EDIT: A few tweaks to the text to reflect that it's an open challenge.
Quite a while back I experimented with having only boarding houses as housing for my little test subjects.
http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=382.0That village reached about 250 souls before I gave up on it (a save went bad and it was quite a while back to the last one. Autosave is a fine thing).
I've recently started an other little commune and managed to throw together a boarding house first year without ever building a standard house. They survived the first winter hand to mouth and then developed a healthy surplus of food. The evict everyone trick seems to be working now as well. Perhaps it can be seen as a form of maypole dancing. Perhaps even the landlords daughter will pay the pub a visit.
Anyways, I thought this might be food for a challenge:
You shall build a thriving community with boarding houses as the only housingUse any map seed
Any size
Any terrain
Any climate
Starting conditions hard (no houses, remember)
Disasters on (hey, a little randomness and chaos never hurt, right?)
Mods who alter the behavior of births, deaths, boarding houses and nomads forbidden.
Lets say we play to year 50.
There are several goals to measure how well you've done:
*Number of banishims
*Hearts and stars- these should be both over four (four and a half and five is your target)
*Percentage educated- which means that nomad acceptance for number of banishims will make this one suffer
--------------
* For those who want to do this really really hardcore you must meet the criteria for 'one with nature' -400 banishims without ever building a field, orchard or pasture. UPDATE: To make things interesting enough, only one tradeport is allowed for hardcore.
The scoring is computed as follows:
Population value is the total population
Education value is population X percentage educated
Stars value is population /5 (max stars) X achieved stars
Hearts value is population /5 (max hearts) X achieved hearts
Discover the micromanager within. Give this challenge a try.
PS This is an open challenge- find a new way of maximising your commune? Want to add multiple entries? Do post it and your score- I'll try to keep an updated scorecard. DS