Buy Banished

Banished is a city-building strategy game developed and published by Shining Rock Software LLC. It was released in February 2014. In Banished, you control a group of individuals that want to start a new life by developing a new city. You develop your city by increasing your population, gathering resources, and constructing buildings. The game embraces simplicity as trade is the primary currency and not money. This review will cover the gameplay, the integrated Steam Workshop, and the performance and graphics.

Banished presents strong and complex gameplay as game mechanics heavily alter the game. You will learn some mechanics as you play the game whereas other mechanics such as average health and average happiness are presented on the UI. For instance, average health represents an average of all your citizens health. The worse health your city has the less productive they are and the higher chance they have of dying. Furthermore, couple worse average health with the dynamic weather seasons and expect them not to be productive in Winter. As you continuously learn the game you will learn how to strategise and manage your city while incorporating the various game mechanics and the weather seasons, which all seasons have an effect on your city. Other mechanics have long-term implications. For instance, when children turn 10 they can enrol into a school until they turn 17. If they don't enrol you can use them as workers. If they enrol, you cannot use them as workers, but educated citizens will be much more productive long-term compared to uneducated workers. So by and large, these game mechanics emphasis strategy and they showcase the challenging nature of Banished because it is a very difficult game.

Also on gameplay, the game incorporates randomly generated maps that have different amounts of water, hills, and so forth. These affect your plans for your city, but there is a very useful and very informative UI that is customisable. It allows you to add different data to your screen which constantly updates. Specifically, if you want to keep your storage house information box on the screen, you can move it to the top left corner. Overall, the game teaches you about strategy, understanding the mechanics and their consequences, and to assist you allows you to customise your screen with informative UI to help you manage.

Banished uses Steam Workshop. Briefly, Steam Workshop allows individuals that own the game to tweak it, improve it, and mod it. I will admit for the majority of my play time I used Banished Plus, a large mod that provides more balance to the game by tweaking mechanics to reduce the fast-paced length of the game and increase realism. There are an abundance of other mods that once you download the game will inform you of any compatibility issues, which is a nice and handy tool. I use Banished Plus because I think the vanilla game is basic and fast-paced because there are not many buildings in the game are citizens can be very stupid and lazy. Furthermore, add these with the lack of long-term objectives showcase the need for mods to help improve the behaviour of your citizens and expand the amount of content. Therefore, using mods drastically improved my experience of the game. And as a side note, I generally think the developers should have made DLC to expand the content to give more replayability.

Technically, Shining Rock have excellently optimised this game. I can play it on max settings and achieve a constant 60FPS on x10 speed. Features like the weather system and the large amounts of population usually would hit the game in performance, but for the most part I did not experience that. At 110 population on x10 speed I stayed at 60FPS. At 220 population, I was managing a solid 50FPS with the drop due to a larger city and more population. It is evident the six patches in Banished helped improve the performance of it. Graphically, the game is gorgeous. Buildings and citizens are very detailed and the weather system adds a layer of realism to it.

Banished is a very good game. I love the complex gameplay through the variety of game mechanics and their effects on other mechanics. I absolutely adore the beautiful graphics as the buildings are incredibly detailed, the seasons are highly realistic and the scenery is just superb. Banished has excellent performance as I managed to sustain 60FPS for the majority of my play through. It was only at 200+ population I started to see a small dip in FPS and performance. At USD$19.99, I recommend purchasing Banished because overall, it has high replayability.

8.5/10

- Steam workshop.
- Complex gameplay through the various game mechanics.
- Beautiful graphics.
- Excellent performance.
- Weather system.
- UI.

- Lack of content.
- No long-term objective.
- The disappointing fundamentals in the vanilla game.

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/242920/

Tried to claim the achievement for a 300 villager society without schools, using only hunting and gathering.

Now my townstead, built along a river bank and surrounded by small hunting/gathering campsites, has such an immense production of food that a lot of it goes straight to the trading post.

We just bought a massive supply of tools, clothes, and iron, with venison. Every trading post has at least 2000 pounds of venison in stock.

I've made a society where venison is the official currency.

10/10 would keep playing.

More incest than Game of Thrones!

With almost 40 hours in the game i can honestly say that the concept is awesome. However the mechanics are way off. Where to begin.... i could say the same thing as so many other "farmers starving while harvesting" but i wont. Instead how about a crop field being worked by 6 farmers (max) not clearing the harvest before winter takes it away, mind you my storage barns are right next to the fields. How about the respawn rate of herbs and gatherer items. Even placed in a dense forest they drop off very sevrerly after the 2nd year. lets talk about the ai pathing, even with stone roads placed to every building/field/stockpile they still decide to cut a straight line to their destination. while on the topc of AI how much sense does it make that a single person living in a home takes 300 units of venison and 150 units of squash. even with a market the people take way more food than they need. Moving on.... the mining and stone cutting speed OH MY GOD. a whole year to mine 45 iron with 10 miners, again stockpile stupid close to the mine. Also the aging system, children take 3-4 years before they become laborers or students but people can die of old age in 3-4 years, really. By year 35 i had a lost probably 45 citizens to old age. i get maybe the shortened lifespan due to primative conditions but it wasnt that friggin short.

All in all, its a great game with mods turned on. However you cant get achievments with mods turned on. This game needs a serious overhaul.

Alright, let's establish what Banished is NOT.

It's not a city builder like Sim City, it's not a life sim like Sims, it's not a survival/crafting game like Don't starve and it's not an econ sim like Industry Giant. It's a little bit of everything, but Anno on a micro scale might be a pretty fitting description.

You basically start the game with a few settlers and various resources/buildings established. You do not have ANY goals, your only goal is to survive and thrive. To do that you're going to build houses, establish an economy and "produce" new settlers.

That means cutting wood, gathering/hunting/harvesting food, so your citizens won't starve to death, creating building materials, chopping firewood, so your citizens won't freeze to death during winter, and carefully establishing houses and increasing your population, so your city won't simply die out. Blacksmiths create tools for your citizens to work with, trade posts let you trade materials, etc.

All in all there is a lot to do. You need to balance your need for expansion with a sustainable economy. If you have too many citizens and not enough of them producing food, then your city will simply starve, which will usually lead to a chain reaction of you losing the game, since dying citizens can't produce more food, but if you take too many citizens away from other production like fire wood, hunting, tailoring or anything concerned with blacksmithing, you will have other issues to contend with. The game can spiral out of control quickly, which is what makes it appealing, I guess. The larger your city grows, the more sprawling your infrastructure becomes, the more challenging the game gets.

I would also definitely recommend the Colonial mod, which opens up the game immensely with new buildings.

Not so great stuff: The UI could need improvements, several buildings share "jobs", so it's a bit finnicky to assign citizens to a specific building. It's also very hard to see dependencies of buildings. You want to build X, but you don't realize that you need to produce Y first...only having icons is not so great. Apart from that I don't have many complaints.

Now the obligatory game report:

Started my city, everything went pretty well, produced food en masse, unfortunately did not realize that my citizens were getting too old, so my 40 peeps city went down to below 30 pretty quickly. Thankfully my Banished were still in a happy mood and procreated happily. Still that took over 10 years or so, then my food supplies started dwindling, all the while my old guys kept dying, and I still could not make all my children work...damn it. Vicious cycle. After having burnt through about 6,000 units of food (a lot) I almost got back on track, but then my city was ravaged by a disease. I was able to erect a hospital in time and got that under control as well. After that things started to go smoothly again. I played for about 31 years, then I got "bored".

Banished is a great game, but lacks longevity, unless you are content to just simply sand box your way for hours upon hours. Still, I liked it and getting 5 hours out of it for a product on sale makes it worth it to me :D

I was british explorer with morion helmet and I discovered a land which contains a lot of resources, so I decided to found a place called "Jamestown" and let's establish the base to grow the town.

the game is really nice but ..... they need to stop dying after first winter

This is a game I could play for the rest of my life. I might go months or years without playing it but sometimes you get that itch and can come back to it and start yourself a little colony and before long you have a rich and prosperous city...until tornado wipes out the entire place.

or those damn plague bearing people from "camp refugee"

I reserved judgement on this game for a long time, I have logged many hours building village after village. But things come up time and time again, bugs like... Farmers not hauling that last basket of food away and making the field unusable next season. Or visual glitches with the water going all funky like. It would be nice if the devs didn't just leave the last post in games news about a new beta build, showing to all of us they lost their commitment to it. Luckily however the community has jumped in to help bring new content in light of a lack of official updates.

I could of reccomended this game 100 hours ago, but with the devs dropping it, I can't any longer.

what a waste, thanks for abandoning the game. no new features coming up, no big fixes. i had 56 farmers and only 70people in town, they all starved, the food being harvested provided a fraction of its actual bounty. no visual bugs but under the hood need a lot of tweaking.