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Banished - Medieval SimCity

MoLAoS

Guest
Isn't this true of every game? Once you know all the rules and have solved it, what game IS challenging? Anytime someone says something is "challenging", I've learned to read it as "I have no idea what the fuck I am doing".
Most strategy games are still challenging after you learn the mechanics, otherwise you couldn't pump hundreds of hours into Civ. I suppose city building as a genre is more prone to death by optimal solution.
That's not true at all. Once you learn the mechanics, once you know exactly how to play each stage of the game and what the optimal response to every situation is, it becomes trivial. Then you increase the difficulty and the game boils down to outlandish cheating vs. game-breaking exploits.
Haha, this reminds me of DDRJake. I mean, lots of people can do it, but not many people got as much attention as him or a QA job at the game company. Those exploits.
 

Zewp

Arcane
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
3,566
Codex 2013
Banished is a game that's fun for about an evening. And then you uninstall it.

It's a damn shame too. It has a lot of potential.
 

Adamaklas

Literate
Joined
Jun 2, 2015
Messages
41
Fun game, when i started playing i was freaked out by the idea that i would be hooked on it like a CIV game , and i have no time for a CIV campaign....
Luckily after 20-30 hours the steam blows away and you get the common < man what am i doing with my life > sense when you catch yourself upgrading the last wooden homes to stone homes :P

I like the lack of monetary system!
 

Brutan

Savant
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Messages
127
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Romania
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I too don't get what the fuss is about this game. It's nothing special and it's completely soulless and shallow. I'm glad that a indie scored big but I'm disappointed that he didn't add more to the game (features, depth etc).
 

Perkel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,804
Banished is a game that's fun for about an evening. And then you uninstall it.

It's a damn shame too. It has a lot of potential.

my main problem is that it isn't DF.
Dwarf Fortress is like Scat. Once you get accustomed to it you can't live without that random shit.
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

Self-Ejected
Village Idiot
Joined
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Messages
7,407
I'm quite enjoying this game. Or, at least, I was.

5 years in, playing at slowest speed to fully immerse myself, I'm enthralled by all the little intricacies. Then, the second I build a trading post it all goes to shit. Why? Throughout the game so far I've had a surplus of fish. So I send my trader to go pick up 100 fish. Wouldn't even dent my stock. Then all of a sudden my stockpile vanishes, as if it was stolen the second I pressed the go collect button.

Bewildered I searched around for all my missing fish. It turned out one household has decided to take home 363 fish. WTF? Did the daft cunt who designed the game not put food limits for houses? LMAO... its Ceaser 3 level shit all over again... I dunno what to do now. Play on regardless or insta-uninstall. OMFG...lol
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

Self-Ejected
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Messages
7,407
Welcome to Buttercup! Population 59.

So I'm only 11 years in and I've already upgraded all my houses and pretty much sorted all my food, clothing and tool issues:

AuyCoDl.png


And the game's problems are already starting to shine through. Or whatever the opposite of shine is. In addition to my previous complaints about the inability to control individual house's consumption:

The leather versus venison ratio is really out of kilter. Leather is required to make clothes and is one of the best things to barter, either by itself or by making it into clothes, but you only get about 4 leather per 200 venison. So by reducing the number of Hunters you hardly ever get any leather, but increasing the number of hunters to get more leather you end up with too much venison. Why is too much of anything bad? Because you can't put individual limits on what gets put in the storeroom. So my storerooms are becoming filled with venison. You can transfer the venison to the trading hut, but then that gets full of venison. Why is it bad to have lots of venison to sell? Because the trader didn't want any venison. Utter madness. Why can't you just instruct your hunters to specialise in one specific item, leather or venison or both or neither, why was this button so hard to implement.

I've been waiting for sheep or chickens to be delivered so I can progress in the game, you can even see I've already built two large paddocks in preparation, but the traders are never offering livestock of any kind. I was hugely disappointed by this after the first trader (after building the trading hut) arrived and had nothing I wanted. Then, year after year, the trader has fuck all of interest. You can't even order livestock. You can order everything in the game except livestock. So after year 9 I went on-line to find out what the deal is. It turns out that the trader's goods are random and the chance of a livestock trader are infinitely small. So one guy was complaining about going 59 years without seeing one (that's about 250 in-game years), and another guy was saying he'd built two trading posts and it still took took decades to see one. I facepalmed and tried the suggested save-scumming on the trader, but after about 3 savescums it forces a seed for some reason.

Why is livestock supposed to be so rare? Maybe because it's too OP? Not really, I mean OP with regard to what? My game's already over and complete without it, I just want it because it's part of the simulation, not to become 'more OP than OP'. Makes no sense whatsoever, just seems like added frustration because the dev's a weirdo rather than because logic.

When you upgrade your houses from wood to stone, you're not actually upgrading them, you're destroying the old house and putting up a new one. It's horrendously misleading terminology. When I upgraded one house, for example, it made all the occupants homeless until it was rebuilt. They then re-entered the house upon completion. "Ok..." I thought. But then, when doing another house, when the upgrade was finished, it put a completey new couple in the house and left an entire family homeless! LMAO. Are you kidding me? So I had to build them a new house. I had to build three new houses to accommodate all the people who got made homeless from me 'upgrading' houses. LOL.

You cannot choose who gets married to who nor who gets a newly built house when you do not wish to build a house for every person the second they hit adulthood with an available partner. So I've now got two houses wasted by having 'old couples' choose to live there in priority over young couples. In a large city, this kind of chaos is normal, but in a population 60 town this kind of shit would be common-sense, particularly in a simulation game where people don't even have a 'bicker' or 'awkward' mechanic.


And it's all a huge shame, because the game has a really wonderful and immersive atmosphere and general aesthetic that is better than any other building game I've ever played. It's only crippled by the appalling mechanics which, one would assume, are all quite easily fixable (?). Can the game decide properly if we are in full control or not, and once it's made that decision can it please design itself around the decision made. As it is, it's just a crippling shame. I'll play it for the things I like to play about it and finish doing what I want to do with it, but, god damn, if this isn't one of the biggest lost-opportunities in the entire gaming pantheon.
 
Last edited:

oscar

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Location
NZ
Colonial Charter mod is quite nice, adds tons of buildings and production chains.
 

Nutria

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한양
Strap Yourselves In
why was this button so hard to implement

UI is no fun to implement. That's my guess why it's lacking in so many indie games.

IIRC it was traders never bringing me livestock that got me to quit. Oh well. It was nice watching my village grow up to that point, I guess.
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

Self-Ejected
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Messages
7,407
Colonial Charter mod is quite nice, adds tons of buildings and production chains.

I've had a look at this, details-wise, but as far as any information I can find goes it just adds tons of new shit, I can't find any details on how this mod might or might not change the mechanics of the game. Even in my game above there are some buildings I could still build, I just don't want to, as my settlement has chosen to be non-religious-specific and t-total. Building more buildings isn't really what I was complaining about. Does the mod improve your ability to actually manage your town to the minutest detail or does it just enable you to build more shit?
 

oscar

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Messages
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NZ
I think those elements are hard-coded. It's very odd to me considering how successful Banished was that the creator never released any expansions or sequels delving into that side of things.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Developer
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Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
It got a lot better compared to ?3? months ago, so there's that.

Yup, gonna give it a try later on. It actually had a new update today.

As for Banished, done with it. Played it for 19 hours, there is no end game. Another management/tycoon like game that relies on Achievements to extend playtime. Game it a negative review on Steam and uninstalled. Fun.
19 hours of great fun was well worth the price. Played it, enjoyed it, and moved on. Not every game has to offer hundreds of hours of game, especially if it has the right price.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
It got a lot better compared to ?3? months ago, so there's that.

Yup, gonna give it a try later on. It actually had a new update today.

As for Banished, done with it. Played it for 19 hours, there is no end game. Another management/tycoon like game that relies on Achievements to extend playtime. Game it a negative review on Steam and uninstalled. Fun.
19 hours of great fun was well worth the price. Played it, enjoyed it, and moved on. Not every game has to offer hundreds of hours of game, especially if it has the right price.

Learn to comprehend a post before replying to it, next time.

I never said those 19 hours were "GREAT FUN". Why is it that retards on Codex have trouble understanding that hours spent doesn't equal to FUN for everyone?

On the other hand, I do see why people like you would find a half-arsed version of games like Anno/Majesty fun. Whole game is nothing but placing generic looking buildings and managing food for the dumbfuck AI with no effort put into developing the game world or aesthetics.

This is Skyrim of city management games.
For me it was 19 hours of great fun (that's what I meant), and it worth the money. Too bad you couldn't appreciate the gameplay.
 

J_C

One Bit Studio
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Messages
16,947
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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
For me it was 19 hours of great fun (that's what I meant), and it worth the money. Too bad you couldn't appreciate the gameplay.

Haha, explain to me how it's fun.

Initial game lasted for about 11 hrs. Bought every seed and cattle, added all buildings and perfected the "formula" this game runs on. Now I don't even let the food my village has, go under 30K, in-fact, when I quit playing it, I had reached 50K food production.

All I was doing in next 8 hrs was added more houses and assigning workers. That's it.

Oh there was a cyclone that randomly showed up and destroyed a Forester building and store next to it. The retarded AI didn't even bother evacuating and sacrificed itself with the building. This is a "Very Positive" game on steam and all the real reviews are the negative ones which are complaining about same thing (along with bugs STILL present which I encountered).

There are no stories to tell, no interesting heroes and villains. Games like Black & White, Populous, Age of Empires, Majesty managed to have this shit years ago and now people think this half-arsed game is "good" when doing less than those games?

Hell, looking at Cities Skylines right now, it's the same game with ten times more content. And no, mods don't maketh the game. If the original game is missing content, then I rate it based on that. And Banished is missing a LOT.
Get it, you didn't like it. But I did. I didn't have a problem with the AI, and the main gameplay loop was enjoyable for me, raising stockpiles and managing them throughout the different seasons. Age of Empires is not even the same genre as this, so I don't know what are you smoking, and even Majesty is a stretch.

Of course the real reviews are the negatives ones, and the others are just paid shills by a lone indie developer. I bet in your eyes real reviews are the ones which support your view in every game. :roll:
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
The developer's next game is coming along: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2018-09-19-new-stuff/

New Stuff!

After a bit of engine retooling, woodworking, yoga, a foray into programming language design, and trying to figure out what the next game will be, I’m happy to say I’ve chosen a design and am actively working on a new project. It currently has lots of temporary artwork that took less than 10 minutes to make and lots of debug rendering.

PathFinding.png


After making Banished I had so many ideas for new games it was hard to pick what’s next. But given that a lot of the game ideas had similar requirements, I spent some time updating the game engine to have some of the features I’d need. Anything in Banished that could be reused I refactored to be generic, if it wasn’t already. I made a lot of additions as well, preparing for multiple prototypes of various designs. I also tried to make some changes that would reduce programming workload and decrease the introduction of bugs.

Now that I’ve chosen and am working on a specific project, I’m finding that trying to make generic systems in isolation isn’t really a good thing in practice. I violated the KISS and YAGNI principles for a bit, and there’s a price to pay. Without a specific goal it’s impossible to have actually designed things in a way that is fully useful. So most of the things I wrote and refactored need more refactors, additions, and removals. Hmmm.

As an example, I built a wonderful terrain generator that allows me to create giant 250sq km landscapes, control where mountains, oceans, plains, and rolling hills are placed, rivers are generated that flow properly, erosion is performed, and it the results look great. But I don’t think I’ll be using it in its current form. There are some great concepts in it and I learned a lot, but it’ll take a ton of rework to be useful for a specific game.

Generator.jpg


Unsurprisingly in writing Banished, creating good code for the game as it needed it, and only refactoring the code when things got messy resulting in some great generic reusable systems. 65% of the code from Banished is getting reused. And as I continue to put together the beginnings of a new game, that amount is going up as I find things to pull out of Banished for reuse.

Writing a game engine really needs a game to go with it. Otherwise I’m just guessing.

Now back to programmer art and putting a new game together. More to come!
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
:necro:

Devlog on technical changes in the next game: http://www.shiningrocksoftware.com/2019-10-01-small-ideas-big-changes/

In short, he is trying out camera system that can look up to the sky and more organic, off-gird layout of buildings.

Small Ideas, Big Changes

As I’ve been working lately, I’ve been very aware that seemingly simple things I wanted to have in a new game have huge implications on the difficulty of making a game and engine.

The first thing I wanted to change from the previous game was the ability for the camera to look up toward the horizon. In Banished the camera always looked down, and the higher the camera got, the more the ability to look up was limited.

This was great for performance – it limited the number of objects drawn, and no graphics models needed simpler level of detail (LOD) versions. The terrain was simple. I didn’t have to have a fancy sky drawn, nothing had to be drawn past the mountains at the edge of the map. The drawback was that you couldn’t ever see the whole settlement once it got large. You also couldn’t move around very quickly.

Now with that simple change – looking up, and zooming farther out there’s more work to do. All models need some of LOD to keep the triangle count down and keep highly detailed objects from aliasing in the distance. The terrain now has LOD as well. Having LOD on the terrain makes texturing it and having decals on it harder. And brings in other problems like objects disappearing or floating because the terrain is less detailed in the distance. I also have to draw to the horizon, ocean or mountains, the sky, the sun.

Drawing shadows also takes more time. Instead of a single shadow map based on what’s visible, to draw to the horizon takes multiple shadow maps, various tricks for distant shadows, and more complex pixel shaders. This also increases CPU load as 4 shadow maps are drawn instead of 1.

The renderer also has to change to handle this. While it works just fine, it’s slow. Instead of dealing with say 4000 visible objects in view, my current test scenes are dealing with 40000. So the renderer has to be changed to handle culling away and drawing 10 times the number of objects in the same amount of time as before. Granted GPUs are a bit faster than before, but CPU time hasn’t increased the same way.

After the camera change, the next change I thought wouldn’t be so bad is arbitrary layout of buildings. No grids. Grids were great in Banished because it made lots of things simple. Pathfinding was on a grid, placement of objects was on the grid, everything used the grid.

But I want to see organic layouts. I’d like farmed land to follow terrain and butt up against a river. I’d like buildings and roads to placed in whatever natural way they end up being.

But with the grid gone, lots of things are more complicated. Placing objects now requires checking an arbitrary shape against everything else already placed. This requires a spacial subdivision structure to be fast. It’s also harder to visually convey the overlap and how far you might have to move something to get it to fit.

It also adds a little friction to placing buildings. With a grid, you might place 2 buildings and leave space inbetween for something else – because you know its size. With arbitrary sizes, rotations, and shapes this can get harder, and potentially frustrating. When you do want to line up objects, its not as easy either.

Because things are arbitrary, I’m no longer limited to square regions – players can create any shape for an area – which is great, but makes the user interface more complicated. At the same time it can add friction to the experience because you have to spend time layout out areas if you don’t want the results of a quick click-and-drag.

I’ve been working on making placing arbitrary objects and regions as painless as possible, but it’s challenging.

As I wrote about last month, pathfinding has also gotten more complicated. However with the complexity comes flexibility. I have pathing setup such that characters can always walk between buildings, reducing the chance of getting stuck, and decreasing search time while running the A-Star algorithm. Search time is also decreased due to much more open area.

Thankfully, graphics doesn’t get anymore complicated, it was written to handle things in any orientation from the start.

These two seemingly simple changes have caused my game engine to get slightly more complicated. What is hardest is that there’s even more tiny details than I’ve written about that I keep running up against that were unknowable until I ran into them. I’ve spent more time making the features work than expected.

In the end, these changes are good – even I went back to building a grid based game with limited camera. It’s just surprising to see how far reaching a simple design decision can be.
 

oscar

Arcane
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Aug 30, 2008
Messages
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NZ
I always felt like he could have done a lot more with Banished. It sold like hotcakes and the base engine was very solid, it was just dying for an expansion (extra challenges, perhaps more in-depth relations with natives) to flesh things out a bit deeper. The Colonial Charter mod hinted at what could have been done..
 

Gerrard

Arcane
Joined
Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,922
It also adds a little friction to placing buildings. With a grid, you might place 2 buildings and leave space inbetween for something else – because you know its size. With arbitrary sizes, rotations, and shapes this can get harder, and potentially frustrating. When you do want to line up objects, its not as easy either.
Just make a blueprint mode like in Anno.
:nocountryforshitposters:
 

Nutria

Arcane
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한양
Strap Yourselves In
I'd like him to make the game better, not fiddle with making it possible for me to have a telescope in the game and get accurate observations of Titan's orbit.
 

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