How can being Homeless be a good thing?

[maiden4meldin]

Being Homeless in Banished has advantages in the Early Game, here is why.

1. People in Banished require at a minimum of One house built. Then Every Citizen will Use this house to get Warmed up.
2. A Homeless person will eat directly from a Barn.
3. Homeless people do not have more babies.

Those are the facts. Here is the explanation

1. With a single house built. You save and conserve your food, giving you a chance to get set up for food production faster, than if you built housing first. Also, as the houses will NOT share the food in their houses. Usually the last house built, does not get a full inventory, for both firewood, or food. So, in year One, if you built all the housing you need, Then you did not build the Food Production you need first. Or the School either. Year 2, You are behind on Tools, Food, Clothes, and Firewood. But the Priority has got to be Food Production buildings. And they won't have Maximum food production as now you have Uneducated labour joining the ranks of workers. Further putting a strain on already vanishing food supplies. Causing the starvation cycle. Once that cycle begins in early game, It is almost impossible to save it. Because a starving Banshee Refuses to Work. Food won't be harvested from fishing docks, gathering posts or farms and orchards, pastures or hunting cabins. The People will simply stand at the Barns and wait for food to arrive. period. Start Over.

2. Homeless citizens eat straight from the Barn. This leaves a lot of surplus supplies in the Barn, for the single house to restock. No risk of starving. Also gives your builders the opportunity to build the School first, then the Forestry Node, and the House before winter arrives. Or you can build the house before the Forestry Node, same deal. Then Year two when you get low on tools and clothing, you can easily build the woodcutter, blacksmith and tailor. And another house, as you are continuing to build up the Forestry node, by clearing all the iron and stone from the node, it begins to supply more foods. Again, building a surplus of food is helped along by having homeless people only taking the food they can eat at the time. Reducing the risk of Starvation as well.

3. By not having a population in housing, you are limiting their ability to produce more babies. Children Produce Nothing But Eat Plenty! Children do nothing but eat , use clothes, and restock the family house, constantly refilling it as food is brought into it.
You will continue to build housing, as your years drone on, By year six, you should not have any homeless people, and a surplus of about 3000 food, just with a Forestry Node alone.

The School, should we build first, or after the house and forestry node.

I always build my school as first building in any game I play, mods or Vanilla. The reason is simple. Uneducated workers will produce 30% less. In the early game, this can be a serious handicap. Even with a single worker being uneducated, that worker will travel through every job available in the first few years. Causing loss in production everywhere.
The Only Negative about building the school first, is waiting for the students to graduate. And I say, You will Always have this negative, regardless of when you build the school. Less workers in early game, when you are most desperate for them, does make for a slower start. But not by much, and the gains of Educated workers in my opinion outweigh the negative every time.

[pdoan8]

Those are reasons that I do not need boarding house and I do not recommend boarding house as starting resident. Boarding house is also nearly useless for accepting nomads. You want nomads to be homeless while you make adjustment to your food production (if needed). Homeless nomads will also force single widows/widowers together and free up some house. When you are sure with your food production, build new houses for the rest of the homeless.

Another advantage of homelessness is you can use it to recover from a bad food crisis.
- Drop the number of builder to zero.
- Demolish most of the house to force all the stored food back into barn. Only keep one or a two houses to provide heat.
- Make adjustment to your food production.
- Reclaiming the house as your food stock improve. Each house reclaim will use 200 - 500 food (and up to 25 firewood).

If you need to build something with builders during this time:
- Place the building.
- Wait for laborers to bring all building materials.
- Use priority tool to put the new build on high priority.
- Add one builders.
- Remove builder again when finished.

[maiden4meldin]

Originally posted by pdoan8:

Those are reasons that I do not need boarding house and I do not recommend boarding house as starting resident. Boarding house is also nearly useless for accepting nomads. You want nomads to be homeless while you make adjustment to your food production (if needed). Homeless nomads will also force single widows/widowers together and free up some house. When you are sure with your food production, build new houses for the rest of the homeless.

Another advantage of homelessness is you can use it to recover from a bad food crisis.
- Drop the number of builder to zero.
- Demolish most of the house to force all the stored food back into barn. Only keep one or a two houses to provide heat.
- Make adjustment to your food production.
- Reclaiming the house as your food stock improve. Each house reclaim will use 200 - 500 food (and up to 25 firewood).

If you need to build something with builders during this time:
- Place the building.
- Wait for laborers to bring all building materials.
- Use priority tool to put the new build on high priority.
- Add one builders.
- Remove builder again when finished.

Excellent additions to my post Pdoan!

I had not ever thought about demolishing houses in a food crisis before. I haven't had any kind of crisis' to need that mind you. When I am building my houses. I count each house as five hundred food/year. Before I get the town hall that is. And then I multiply times three. So, 1H=500x3=1500F H/house F/food. When I reach my surplus for these, I can easily build more housing and or take in Nomads at will without worry about a food crisis. Keep in mind those are for production values after the Town Hall is built. I keep between 3 and 4 times the food I need per year in storage. I build my food so my production is staying above my residents, and utilize my trading post to provide surplus and variety of food. But I love the solution for those who play a leaner food game than I do.

[Didz]

Hardly see that as an advantage. It's just an alternative starting strategy that exploits flaws in the programme code.

[pdoan8]

What flaw?

From version 1.0.2

If citizens are already walking to get food at a distance location and become starved, they’ll now interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn.

If citizens are working far from home and become hungry, they’ll eat food from their home as if they brought food with them. This will not interrupt the current task. If no food is available at home they will interrupt the walk and get food at the closest market or storage barn.

Because citizens can eat from home when far away, they can better deal with freezing, and visit a warm place when needed.

[Didz]

Exactly that!

In trying to resolve the walking death syndrome of the early release the developers created exploitable flaws in the programme code that negated the need for houses. As a result an alternative starting strategy is now possible that exploits this flaw in the code.

[pdoan8]

Why can't people bring food with them on a long trip?

Why can't people eat at the barn instead of bring food home then eat?

When you start hard mode, will people die of starvation before you build your first house?

I don't see how you keep seeing it as flaws in coding. Please explain.

[Didz]

That basically wasn't the way the game was originally coded.

The original idea was that the player would be challenged to provide enough housing to accommodate their people from the outset. So, you actually got warnings that if you didn't house all your people before the first winter some of them were likely to die of cold or starvation. That was part of the challenge of the game.

However, there was a coding issue that didn't prevent bannies wandered too far from home to get back in time to eat and so in the early game there was a constant complaint from players about 'wandering death syndrome' where bannies would simply die on the march.

They would even pick food up from a warehouse and then die of starvation before managing to get it home to eat it.

And so the developer added the new features that allowed bannie to eat directly from warehouses and warm themselves at anyone's house. Which reduced the frequency of wandering death syndrome but opened up the opportunity to just ignore the need for housing at all during the opening strategy.

In effect, that is as much a flaw in the coding as the original lack of an inhibitor to prevent bannies wandering too far from home. The only difference being that the flaw works to make the game easier to play and so players don't complain about it as much.

[pdoan8]

If the code were not changed:
- What happen to the people whose houses are destroyed in fire or tornado?

- What happen when laborers whose houses are on one side of the map get the order to harvest resource on the other side of the map?

- What happen to vendors and merchants who have to walk all over the map to gather goods?

- What would it be like to play a huge map mod?

In all of the games that come after Banished, do you know of any that have house design as you said? If you were the coder, how would code this?

[Didz]

Originally posted by pdoan8:

If the code were not changed:

- What happen to the people whose houses are destroyed in fire or tornado?
They became homeless, unless there was a boarding house with available space to take them in. So, it became important to rehouse them as quickly as possible.

- What happen when laborers whose houses are on one side of the map get the order to harvest resource on the other side of the map?
Well that was one of the conditions that caused 'wandering death syndrome', which was what was upsetting everyone. It was possible to minimise the risk simply by not ordering bannies to harvest resources right over the other side of the map.

And I still have the habit of building houses local to any area I plan to do serious construction or harvesting to reduce the travelling distance of the workers. But no matter how careful you were there was no way to guarantee that the code would not assign a worker to a task that simply had too far to travel to get there.

I think what everyone wanted was a change to the task scheduler that just checked whether the task being assigned to the worker was not suicidal. But instead we got this eating from warehouses and using communal housing solution.

- What happen to vendors and merchants who have to walk all over the map to gather goods?
I can't say I ever noticed that being problem. That might be because vendors and traders always collect goods from the closest source. So, for something like that to happen you would have had to somehow contrive to completely strip most of the map fro some specific resource they were looking for which would actually be hard to do.

The usual cause of 'WDS' was something like long distance construction projects or long distance resource gathering.

- What would it be like to play a huge map mod?
Well given that 'WDS' was largely triggered by players scheduling long distance tasks I assume that the risk of doing so would be heightened if there was more space available.

In all of the games that come after Banished, do you know of any that have house design as you said? If you were the coder, how would code this?
I've never experience 'WDS' in any of the other similar games I've played. Nor have I noticed coding that allows characters to eat out of warehouses or warm themselves at another characters hearth. But having said that I've never witnessed another game that has starvation and hypothermia as a risk. I don;t even remember that being a thing when playing Ostriv. which is set in Russia.

[pdoan8]

Originally posted by Didz:

- What happen to the people whose houses are destroyed in fire or tornado?
They became homeless, unless there was a boarding house with available space to take them in. So, it became important to rehouse them as quickly as possible.

How quickly is quick enough? You do realize that Bannies will eat about 25 times per season (roughly 100 food per year). Anyone who miss two or three eating cycle will be dead. How fast can you build house for everyone in hard start? If you finish all the houses by the end of the first Spring, most (if not all) of your people would be dead by then.

Originally posted by Didz:

- What happen when laborers whose houses are on one side of the map get the order to harvest resource on the other side of the map?
Well that was one of the conditions that caused 'wandering death syndrome', which was what was upsetting everyone. It was possible to minimise the risk simply by not ordering bannies to harvest resources right over the other side of the map.

And I still have the habit of building houses local to any area I plan to do serious construction or harvesting to reduce the travelling distance of the workers. But no matter how careful you were there was no way to guarantee that the code would not assign a worker to a task that simply had too far to travel to get there.

I think what everyone wanted was a change to the task scheduler that just checked whether the task being assigned to the worker was not suicidal. But instead we got this eating from warehouses and using communal housing solution.

When you have expanded to the whole (vanilla) large map, your laborers/builders are often not distributed evenly over the whole map. There is still a chance that your laborers/builders will have to walk a very long distance to do something. The game will attempt to switch job so that worker's resident will be closer to job site, but this is not always done completely with larger population. The whole job reassigning thing will occur again and again. Job switching is also limited to mostly laborers and builders.

To be honest, the WDS is a myth to me. I start playing Banished from version 1.0.4 (after the new eating/heating code) and I have never experienced it in over 1000 hours (not include offline). Most of the WDS I heard of are usually the result of user fault (order resource harvest with no path), or bugged map (which I have never had).

Anyone who start playing Banished after version 1.0.2 would not experience and should not experience WDS other than a bugged map. I would like to hear from anyone who played Banished since before version 1.0.2.

Originally posted by Didz:

- What happen to vendors and merchants who have to walk all over the map to gather goods?
I can't say I ever noticed that being problem. That might be because vendors and traders always collect goods from the closest source. So, for something like that to happen you would have had to somehow contrive to completely strip most of the map fro some specific resource they were looking for which would actually be hard to do.

The usual cause of 'WDS' was something like long distance construction projects or long distance resource gathering.

If you start playing Banished after version 1.0.2, you wouldn't notice anything.

Originally posted by Didz:

- What would it be like to play a huge map mod?
Well given that 'WDS' was largely triggered by players scheduling long distance tasks I assume that the risk of doing so would be heightened if there was more space available.

I should not bring up mod map since mod was introduced after version 1.0.2.

Originally posted by Didz:

In all of the games that come after Banished, do you know of any that have house design as you said? If you were the coder, how would code this?
I've never experience 'WDS' in any of the other similar games I've played. Nor have I noticed coding that allows characters to eat out of warehouses or warm themselves at another characters hearth. But having said that I've never witnessed another game that has starvation and hypothermia as a risk. I don;t even remember that being a thing when playing Ostriv. which is set in Russia.

In all of the games (after Banished) that I played, they either have a similar mechanics (LiF: Forest Village, Kingdoms and Castles, Patron), or use a different mechanics for housing need (Dawn of Man) where house is not "owned" by anyone.

Edit: to me, the change is for the better. Of course, it reduces difficulty, but it also allows more flexibility in game play.

[Didz]

How quickly is quick enough?
That's a bit like saying how long is a piece of string. It rather depends on how hungry they were before they became homeless. But basically it was never a good idea to have homeless bannies wandering about in the original game.

Anyone who start playing Banished after version 1.0.2 would not experience and should not experience WDS other than a bugged map.
No! It should be very rare since the 1.0.2 patch. But you still do see players occasionally complaining that there bannies have died of starvation despite there being ample food in their warehouses. So, it must still be possible to make it happen. Presumably, WDS can still occur if you are too far away from home or a warehouse.

To me, the change is for the better. Of course, it reduces difficulty, but it also allows more flexibility in game play. the change is for the better. Of course, it reduces difficulty, but it also allows more flexibility in game play.
It doesn't really bother me as I continue to play the way i always have so I don;t exploit the 1.0.2 patch deliberately at all.

If I'd had a choice I would have preferred a change that prevented 'bannies' wandering too far from home to get back in time to eat or get warm. But I guess the developers were worried that players would complain that they coiuldn't do long range gathering and construction because the 'bannies' wouldn't travel that far.

The 1.0.2 patch obviously makes the game easier to play and it undermines the whole point of housing as a key feature.

[maiden4meldin]

Interesting discourse here. Frankly, the version people are playing is 1.07 and no uupdates forthcoming. Regardless of previous versions. This is the version we have now. And call it an exploit or don't. The reality is. This is how the mechanics work now.

The homeless game start is a reality, and an advantage, and is not considered cheating. I didn't discover the homeless start through forums. i developed it on my own. And I have seen other post about it as well. So, take advantage or don't makes no difference to me. But these are the advantages and disadvantages of a homeless start.

[Didz]

Its how the code works but as with all bad code it is the players decision whether to exploit the flaws in it or not.

Such flaws exist in almost all computer games. I can still remember the 'target Fixation' flaw in Command and Conquer where the code used to become fixated on a specific unit and try to pursue it to destruction before choosing a new target. You could see what the developers were trying to achieve in that concentrating fire on one target was a more effective tactic than randomly firing at several targets in a group. But players soon learned how to kite the AI with a single unit whilst blasting them to oblivion with the rest of the group.

There are similar exp[loits with Totalwar games which i use regularly to enhance my chances of success. This homeless exploit is just another of many that are available to players in various games.

[maiden4meldin]

Originally posted by Didz:

Its how the code works but as with all bad code it is the players decision whether to exploit the flaws in it or not.

Such flaws exist in almost all computer games. I can still remember the 'target Fixation' flaw in Command and Conquer where the code used to become fixated on a specific unit and try to pursue it to destruction before choosing a new target. You could see what the developers were trying to achieve in that concentrating fire on one target was a more effective tactic than randomly firing at several targets in a group. But players soon learned how to kite the AI with a single unit whilst blasting them to oblivion with the rest of the group.

There are similar exp[loits with Totalwar games which i use regularly to enhance my chances of success. This homeless exploit is just another of many that are available to players in various games. [/quote]

My son found an exploit in Lords of the Realm 2. Standing armies can only have 1500 soldiers in them. And castles can have a limited amount depending on the castle. When he was 8 or 9 years old, he would play against his dad. And one time, my son decided to stock up on his armies, and began making tons of archers pikes and macemen. He would stash these little armies in out of the way spaces. Once he had more than 3000 usually around 5000 soldiers, he would disband them all in the one county, and then rebuild his army from that county. Since the county only counts the percentage of soldiers available he could double or even triple the amount his army size could be. He then walked all over his dad, and crowed about it for weeks later roflol. But, that is an outright exploit, dreamed up from the mind of a child lol.