Banished is great, but after I did all the achievements, it became a lot of more of the same. It's a way better management game than PC. PC gave more freedom in the creative department, that keeps a game wortwhile over the long haul., and I can see that reflected in the hours clocked on both games.
The Planet Coaster meta-game, lessons from Banished
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I think that's a key for me. PlanCo isn't JUST a management game. And it isn't JUST a creative game. Blending the two will dilute either side of the coin for balance. Think about how complicated Banished would be if every building was a "shell" and you had to actually build houses and what not like we do in PlanCo. What if peeps happiness and satisfaction was tied to a "scenery rating" of those buildings. What if you had to design the mines and farms with "parts" and your design had efficiency ratings, and safety ratings? What if the paths were actually used and had congestion problems, delaying peeps from their work. Or if you had to build transport to get the peeps to the outer reaches of your settlement.
Yeah, Banished is a management heavy "sim". It has to be, because that's all it is. There is no real creative aspect. No, where you plunk down houses is not creative. If you look at some of the things people complain about in PlanCo, you can do the same with Banished. For instance peep birth and aging doesn't follow the game years. *gasp* there's that pesky abstraction again.
Yeah, Banished is a management heavy "sim". It has to be, because that's all it is. There is no real creative aspect. No, where you plunk down houses is not creative. If you look at some of the things people complain about in PlanCo, you can do the same with Banished. For instance peep birth and aging doesn't follow the game years. *gasp* there's that pesky abstraction again.
It actually started annoying me at some point with banished, because I kind of wanted to build a village that had a 'pretty' looking layout, untill I realized I was just hurting my villagers by making them walk longer and be less efficient. After that, it was just efficiency layouts only and my villages started resembling cities more than villages by exploiting the land as best I could.
I guess that's what I missed a bit, just to build a cute pretty village, rather than a bunch of clusters of tightknit houses and resource generating facilities. After you figure out the optimal strategy, it gets really boring, really fast. Fortunately, the game is hard enough that it takes a while before you perfect your meta, so it's still a great game IMO.
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