My first day with Banished, and I'm enjoying it (with some niggles) so far, but I am in season 9, have only seen the river trader 3 times, and each time he has only had one item for sale, and no livestock -- I have 3 paddocks with nothing to put in them. Is this normal? Is it a crap shoot? Surely a new colony would have taken livestock with them?

Cool. Thanks, Stuff. Those links will come in handy. As it happens, I have just entered late winter season 10, the river trader turned up with sheep to offer -- you're not wrong; they are *very* expensive. I got two and ordered chickens and cattle.

Now to face my elderly population dying out... :D

You're welcome =)

Seems I needed animals and seeds early on, with both being expensive, I found hide coats to be a good trade item. After I have enough resources to support more than one tailor I have one making nothing but hide coats for trading. Eventually I start trading wool coats but only if my folks are well clothed.

Also I have had a trade (mostly involving food stock) throw my villages into starvation mode. What ever you have in stock at the trading post will be replenished from the barns immediately after a trade. If you don't have reserves it can be fatal.

Concerning barns, keep a good watch on their current capacity. I once had all my farmers start idling with crops in the field rotting with winter closing in. Nothing I could do seemed to get them going. I finally realized my barns were at full capacity and . . when the barns are full .. they won't harvest as they only take food to barns.

Now if I have several crop fields I will have two or three barns adjacent to the fields. If the hit 70% full I build another. Having plenty of barns also makes harvest time go faster since they don't have to carry the food as far. Having the farmers homes adjacent to the fields also helps as they spend less time coming and going from home.

Enjoy, lots of fun in this game . . can be brutal though till you get the hang of it =)

I haven't had any starvation (or overflowing barns) yet, but I have a market next to the fishing port and trading port, and that, with vendors, keeps things flowing nicely. I haven't worked out how to keep the population growing yet, though. Most of them are dying off from old age. I think it has to do with managing to keep couples in the same house, and I'm also thinking that has something to do with *not* reassigning professions, so no more reallocating farmers to other tasks in the winter and so on. At least that's my theory. :)

It can be a challenge to grow the population in the vanilla Banished. The problem, IMHO, is the aging is much faster than it should be . . best guess is maybe 4 - 5 yrs of aging for every year that passes. That causes the population to age quickly but also allows students to graduate much sooner giving you a skilled work force much sooner.

If you don't build new houses often the younger folks will not marry and move out on their own. So I ended up building constantly trying to keep up with the fast aging. If you click on your houses you might find only one old person living there which locks that house down to one person. One trick I learned was to click the update to stone button for the house which causes the older person to move in with someone. I then hit the reclaim button to stop the update and find myself with an empty house that younger folks could move into and start a family. Works most of the time.

I eventually got tired of the exaggerated aging and started using the One year is one year mod which slows the aging down to a realistic rate. The only downside, besides the ages being misrepresented on some dialogs, was it takes much longer for students to graduate. Once I reach a point where I have a couple of schools with max students it seems to work well. Once I have several max student schools I don't notice the longer time it takes to get educated workers. It can be frustrating to use the mod early in a game as your students are your new workers. You might give the mod a try if you want a more realistic aging.

One year = one year mod

I have not noticed that reassigning workers affects growth. I do that regularly especially in the first ten to fifteen years. I did notice that rotating crops does not seem to make any difference in output or harvest. Eventually, with a market and town hall, you will get nomads. A few at first than 80 to 100 at a time. At that point I stop reassigning my workers. Nomads bring their own problems, disease, housing shortages and overwhelming of the food supplies.

At some point I usually build two boarding houses to accommodate their arrival but once their numbers are 100 or more I usually deny entry as it can cause chaos with that many new mouths to feed. =)

Wow, I had no idea that outsiders came flooding in. That's something to look forward to... or not.

I looked at that 'one year = one year' mod among a select few others, funnily enough, and I actually have it installed, but it won't trigger until I start a new game as I understand it. That's ok for now. Thanks for the suggestion.

They do indeed and it is great the first few times . . 15, 23 etc etc. Then you will get 80 or 100, really great because you can stop reassigning your farmers etc. But there is a housing and food burden that comes with that many nomads so weigh it carefully. I did not have many problems till I started letting 100 + in for the second or third time. There is a pop-up that will notify you of their arrival and a tab in the town hall dialog that lets you accept / deny entry. You will see a long line of folks walking out of town if you deny entry. Disease can also follow their arrival so hospitals are nice to have in place.

Mods are touchy with Banished. I found that I sometimes had to enable them, open and save a game, close the game and check to see if a new mod was enabled. Had to do that process a couple of time on occasion before the mod was working and recognized. If a mod is incompatible it will turn red on the mod dialog. After playing a dozen or so games I now play for the fun of it and use several mods to reduce the brutality. Like the game a lot and find it enjoyable to play when I only have 20 - 30 minutes to spare. Of course that can quickly turn into hours. =)

I just had my first such occurrence today -- not from nomads -- in the shape of a pestilence outbreak among the sheep. It wiped out my entire herd, they were an important food and clothing source, and I have never seen another animal trader. Grrr! Is there a way to treat animal diseases? Haha! Tell me about it. I had the afternoon off and thought I would get an hour in at lunch time; it's now dinner time and I'm still playing. :D

I move them to a vacant pasture if I have one. Usually I will split my pastures as soon as they reach maximum. That insures that I have more than one herd. As you well know they are expensive to replace from the trader.

There is a discussion here the seems to cover it.

Just one more thing and I will quit playing =)


Edit: Don't let it get you down too much. I started several games when I first started playing . . . each ending in disaster of some sort. But . . I learned from each and applied the lessons to the next game. Big day when you hit 1000 people or 50 years. =D

Starvation is usually my downfall, current game at 70 yrs and apparently did not handle my food supply efficiently so I find my self trying to decide whether or not to try and recover or just start a new game.

Time to build spare pastures. :)