just like real life, aint it?

Can't really touch the AI with mods, so no.
We've all had multiple town-death before learning how the AI does things. Once you've gotten a good grasp of what/how it decides things, you'll rarely lose a town unless you forgot a critical detail.

Basically: your people need 100 food per person per year. If you don't have enough, people will start walking too far to find few scraps of food, meaning a waste of time and productivity drop.

Your best friend at the start of any game is the gathering hut placed in a forest, with storage not too far from it (either right next to the hut or just outside the circle). A hunter or a good fishing dock (maximum of ater in the circle, nothing eating through that, not even an other fishing dock's circle!) added to that will let you bring in 3 of the 4 food groups to keep people relatively healthy.

The AI assigns jobs based on distance, to reduce walking times globally. If you have people walking a super long way, it's because in order to keep the average walking times as low as possible, the AI had to assign it that way. It's usually a sign that you need to add a house closer to that specific workplace.

Farmers "doing nothing" can be a range of issues, depending on the kind of "doing nothing" that's going on.
Planting only happens in Spring. If you built your field and it was only ready in Summer, they won't plant anything that year.
While not working (between harvest and next spring), farmers will act as laborers. If you planned clearing/building jobs far from the fields, your farmers will go and cut trees/rocks/carry stuff there, which means that in Early Spring they'll be too far from the fields and will start sowing late. You'll loose a lot of plant-growth time, leading to poor harvests.
If the fields are too large / too far, you'll have the same issue: sowing will take long and the field won't have time to reach 100%. If barns are far from the fields, during harvest your farmers will need to walk a long distance to drop off the harvested stuff, delaying the harvest and potentially making you loose part of it to the first snows.
If farmers plant stuff correctly but then never harvest the field, it's an issue with the access points to the field: Never build anything (except a road or another field) right next to a field: oneblocked tile can be enough to make the field be seen as unreachable at harvest time. That's a pathing issue that sadly never got fixed. Something to keep in mind when placing fields near buildings.

Education is important. An average of 30% difference in productivity between educated and uneducated workers.
Tools are critical. People are terrible at working without tools, and whenever you get new tools in storage, toolless people will stop working to go grab one. It can totally cause a spiral of doom, killing your town. I try to always have at least as many tools in storage as people in my town, just to be on the safe side.

Balancing houses versus pop is "tricky": too many houses and you'll split up existing couples, not enough houses and adult children won't move out of their parents houses, meaning they won't have kids themselves.
Any new house you build will be used, and people moving in will try to fill the house's storage with enough firewood and food to last a year. On top of that, they'll usually have a kid in the next year, and that newborn will also eat 100 food/year. Something to remember before building houses.

AI issues crop up at very high population levels and high play speed, because it struggles to handle all the calculations it needs to do before starting the next round of assignments. There are very few tricks to use to solve that.
A couple of mods have also created issues leading to people standing doing nothing (not even officially "iddling") for no reason.


TL;DR: The AI is quirky, it takes time to get used to it, but after that it's good fun, until you reach the point where it can't process all the madness. Unless you have amod causing issues, then it's a different bag of nettles to sort through.

Originally posted by Vrayna:

Can't really touch the AI with mods, so no.
We've all had multiple town-death before learning how the AI does things. Once you've gotten a good grasp of what/how it decides things, you'll rarely lose a town unless you forgot a critical detail.

Basically: your people need 100 food per person per year. If you don't have enough, people will start walking too far to find few scraps of food, meaning a waste of time and productivity drop.

Your best friend at the start of any game is the gathering hut placed in a forest, with storage not too far from it (either right next to the hut or just outside the circle). A hunter or a good fishing dock (maximum of ater in the circle, nothing eating through that, not even an other fishing dock's circle!) added to that will let you bring in 3 of the 4 food groups to keep people relatively healthy.

The AI assigns jobs based on distance, to reduce walking times globally. If you have people walking a super long way, it's because in order to keep the average walking times as low as possible, the AI had to assign it that way. It's usually a sign that you need to add a house closer to that specific workplace.

Farmers "doing nothing" can be a range of issues, depending on the kind of "doing nothing" that's going on.
Planting only happens in Spring. If you built your field and it was only ready in Summer, they won't plant anything that year.
While not working (between harvest and next spring), farmers will act as laborers. If you planned clearing/building jobs far from the fields, your farmers will go and cut trees/rocks/carry stuff there, which means that in Early Spring they'll be too far from the fields and will start sowing late. You'll loose a lot of plant-growth time, leading to poor harvests.
If the fields are too large / too far, you'll have the same issue: sowing will take long and the field won't have time to reach 100%. If barns are far from the fields, during harvest your farmers will need to walk a long distance to drop off the harvested stuff, delaying the harvest and potentially making you loose part of it to the first snows.
If farmers plant stuff correctly but then never harvest the field, it's an issue with the access points to the field: Never build anything (except a road or another field) right next to a field: oneblocked tile can be enough to make the field be seen as unreachable at harvest time. That's a pathing issue that sadly never got fixed. Something to keep in mind when placing fields near buildings.

Education is important. An average of 30% difference in productivity between educated and uneducated workers.
Tools are critical. People are terrible at working without tools, and whenever you get new tools in storage, toolless people will stop working to go grab one. It can totally cause a spiral of doom, killing your town. I try to always have at least as many tools in storage as people in my town, just to be on the safe side.

Balancing houses versus pop is "tricky": too many houses and you'll split up existing couples, not enough houses and adult children won't move out of their parents houses, meaning they won't have kids themselves.
Any new house you build will be used, and people moving in will try to fill the house's storage with enough firewood and food to last a year. On top of that, they'll usually have a kid in the next year, and that newborn will also eat 100 food/year. Something to remember before building houses.

AI issues crop up at very high population levels and high play speed, because it struggles to handle all the calculations it needs to do before starting the next round of assignments. There are very few tricks to use to solve that.
A couple of mods have also created issues leading to people standing doing nothing (not even officially "iddling") for no reason.


TL;DR: The AI is quirky, it takes time to get used to it, but after that it's good fun, until you reach the point where it can't process all the madness. Unless you have amod causing issues, then it's a different bag of nettles to sort through.

Most intelligent reply I ever got. Here is a more detailed list of problems.

As for people standing around, it's farmers doing NOTHING as laborers at times. Especially when I really need it. So I will often have to take them off farming in winter then hurriedly put them back in time to start farming. Then, for some reason, it will only assign builders from across the map who will take ages to show up, then do ONE build point. ONE. Making it take years to build a single house.

As for eating, I have had towns starve with 1000 food stored. They are holding food and starving, and for some reason many die of starvation at the exact milisecond they show up at a barn or house to eat. This is very game breaking at times as I have people starving during a harvest. This could have easily been solved by not making villagers need ten square meals a day. Or atleast making it take longer to starve to death. Seriously, who starves to death in half a day.

Perhaps a mod can be made to simply increase time it takes to starve.

Also, I have found fishing very inneffective. It really only makes much of a difference when you have five or more going at once.

Depending on population levels, 1000 food is really not a lot. If you have several barns, it can be scattered around the place. If several people are hungry at the same time, people can waste time going to a storage thinking they'll find food there, only to have it taken away before they reach it and having to go elsewhere. Having a market can help with that as the food will be brought to that specific place, and it'll be where anyone inside its circle will go to find what they need.

Once people have a house, they will only eat there, so they'll take the time to walk to storage to find food, bring it to the house, and eat. When food is scarce it can be a good idea to temporarily mark houses for destruction (while making sure you have no builder) to make people homeless. That way they'll only take the food they need to eat without trying to fill their house, AND will eat directly at the barn/market. It saves you time and limits the issue of the bad food reparttion between houses.

Ultimately though, the best solution is to never get to the point where there isn't enough food for everyone. And if you have more than 10 people, "enough" is always more than 1k food. Having 1 year's worth of food in advance is considered the "pretty safe" thing. So 100 times the number of villagers.

Walking distances are also a BIG THING. Placing jobs (clearing/building) far from housing will never be efficient. By the time they reach the workplace they won't have time to do much before they need warmth/food/health/happiness boosts and willl start walking back to their house or to storage. If you want to create a second city-node, it's safer to first place a stockpile then a house our two about mid-way.

Inactive farmers get switched to labor jobs automatically. They might take a while to find a task to do if they have needs to fill first, but unassigning them and re-assigning them in spring will rarely help.

A well placed fishing hut (on a point in a lake, or on the inside of a river bend) with an almost full circle of water will provide quite a lot of food, IF housing and storage are nearby. Never put 2 fishing docks close together, or build a bridge going through the fishing dock's circle though.

You can fully staff one fishing dock, each added fisherman will helpbring in more fish. On the other hand, hunting lodges have a hidden cooldown for animal kills, so while 2 hunters are better than 1, the 3rd one will only help a little bit and the 4th one will be almost useless. Only reason to fully staff a hunting lodge is if it's really far from everything and hunters spend more time walking than actually working. (In that case you're usually beter off fixing your walking distances than increasint the hunters though)

Kralyerg has made many small mods (on top of working on CC and MegaMod). On his download page[blackliquidsoftware.com] on the BlackLiquid site you can find the Less Food mods, which will make your people eat less.
I'd also recommend one of the Ridiculous Storage mods to avoid having to build so many barns. Plenty of other little lightweight treasures in there, that can help get a good grip on the game mechanisms without getting a headache over tedious details.

Warning: Any mod will disable achievements.

Pick the mod(s) you need, extract the .7z if needed (some mods are compacted, some are small enough to come directly as .pkm mods),
Drop the .pkm file inside the Steam/SteamApps/common/Banished/Windata folder
Inside the game, enable the mod(s) in your mod menu. Confirm the change when you exit the mod menu.
Exit entirely the game, and restart it before you start a new town.

That exit/restart will help prevent a big that would make you crash when quitting your town to get back to the main menu. It's a workaround to avoid a bug that's been there since the addition of modding.
A good reflex to get: any change in your modlist = a restart before doing anything. :)

Okay, I gotta remember the demolition trick. As for the other tips I did come to the same conclusions, but you ironed them out a bit. Thanks. The problem with fishing is you also need laborers to get the fish, which uses them up. And no matter how I do it the fishing makes almost no difference so I find them better served as gathering huts instead. The only reason I have multiple barns is I really spread out my fields so I place barns near them so they harvest efficiently, but that does mean I depend highly on markets. As for the mods Vrayna, I would rather a slower starvation then less food. Thank you though.