I totally agree, a rushed growth will lead you to trouble. Not building houses too quickly to control your pop growth allows you to make reserves. I think I have about 15k stored food atm.  I try to keep 1k food reserve by 10 pop. Worked pretty well so far, at one time I had a scary food drop but the reserve was there to buffer it while i directed more pop to food production. 

Another rule of thumb I found that seems to work pretty well is build 1 house per two adult workers, not counting students. Gives me steady and manageable growth, although now that I am at around 150 pop, I started building slightly less because growth rate is increasing.

I'm around 250, the diminishing returns are really starting to show (people spend more and more time running, markets need 3-4 traders to stay balanced). I've got ~30 laborers constantly because I've got nowhere to put them. I think I will preemptively start building graveyards because there doesn't seem to be any way to slow down population growth besides letting people freeze to death. Yay communism.

Well, I've finally purchased it, and I must say, after Game dev tycoon this is my best investment into games (Avadon is a sequel, so it doesn't count ). and definitely that is the game I've been looking for. Quite relaxing (with disasters turned off), contemplating, precisely what I like. For single-man game it is outstandingly well made, and some bigger companies (with much more shorter names and their own digital distribution system) should take note on how to properly create games.

Balance-wise Banished is well done, I think. It has some questionnable or not exactly clear areas (like argument about crop rotation, finite amount of game for hunters and their area of operations, but that could be rectified easily. Of course some work could be done on interface, specifically commands, prioritizing, and other "excel simulator" elements, but even without them Banished is very fine game, at least with population around 200 people. Though I think my settlement comes to a degree where either I missing something, or citizens AI behaves somewhat erratically, especially when it comes to laborers and all forms of haulage - long, regional, and distributional.

tl;dr: good game, well worth the money and time invested. Since Gnomoria refuse to load my several-decades long playthrough save, Banished fit in quite well.

I got my town to slightly over 250 habs but at this point my interest started to lower if only because I had every building built and it had gotten into a bit of a repeat loop. Even though the dynamic changes with a growing town.

My town seems to be running smoothly. I had a fire but the folks did not manage to take it out. I tried setting priority on the fire but it still took my sims lots of time to commit to bucket duty. In the end a sawmill and a home burned out... no big deal in the end.

At this point I think the game would need more meat around the stick. It has a solid core and nice UI so a few new mechanics and added content would greatly help extend it.

I poked around the official forum and it seems the dev has plans to expand the game but since it just got out he is currently neck deep in fixing all the bugs people have.  Even though I had a mostly bug free experience some poeple do have them and the forum is very bustling. He must be quite overwhelmed lol.   Once he gets the thick of the bugs sorted out I expect this game might get more content.

More content is interesting, but seeing many games ruined via addition of "expansions", I'm kinda reluctant toward changes as they may be the very thing that would break game's spine. If course, there are ways to improve it, but I hope those changes could be reverted, "just in case".

I decided to buy. Been playing it a lot. There's a learning curve that's steep(not as steep as Crusader Kings II), but its more of a step by step learning experience. One town fails, I figure out why, start a new town and repeat this until I have finally a stable town. My main fault was growing too fast which I find a slight negative for the game, you have to be patient which is rarely a plus for me in an RTS game. I'm not talking ACTION PACT, but just waiting a few years to do anything of substance. As well once I figured out how the game works i'm always at speed 10 which is a good indicator of the 'down time' this game has. I also agree with above posts that it needs more middle and late game things to do.

Disasters so far are rare and easily fixed. All you need to do to stop an epidemic in your town is have one hospital that only requires one colonist to be the doc during the epidemic and the sick people get better fast. I've never seen an illness go beyond 5 people. Fires are rare and easily handled by dividing areas of the town by streets which I was doing regardless. The tornado could be devastating, but it doesn't seem to go into town much.

It is an enjoyable enough game though. The 'one more turn' translates the experience well enough even though its an RTS. So they got my money, but I feel let down because I do not see myself playing it much further.

I will definitely be coming back to this game in a few months to see if new stuff has been added to it.

I really like it.  It beats the pants off EA's mediocre SimCity.

Oh yeah, I watched a bunch of Banished gameplay episodes by Sips the other day.  I think it's kind of nice that after getting comments he re-configures the town a bit to improve things.

Where did you read that? I'm curious to see what he's changing.

Saw Felicia Day give Banished a shout out, so it's definitely out there getting attention.

Has there been any talk of an update coming?

Author says he is still working on the first patch, which should be exclusively bug fix if i understand correctly.

But you can download a partial patch apparently.

http://shiningrocksoftware.com/forum/discussion/1991/working-on-update-for-1-0-1-

Um, sorry that may have been confusing.  During the gameplay episodes I mentioned, Sips changes some things around in response to comments, and mentions it a few times.  Here's a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYqfXQ-ztmZKnUHBhWuCzJYyW0p3VSRXm

Could someone do me a favor regarding the Banished forums? I am getting an error message whenever I try to post. I tried contacting the guy that made the game, but no response in a week. I assume he's swamped working on it alone. SO my favor is could you post my error message to the banished forums and link me so I can follow it?

The error message: