Kingdoms of Amalur is the gaming equivalent of popcorn. It's easy as hell to consume a whole bucketful without even realizing it, but it's totally vacuous, nutritionally. That's not a complaint, by the way. I sunk seven hours into this game yesterday and I barely even noticed. I only quit because I was running out of time to do paperwork.
So what was I doing that was so compelling? Absolutely nothing of consequence. I mean, on the fiction layer, I was helping an isolated village that was under siege by giant spiders and slaying a massive, magically mutated troll that was the fated doom of an ancient, talking tree, but really it's all variations on "go to place, kill monsters, get loot and xp." Kingdoms of Amalur doesn't have any memorable characters or quotable dialogue to capture the imagination, but as a pure, dumb brawler of a game, it's the tops.
It's perhaps a little silly that in a game as story-driven as this, I could spend so much time doing so little of consequence, but I take an existential approach to these sorts of things. The whole purpose of a video game plot is to provide you with a series of excuses to do video game activities, and so long as those excuses are consistent and uncontroversial enough to not be a distraction, then even a dull story can be good enough (though I will say that a good story almost always makes for a better game, so it's not an entirely disposable thing).
I'm feeling pretty good going into the back half of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I wouldn't be surprised if I reached 20 hours by this time tomorrow.
Monday, November 14, 2016
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - 2/20 hours
I am aggressively apathetic to Kingdoms of Amalur's main story. I have a page full of notes about it, and I just can't bring myself to care. Which is weird, because I love everything else about the game.
Once you get out of the tutorial, the opening area is this grand forest with trees that stretch to the sky and wrap around the ruins of some monumental architecture and everywhere you look there's colorful flowers and foliage. The environment feels ancient and arcane and it begs you to explore.
The combat is similarly amazing. It's very kinetic and fluid. You'll find yourself dodging around the battlefield, executing combo attacks and hurling magic like nobody's business. It's an action-rpg that puts the emphasis on action.
And character advancement is pretty great as well. There are three main paths - might, finesse, and magic - and in each path are several different abilities that you can distribute points into and once you reach certain point thresholds in a given category, you can unlock "destinies" which are a little like classes which give you powerful and broad bonuses like increased mana regeneration or greater critical hit damage. Plus, there's a parallel system of non-combat skills that can dramatically change how you interact with the world. Chasing the level-up bonuses is very satisfying.
I can't think of another game with such a dramatic disconnect between the gameplay (yes! I could do this for 100 hours) and the story (oh god, no, where is the skip button), and I wonder why this is. It's not as if the story is bad. It's just . . . overstuffed. It's like they had a list of interesting fantasy conceits and then rather than limit themselves to a few to flesh out into their most compelling form, they just said "fuck it, let's use them all."
It's like, there's this division between fae creatures and mortal races and you could build a great setting around exploring the cultural clash . . . except that some of the fae have started worshiping this dark god and have declared war on mortals, which, okay, could be a logical extension of the initial premise and would give you plenty of excuse for action-rpg combat . . . except the dark fae literally cannot die and thus the war is unwinnable for the mortals, which is fine, that gives the game a central mystery, so your path to victory is more complicated than just hack-and-slashing your way to the main guy . . . except the gnomes have invented an incredible magi-tech device, the Well of Souls, that can potentially bring back the dead and even the odds and that is something with such dramatic philosophical and storytelling implications that it surely must be the keystone of the plot which we must explore and defend over the course of the story . . . except that it gets blown up during the game's tutorial and the project's one and only success (the player character) must flee for their life, which is a strong premise for an entirely damned different game . . . except that you then subsequently find out that your character is uniquely outside the bonds of fate and has the potential to manipulate destiny to an almost godlike degree . . . and what the fuck are you doing, Kingdoms of Amalur, it's only one hour into the game?!
It's an approach that's mirrored in the game's treatment of NPCs. You wake up with no memory on top of a pile of corpses in grand RPG tradition. After wandering about for a bit, you meet up with one of the morgue gnomes from the opening cutscene and he's obviously a tutorial guide, a temporary companion who explains how things work and then sends you on your way. So far, so good, but this gnome, Encel, tells you that your first objective should be to find Professor Hugues, the scientist responsible for your resurrection. In any decently designed game, Hugues would be your mentor and quest-giver for the first act of the game, the guy who slowly introduced you to the lore of the setting while acting as a familiar face in your first hub area. But all he does is give you an info-dump and then sacrifice himself to save your life (never mind that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense for the inventor of resurrection technology to die instead of the first successful subject of the technology, at least if we're talking about who should nobly sacrifice themselves for whom). Okay, so he's a red herring, a sacrificial lamb so that we know the resurrection technology is irreplicable. Surely, in any halfway-decently designed game, the next major character, Agarth, the scruffy, drunken fateweaver who tells you about your next unique lack of destiny, would be the persistent mentor, but he immediately tells you about a third guy you need to get lore from, and it is at this point that I completely lose interest. If I recall, Agarth stays with you for a couple more quests, but it doesn't matter because he eventually hands you off to a dull non-entity and then hangs around a random town as a vendor for the rest of the game.
I think it's because I get jerked around so many times so early in the game that once I check out and start chasing random side quests, I never check back in. I've actually finished the main story, but I couldn't tell you anything about it. There's just not a strong enough through-line to attach a memory to. There aren't any really great characters along the way, and the ones with a glimmer of potential don't stick around long enough to matter.
Oh well, killing hordes of monsters in meaningless side-dungeons is super-fun, an in the end, isn't that why I'm playing the game?
Once you get out of the tutorial, the opening area is this grand forest with trees that stretch to the sky and wrap around the ruins of some monumental architecture and everywhere you look there's colorful flowers and foliage. The environment feels ancient and arcane and it begs you to explore.
The combat is similarly amazing. It's very kinetic and fluid. You'll find yourself dodging around the battlefield, executing combo attacks and hurling magic like nobody's business. It's an action-rpg that puts the emphasis on action.
And character advancement is pretty great as well. There are three main paths - might, finesse, and magic - and in each path are several different abilities that you can distribute points into and once you reach certain point thresholds in a given category, you can unlock "destinies" which are a little like classes which give you powerful and broad bonuses like increased mana regeneration or greater critical hit damage. Plus, there's a parallel system of non-combat skills that can dramatically change how you interact with the world. Chasing the level-up bonuses is very satisfying.
I can't think of another game with such a dramatic disconnect between the gameplay (yes! I could do this for 100 hours) and the story (oh god, no, where is the skip button), and I wonder why this is. It's not as if the story is bad. It's just . . . overstuffed. It's like they had a list of interesting fantasy conceits and then rather than limit themselves to a few to flesh out into their most compelling form, they just said "fuck it, let's use them all."
It's like, there's this division between fae creatures and mortal races and you could build a great setting around exploring the cultural clash . . . except that some of the fae have started worshiping this dark god and have declared war on mortals, which, okay, could be a logical extension of the initial premise and would give you plenty of excuse for action-rpg combat . . . except the dark fae literally cannot die and thus the war is unwinnable for the mortals, which is fine, that gives the game a central mystery, so your path to victory is more complicated than just hack-and-slashing your way to the main guy . . . except the gnomes have invented an incredible magi-tech device, the Well of Souls, that can potentially bring back the dead and even the odds and that is something with such dramatic philosophical and storytelling implications that it surely must be the keystone of the plot which we must explore and defend over the course of the story . . . except that it gets blown up during the game's tutorial and the project's one and only success (the player character) must flee for their life, which is a strong premise for an entirely damned different game . . . except that you then subsequently find out that your character is uniquely outside the bonds of fate and has the potential to manipulate destiny to an almost godlike degree . . . and what the fuck are you doing, Kingdoms of Amalur, it's only one hour into the game?!
It's an approach that's mirrored in the game's treatment of NPCs. You wake up with no memory on top of a pile of corpses in grand RPG tradition. After wandering about for a bit, you meet up with one of the morgue gnomes from the opening cutscene and he's obviously a tutorial guide, a temporary companion who explains how things work and then sends you on your way. So far, so good, but this gnome, Encel, tells you that your first objective should be to find Professor Hugues, the scientist responsible for your resurrection. In any decently designed game, Hugues would be your mentor and quest-giver for the first act of the game, the guy who slowly introduced you to the lore of the setting while acting as a familiar face in your first hub area. But all he does is give you an info-dump and then sacrifice himself to save your life (never mind that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense for the inventor of resurrection technology to die instead of the first successful subject of the technology, at least if we're talking about who should nobly sacrifice themselves for whom). Okay, so he's a red herring, a sacrificial lamb so that we know the resurrection technology is irreplicable. Surely, in any halfway-decently designed game, the next major character, Agarth, the scruffy, drunken fateweaver who tells you about your next unique lack of destiny, would be the persistent mentor, but he immediately tells you about a third guy you need to get lore from, and it is at this point that I completely lose interest. If I recall, Agarth stays with you for a couple more quests, but it doesn't matter because he eventually hands you off to a dull non-entity and then hangs around a random town as a vendor for the rest of the game.
I think it's because I get jerked around so many times so early in the game that once I check out and start chasing random side quests, I never check back in. I've actually finished the main story, but I couldn't tell you anything about it. There's just not a strong enough through-line to attach a memory to. There aren't any really great characters along the way, and the ones with a glimmer of potential don't stick around long enough to matter.
Oh well, killing hordes of monsters in meaningless side-dungeons is super-fun, an in the end, isn't that why I'm playing the game?
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
The minds of New York Times bestselling author R.A. Salvatore, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion lead designer Ken Rolston have combined to create Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a new role-playing game set in a world worth saving. Build the character you've always wanted and continuously evolve it to your style of play with the revolutionary Destiny system. Choose your path and battle through a master-crafted universe featuring some of the most intense, responsive, and customizable RPG combat ever.
Previous Playtime
5 minutes
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
There was a period, near when I started the blog, when I thought I could buy PC versions of all my Xbox 360 games and it would be like carrying my Xbox 360 with me wherever I went. And while the last two years have been a little bit like that, the reality hasn't been nearly as satisfying as the fantasy.
The reason Kingdoms of Amalur, specifically, made it through before I came to my senses is that the discounted price for the complete edition was less than the price of the individual DLCs on Xbox. That's just the dark temptation of Steam, I guess.
Expectations and Prior Experience
This is another one of those games I've played extensively on console, so it should hold no surprises for me. Then again, despite getting to the end, I couldn't tell you a thing about the game's plot. There's like some fairies who come back to life and you're the only one who can kill them permanently because you were brought back from the dead and have mysterious fate-shaping powers. However, all that is established in the first half-hour or so and the game lasts for more than 50. You eventually have to go to a place and kill a guy, but, you know, that's always the case.
Big plot-shaped hole in my memory aside, I remember this as being a fun and fast-paced action game with a lot of loot and deep character customization. That's all I really want - to bounce around the screen slaying monsters and becoming more powerful. And luckily, I already know that Kingdoms of Amalur can deliver.
The minds of New York Times bestselling author R.A. Salvatore, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion lead designer Ken Rolston have combined to create Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a new role-playing game set in a world worth saving. Build the character you've always wanted and continuously evolve it to your style of play with the revolutionary Destiny system. Choose your path and battle through a master-crafted universe featuring some of the most intense, responsive, and customizable RPG combat ever.
Previous Playtime
5 minutes
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
There was a period, near when I started the blog, when I thought I could buy PC versions of all my Xbox 360 games and it would be like carrying my Xbox 360 with me wherever I went. And while the last two years have been a little bit like that, the reality hasn't been nearly as satisfying as the fantasy.
The reason Kingdoms of Amalur, specifically, made it through before I came to my senses is that the discounted price for the complete edition was less than the price of the individual DLCs on Xbox. That's just the dark temptation of Steam, I guess.
Expectations and Prior Experience
This is another one of those games I've played extensively on console, so it should hold no surprises for me. Then again, despite getting to the end, I couldn't tell you a thing about the game's plot. There's like some fairies who come back to life and you're the only one who can kill them permanently because you were brought back from the dead and have mysterious fate-shaping powers. However, all that is established in the first half-hour or so and the game lasts for more than 50. You eventually have to go to a place and kill a guy, but, you know, that's always the case.
Big plot-shaped hole in my memory aside, I remember this as being a fun and fast-paced action game with a lot of loot and deep character customization. That's all I really want - to bounce around the screen slaying monsters and becoming more powerful. And luckily, I already know that Kingdoms of Amalur can deliver.
Friday, November 11, 2016
Banished - 20/20 hours
In my last ten hours with Banished, I managed to get by with only one untimely death. My secret? I played the rest of the game on 1x speed. I do not recommend it.
I can't even say why I did it. I just got an idea in my head. And then I tried it for awhile. And then I was like, "this experiment is a miserable slog, but I'm halfway through, so maybe I should just tough it out." The longer it went, the more it tested my patience, but the more it became a sunk cost. But since apparently "stubbornly clinging to sunk costs" is my thing now, I stuck with it all night.
There are certain advantages to playing at 1x speed. You have a lot of down time between making decisions. Once the basics of my town were set up, I could get away with glancing at the village once every few minutes. In the meantime, I could watch a movie or read a book. I think, if you're okay with playing the same game for weeks at a time, it might be worth it to keep Banished running in the background while you're doing other things. It really emphasizes the "self-contained digital garden" aspect of these sorts of games. I definitely got a feeling of peace and joy from looking at my patchwork of fields and neatly arranged cottages, with their tiny people moving about between them.
Another advantage to 1x speed is that it gave me plenty of time to plan. I wasn't reacting to things nearly as much as in my other villages. Normally, when a real-time game gives me the option to speed up time (and this is true of Banished, Crusader Kings II, Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and probably a half-dozen more games that slip my mind at the moment) I just crank it to the highest possible speed and then pause it whenever events get ahead of me. Pausing allows me to peruse various informational menus to my heart's content, and running at maximum speed insures I'm always either making a decision or researching a decision.
I used to consider this the ideal way to play a game. After all, why should I wait around for things to happen? Is not reacting to a simulated scenario the very essence of what makes a video game? Perhaps, and perhaps not, but I did notice playing Banished at 1x speed that my decisions appeared to be better than playing it mostly at 10x speed. I was able to see the trends that preceded a collapse, and head them off before they became too severe. I was able to shuffle my construction priorities to better serve my community's needs (technically, I could still do this before, but since the wait to get anything built wasn't very long, it had always been easier to just let the construction finish).
My greater thought and consideration was starting to show results. As of quitting time, my slow village had only one death - of a mysterious sickness - compared to my fast villages' dozens from starvation and exposure (though, ironically, none from illness). Now, it could be that I only got to year 8 and 35 adult residents with slow-town, as compared to year 41 and 110 adult residents with fast-town. It could also be that, since slow-town was my most recent village, it benefited from all the accumulated knowledge that I'd gained in the previous 10 hours. Even so, not rushing around like an impatient idiot probably helped at least a little.
I wonder what the "correct" way to play Banished is. The slowest speed being labelled "1x" seems to imply that it's somehow the default, but then the length of time where nothing at all happens on that speed suggests the others were meant to be used quite frequently. Playing with 10x on all the time is almost certainly "wrong," though.
Which isn't to say I'm going to stop doing the equivalent in future real-time games . . . so long as they don't hit me with a deeply personal and gruesome tragedy as punishment.
My takeaway from Banished is that it's a fun game on several levels, and the basic structure of resource and time management is among my favorites, but it's bare-bones presentation and unflinching look at the grimness of medieval life has made me realize something - I want games to coddle me, at least a little. I can pretend that the neglected citizens of SimCity are just moving away, or that the residents of unproductive houses in Anno 2070 are just grumpy. Nowhere do I have to confront the terrible consequences of my political ineptitude. But in Banished you can't look away. My cities were always so close to the edge of survival that even a single loss was keenly felt (when it didn't set off a chain reaction that wiped out the whole town, that is). That's too much responsibility. I wouldn't say that I play games to escape, exactly, but I always get a little worked up when they get too intense.
Banished is a fine game, but I definitely prefer its low-pressure relatives.
I can't even say why I did it. I just got an idea in my head. And then I tried it for awhile. And then I was like, "this experiment is a miserable slog, but I'm halfway through, so maybe I should just tough it out." The longer it went, the more it tested my patience, but the more it became a sunk cost. But since apparently "stubbornly clinging to sunk costs" is my thing now, I stuck with it all night.
There are certain advantages to playing at 1x speed. You have a lot of down time between making decisions. Once the basics of my town were set up, I could get away with glancing at the village once every few minutes. In the meantime, I could watch a movie or read a book. I think, if you're okay with playing the same game for weeks at a time, it might be worth it to keep Banished running in the background while you're doing other things. It really emphasizes the "self-contained digital garden" aspect of these sorts of games. I definitely got a feeling of peace and joy from looking at my patchwork of fields and neatly arranged cottages, with their tiny people moving about between them.
Another advantage to 1x speed is that it gave me plenty of time to plan. I wasn't reacting to things nearly as much as in my other villages. Normally, when a real-time game gives me the option to speed up time (and this is true of Banished, Crusader Kings II, Stellaris, Cities: Skylines, and probably a half-dozen more games that slip my mind at the moment) I just crank it to the highest possible speed and then pause it whenever events get ahead of me. Pausing allows me to peruse various informational menus to my heart's content, and running at maximum speed insures I'm always either making a decision or researching a decision.
I used to consider this the ideal way to play a game. After all, why should I wait around for things to happen? Is not reacting to a simulated scenario the very essence of what makes a video game? Perhaps, and perhaps not, but I did notice playing Banished at 1x speed that my decisions appeared to be better than playing it mostly at 10x speed. I was able to see the trends that preceded a collapse, and head them off before they became too severe. I was able to shuffle my construction priorities to better serve my community's needs (technically, I could still do this before, but since the wait to get anything built wasn't very long, it had always been easier to just let the construction finish).
My greater thought and consideration was starting to show results. As of quitting time, my slow village had only one death - of a mysterious sickness - compared to my fast villages' dozens from starvation and exposure (though, ironically, none from illness). Now, it could be that I only got to year 8 and 35 adult residents with slow-town, as compared to year 41 and 110 adult residents with fast-town. It could also be that, since slow-town was my most recent village, it benefited from all the accumulated knowledge that I'd gained in the previous 10 hours. Even so, not rushing around like an impatient idiot probably helped at least a little.
I wonder what the "correct" way to play Banished is. The slowest speed being labelled "1x" seems to imply that it's somehow the default, but then the length of time where nothing at all happens on that speed suggests the others were meant to be used quite frequently. Playing with 10x on all the time is almost certainly "wrong," though.
Which isn't to say I'm going to stop doing the equivalent in future real-time games . . . so long as they don't hit me with a deeply personal and gruesome tragedy as punishment.
My takeaway from Banished is that it's a fun game on several levels, and the basic structure of resource and time management is among my favorites, but it's bare-bones presentation and unflinching look at the grimness of medieval life has made me realize something - I want games to coddle me, at least a little. I can pretend that the neglected citizens of SimCity are just moving away, or that the residents of unproductive houses in Anno 2070 are just grumpy. Nowhere do I have to confront the terrible consequences of my political ineptitude. But in Banished you can't look away. My cities were always so close to the edge of survival that even a single loss was keenly felt (when it didn't set off a chain reaction that wiped out the whole town, that is). That's too much responsibility. I wouldn't say that I play games to escape, exactly, but I always get a little worked up when they get too intense.
Banished is a fine game, but I definitely prefer its low-pressure relatives.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Banished - 10/20 hours
It's been a long time since a game has so thoroughly tested my emotional fortitude. My little guys live in such squalor. The blacksmiths can't keep up with maintaining their tools. The woodcutters can't chop enough fuel to keep the houses warm. The farmers manage to keep one step ahead of starvation, but one bad year will see 3 or 4 people head into the graveyard. And it's all my fault.
I really regret my arrogance when I first started the game. Balancing the needs of a small town is relatively easy, probably because a single craftsman can supply an entire town and a single gatherer or hunter can supply all the necessary dietary diversity. Yet as the population grows, its need for resources grows rapidly and each new specialist needs at least one new farmer. The result is chronic shortages.
I'm certain this can be overcome with skill, but the necessary failure that comes with learning is taking a serious toll on me. I feel guilty when my simulated people die. I know, it doesn't make any sense, because they're just data. It's just, the game doesn't just blink off a little light. It tells me that the animated dot is a person who froze or starved to death. Those are horrible ways to die. To the degree that I buy into the game's premise, to the degree that I believe these farms and blacksmiths and tailors matter, then I have to believe that I am responsible for this unimaginable suffering.
I mean, let's not get carried away. I'm not curled up on the couch weeping my eyes out in grief. I do still have a sense of proportion. It just bums me out, you know. I want my simulated people to have simulated prosperity and when I fail, I feel simulated sorrow. It's not as potent as the real thing, granted, but it's not an ideal way to spend an evening.
I really regret my arrogance when I first started the game. Balancing the needs of a small town is relatively easy, probably because a single craftsman can supply an entire town and a single gatherer or hunter can supply all the necessary dietary diversity. Yet as the population grows, its need for resources grows rapidly and each new specialist needs at least one new farmer. The result is chronic shortages.
I'm certain this can be overcome with skill, but the necessary failure that comes with learning is taking a serious toll on me. I feel guilty when my simulated people die. I know, it doesn't make any sense, because they're just data. It's just, the game doesn't just blink off a little light. It tells me that the animated dot is a person who froze or starved to death. Those are horrible ways to die. To the degree that I buy into the game's premise, to the degree that I believe these farms and blacksmiths and tailors matter, then I have to believe that I am responsible for this unimaginable suffering.
I mean, let's not get carried away. I'm not curled up on the couch weeping my eyes out in grief. I do still have a sense of proportion. It just bums me out, you know. I want my simulated people to have simulated prosperity and when I fail, I feel simulated sorrow. It's not as potent as the real thing, granted, but it's not an ideal way to spend an evening.
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
Banished - 5/20 hours
Thanks to the election, I've been too stressed out (and lately) depressed to do much games blogging, but I decided to push past that and start up Banished anyway. And at first, things went well. My town of about 35 people reached an equilibrium, harvesting resources as quickly as they were used and being able to support a church and a graveyard, with the villagers having a diverse diet and good health. I was feeling good.
Then the tornado hit.
It completely wiped out my village center and killed half my citizens. And I couldn't rebuild their houses fast enough while harvesting enough food. That winter most of the rest of them died of starvation and exposure. Eventually, there were only three men left, doomed by their gender to be the last generation, and who slowly died off one by one.
I feel like this might be a metaphor for something.
Since then, I haven't been able to duplicate my initial success. It always seems easy enough at first, but on one attempt, I completely ran out of stone. In another, my population grew faster than my ability to feed them. I guess I just got lucky my first time through (at least until everyone died) and I didn't understand the mechanics as well as I thought.
That's becoming a distressingly familiar feeling lately. I've got nothing to do but keep trying. It's the only way to learn.
Then the tornado hit.
It completely wiped out my village center and killed half my citizens. And I couldn't rebuild their houses fast enough while harvesting enough food. That winter most of the rest of them died of starvation and exposure. Eventually, there were only three men left, doomed by their gender to be the last generation, and who slowly died off one by one.
I feel like this might be a metaphor for something.
Since then, I haven't been able to duplicate my initial success. It always seems easy enough at first, but on one attempt, I completely ran out of stone. In another, my population grew faster than my ability to feed them. I guess I just got lucky my first time through (at least until everyone died) and I didn't understand the mechanics as well as I thought.
That's becoming a distressingly familiar feeling lately. I've got nothing to do but keep trying. It's the only way to learn.
Monday, November 7, 2016
Banished - 2/20 hours
I know now why virtually every other small-scale city-building game tries to leaven itself with humor. I've never felt such a keen sense of responsibility for my video game pawns. There's just something about seeing them scurrying around, unadorned by commentary, snark, or even any sort of distinctive UI elements, that tricks my brain into granting the villagers a sort of independent life. The thought of them starving or freezing to death troubles me greatly.
Banished is essentially a resource-gathering game, but there aren't many ways to combine resources and your villagers will just use many of them raw. My main constraint to growth so far has been a lack of labor, leaving many of my buildings understaffed, but since none of your buildings require maintenance or upkeep, there's not been any downside to expanding my village purely on a speculative basis. There's a possibility that my population will outgrow my food, but growth so far has been pretty slow, so I'm not worried about it.
Which is to say, things have been pretty simple thus far and I'm not sure how more complicated it's going to get. Maybe my villagers will get more complex needs as they pass certain population thresholds, but the tutorial didn't explain anything about traffic or pollution or any of the other mechanics a typical city-builder uses to punish over-rapid growth.
It's tempting fate, I know, but I think I have this game more or less figured out.
Banished is essentially a resource-gathering game, but there aren't many ways to combine resources and your villagers will just use many of them raw. My main constraint to growth so far has been a lack of labor, leaving many of my buildings understaffed, but since none of your buildings require maintenance or upkeep, there's not been any downside to expanding my village purely on a speculative basis. There's a possibility that my population will outgrow my food, but growth so far has been pretty slow, so I'm not worried about it.
Which is to say, things have been pretty simple thus far and I'm not sure how more complicated it's going to get. Maybe my villagers will get more complex needs as they pass certain population thresholds, but the tutorial didn't explain anything about traffic or pollution or any of the other mechanics a typical city-builder uses to punish over-rapid growth.
It's tempting fate, I know, but I think I have this game more or less figured out.
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