My personal wishlist

Good comments, Pleaky. I agree with much of it but have a different opinion in some:

2 workers in smokehouse and brickyard, good. (I actually thought the brickyard had more workers, didn’t it in an earlier version?)

More variation of izbas is also good. For some reason (maybe because there’s only one) I only use them out in the woods or in a pasture area. Usually never in villages.

I don’t like that you will take away the reports at the Thingstead, Tom. I need statistics right at the beginning. It’s necessary in the more difficult starting options. I also think that it should be possible to build a large settlement and stay in “old times” and have all the necessary options to manage it. Personally, I don’t need any other incitement to build the red townhall when I advance into “modern times” than its beauty. But something extra, compared to the thingstead, like happiness is also something to think about. Maybe a safety aspect? To replace all the wells in a more advanced settlement? Or spiritual? Didn’t the communists in Eastern Europe replace the faith in God with the faith in the State?😉

Flagging is tricky and we have discussed it a lot in the past. I find it works now, not perfect but as good as it can work. Of course, it gets more complicated if we add more mods. Just one point of view, don’t make changes too often. It takes time to get used to it, to where a product belongs. I like to have control of all kinds of production and I like to have this as simple and easy as possible. So I’ve learned where to look, on the menu or at the inventory or both to make this work.

Taverns and temple aren’t perfect but they do work, we just need to find a strategy how. If we are in a good mood, we can even see it positive; something to solve that adds a spice to the game.

I like the peat cutting the way it is. I like that it’s a different “mechanic” than deadwood. Peat is an obstacle but also a resource, especially on a Seafarer map. But I agree that the spots could be large but rare on a forest map. I’m a micromanagement kind of person, so I don’t really mind the tedious marking, even if it would have been nicer to be able to mark a whole area. I also use crayfishing, even sometimes in a medium-size game. A permanent crayfisher would also be nice but there’s also something good in various methods here. And crayfishing really “save the day” if you get the crazy idea to try Ironman on a Seafarer map on “harsh”.

Since we can’t mine gold anymore, it makes no sense to have different flags for gold and coins. I guess it’s a remain from the “goldmining” version of the North.

Agree with workshops for late game. I use to put the workshops on all kinds of buildings with a grassroof, like storages, inns…when I’ve upgraded to the red houses.

I like to see the increased radius of the wells. I’m not sure but I think you still have a stone well and maybe it still needs rope to be built. Couldn’t the radius of it be even bigger? A more efficient well, that could support more people with water after you’ve bought the nessesary rope?

By the way, I will start a new Nordic game, maybe even tonight. There’s some testing of the autotrade in a larger settlemet that I wanted to do for a long time. I’ll let you know how it works.

It’s nice to discuss things with someone with ideas and a different approach to the game than I have. Discuss things is principally only interesting if you have a different point of view.

I understand your points when it comes to letting things run automatically, Pleaky. Now, crayfishing isn’t a problem. There are plenty of other protein sources that run automatically so you can just leave it to us “micromanager”. (I can confess, I don’t use it in all games either). The taverns are another matter, you can’t just leave them if you want to make your population happy. I usually get around these limit problems by serving meals instead of alcohol. In most Nordic games I have more proteins than I need anyway. That might not be perfect either, some vendors “steal” some of it to make business with serving roasted meat as fast food, but usually, that doesn’t hurt much.

With the peat resource, I think we both agree. I find it very good that you can choose to use the peat or just clear the bogland away, easy and automatically. I don’t use every square of peat. Even on a map with limited resources, I sometimes want it gone fast. So I fully agree, big pieces of bog that you can clear away in a planned and fast way, is much better than these small odd tiles that you don’t notice before you want to build on them.

Yes, I like the surviving aspects of Banished the most. One of the reasons I like the North mod so much. It really has hard options. It’s almost like a different game. I do enjoy a mild farming game, too. It’s a good thing when both things work. And yes, with spare resources you are more dependant on early statistics. I usually look a lot on graphs and production numbers in the townhall menus when I play these “surviving games”. That’s why I don’t like statistics taken away from the thingstead. I don’t want to go back to Kid’s tiny townhall, that I used to build earlier in the North before there was an early townhall function.

I didn’t primarily mean the flagging as a tool for modding when I claimed that it gets more complicated with additional mods. I know too little about modding to talk about that. I meant that it gets more complicated to use the categories as a player. Say, you add a mod that has a copper resource. The metal and ore category is tricky enough to use as it contains iron ore, iron bloom and iron. If you add copper ore and copper metal, I would say it makes no sense at all to look at the menu.

Endgame in Banished is a tricky thing because there are no real goals. You need to set them for yourself and yes, your goal is a good one that should be possible and make sense. But are the DS buildings really that cheap? I have used all these mods, not always together with the North but I never had that impression that the buildings were cheap to build. On the contrary, I remember that I found the lovely Bryggen houses from the Townhouse mod rather expensive since they needed a lot of expensive iron. But that was an earlier version and there might have been some changes. And I basically agree, advanced buildings should be expensive.

I was surprised when I read that you find the sandpit too strong. I have never had that impression but I’ve really never had checked it. Normally, I’m a person who wants control, so when I first use a building or construction, I check its economy but I have learned over the years that Tom is very good at finding balance in his mods, the numbers use to make sense, so I don’t always check the economy of his sites. So I needed to take a look at the sandpit in my new game. One worker produced around 150 sand each year, that’s a profit of 600. Not much in a Nordic game where you can say that each Banni needs 25 proteins x2, 25 vegetables x3, 25 grain x4 and 25 fruit x5 = 350 each year to eat and fuel, tools and clothes worth around another 100. He can’t even support one child not to speak about the traders, vendors, priests, laborers and other not directly producing persons. My Bannis still have 3 hearts so I guess that you can push the production higher with a happy miner, and together with occasional gold findings, the profit makes sense but I still don’t find sand profitable enough to produce for export. I think Tom has set the trade value to 4 because he wants to improve the “vanilla” raw material values, where the profit of producing raw materials are so bad that people usually import them.

I started a new game yesterday with some specific goals but this is long enough end I will not hi-jack your thread Pleaky, so I’ll write about it another time on another place.

I can agree about the alcohol. What’s there for if not to be served in the tavern? But on the other hand, you can also see it the other way around; if Tom gave us the option to serve a hot meal instead, why not use that if it gives you less trouble? Maybe it’s even healthier. I’ve seen young children consume alcohol. Early alcoholism… Hm…. I think I prefer roasted meat!😉

I might remember wrong and I’m not sure in which mod combination I played but don’t merchants bring lime and copper if you haven’t loaded the production sites? I’m sure that I played a game with some DS houses in a mod that didn’t have iron fittings. He was the first to introduce those,as far as I know. I think it was in an earlier version of the North and I remember how I waited for the merchant. But I think Tom has made some principle changes in the trade after that so it may not work like that anymore.

Even if I still don’t find the Bryggen houses cheap with all those iron fittings, I can agree that there should be more glass but maybe not roof tiles. Even if many of those houses may have roof tiles now, I don’t think they had originally.