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Manor Lords fuses city-building and RTS mechanics, splitting the difference between Farthest Frontier and Total War. Turn your humble village into a sprawling metropolis, grow crops, and manufacture weapons, then take those weapons into battle. Bandits and rival lords vie for control of your land and resources as they would in Crusader Kings, so every expansion into the wilderness is another potential conflict. Although both halves of the game will require fattening before they’re ready to leave early access, Slavic Magic has already given us a foundation worthy of a lord. It just needs to feel more like a game and less like a tech demo.
Hamlet to Metropolis
Almost everything Manor Lords does has been done before. It simply does those things better. You start with control of a plot of land, five homeless families, and a meager pile of resources. From that, you’ll need to grow a thriving settlement. Every system here has nuance to keep things interesting. Cut too far into the forest with your lumber camp and you’ll cause the animals to migrate (bad for your hunters). Sow the same field for too many seasons and you’ll deplete the soil (bad for your wheat). The ripples of cause and effect are intuitive but daunting.
Regional Wealth and a few other mechanics would benefit from a more robust tutorial. Separating town income from the lord’s personal wealth makes sense, but it took me several hours to understand why I wasn’t making money despite a thriving market. Policies and the Development Point tree offer potent strategic choices (such as allowing you to order your peasants to fast every fifth meal, saving food but lowering morale). There just aren’t enough of them in the game yet.
Most of the problems (bugs, lack of military troop types, etc.) are explained by early access. Manor Lords is a work in progress. That said, its city-building already delivers a deeper and more immersive experience than many games. If you like to treat your village like an ant farm, AFKing while your peasants saw logs, plow fields, and carry vegetables to market, Manor Lords is exquisite. You can even abandon the bird’s-eye view entirely and walk through your town in third-person mode for even deeper immersion. Though this mode is barely a proof of concept, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come.
It’s hard to explain how engaging Manor Lords is as a simulation. It’s more than weather and seasonal changes. Zoom in during the construction of a new church, and you can listen to your workers banter while they hammer nails. Your hunters don’t just disappear into the woods: they shoot deer, skin them, and hang them to dry. Whereas most medieval city-builders are a watered-down mashup of various social systems and architectural styles from the Middle Ages, Manor Lords aims for authenticity and hits the mark.
Kingdoms and Combat
If you don’t fancy combat, the Rise to Prosperity scenario offers a pacifistic option, allowing you to focus on city-building. For everyone else, warfare is an integral part of the game. When bandits or a neighboring lord attack, the game transitions seamlessly into an RTS. In addition to your own lordly retinue, you can arm your villagers and assign them to various troop types or even recruit mercenaries. For now, the limited selection of footmen, archers, spears, and polearm units offers little tactical variety. That will change as more unit types arrive in early access.
Arranging your spear line to protect your archers before flanking with footmen for a decisive blow is fun if somewhat shallow. The most interesting part of warfare in Manor Lords, however, may occur in the markets and trading stalls far from the battlefield. Before your villagers can fight, they must be armed, meaning you’ll need to craft or purchase weapons. Hauling ore, smelting it, and hammering it into spears is laborious, but the alternative is establishing a costly trade route. Hiring mercenaries is an even more expensive alternative.
Like in Eve Online, manufacturing weapons matters as much as wielding them. That creates a beautiful tension between the supply of the market and the demand of the battlefield. Creating the supply chains necessary for combat is arguably one of the best parts of Manor Lords. It kind of needs to be, since there’s nothing to see on the diplomacy front. In the absence of treaties, alliances, spycraft, or politicking of any kind, everything gets decided at swordpoint.
Manor Lords can’t compete with the likes of Total War in terms of RTS depth. It can in terms of RTS vibes, however. The shouts of your soldiers and the clash of swords are just as thrilling here as they are in Warhammer or Shogun. High-quality art and sound design are a hallmark of Manor Lords from the battlefield to the bakeries. Watching your villagers get speared and thrown in the mud isn’t as soothing as watching them plant barley, but it’s certainly engaging.
Room to Rise
Much like the wheat bread baking in the humble hamlet of Nusslohe, Manor Lords needs more time in the oven. You don’t have to be an expert baker to see how delicious the final product will be, however. A fully realized version of this game could likely compete with the best of the best. We’re far from that reality, unfortunately. It’s a true early access title: buggy, incomplete, and unfairly tantalizing. Too much of it feels like an alpha or tech demo to recommend now, but if you’re an RTS or city-building fan, you should keep one eye on Manor Lords.
Manor Lords is available on PC in early access.
