I'm still early in the playing, but it seems like this game mostly blows one note. Once the mechanics are figured out and a basic idea of how to found a village, you're done doing new things and exploring new ideas, making interesting decisions. That's my prediction for myself, anyway.

Startopia suffers from this, too. Once you're done with the missions, which are essentially elaborate (but very fun) tutorials, you've experienced the game. There were some fan missions that added some varieties and challenges, but mechanically, the game's done. With Banished, the tutorials just get you started, but learning what to build, what jobs to assign, and why become the main quest of the game. After that, you paint a town, trying to keep things balanced. Finish doing that, and you're basically done.

It also doesn't help that presentationally, Banished is a bit flat. It's not a city building game that allows much self-expression, like Sim City might. It's an organism survival and growth simulation. I'm hoping an expansion or a good mod shakes things up, tilts the balance off a bit, maybe adds some cultural conflict or flavor.

None of this is really a problem for Banished, it's a great little game, but it's not as replayable as it could be. Once you learn to keep a village going, and you know what critical choices to make and why, you're left wondering what could have been next. Guild management? Political/relgious power brokering and infighting? Crime simulation? Pollution and contagious disease management? Cultural growth? Elimination/protection of unpopular or undesirable minorities? Defense against invasion? Or is this a town of people who basically all get along and are too tired to do anything but work, eat, briefly worship, and sleep?

RIght now, though, I'm having a lot of fun trying to keep everyone from dying. It's good enough for now, but I'm sad in advance: I know I'm going to be left wanting more.

While I love this game...it seems like it's half-finished at best, and I keep waiting/hoping that there will be future updates or modding which will expand on the ideas and engine that was introduced here.

Hell, if I had half a brain and the time to do so, I'd love to try my hand at modding and provide some extra content...but I wouldn't even know where or how to begin. :(

This one expands quite a bit: http://banishedinfo.com/mods/view/679-CC-Excellent-Adventure-BlackLiquid

I'd call the game a finished product, but it could certainly be expanded in many, many ways.

Thanks! I'll take a look at this! :)

Hard?! I can barely make it on medium difficulty XD

I don't consider the thrill gone at all though. This game presents a constant challenge for me and it's a nice break from all the shoot-em-up crazy action games. Which I don't particularly care for. It's nice to have a quality relaxing city-building survival game in my library.

Kudos on playing guitar

It's the one, the only, game I play on Hard, I guess because I like having no buildings at all at the beginning. I have yet to reach a decent-sized town, but that's ok. (I'm also impressed by the program speed; if only more games could start/save/load so quickly)

I started playing on Hard+Harsh+Disasters right after tutorials and made it (easy on other accounts, though -- Valleys, large map -- because I don't want much trouble with layouts). The key is watching what your citizens do and making them avoid wasting time on trivialties and getting killed. Cold wastes time. Hunger wastes time. A lack of accessible resources wastes time.

1. Pause the game and plan the city, then pause every building except resource pile(s). Planning is half the game. The core idea is that dedicated storage such as barns and stockpiles should be built close to heavy resource producers, and houses should be built around marketplaces (within marketplace circles -- as well as blacksmiths and tailors); a dedicated vendor will then carry resources from barns to the marketplace to guarantee a steady supply of necessary resources and minimize resource runs by regular citizens.

2. Gather resouces, starting with the area where you'll be building stuff. When the resources are collected, but not earlier, unpause your food producers one by one (gatherer, hunter, fishery -- at least two). Don't start construction unless you have the resources for it, else citizens will be running around with a couple of stones, wasting time.

3. When the buildings are ready, get people to produce food in them asap. (Everyone else is still collecting resources.)

4. Build (unpause) a longhouse. Oh look it's winter.

Next year, build a woodcutter and start stockpiling firewood. Firewood is essential for survival beyond the first winter.

At this point, the tools are probably broken and the clothes are starting to wear out. Build a blacksmith and a tailor and get your reserves up to standard. Build another food producer in between.

That's it, your start is secured, build stone houses (stone only!) and get your citizens breeding. Kids go to school when they hit 10, so if you can get a school up when your first generation can attend it, great. Get other useful infrastructural buildings up (I don't remember anyone dying in childbirth once I had a hospital).

Oh, and one more thing, since it isn't obvious:
After the second year, you'll probably start getting alerts that your produce storage (the cart) is getting full, so it'll be tempting to put a barn nearby, in the village itself, as an emergency measure. Don't; build a Trading Post instead and move extra stuff there. Later, if you're an eco-minded individual like me, build more trading posts to trade for stone and, eventually, iron (more posts = more visiting traders).

More things I forgot:
1. There's a command called the priority tool. Select an area, and work in said area will be done above all else, if possible.
2. No work is done at a building site if it's paused. This includes removing resources from it. However, you will often want to prioritize remove resources from future building sites without actually building anything there yet. It appears that, after buildings are planned, it can only be done manually (or by removing the planned buildings and prioritizing independent resource gathering in a selected area).
3. Once you've sold a quantity of items, unless you're swimming in resources, pause the game and adjust the new Trading Post targets, else the Trading Post will be restocked from your village's essential stash.

Update:

I started a new game and rolled up a map with a nice flat region... except the starting location was across a small (unfishable) river from it, smack down in the center of a cramped triangular valley barely large for a single forester.

So I did as described, except the first thing I built was a bridge. Immediately across the river and a little bit to the side, I planned a barn, and the circular area south of the river was exactly the right size for a forest 4-pack node (hunter and gatherer built immediately and set to 4 workers each, forester and herbalist on hold). I put up a second stockpile right next to the node, to save time (to be later dismantled). Because most of the produce was still kept in the cart, I put the longhouse in the valley (but near the bridge), next to the initial stockpile and the (temporary) woodcutter.

The core village was laid out to the east, 12 houses around a marketplace with a school, a tailor, a blacksmith, and yet another temporary stockpile close by. The two food producers were producing a surplus, so I figured out I can live a bit without tools and had got a school up by the time the first child born in the village was old enough to attend (Winter 3) and a tailor by the time clothes started wearing out (because the distances to and from the future town were huge, without clothes I ran the risk of the nekkid builders chain-freezing on the way to it, with laborers replacing builders only to immediately die, so the tailor took priority over the blacksmith). No one whatsoever was hungry or cold.

The blacksmith took its sweet time to go up and even more time to start cranking out tools. The tool deficit maxed out at 12 before it started receding, and the dumbass blacksmith was literally the last one to get a tool. Only then I was able to finish the marketplace (and the barn) and start building the first individual stone houses around it. After everyone moved out of the longhouse (but before building more homes for nuclear families to encourage childbirth) I finally put up a forester and a herbalist, and as the stones from the surrounding area finally trickled in (laborers were the last to move to new housing), a Trading Post (and then a fishery and a second Trading Post).

New houses went up so fast that, although I don't have a Town Hall yet (so, no access to graphs), it looks like I've been able to fully avoid the usual population slump (when childbirth incentives miss most of or all of the first, uneducated wave of young people). I moved the woodcutter closer to the village. I plan to turn the initial starting area into a dedicated log producer by setting up a forester to plant only, then cutting the whole area bare with Remove Resources, and export firewood.

I wonder, can you use the 'Remove Resources' button on a building instead of destroying it in order to remove resources from it? (Probably not... but worth a shot lol)

This game would be REALLY cool with a map editor. I didn't want to, but I'm thinking of downloading the 'Flatten Tool' to flatten some areas on the maps I'm working on. Just for the small areas the map generator decided to rough up land or create tiny mountains lol.

I just built a trading post for the first time. I've only got two maps I'm working on. Both are medium difficulty and fair weather. Tried mild weather, but my villagers would all die of starvation or cold before I could get anything done :P

If you mean the resources inside the building/home, then you can force their removal by tagging the building for destruction. Before they can start dismantling the building, the resources inside must be removed, which takes a bit of time. If you just want the resources removed for one reason or another, but not the building, you can later cancel the destruction of the building before it's completed. At that point workers will start to put resources back in, like food and firelog for houses, but this trick can be useful for clearing out barns or stockpiles. For instance, stockpiles out in the sticks tend to fill up with logs, and the workers will then carry the new ones a long distance. If you temporarily clear it out, they can work more effectively. Just be aware that labourers will pour in to empty the stockpile. It can look pretty funny at times when you have a well-developed city with a high population and many hundreds of labourers. They'll form a nice queue of 'ants' :D