Quote Originally Posted by LibraryOgre View Post
I did, and I had a lot of fun. I built up to a pretty stable 200 person community, that had some room to grow. I did not realize that Gatherers were the powerhouse of food generation; I always went to agriculture as soon as possible, but the way the game is set up, you want to live in a dense forest with a lot of people gathering food.
My record in Banished was about 1400 people, at which point I had a self-sustainable settlement but just couldn't be bothered to keep growing because I pretty much occupied the entire map with some sort of industry and continuing to grow would have required me to do a lot of juggling with my balance of resources and trade to cover the loss of forests for wood harvesting.

At the beginning of the game food production definitely favours harvesting (and fishing! Fishing is great! Oh, and especially hunting. A couple of hunting posts in the early game will be a phenomenal source of food and clothing) over agriculture. It's consistent, so requires less storage, has a bit of inherent variety in food production to make your villagers happy and coexists with forestry and early-game medicine in very valuable ways. In the early game where people are your most limited resource it's invaluable, but it's extremely space inefficient and coexists very poorly with other industries as a result. You'll always want to have gatherers working where your foresters are handling wood production, but gathering just doesn't scale well once you start looking to have a large settlement with the full range of jobs in play. In the midgame space starts to be a lot more important than people as far as limited resources go, since travel times quickly get impractical. By the endgame, where space efficiency is the only limitation on growth, gatherers will represent virtually none of your food production. An area of land could support 40 farmers who sustain 200 people, or two gatherers who sustain 20. Unless you desperately need the firewood production the farmers win the land-use argument every time.

IIRC the no-farms strategy can actually support something like 800 people, which is pretty impressive, but I know people better at the game than I who've topped out with over 3000 people in their community.