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Weapon Challenge

Started by Nilla, March 31, 2020, 04:19:25 AM

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Nilla

I was a bit bored in my quarantine so I reopened an old Facebook group for Banished players where I used to be active before I found this web page. I haven´t opened that group for years but it looks like it´s still pretty active. One guy just published a challenge, he has on his web page and I thought; why not participate. https://bluebellygames.game.blog/banished-armory-challenge/?fbclid=IwAR1RP42JeFv7LdbbGCJgzhewFc0NH5rEyQK8DTexde_THyMK3-WFIO_kZPQ

Summary: use the mod RKEd only and produce as much value of weapon and armour you can on a defined map and settings in 50 years. You get points according to the trade value of the different weapon. If someone here who hasn´t seen that challenge is interested to play it, I´m sure it´s alright.

The challenge is much more interesting than it sounds at first sight. You must decide if you want to produce more cheap, easier stuff or go for the expensive royal armour. You also need to decide if you want to produce the raw material yourself or trade for some of it or all of it. And if you import will you import ore or the more expensive metals. I can´t see a clear "best solution". So I started a game with everything; all kind of weapon and armoury, producing a lot of ores and metals but also importing a lot. In the end, the game was a complete mess. I did produce a lot of weapon and armour but I had absolutely no concept. I´m ashamed of location and logistics. I was in about year 28 and wouldn´t have liked to play that game another 20 years, so I decided to start a new game with a clear strategy. I don´t know if it will be as successful as my first, messy town but at least I want to feel comfortable.

I started that town yesterday and want to blog its progress here. But it will be later. Now it´s lunchtime.

avdpos

#1
Can ad  that I also have seen the challenge and have started it.
Haven´t actually played "only" RedKetchups mod so I guess I will have two entries - one learning and one more final version. But it seems rather fun

Was way to long ago ago I played a Banished challenge. Also I quickly realised that I´m bad at hard starts nowdays. Have played soft mediums for many gam

And by the way, Nilla - arne´t you also in Sweden? We do not have that much quarantine from my knowledge.

Nilla

Nice to have a fellow countryman on board and yes we don´t have any forced quarantine but since my husband and I are both chronically ill, we stay at home anyway.  In my case, no one can say for sure, if it´s more dangerous than for normal healthy people but experts on the web page of a community with the same illness as I, say that it´s more likely that we get more ill than average. And my husband belongs for sure to a risk group and I certainly don´t want to be the one who infected and killed him. So even if we have chosen our quarantine ourselves, it´s as boring as if it would have been forced upon us.

And I strongly assume it´s RKEd only, without knowing for certain. Otherwise, it would be a strange challenge because there are so many mods out there that would make this task a lot easier, they don´t even need to be obvious "cheat" mods like "immortal mines" or "double stones from each rock".

I´ll tell a little about the start of this game and will show some screenshots.

First picture
The hard start; yes it is difficult in this game with all the children from the beginning. This time I even had to go back to the autosave. I don´t really understand why he decided that it should be "disasters on" for a challenge like this.

Second picture
We´ve managed the first hard years. As I usually do in my games, I decided to build the school as fast as possible and there´s only one uneducated youngster. I can confess that I saw that starvation sign on people´s heads a few times before the first youngsters started to graduate but with luck (or skill ;) ) all managed to survive.

I never plan my games and my settlements in detail. I have a "concept" that I want to follow, that´s all. If I plan to trade, what I do in this game, I usually look before I start an area, where to put trading ports and bridges, and I look for good spots for clay and sandpits. I also try to have some "main roads" that I later want to build and when I can afford the stones also pave.

Third picture
You can see now that we had time to build the roads and also two trading ports. I only wonder if watermelons are fruit or vegetables. If I remember it right, there was some discussion about it but I will buy them anyway and hope that it´s fruit.

And yes, I sell firewood.  :-[ I know, that Red made it less profitable in this mod but it´s still the easiest thing to sell for seeds and animals at the beginning. I will make this game as simple and easy as possible but not build a firewood economy long term. I promise that.

Nilla

One thing I like so much about making a blog of my settlements is to play in the evening and in the morning go back and look at my screenshots and think about what I´ve done. Not seldom have I discovered things, I need to do or change in the next years. Maybe not so much today but we will see.

First picture

You wanted to see screenshots and intermediate results every 10 years, Greg. Here we are in year 10. It´s easy to calculate the score; it´s 0. But look! We´re on our way building our first Armour Maker. :) And you can see we´ve been busy in the last years. My "mantra" for this game is efficiency. Everything will be made as cheap, simple and dense as possible.  So far, there´s only one small exception: I couldn´t resist the lighthouse town hall. Even if it is more expensive to build than other town halls, I must have it. It´s too lovely to ignore.

Second picture

You´ve chosen a very nice map, Greg. I like the starting position on that peninsula. It´s not as boring as some other starts on a plain map and you can develop your settlement in several directions. First I thought about going north across the river to that huge space and use the close lake for jetty buildings but I can´t resist the river in the south that´s exceptionally good for trade. So we are heading south!

Yesterday you may have wondered why I built that tailor shop away from everything else. You can here guess why. I want to put sheep (or lamas) in that big pasture but not even with a 3 port and several orders, has anyone brought any so far. But it´s no problem, there´s enough leather for clothing, even if it hurts a bit, not to be able to use them making armour.

As I´ve said; efficiency! That´s why I build these Country Little Houses. I will stick to them this whole game; cheap, no stones needed, look nice enough. They have a medium heat economy, so maybe if this had been a "harsh" game, I may have decided differently but on "mild"; they are my houses.

Third and fourth picture
We´re in year 14. Things have developed fast. We have almost 100 inhabitants, all educated. And we have produced some weapon and armour. Not much yet. In my first game, I had more to this point but this is much more relaxed and calm and we are preparing for later. I have decided to trade for gold ore, coal and iron. There will be no random mines (I had a few of them in that other game). Since the merchants don´t bring so much gold ore, I need to spam the river with trading ports. If you look into the inventory, you may get a hint on what I plan to produce for export. ;)

Nilla

This is a nice and difficult game. I do like it very much!

As I´ve said, mantra; efficiency! In all aspects:
-Building dense. If there happens to be a free spot somewhere, be sure there will be a stockpile on it.
-Keep it simple; no complicated chains and products that need attention.
-Process food but only in simple ways, like making bread and drying meat and fish.
-Use the limits by fuel, tools and clothes.
-One simple profitable product for trade; beer. Breweries are located close to trading ports.
-Produce a safe surplus of food but don´t make too much.
-Use all free people to expand the production of weapons and armour.
And........
.....go for at least 1M points in the end! ;)

That´s my strategy.

I was so focused on these points that I forgot that we´re supposed to show a screenshot every 10 years. And without "thinking about it" I was in year 25.  :-[  But luckily I had a save from early winter 19. That will have to make do.

First picture.
Main production area. My strategy to import all/most raw materials for the weapon isn´t very successful, yet. I must confess, I have some difficulties to"tune" the trade orders. The merchants don´t bring much gold ore each time and I want to focus on the expensive products. But I also need some iron and coal. Not too much, but enough. The merchants often bring more iron than I can afford to buy and I´m about to increase the amount of beer in the ports. But often I run out of the one or other product. As I said; difficult but fun.

The store of weapon isn´t very impressive. 60 Nobel Armour, 145 Royal Armour, 218 Fine Weapon

Second picture
It´s a little bit better if we look here as well. It will be my long-term strategy to keep the number of barns down. I think the trade will work even if the ports are filled to 50% with stored weapons. But at my first, messy attempt, where I mined and produced most raw materials myself, I did have more weapons to this time. But I want a relaxed simple game and I don´t care so much about intermediate scores.

Anyway, I´ve stored another 500 Royal Armour and 352 Fine Weapon in the ports. If I calculated it right it´s 59 175 points, not bad for a start.

Third picture

Here I am now. It all looks the same, just a bit more of everything. The only new thing is that I´ve started to exploit the lake. It´s connected to the river and the merchants do stop at the ports. Sometimes trading ports at lakes may be a bit tricky but here they work fine.

avdpos

Impressive Nilla!
Going into year 19 myself and I do still only have the 10 armors/weapons I have bought from traders.
Seems like it start being time to produce more things than villagers for me - couse that I do have some more of.

I´m still new to red ketchup mods - what do you need for raw material to produce malt? Any sort of grain I guess? Those traders still haven´t sent me anything in that way - but I have an impressive collections of buffalos for lower levels of armor/weapon. So I´m a cultured swede and export lot´s of perfume.

Nilla

This Swede orders the finest German malt from every food tradesman that arrive and since I have a lot of trading ports, they deliver more than I need. But you can also use most grain to produce it yourself. But a few more breweries to be able to import malt is easier.  Perfume is also quite profitable but for me in this game, it´s too complicated with 3 different materials as input. I want it simple and efficient.

If you have a lot of people, @avdpos, it´s promising, just use them to produce weapon!

Nilla

This game goes on very nicely. Just as I´ve thought; weapons multiples like a virus! ;) Not without difficulties, but that´s the way it should be to enjoy a game. I still haven´t got the trade orders right even if it has been better now when the population is over 250 and the really big boats arrive. I have produced too much gold and am often short on iron. I would very much like to autotrade but I´m far from that and I don´t think I ever will reach that point.

I still stick to my initial strategy and mantra, so there´s not much stress.
-Dense building; you can see I haven´t used much of the map. This also makes the logistic easier, I only need 1 trader in each port (when I get a big load of iron and coal, I try to add a 2 trader temporarily to that port to help unload). I also need fewer markets for raw materials, even if I sometimes need to use several vendors in those I have.

-Still none of the production chains, I normally like so much by RKEd, like perfume, jewels and greenhouses

-We make flour, bread, dried fish and meat and use simple food.

-I raise the limit by tools and clothes as the population grows so that I have about 1 for each inhabitant, with a small overcapacity, the sites stop now and then and tailors and blacksmiths work as labourers. I have a larger overproduction by fuel, just to make sure that there´s no lack of charcoal for gold melting.

-Beer for export is excellent. I also put small amounts of things I get, that is too complicated to process in this game like flowers, flax, cotton, herbs, fur in the trading ports. Good to have when the merchant wants 2623 trade value and you mainly sell beer worth 8.

- I produce all the food myself. Maybe that´s not the most efficient way, the food merchants bring more malt than I need so there would be room for import but this way is more relaxed. I have good control and try to produce about 5% more than I need every year. So I have a safe surplus.

-I keep about 10% of the workforce as labourers and as soon as I have more people, I expand houses, armouries or food, or occasionally one of the other needed sites. This way everything just keeps on developing.

I didn´t write about a few other for me obvious things in my last entry; I build a house for every new couple. On the screenshots from year 30, with 101 houses for 114 families, it may look like I´m a bit behind but I´m not. I have a larger surplus of young men and if I build a new house, student girls would move out and probably move further away from their school. And of course, I take no nomads. Red has hard penalties for uneducation in his mods, so no uneducated in my town to mess with my production numbers. I also employ no herbalist that prevents people from working but of course, I have a good diet and enough markets to keep up health.

First picture
Main town. Again I almost forgot to stop and take some screenshots but at least this time I´m in the right year.  :-[ ;)

Second picture

The jetty part of the town has developed.
I have 965 Fine weapons, 713 Royal armour, 125 Noble weapons and 60 Noble armour in my stores........

Third picture
......and  9752 Royal armour and 1700 Fine weapons in my trading ports.

754 875 points if I don´t miscalculate. I think I need to change my goal, maybe 5M instead of 1M.  :P :-\

avdpos

Good job @Nilla!
You are getting extreme amounts of scoring. Can´t see how I will get faster production and pass you -but I will make a try.
I´m to little focused on the trading economy to min-max..

But I have made it to year 20, here is my town: https://imgur.com/a/3In2qhh

Nilla

Nice layout @avdpos. With all those people you get the big boats if you trade and will get a lot of materials to produce a lot of weapons if you want to.

Nilla

This game continues the same way; not much new to tell. I´m not quite at the next intermediate score level, but soon. Each year now takes longer. At the beginning of a game, I switch the speed between 2x and 5x, along the way the 5x speed gets rarer and now I switch between 2x and 1x. But I rarely stop the game to plan. I like a relaxed flow.

The trade orders now mostly work, it´s been a while since I ran out of anything. I´ve deliberately reduced the number of gold bars. They are stored in barns and took too much space away.  I´m almost surprised how this game works totally according to my plans, relaxed and nice. Usually, there are one or other obstacle in the way. One thing happened; if you look carefully at the overall-map you may see a light green band on the other side of the river. That´s the trace of a second tornado. I was a bit nervous as it started south of the settlement. You never know how these tornados turn but this one decided to stay at the "right" side of the river.

First picture
Still expanding southwards. At the south end of the map, there will be food production; fields and pastures and maybe some forest, just to use the space. But there´s still room for some more armouries.

You can see that I keep the menus open from houses that are under construction. I always do this when the number of houses is this close to the number of families. If suddenly students start to move out; a sign of gender unbalance, I have control and can pause new houses for a while.

Second picture
Jetty area and inventory. You can see that the food variety isn´t very large but everyone is happy and healthy, so it works. Since rice doesn´t grow as fast as cranberries and watercress, I mainly farm wheat on my conventional fields.

Third picture
A busy, dense town. My idea of storing weapons and armour in the trading ports works well. Some ports are now filled to 50% but I have no trouble buying everything I want due to a lack of space in the port.

Nilla

I´ve passed the 40-year intermediate score; about 2,8M. This game is insane! I miss a warehouse to store all weapons, so I´ve just built my second trading port that´s not connected to the trade route, just to fill it with weapons and armours. And at least the older ports all are filled to about 50% with weapons.

The trade still works well. It would also have worked with fewer ports. I don´t buy all of the malt, iron and coal that´s delivered but most of the gold ore. But this way, it´s comfortable. I order malt from the food merchants, gold ore from the general merchants and iron, coal and gold ore from the resource merchants. When some are brought, I look at stockpiles and barns in that area. If there's only little of the material that´s offered, I buy a lot. If I already have much in that location, I can buy less. This way logistic work pretty well without all too many vendors. As usual, I don´t understand why the traders ignore some stockpiles and barns close to the port and instead walk much further to deliver the imported material. But this is Banished. Not much to do about it.

First picture
I´m using the south end of the map for food production. It helps to fill the markets in this south part of the town without too many vendors and the area is anyway too far away from the trading ports where the raw material is delivered to be good for armouries. I´m now behind building houses. I don´t have enough builders and  I´ve prioritized other things.

Second picture
It´s better to develop the industry on the other side of the river. It´s closer just across the bridge. I will also build at least some of the possible trading ports, even if I don´t really need them, just to make it easier to get raw materials. Anyway, I start to build one store for raw materials, one for building materials a market and some houses.

Third picture
A lot of weapon in the ports. I don´t know if I can do 5M in the few years left but at least it will be close.

Nilla

It took a few days to play in the end but now I´m there; summer 50. Weapon and armours "stashed" everywhere.

84305 Royal Armour
27107 Royal Weapon
2787 Fine Weapon
920 Weapon
420 Shields
165 Noble Weapon
120 Noble Armour
60 Fine Armour

The total score is 7 197 605! Insane!

I have totally 202 Blacksmiths at 104 sites. (Must have forgotten to put 2 blacksmiths in a few sites. I´ve also forgotten to change the production from default simple shields and weapon in a few sites. That´s why I have some of these cheaper goods, too) A handful sites for tools, maybe 10 foundries making gold from gold ore but the rest of them are producing royal armour or royal weapon. If the supply of raw material is good, 1 blacksmith produces about 60 weapon/armour each year. So the annual production of weapon/armour now at the end of the challenge can be about 10k. But last year, I totally ran out of coal and I´ve also been a bit short on iron in some periods.

How can anyone beat this?

I believe in the basic strategies I´ve written about in this blog. So make it simple, import raw materials, put more effort at the beginning of the game on increasing your population and preparing for a large trading economy than producing the weapon. You can see on the scores at 10-20-30-40-50years; 0-59k-750k-2,9M-7,2M that it´s the production the last 20 years that´s important.

So if I would play this game a second time, I would have tried to raise the population faster by not building a school that early and by taking the first batch(es) of nomads and go for a 100% education and weapon production from year 25-30 and further. I would have built as many trading ports as I could and I would have stored as much stockpile materials (iron, coal, gold ore) as I´ve could in this time. This way the production at each site would have been high all the time. I think, 10 M points wouldn´t be impossible. I don´t want to do it myself. But if anyone wants to try, I would be pleased to help with advice.

First picture
Not much to say to the pictures. Everything looks pretty much the same. Also the other side of the river.

Second picture
In this corner I´ve built a forester for walnuts, just to use the space. It's too far away from the ports for weapon/ale. You can also see the one, weird-looking canal- trading port. It´s only there as a warehouse to store the weapon. The normal one next to it also has no connection to the trade route.
Inventory1.

Third picture

Starting position. Everything´s still there. Nothing is demolished or replaced. Some sites are "parked". It´s not much use to start the production of iron ore and coal to supply the armouries but if I run short on stones, I may open the mine.
Inventory2.

Fourth picture
Inventory, trading ports.

I have an idea to continue this game: set down the number of workers in each weapon site to 1, build a lot of houses but no more food production, use the weapon in the ports to buy food. Maybe even take some nomads to expand this town to a really big city. But I´m not so fond of building big towns on big maps. The lags are annoying. I prefer to fill small or medium maps. We will see, I haven´t decided yet what I want to do.





avdpos

Good work!
Have a hard time seeing how I shall be able to beat you. I am at year 23 and have made what you said was "possible ways to improve" as I have taken in ~150 nomads and got a rather high population.
I´m certain I never would have had a chance to beat you if I hadn´t seen your score - it is so high I hadn´t realised I needed to build so much.
So I make a run - and if I do beat you it is thanks to your village blog

Nilla

Have you built many trading ports? You need a lot of them and it takes time before the orders start to work. And don´t take any more nomads now and see that you have schools enough. Let your population work and use everyone you can spare to build a weapon industry. If you want to show any intermediate screenshots, I might give you some more advice.

Anyway, I tried to run the game a bit longer but it´s simply too boring, just to build houses. I had maybe a production of 10 k royal weapon and royal armour at the end. Since the import of the raw material is financed with beer and only the weapon production at this level could support another 6000 people with food, (I don´t even count all the weapon I´ve stored) it will stay boring a long time. It was fun to have a different goal but now I´m heading back North.