Indie Focus: Banished

As the name implies, Banished has you take control of a group of exiled villagers as they try to live in the wilderness. This is the simple setup for what turns out to be a brilliantly put together survival city-building game that focuses on resource management rather than combat. Its competency is all the more impressive considering it was created by a single man.

The game focuses entirely on management, so it doesn’t have use combat as a gameplay crutch at all, meaning that every villager you lose is your fault in some way. They will starve to death, freeze to death, die of illness, get crushed by rocks, and they’ll even die of old age if they make it that far.

If your town falls, it is your fault as you simply were not prepared, whether it’s because you didn’t stockpile enough herbs to fend off a disease, or you didn’t build a well in time to put out the fire that’s burning everything down. Even villagers dying of old age is bad news, as that is one less villager to work for you and if they didn’t leave any children behind them there will be nobody to replace them.

You start with enough supplies to get going, the amount varies depending on your chosen difficulty level, and you’ll want to begin by setting up some food production. You have a wealth of options as far as food goes, whether you want a smaller constant income from hunters and gatherers or the longer term but higher yield farmable crops like wheat or peppers. Early on you will need to use shorter term options or your initial food stores will run out before you can harvest, particularly if you opted for an orchard which takes years before it bears fruit (pun intended).

Overall you will want to aim for a wide selection of foods so your villagers can maintain a healthy, varied diet. If they have a limited diet then they are at risk of developing illnesses, but you can try to combat this with a herbalist, who will gather herbs from forests to fight various ailments.

Naturally, wood and stone are some necessary basic building materials and you have a few options for these as well. You can simply have an area pilfered entirely for its resources, wood from trees, stone and iron from rocks, leaving behind space in which to build, but this isn’t too useful as a long term solution as you will eventually run out of trees and rocks to harvest.

Alternatively, you can build a forester’s lodge that will maintain a dense forest around it, cutting down trees as they reach maturity and providing you with a long term solution to the deforestation problem. Quarries and mines, for stone and iron/coal respectively, aren’t as high maintenance, though. They last a long time and output a lot of material, but eventually will run dry as non-renewable resources.

Much like any strategy game, it’s a balancing act as you try to keep multiple plates spinning at the same time. There’s food, herbs, building materials, warm clothes and firewood for during winter, and tools for use by your workers, all of which you need to produce enough of to keep your village going. Every resource ties into everything else in some way, and the moment you realise that you missed something, you will be kicking yourself as the construction of your new buildings grind to a halt or you find yourself with a plague and nothing to treat it.

Micromanaging your villagers’ occupations is your key to success and the UI gives you a few options to do so. There is a jobs menu where you can assign villagers to certain professions, everything from gathering herbs to teaching students, just bear in mind you need labourers to cut down trees, harvest rocks, and move resources around. They’re effectively another vital resource for you to look after.

Your population grows quite slowly so you will likely find yourself moving villagers from one profession to another as your needs require it. A good way of getting more output from your workers is having them educated, which you must do as they are growing up. Build a schoolhouse and children will become a student at the age of 10, which delays their coming of age and joining your workforce but, once they graduate, they are more efficient and are more effective at jobs than an uneducated worker.

It’s really very complicated but that is where the game’s difficulty comes from. It is a survival game, not a city-building game. You are fighting against the elements and you will lose villagers and whole villages, but doing so is a learning experience that you can take on board when you start a new game.

Banished isn’t the prettiest strategy game, and if you are looking for something like Sim City then you are in the wrong place, it’s a survival game through-and-through and it does what it sets out to do with a proficiency that other games often lack.

Shining Rock Software, all one person of it, has quietly and confidently crafted a survival strategy game that competes with the biggest games in the genre. As a fan of this type of game you would be missing out if you let it pass by.