Banished - City Building

Finally a good looking city builder that would suit any Anno gamer. This is Banished by developers Shining Rock Software. Follow in the foot steps of a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. With only a cart and supplies from the homeland, it's time to begin a new life, and a new civilization.  Grow your town into a successful culture, keep the population alive by agriculture, hunting, gathering, trade and fishing, failure to achieve this and everyone suffers.

Survive the harsh winters, build houses, make warm clothing and burn firewood. But be warned, if you cut down too many tree's, this will have an affect on the local wildlife for food supplies. You do have the ability to re-plant, as if a game of Settlers, but the cures for diseases only come from forests that have lasted for many generations. The developers have really thought this through by adding extra ideas to a typical genre of city/town creation.

They even have extra situations for farming, if you farm the same area for season after season it will ruin the soil, or killing of fish and wildlife too quickly without them re-producing will lead to extinction. Even wandering nomads can join your town to grow the population more quickly especially in times of low development, but this may well allow the increases the chance of illnesses from far off lands!

Feature Gameplay from the website :

The townspeople of Banished are your primary resource. They are born, grow older, work, have children of their own, and eventually die. Keeping them healthy, happy, and well-fed are essential to making your town grow. Building new homes is not enough—there must be enough people to move in and have families of their own. Banished has no skill trees. Any structure can be built at any time, provided that your people have collected the resources to do so. There is no money. Instead, your hard-earned resources can be bartered away with the arrival of trade vessels. These merchants are the key to adding livestock and annual crops to the townspeople’s diet; however, their lengthy trade route comes with the risk of bringing illnesses from abroad.

There are eighteen different occupations that the people in the city can perform from farming, hunting, and blacksmithing, to mining, teaching, and healing. No single strategy will succeed for every town. Some resources may be more scarce from one map to the next. The player can choose to replant forests, mine for iron, and quarry for rock, but all these choices require setting aside space into which you cannot expand.

A game that will most likely be in my top list of purchases when it's available for Mid-to-late 2013 

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