things like seeds and livestock, you'll have enough to take a hefty chunk off the price before you have to dig into other resources to leverage for bartering. Similarly, having 2-4 shoremen digging up clay for eventual use in pottery helps, but that method involves a production line and two extra buildings in between "get clay" and "someone can made pots." If you're lucky enough to start with hemp or flax, or acquire it early on, you can make rope to sell, too.

anyway blah blah blah Wry likes micromanagement economy games and tetris'ing buildings into efficient configurations so that pretend numbers get big and not small.

I played this game when it was still Early Access, and i loved it, I've been meaning to go back, but I'm too busy with coop games and friends to do anything on my own.