Do you have the stone to spare? A button called a pathfinding tool is helpful for showing you that the game really needed diagonal roads. You can get some marginally helpful data once you build an expensive building called a town hall. “Why are you playing?”, one of the most fundamental questions for any game to answer, is yet another bit of information missing from Banished. Alternatively, you can probably find some sort of wiki to get you more quickly to the “watching the years creep by” level. Now you’re watching the years creep by without any reason to watch the years creep by. You may, however, stumble across the answers, at which point your town is thriving. Not knowing the answers is what makes Banished challenging. If you can’t sustain a town, it’s because the game hasn’t given you information. What will initially be mistaken for difficulty is merely obfuscation. Do you grow apples or walnuts in your orchard? What good does it do to buy extra seeds when you can already provide enough food with the crops you’ve got? How many people should work at the trading post? What good are all those mushrooms in your storage barn and how are they different from the onions? Should you make your ale out of berries or potatoes? How many herbalists does a town of fifty need? What do you need to do to make your people happy? Why are they unhappy? Why are they unhealthy?

Instead, you make choices that might as well be coin flips. The biggest obstacle keeping Banished from being a competent city builder is the lack of information to help you make choices. 097 betas that might come together as a modest little game in about six months to a year. It’s a bare bones proof-of-concept without any larger gameplay framework, like one of those version. It’s Tropico stripped of any flavor, or Anno stripped of its elaborate economic interdependences, or Children of the Nile minus any of Tilted Mill’s insight into the genre, or Settlers without the hearty Germanic personality, or Stronghold without the castle. It doesn’t do anything that about a half dozen other city builders haven’t already done better. Banished is a city builder for people who haven’t played city builders and therefore don’t know what they’re missing.

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