The first game I bought was 'Brothers'. It's a game where you play as two brothers who are on an adventure to find some kind of medicine that'll save their father. The game looks really beautiful but it's rather tricky to control the two brothers at the same time. Thanks to having an Xbox I play this game on my new laptop with my Xbox controller. Fun game!
(Screenshot picked off the internet)
The second came I bought is LA Noire. I've always wanted to play this game. You play as a detective who tries to solve crimes in LA. The coolest part about this game is that the facial expressions are made by capturing real people's facial expressions. You have to look very carefully while interrogating them to see if they tell lies or not. I also play this game with my Xbox controller on my new laptop.
The third game I bought is Banished. Znoodie told me about this game while discussing Steam sales. The best way to describe this game is Age of Empires without war. You're in charge of a couple of families that only carry some basic supplies. The goal of the game is to keep them alive and build a whole village. You make sure they get food, firewood when it gets cold in winter and medicine for when diseases spread.
I took a couple of screenshots to explain more about the game.
If you start on easy you get a couple of houses and cattle to start with. The first game I played was a total failure. Every winter my food and firewood ran out so by spring my people were starving and freezing. By autumn I finally managed to have them all fed and warm again but then winter made its appearance again and I'd struggle to stay alive.
After playing my first game for a while, learning and discovering, I started a new game.
There are various ways to get food, and it's best to use all of them. Aside from keeping your people fed you also have to keep them happy. One of the ways to keep them happy is giving them a variety of food.
You can gather roots, berries, mushrooms, ... and hunt in the forest. You can fish in the rivers and lakes. You can also set up farms and orchards, if you have seeds. On easy and medium you start with a couple of seeds. If you start on hard you'll have to get seeds by trading with traders.
Traders come to your town after putting up a trading post. They'll arrive by boat. There are different kind of traders who bring different kind of stuff. Some have iron, stone and coal with them, some tools and coats, some cattle, sheep or chickens, some all kinds of food and some have seeds. You trade by stocking some of your gathered materials in the trading post. Everything has a value. Per example I usually trade 625 firewood (4 value) for seeds (2500 value).
After starting a new map things went so well it overwhelmed me. I never ran out of food or firewood, quite the opposite. I ended up having a population over 1000. Sadly I built my map full (medium map) after a couple of days playing so I decided to start over on hard difficulty on a large map.
Here are some screenshots of my medium map.
On my easy map I never managed to fill one stock pile. Here I got several 100% full of wood.
My town center with chapel, town hall, market and several houses surrounded by farms.
I love making big farms and orchards with different fruits and vegetables. It looks nice!
Mining town.
People age and eventually die of old age. To prevent their families to get sad you build graveyards. People can also die due other reasons such as getting crushed by a rock or cave in in the mines, diseases and more.
Sometimes buildings catch fire. It's good to have a river nearby or a well so your people can extinguish the fire quickly before it starts burning other buildings as well.
You can gain a bigger population by giving couples their own home. Every family prefers to live alone, else they won't reproduce. If you have a city hall you have a chance of nomads requesting citizenship. At first they come with 3-5 but when you keep accepting nomads in your town they come with more and more.
On my map I kept accepting nomads, in the end they came by 100.
When your population increases it's important that you can handle their needs. Your food storage can suddenly get emptied per example.
There's much more to tell about this game but I think this explains the basics. It's a really fun and addicting!
