Pangaea: Hulmevil

[Pangaea]

A challenge in this game is that you need to stay ahead of the curve at all times. Know what challenge may come up, and make sure the resource chains are working. Don't do that, and the game has a really nasty habit of slapping you in the face -- hard.

I didn't bother to expand the farms much because the food situation appeared under control. Then it wasn't. And the game can go south rapidly then. It certainly didn't help that 3-4 out of 5 merchants every god damn year bring useless seeds or livestock.

I am building a new farms area further east, hoping to arrest the development. We need more food, and fast. This year the weather lords decided to join in face-kicking too, and it almost turned Spring before the frost started to abate. Naturally this meant lots of dead crops. The situation isn't good, and given the size of the population and the relative lack of food, I worry for a cascading starvation sequence if some areas start lacking food in the barns or markets.

The map had enough topland stone to get 10,000, but there was less iron. Therefore we built two mines and filled it with dwarves. Got iron in every crevice now 

Besides trying to keep starvation at bay, the only point with this game is to tick off a few achievements, so I've built the odd church and a load of graveyards. And dear me do people kick the bucket at an alarming rate.

Unless we all die, I'll eventually put up some more buildings and find a spot for animals in the corner of the map somewhere, so I'm less annoyed by their constant moo-ing and so on.

[Nilla]

I wish you (or rather your poor people) the best. I hope you can conquer possible starvation.

I already saw in your last thread, that the food situation was a bit critical. If I want to be safe,I want a food graph in the same shape as the population graph; increasing all the time, at least as fast as the population. It doesn't have to be like in my last town, I admit it was a bit "overkill". But I don't think you have to be too worried. Unless you have more bad harvests and the seed and animal merchants all have planned a unified attack on you, you will manage!

[Pangaea]

See anything unusual?

[Tom Sawyer]

I see a late winter at 9 °C with beans in the field.

[Pangaea]

The food situation gave me a scare, and it was obvious we had to build more farms. Wish I had more luck with arriving merchants, but even so, the few that did bring food saved our butts. At one point we were down to 70k food, and 50-60k of that was plums.... Without trading ports, a lot of people would have died to starvation, and probably much sooner. Consider it punishment for watching the game instead of playing. Sometimes do the same in Settlers 2. I just love watching those little guys walk around and do their thing, and Banished is similar in a way, so... *blush*

Thankfully my bannies didn't all die. More farms, more imported food, and few houses built. The population has kept increasing, but more slowly, and it appears fairly stable for the time being. Way behind on houses, around 400 for 600+ families, but I'm not motivated to fill the map anyhow, and this 'race' to build everything all over the place to try to keep in control of the ever-increasing population is something I'm not too keen on in this lovely little game.

With starvation turned away, it was time to hunt down some silly achievements.

Picture 1: Any idea how many wells you need? I'm counting 26, and may have missed a few (they're not that easy to spot). I've dotted them around the village. 20 is supposed to be enough.

Picture 2: Coupled with the image above, this is the following early spring. That winter the temperature never fell below +3C, which I reckon must be darn rare. When late winter changed to early spring, the temperature was +11C. Then it insta-changed to 0C at early spring. No idea why, but maybe hard coded? Haven't really paid much attention to it before, but don't think I've seen a winter like that.

Picture 3: Think quarries are butt-ugly, which is why I never build them. Did here, however, to chase down vanilla achievements. I'll be honest, this game is boring me, so I'm just going to tick off a few more.

Picture 4: Mines. I've started to extract coal from one of them. Not exactly low on iron 

Picture 5: I find it a little amusing that people have to go through a dark tunnel to visit the graveyard. Average happiness has gone up after I built the graveyard, but not enough to crawl up to a full 5 stars.

Picture 6: One of the farming areas. These were built during the great food scare, so I mostly focused on easy to fetch produce like corn, wheat and beans. Other areas are much more versatile, because I like the look of diverse plants.

Picture 7: Some orchards were needed as well. Unfortunately the vanilla ones die off pretty soon, making them a bit pointless for food, because farms beat them hands down. They look nice though.

Picture 8: Animals HAD to be tucked away in a corner of the map, so I can reduce their non-stop bickering. Getting enough animals is pretty much the only point with this game. Need to move on to something else, or try another Banished map with mods.

Picture 9: Some graphs that shows some of the issues in the past. Food dropped for a long period (I ought to have cared earlier). Then firewood (and to a lesser extent logs) went into freefall due to a higher population, and heavy trading with firewood and ale when the right merchants graced us with their presence. Then tools started to dwindle. Supply was plenty, though, so no big issue, and it was more due to lack of coal. More seriously was the steep decline in clothes. I ordered some warm coats (darn expensive at 25 a piece) and bought 250. And built 3-4 more tailors. With animals, we will have more leather and wool, so might cope without needing to order.

The population has flattened out a bit, though still increasing. If I manage to play this map much longer, without expanding with big residential areas, it could be interesting to see if there is a mass death at some point, causing a kidsplotion when younger people move into the vacant houses, possibly turning the game into one of those somewhat frustrating up and down population curves over time. Does this still happen when the population is fairly high? With a high population I'd think there will always be some "circulation" so the up-and-down curves shouldn't be as marked. I remember doing a test with 50-100 population in the past, and the ups and down were very severe, almost killing off the entire town due to lack of kids.


Also: 3 Internets to @Tom Sawyer for spotting the weird weather 

[Pangaea]

Small thing I noticed, that may be obvious to the rest of you, since you have played the game a lot more than me. When building animal pens, I tend to do so in new areas, which naturally are heavily forested. It took 3-4 years just to clear the darn things, because they can only have 2 builders, there are maybe 70-80 items to clear, and for some reason labourers can't do it. So it's better to clear the area first, then put down the animals pens. That way labourers will clear the area, which is much faster.

Being so far away, 2 builders will take an absolute aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaage to do this themselves. Get there, cut down a tree or two, get food, clothes, tools, whatever -- repeat.

When making those last two pens, furthest north, I had clued onto this odd game behaviour, and let labourers clear most of the land beforehand.

[Tom Sawyer]

This area in your graveyard picture with these "barracks" and the large "burial grounds" looks really creepy! And I found this ominous doctor house next to the chapel and the huge graveyard, OMG. Better not to think about what's going on there. I do not want to have to live in this part of your map.

The jump of the temperature was from the old unusually warm year to the normal year at early spring. Each year has its own deviation from the normal temperature range. I've never seen such a warm vanilla winter.

[Pangaea]

Haha  I wondered about writing something about the doctor house there, zombies or something. It looks creepy.

Thanks for the explanation on the sudden temperature change. It looked very odd. May have happened before too, but haven't noticed. This time the change was huge. Only noticed the lack of a real winter because each year I tend to go over the farms to see how much was lost, and this time winter simply didn't come. Very weird, but kind of nice to know it is possible with such extreme outliers. Wasn't fun that year when it dropped to -3C in spring, and I lost half the crops because farmers are a little... simple

About merchants though.... is there something in the code that says the chance to get a livestock or seed merchants jumps to 90% when you don't need them at all? I have 5 TP's, and the amount of times I get 4 of these buggers each year is astounding. Not been quite as big an annoyance the last few years because I've built up some animal pens, but just look at this. 3 guys happened to come at the same time.

Frustrating


(edit: merchant #4 came with 1000 logs and then #5 with more sheep and chickens. Yay!)

[Pangaea]

This is odd. A food merchant came!? 

#1 Livestock
#2 Livestock
#3 Livestock
#4 Resources (logs)  \o/
#5 Livestock
#6 Seeds
#7 Livestock
#8 Livestock
#9 Livestock
#10 Food!! 

Hope this nasty trend doesn't continue. All the livestock I mean, not the lucky 'streak' with the food merchant  I'm sure he just got lost upriver somewhere, or lost his instructions.

[Tom Sawyer]

Strange. But I'm sure the game has no knowledge about the merchants. They are just items listed in the tradingpost.rsc and will be chosen by random if the boat is docking at the post. In vanilla the livestock merchant is 1 of 5.

[Nilla]

I like your blog; making a little boring game funny. More of that!

Maybe I should have come with this advise earlier; make ALL achievements on one map! That's fun! I made it, as I got a new computer (or rather inherited it from my son). The tricky thing is, that you have to make everything on a small mountain map. This makes even the silliest achievements a challenge: I remember how I struggled to put in as much stone roads as necessary. This was one of my best games ever. I blogged it if you want to take a look.

By the way, you need much more wells than it's said: I think 40 instead of 20.

I have seen such a wheather; but not often. If I remember right; the fields where the beans are left, will not be worked the next year (or did they freeze away in the cold spring?) I think I left my old beans until they froze the next winter. Of cause, you could demolish the fields and build new, but I remember that I wanted to see what would happen.

Yes it's always better to use laborers to clear the ground than builders. I do it with pastures but also fields and orchards; much more efficient.

And once again; I was right: The lifestock merchants have planned an attack! Beware! 

[Gatherer]

This is odd. A food merchant came!? 

#1 Livestock
#2 Livestock
#3 Livestock
#4 Resources (logs)  \o/
#5 Livestock
#6 Seeds
#7 Livestock
#8 Livestock
#9 Livestock
#10 Food!! 

Hope this nasty trend doesn't continue. All the livestock I mean, not the lucky 'streak' with the food merchant  I'm sure he just got lost upriver somewhere, or lost his instructions.

I've had a similar problem a while ago. I even tried selecting all livestock and crops whenever such a merchant came and set the order to never, hoping they would get the message and stop coming. I was naive.

[Pangaea]

Maybe it's like Animal Farm. The animals are in charge, have taken over the Merchants' Guild, and are now trying to spread their dominance to the rest of the world, holding frightened merchants as hostages 

Shame the game doesn't have pigs

Started to note down what merchants arrived, because it was quite frankly stunning how much bad luck I had. Assumed it was pure randomness, but still I tried to keep Livestock and Seed merchants at port without dismissing them, hoping it would somehow lower the chance of another of the same type appearing. Didn't work. The trend continued yet further, but finally the luck changed. Continuing the list from above:

#11 Seeds
#12 Livestock
#13 Food
#14 General
#15 General
#16 General
#17 Food
#18 Resources

Clearly 13 is my lucky number 

Have got all achievements I can get now, apart from 200 nomads. I'm waiting for the next batch, and hope it will be enough. Have accepted maybe 50 nomads in the early part of the game (28 one time, plus a few minor ones).

Isn't it extremely difficult to get ALL achievements in one map? 900 people on a small mountainous map with harsh climate must be tricky. Particularly when you can't build schools or or farms or TPs either (early on).

Think I've read that blog before, but should re-read it. Thanks for the reminder


On the strange weather and crops, thankfully there wasn't much left when late winter turned to early spring, and the farmers managed to remove what little was left and then start sowing new seeds. Probably akin to how you can still get something from late finished cropfields even if the farmers start sowing it in late spring (or maybe even summer?).

edit: I remember now that Food Variety hadn't got ticked off yet. Despite having all 8 crop types and 8 orchard types (and having harvested them for a few years). There isn't much orchards though, just 1 field for some of them. Do you need a certain amount of produce from each type for it to tick off or something? I found it a bit weird.

[brads3]

Cc does have pigs thou i think u ment the non-modded cut.

[Pangaea]

Yes, I meant the non-modded version. Good that pigs have been introduced via mods, though, as so many other great things.

Forget about the question about Food Variety above btw. I had simply messed up. Put down the orchards, and put Pecans to one of the plots. Then changed things around a little so all nuts were in the same area, but by then a naughty farmer had already planted some trees, so despite the plot saying "Pears", the products are still "Pecans". Will simply have to wait a little for the trees to start dying and the Pears to get planted (don't want to cut it all down now).