deanb Posted September 9, 2013 Report Share Posted September 9, 2013 http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/?page_id=680 So this is a game that has been on my radar for a while and is looking closer and closer as the months pass. Reminds me a bit of a slightly more modern Caesar III, which I rather enjoyed when I was younger. Nice, small scale building of towns and communities. It seems like it might have an issue with intuitive UI mind, but as long as the core game is solid I'm sure I could work around it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted January 9, 2014 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2014 http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/?p=2066 It's gonna release 18th February. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMightyEthan Posted January 9, 2014 Report Share Posted January 9, 2014 I didn't realize it was that close to done. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted January 9, 2014 Author Report Share Posted January 9, 2014 It's been kinda close for a while, the plan was for a end of 2013 launch, but he's had a few difficulties including having to stay his hand in feature creep. I would guess given the timing he had a bit of a new year push and decided he should add a date to at least force himself to stop adding and tweaking stuff and get it out and done then expand/update later on. Now we just need a price. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted February 17, 2014 Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 (edited) Looks good. Knowing myself, I'm going to try to stretch it to the limit as in a scattered village and stuff like that. It also seems like you might be able to designate a person for a specific task. The names and ages are all there, there just needs to be a mechanic of saying directly who does what. So maybe I can set a woodcutter cabin out in the wilderness and have a house by it for those workers to live there. So yeah, going to try to setup a village with two settlements. An agrarian center with a gathering fringes. I think a setup like that could survive a bad harvest. Not to say that the people in the agrarian center will all survive... Maybe I'm putting in features that the game doesn't have... we'll see. $20, tomorrow. I'll be deciding soon if I want it. It is certainly pretty compelling. I'm hoping I can just break the optimistic way of playing the game. Edit: Also might I say that this game can have an impressive modding potential. It just depends on whats under the hood and how The Dev want to go about it. Edited February 17, 2014 by MaliciousH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted February 17, 2014 Author Report Share Posted February 17, 2014 I'm gonna get it. I've been following it, haven't bought a game new in a while. And £12 is a fine price. Though deciding between whether I'll get it either from dev site and see what the Steam key dealio is or just whack it straight through Steam. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danielpholt Posted February 19, 2014 Report Share Posted February 19, 2014 I don't want to say I hate Banished, because there's clearly something there that attracted me to it; but 2 hours in and I've already past the point of giving a hoot about the game. I'll probably never play it again (unless you guy's can persuade me otherwise). I'm not just having any fun with it. I'd start a new game, create some houses for my little dudes and dudettes, then within 2 minutes (on 1x speed) they'd managed to eat our stockpile of food. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted February 20, 2014 Report Share Posted February 20, 2014 (edited) Your villagers sure are hungry. Anyways, I am disappointed in finding out that the game auto paused when you have the game in window mode and you go off to do something else. So much for having the game run itself for a few minutes while I do some other stuff. Side note. The game also runs on the T100. You'll need a mouse at the very least. Bummer. Edited February 20, 2014 by MaliciousH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted February 20, 2014 Report Share Posted February 20, 2014 To preface this, I'm going to try to limit any obvious hints and tips. This game is to me intuitive enough for you to pick up as you go so I don't want to spoil anything.Though I've heard that the tutorials do give out good information but I'm foregoing them to go at it myself. I got a town together that looks like it shouldn't be failing. The only "die off" (It was really only a person or two) was in the beginning when, yes, I had a minor food shortage. What happened was I was building houses too fast. The earlier houses horded the food. Bigdan, this was what you were seeing. To get out of a downward spiral, you'll need to have a field up and going by winter's end. At this point in time, I find that its not food that will kill my village but warmth via firewood. This firewood comes directly from the wood you would use to build so there is direct competition for this resource. I'm currently just hovering about having a massive freeze off. Building wise, stone is also a major issue. Iron can be as well but my map has blessed me with massive surface deposits which allows me to store up a ton for trade. I got my chicken and cattle this way. Ultimately the fun part, to me, about this game is not the buildings (I have already pretty much made them all) but the expansion without caving in on yourself. Expand in the wrong way and you might be stagnant for a while or even crash. Disasters are also starting to roll in onto my town which might pose a major threat to my food supply. I have made multiple wells around the town to ward off any potential fires. Lastly... about no window mode and going off to do something bit... I didn't see an option to toggle the auto pause function. Why does there need to be an auto pause function? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted February 21, 2014 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2014 From what I've played of the game so far I'd say walking away and leaving it to it's own devices isn't really something you'd want it to do. Though I would guess it's only pausing when alt-tabbing? (which is a pretty standard game feature and I'm usually bummed when a game doesn't do it). I'm on dual screens and if I move my mouse from the game it still runs so I can chat or what not in the other screen. They're pretty hungry at first, but on my second game I made sure to have enough variety started up. So far based upon TotalBiscuits video I've not yet adventured in the realm of building a Market, but I do have about ~4000 units of food easy enough (and limited amounts of everything else except herbs). It could be down to better management or maybe just the map. Though my second game has been in a bit of a weird valley meaning a chunk of bridges needing to be built to expand, or tunnelling. I think it's best to get a steady pace going then start building homes. Building homes within the first year is going to kill you off fast, farms and orchards won't be bearing fruit and you'll have your labour focused on building other buildings instead of harvesting at that time. The firewood has definitely been an issue for me. Wish there was a way of prioritizing wood between construction and firewood, since firewoood is pretty much 1 log = 1 firewood. I can see my issue in this current game being old age. I am working on expanding a fair chunk in population now that I'm sorted with farms and building up my first spin-off village (due to aforementioned terrain issues). Just got a trade post built. My first trade amounted to nothing, you can't just do straight trades of all your stuff for their stuff. They'll only trade off you want they want and need. So while I had enough stored to buy sheep, they only wanted three items that I had very little of (and worth very little). So for next trade I've put much more items into the trading post. Hoping to get some bigger livestock. I should probably set-up wells now I come to think of it. Gotta say I like that it's flat development. There's no tech tree, you build whatever when you want. But you might not be wise to do so. My first game failed due to lack of buidlings. I made a mine and quarry way too early on, and forgot to toggle my woodcutter so the quarry and mine used up a huge amount of resources and woodcutter took the rest. The dev in his blogs has sounded like he's going to be launching the game and beyond bugs not doing much work on it, but there's certain tweaks I wouldn't mind seeing. Domestication of animals for one would be good since you only have what you're given. Trackers would be cool to have as well, map out deer paths, good herb spots etc. Custom starting options too, instead of just the hard, medium and easy. Pick specific items to start with, mix up the adult/child ratio, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted February 21, 2014 Report Share Posted February 21, 2014 (edited) You can leave it be on 1x without too much problem. One year on 1x is actually kind of long. The same time I played my current town to year 50, my 1x town on my T100 is only up to like 10. I'm super bummed that there is no soil quality. He took it out. I can see why but I don't see why it couldn't be an option for the masochists like me. One for the reasons for him taking it out is that it was a shit ton of work to manage compared to say hunting and gathering. It should be that way when you realize just how many times civilizations has collapsed because of fields not being tended to properly (Our global one isn't doing much better...). The degradation is slow but steady. It should be an option for "hard" mode. As a gamer, it is nice to have options. For him turning into a bug killing mode, I'm fine with that. I wouldn't be surprised if he is burnt out. Anyways. Expansion (Nomads especially) without having enough food will do this. It was really poorly timed but I survived since I had fields that I could throw everybody at to create the surplus. You got to remember, this is a communist society where everybody gets an equal share thus collapsing the system if spread too thin... Also a fire nearly did my town in. No one died that winter since my army of out of work farmers quickly rebuilt. Thank you Tailor Swift for all the coats. And yes, there was a food shortage the year after that but I managed. If it was in the downturn of the growing cycle, things would have been different. I have since expanded to two other sub-towns with some more on the way. I'm just laying out the grid during the winter... Next post I'll post about some of my grips and wishes for the game. I love it but as with the no soil quality thing, of course it could of gone at it better. Edited February 21, 2014 by MaliciousH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted February 23, 2014 Author Report Share Posted February 23, 2014 (big image, best to right click - open in new tab) My town as of a couple days ago. So quaint and unindustrialised. I'm at about 240 citizens at the moment and have most of the trade items. Year 71. I figure my next game should go quite a bit smoothly. I really do like about this game that you learn something new each time. Very iterative. Bit like Doomsday. I now have two spin-off towns (which pretty handily eclipse my first town, especially my farmville) and two mini-villages that sit on weird spots of the map. Got Markets sorted out, and find they actually help quite a lot. Though they're pretty huge for what they do. I'm at a stage at the moment where I'm going to need to figure out how I deal with food since building farms is breaching my forester, gatherer and herb zones. And since the above image is not long after my little almost apocalypse I'm now well stocked for people making food and shit. In fact I have too many people for the jobs I have going except to make everyone mine and quarry. I think next game will likely be a much bigger map too. Also I'm half debating reviewing the game. Got a few paragraphs already written in my mind, just need Hot_Heart to keep on my back and I might have my first post of 2014 written. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mal Posted February 25, 2014 Report Share Posted February 25, 2014 Banished took the #1 spot on Steam yesterday, the 23rd (Beating out the long standing DayZ and Rust), before losing it to Thief today (24th). Pretty damn good I say. One thing I got to comment on. While it may not be fair since they're not the same thing but Banished pulled off a far more compelling agent system than SimCity. You can see wheres the resources are going by tracking the town folks. You also can track a person as they age, go to work, change jobs and then die. On the job front, you can see the same person at that job for quite a long time. If that person do move on to another job, they get replaced by a similar aged person thus keeping the illusion alive. Another thing is that they all pretty much live in their own houses. Case in point... I tracked this teacher starting from age 50. She was a crusty old teacher, living alone in this one house. I checked back later to see she aged to 70 and still going. I went back again when she was at 80 and she switched to an herbalist. The teacher who replaced her was about the same age. Not to say that it is perfect but it forms quite a good illusion and that is really all you need. Now about that 80 something years old miner... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanb Posted March 18, 2014 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2014 My Banished review: http://pressxordie.com/2014/03/18/review-banished/ And a few pictures (might add more to the album in time), mainly for the snow gltich stuff: http://imgur.com/a/WWDAO#1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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