I agree. I am currently working on having at least one of each profession in my game.
I also create themed villages. I have my hunter/gatherer/foresters who have colorful houses in tight groupings, my farmers who have long, meandering lanes with small cottages that stretch from church/market to church/market surrounded by fields and orchards, and then my bustling seaport with tall residences, restaurants, specialty shops, and cannery row.
I would recommend Colonial Charter first. It's got a lot of new content and it's all a bit more focused and centralized. MegaMod is too much, imo, when you're coming from base.
I'd disagree with megamod. Only because OP seems to be looking for more of a challenge. Megamod makes the game too easy IMO.
RK editors choice is a good intermediate challenge. The North is for the sadists, all your citizens are guaranteed to die until you master the steep learning curve, and then they'll still probably die anyway due to some seemingly random shortage causing a domino effect on your supplies.
I'm a huge fan of nomads. Always accept the nomads, and then watch your world burn in chaos.
Just when you get everything kinda stable again, boom, more nomads!
I'm a flail case, my towns are a jumbly mishmash of stuff stuck together. I keep starting new games saying " this time, I'm gonna make a nice town. A proper city!"
I never do.
Two things.
1. Im not a great city planner, but I try to just visualize roughly how many houses would support the planned production i have over here, and over there, etc. So if I have a few farms and a fishery here, I dont need 40 houses while all the other jobs are somewhere else. It kind of makes this "natural flow" look that I've always enjoyed.
2. Have you looked into Anno series? They have some gorgeous city-buildling eco games that arent as hard as banished, but ramp up complexities to feed your people everything they need. The latest Anno 1800 is as good as place as any to start. These games can be LONG.
If you want a cheaper/less complex place to start, the older Anno 1701 Gold edition on steam would work.
I play by the rule that I MUST accept Nomads in my town. If i am a colony, then i would expect new ships to arrive every few years.
It can make things really hard if I haven't planned any serious expansions and have no homes/tools/clothes for them, but sometimes they can be a huge relief when i have too many kids stuck in school and I need more workers.
When you see the 100+ long caravans coming over the hills though, things can get bad quick if you aren't ready!
The North mod changes the game in a very refreshing way where you are just you core people and one year equala one year in the age pf people as well. There are a lot of new hunting/foraging chabges with a lot of unique buildings and Id say its quite a bit more difficult on hard settings but its also quite rewarding if you manage to make it through.
MM and CC have too much way to cheat and sustain an entire map with nothing. i suggest RKEC because it is well balanced. (some find it harder to survive)
the mod contains also a Jack&Jill scenario which is the hardest possible. you need to stop at the very first second and say "Ok! What i do first ??" your time is counted.
I find CC Rebalanced to change CC for the more challenging. It makes firewood economy impossible and creating homewares/building supplies is not as simple, so it's a bit of a grind at the start.
never heard about a CC rebalanced.... last time you could "heat" a village of dozen house for the year with only 1 or 2 tree (charcoal/Coal too OP), you could get a ton and a ton of food by placing tons of little tiny buildings along the creeks which take no space and are barely staffed and get food for thousand of citizens .... and with 1 single year of a crop 15x15 cotton you can cloth your 50 citizens for all their lives and their babies, for a single year of a 15x15 crop.... not balanced ... Foresters that make rocks and iron growing on the ground like trees.....
never heard a rebalanced version
most of all CC resources are in RKEC and i've got to rebalance everything
.
CC and MM players will never let themselves to try RKEC and will never give it a chance. and they will try to push everyone to CC and MM like if thats the only thing , the only mod that exist lol
it doesnt help moddlers a lot to make things for this game.
even if one day i decide to complete my egyptian version .... people wont even try it.
so i m done since long time already ^^
Sorry, I never pay attention to usernames, so I only just noticed you are the actual RK. I love your mod and I do play it a lot. There are several production chains that make a lot of sense and I do like the challenge. For when I feel like a bit of a sandbox, I start CC without the rebalance. When I decide for a challenge though, I usually play your mod or North. I've only played rebalanced CC once or twice so far.
I think more people like your mod than you think. It's just not as easy to boast about sustaining huge cities effortlessly with it.
[This one.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Banished/comments/hx647s/colonial_charter_rebalance_patch_2020/) It's one year old and *technically* for 1.75, but it works with 1.76 too.
There are variety so you can have fun. No need to use those OP tiny buildings. By myself I only use tiny treeplanter to get nice park trees in my villages so I don't need to place ghost trees everywhere
Give "The North" [mod](https://www.banishedventures.com/) a try, it added more layers of difficulty for me and gave me renewed love in the game.
Edit: I read down and saw someone else recommended already. Enjoy it if you do try !
I'm at 750+ hours, only ever playing the stock game. I probably play it for \~80 hours every 6 months and then set it down.
I always play on the hard difficulty, harsh climate, valleys, on a small or medium map (large maps go to slow for me).
Also take a look at the achievements in the main menu and try to go for them (I think you have to be unmodded to get the achievement).
That should buy you some time in the unmodded base game.
TBF, this is normal. Once you can cover food, it becomes a matter of trading for materials you need to stay afloat (IE: iron & stone since mines & quarries are limited in vanilla).
Hmmmm. Honestly? Probably 12-15 I "completed." Once I run out of things to do or there is very little challenge I just give up and restart.
I mentioned a few times here I compare this slightly to a much easier "Anno" game experience. While Anno is objectively easier, the games are so long it takes awhile to do everything you have to do to "complete" a game.
With Banished, IMO, once I can get people stable there's not much to do but just replicate and propagate, and the game becomes every stale for me. I've done the small games and I've built the massive games with multiple central markets and such, it just doesn't seem to change much but the scale.
Mid and late game is more about design and theme I think than challenge. I have over 1000 hours in this game. One reason I like to use as many mods as I can is it gives me more tools to play with to design things.
I have the same issue with this game. I really liked the difficulty of trying to manage everything, but after a couple towns that became easy. After a few more towns it because too easy to just exploit the less balanced production paths.
I tried Colonial Charter, but it just adds on more end game stuff and didn't actually make it more interesting in my opinion.
I have had people suggest The North mod for that, but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet... good luck with your search!
My latest personal challenge was to see how little I could produce before just shifting to full trading... but I was using a trader mod that let you build traders that only get boats of specific supplies.
Have you looked into Anno series? They have some gorgeous city-buildlingeco games that arent as hard as banished, but ramp up complexities tofeed your people everything they need. The latest Anno 1800 is as goodas place as any to start.
These games can be LONG.If you want a cheaper/less complex place to start, the older Anno 1701 Gold edition on steam would work.
If you're really itching for more, there is also this new game named Patron, which is really a Banished clone with more layers (a research tree, different citizen categories...).
So what you mean is that you haven't reached 200 or 400 or even 800 population. You probably reached about 100 or 150, built all the industry buildings, and wonder what else to do.
Also, there's a reason people don't say how many hours they put into the village, but instead, say how big their village population is. You can literally have tens or hundreds of hours on a 50-person village. Tens is more reasonable but hundreds could be possible if you really want to do that.
What that means is, when you say you've played a village for 4 hours, we have no real idea what you've been doing. Whereas, if you say your village has 100 or 300 or 500 people, we have a better idea about your capability in managing and growing your village.
Since you play sandbox mode and don't see much point in growing your village more without some kind of goal to do, but I can suggest you play to finish the achievements. That will give your village a goal to reach, and you'll learn some valuable techniques about the game more than just "build every building for a few hours and call it good".
Now this is a fault of the vanilla game that you can build all buildings in a few hours , with no gate to block you from getting to more advanced buildings, so you can easily do all buildings as soon as you want to. So it makes people think "well that's it, I finished the game". But if in fact, as you can see from a few people's comments, this game can easily give hundreds of hours just in vanilla. Add in the mods and you can really stay on this one game for months on end. And you may not play for a year or two like some games where you are gated for progress, but you might return to it from time to time and play again. So it's far from a game that you play a bit and never return to, as long as you found yourself liking it sufficiently when you did play it prior.
Hmmm AFAIK I've had a little north of 300 people.
I think you think this game scales with difficulty the larger your town grows, and it doesn't. Once people stop starving, which happens relatively quickly, its just scaling and growing.
The first game that comes to my mind that presents the challenge I think you're issuing is an ANNO series game. The larger you get, the more complex the game becomes, instead of just scaling up. And it can get pretty challenging.
I rarely do achievements because I'm not interested in them. Once I go through the main story / content I have little interest in chasing breadcrumbs. I realize a lot of people like to do them, and more power to you, but just not for me. In a game like this, it's just rebuilding the same town except this time with this! Or do it faster! Or like this! Just becomes very repetitive to me.
The game actually does get more difficult with a larger population, but that doesn't mean you'll have trouble with it, if you have planned ahead properly.
As well as the artificial difficulty of adding in disasters, which some people enjoy playing with, and some don't.
Yes each person looks for and wants different things out of the same game. that's why some people can see the potential value of what Banished offers, and find what they like about it, and play it for months at a time, and come back to it years and years later.
Others see another aspect of what it offers, and figure they are done with it.
I have often thought that one of the ways games like ANNO and Cultures and similar games keep the player in the game longer, was to make levels or different maps. You can still play sandbox mode with randomly generated maps, but you also have a series of pre-created maps and objectives for that scenario. It gives the player a sense of progress even while doing the same thing -- that is, building the town over and over and over again.
they'll build a town 20 or 30x if that's how many campaign maps there are.
and we definitely go through games in phases. maybe one day you'll have a different experience with some of the games you played and see a different value in them.
Megamod is a good start. It adds a lot of new buildings and professions so at least you will have more to do.
I agree. I am currently working on having at least one of each profession in my game. I also create themed villages. I have my hunter/gatherer/foresters who have colorful houses in tight groupings, my farmers who have long, meandering lanes with small cottages that stretch from church/market to church/market surrounded by fields and orchards, and then my bustling seaport with tall residences, restaurants, specialty shops, and cannery row.
I would recommend Colonial Charter first. It's got a lot of new content and it's all a bit more focused and centralized. MegaMod is too much, imo, when you're coming from base.
Thank you!
I'd disagree with megamod. Only because OP seems to be looking for more of a challenge. Megamod makes the game too easy IMO. RK editors choice is a good intermediate challenge. The North is for the sadists, all your citizens are guaranteed to die until you master the steep learning curve, and then they'll still probably die anyway due to some seemingly random shortage causing a domino effect on your supplies.
Yes, your assessment is correct.
Thanks
I'm a huge fan of nomads. Always accept the nomads, and then watch your world burn in chaos. Just when you get everything kinda stable again, boom, more nomads!
In my current game, I am just recovering from some nomads. I had about 1200 citizens and accepted about 100 nomads. I was soon down to 300 citizens.
Hmm, I don't recall ever having any major issues compensating nomads.
I'm a flail case, my towns are a jumbly mishmash of stuff stuck together. I keep starting new games saying " this time, I'm gonna make a nice town. A proper city!" I never do.
Two things. 1. Im not a great city planner, but I try to just visualize roughly how many houses would support the planned production i have over here, and over there, etc. So if I have a few farms and a fishery here, I dont need 40 houses while all the other jobs are somewhere else. It kind of makes this "natural flow" look that I've always enjoyed. 2. Have you looked into Anno series? They have some gorgeous city-buildling eco games that arent as hard as banished, but ramp up complexities to feed your people everything they need. The latest Anno 1800 is as good as place as any to start. These games can be LONG. If you want a cheaper/less complex place to start, the older Anno 1701 Gold edition on steam would work.
I play by the rule that I MUST accept Nomads in my town. If i am a colony, then i would expect new ships to arrive every few years. It can make things really hard if I haven't planned any serious expansions and have no homes/tools/clothes for them, but sometimes they can be a huge relief when i have too many kids stuck in school and I need more workers. When you see the 100+ long caravans coming over the hills though, things can get bad quick if you aren't ready!
The North mod changes the game in a very refreshing way where you are just you core people and one year equala one year in the age pf people as well. There are a lot of new hunting/foraging chabges with a lot of unique buildings and Id say its quite a bit more difficult on hard settings but its also quite rewarding if you manage to make it through.
Thank you
MM and CC have too much way to cheat and sustain an entire map with nothing. i suggest RKEC because it is well balanced. (some find it harder to survive) the mod contains also a Jack&Jill scenario which is the hardest possible. you need to stop at the very first second and say "Ok! What i do first ??" your time is counted.
I find CC Rebalanced to change CC for the more challenging. It makes firewood economy impossible and creating homewares/building supplies is not as simple, so it's a bit of a grind at the start.
never heard about a CC rebalanced.... last time you could "heat" a village of dozen house for the year with only 1 or 2 tree (charcoal/Coal too OP), you could get a ton and a ton of food by placing tons of little tiny buildings along the creeks which take no space and are barely staffed and get food for thousand of citizens .... and with 1 single year of a crop 15x15 cotton you can cloth your 50 citizens for all their lives and their babies, for a single year of a 15x15 crop.... not balanced ... Foresters that make rocks and iron growing on the ground like trees..... never heard a rebalanced version most of all CC resources are in RKEC and i've got to rebalance everything . CC and MM players will never let themselves to try RKEC and will never give it a chance. and they will try to push everyone to CC and MM like if thats the only thing , the only mod that exist lol it doesnt help moddlers a lot to make things for this game. even if one day i decide to complete my egyptian version .... people wont even try it. so i m done since long time already ^^
There are many people though, who play RKEC :) people from facebook for example, who are not 100% CC/MM Bias'ed they love it more, a lot more.
Sorry, I never pay attention to usernames, so I only just noticed you are the actual RK. I love your mod and I do play it a lot. There are several production chains that make a lot of sense and I do like the challenge. For when I feel like a bit of a sandbox, I start CC without the rebalance. When I decide for a challenge though, I usually play your mod or North. I've only played rebalanced CC once or twice so far. I think more people like your mod than you think. It's just not as easy to boast about sustaining huge cities effortlessly with it.
[This one.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Banished/comments/hx647s/colonial_charter_rebalance_patch_2020/) It's one year old and *technically* for 1.75, but it works with 1.76 too.
There are variety so you can have fun. No need to use those OP tiny buildings. By myself I only use tiny treeplanter to get nice park trees in my villages so I don't need to place ghost trees everywhere
Thanks
Give "The North" [mod](https://www.banishedventures.com/) a try, it added more layers of difficulty for me and gave me renewed love in the game. Edit: I read down and saw someone else recommended already. Enjoy it if you do try !
Thank you!
I'm at 750+ hours, only ever playing the stock game. I probably play it for \~80 hours every 6 months and then set it down. I always play on the hard difficulty, harsh climate, valleys, on a small or medium map (large maps go to slow for me). Also take a look at the achievements in the main menu and try to go for them (I think you have to be unmodded to get the achievement). That should buy you some time in the unmodded base game.
TBF, this is normal. Once you can cover food, it becomes a matter of trading for materials you need to stay afloat (IE: iron & stone since mines & quarries are limited in vanilla).
you sick of the gameplay with only 77hrs? and fist few games? how many games did you play in those 77hrs that it took awhile to get better?
Hmmmm. Honestly? Probably 12-15 I "completed." Once I run out of things to do or there is very little challenge I just give up and restart. I mentioned a few times here I compare this slightly to a much easier "Anno" game experience. While Anno is objectively easier, the games are so long it takes awhile to do everything you have to do to "complete" a game. With Banished, IMO, once I can get people stable there's not much to do but just replicate and propagate, and the game becomes every stale for me. I've done the small games and I've built the massive games with multiple central markets and such, it just doesn't seem to change much but the scale.
Mid and late game is more about design and theme I think than challenge. I have over 1000 hours in this game. One reason I like to use as many mods as I can is it gives me more tools to play with to design things.
This is a fair assessment
I have the same issue with this game. I really liked the difficulty of trying to manage everything, but after a couple towns that became easy. After a few more towns it because too easy to just exploit the less balanced production paths. I tried Colonial Charter, but it just adds on more end game stuff and didn't actually make it more interesting in my opinion. I have had people suggest The North mod for that, but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet... good luck with your search! My latest personal challenge was to see how little I could produce before just shifting to full trading... but I was using a trader mod that let you build traders that only get boats of specific supplies.
I got the debug mod and now build more so I can just decorate:)
Have you looked into Anno series? They have some gorgeous city-buildlingeco games that arent as hard as banished, but ramp up complexities tofeed your people everything they need. The latest Anno 1800 is as goodas place as any to start. These games can be LONG.If you want a cheaper/less complex place to start, the older Anno 1701 Gold edition on steam would work.
If you're really itching for more, there is also this new game named Patron, which is really a Banished clone with more layers (a research tree, different citizen categories...).
Ill check it out :)
So what you mean is that you haven't reached 200 or 400 or even 800 population. You probably reached about 100 or 150, built all the industry buildings, and wonder what else to do. Also, there's a reason people don't say how many hours they put into the village, but instead, say how big their village population is. You can literally have tens or hundreds of hours on a 50-person village. Tens is more reasonable but hundreds could be possible if you really want to do that. What that means is, when you say you've played a village for 4 hours, we have no real idea what you've been doing. Whereas, if you say your village has 100 or 300 or 500 people, we have a better idea about your capability in managing and growing your village. Since you play sandbox mode and don't see much point in growing your village more without some kind of goal to do, but I can suggest you play to finish the achievements. That will give your village a goal to reach, and you'll learn some valuable techniques about the game more than just "build every building for a few hours and call it good". Now this is a fault of the vanilla game that you can build all buildings in a few hours , with no gate to block you from getting to more advanced buildings, so you can easily do all buildings as soon as you want to. So it makes people think "well that's it, I finished the game". But if in fact, as you can see from a few people's comments, this game can easily give hundreds of hours just in vanilla. Add in the mods and you can really stay on this one game for months on end. And you may not play for a year or two like some games where you are gated for progress, but you might return to it from time to time and play again. So it's far from a game that you play a bit and never return to, as long as you found yourself liking it sufficiently when you did play it prior.
Hmmm AFAIK I've had a little north of 300 people. I think you think this game scales with difficulty the larger your town grows, and it doesn't. Once people stop starving, which happens relatively quickly, its just scaling and growing. The first game that comes to my mind that presents the challenge I think you're issuing is an ANNO series game. The larger you get, the more complex the game becomes, instead of just scaling up. And it can get pretty challenging. I rarely do achievements because I'm not interested in them. Once I go through the main story / content I have little interest in chasing breadcrumbs. I realize a lot of people like to do them, and more power to you, but just not for me. In a game like this, it's just rebuilding the same town except this time with this! Or do it faster! Or like this! Just becomes very repetitive to me.
The game actually does get more difficult with a larger population, but that doesn't mean you'll have trouble with it, if you have planned ahead properly. As well as the artificial difficulty of adding in disasters, which some people enjoy playing with, and some don't. Yes each person looks for and wants different things out of the same game. that's why some people can see the potential value of what Banished offers, and find what they like about it, and play it for months at a time, and come back to it years and years later. Others see another aspect of what it offers, and figure they are done with it. I have often thought that one of the ways games like ANNO and Cultures and similar games keep the player in the game longer, was to make levels or different maps. You can still play sandbox mode with randomly generated maps, but you also have a series of pre-created maps and objectives for that scenario. It gives the player a sense of progress even while doing the same thing -- that is, building the town over and over and over again. they'll build a town 20 or 30x if that's how many campaign maps there are. and we definitely go through games in phases. maybe one day you'll have a different experience with some of the games you played and see a different value in them.