I love City Building games. Lately, I’ve been really craving a new one to play, but cycling through my dense Steam library, I just can’t find any that satisfies my itch. Along comes Manor Lords, and wow, do I wish I had gotten to it sooner. Despite still being in Early Access, this medieval City Builder / RTS combo has quickly become my favorite in the genre.
Manor Lords combines city building and RTS combat and challenges you to build a thriving village and expand into the map, conquer your neighbor’s territory, build ANOTHER thriving village, and connect them to create an interlocking web of prosperous territory. It presents several layers of strategic depth as you’re made to manage both your personal wealth, the necessities for survival in a village, as well as its production and trade of industrious goods and its standing militia, and then expand and do so with several other villages as you play a game of grand strategy against your fellow lords.
If I had tried to cover every detail currently present in Manor Lords’ city-building gameplay, this article would have gone on forever. Instead, I’ll simply say that it is incredibly solid, especially for its current Early Access state. You play a game of supply and demand, managing food production, building supplies, and industrial goods with a workforce of families whose approval rating needs to be managed. The game works in a bit of the Anno-style housing upgrade system, wherein you need to supply your villagers with certain amenities to evolve their dwellings to a higher level.
I will say that as much as I love the city building in Manor Lords, it feels a little bit too easy at present. I get the feeling I wasn’t advancing my village as quickly as the game expected me to, which happens in many of these games for me. Still, I found that having a surplus of Firewood and Food (the essentials for survival) was easy, and getting through multiple winters was a breeze.
This is probably done to counteract the RTS gameplay, though, which sees you fighting with units made up of part of your population. I did struggle to raise one entire, fully supplied militia unit, even as my enemies had armies of 90+ soldiers on the battlefield, so again, player error.
Only male villagers can join the militia. If I’m being honest, I don’t know how I feel about this feature. Yes, it’s historically accurate, but I personally align myself more with the “let women join the guard” side of fantasy and medieval settings, even if it breaks the historical accuracy a little. More than that, however, this limits the size of your militia by only allowing certain members of your population to join. Sure, this could easily be seen as a way to add strategic depth, but I would prefer the game let me give the ladies in my village some swords as well.
The attention to detail in Manor Lords is astounding and goes a long way toward making the process of managing your village and producing goods easily manageable. Just one example is that buildings like sawmills, hunting camps, and other production facilities that consume resources allow you to set a reserve limit, stopping the building from dropping your supplies below the number. As someone with ADD, this is an insanely helpful feature, and it allows me to put my attention elsewhere, knowing I won’t have to worry about something using up more of my supply of a resource than intended.
This attention to detail continues into the actual building aspect of the game, which, my goodness, I am crazy about. I want nothing more in a City Builder title than to avoid straight lines and gaps in my building placement. Manor Lords gives you unprecedented control over how your buildings are placed and the curvature in which you can lay down things like roads and housing, creating buildings that beautifully hug curves and look stunningly realistic, even more so when you take control of your lord and come to visit a town.
Not only that, but the game allows you a huge level of customization. Not only can you change the appearance of your custom troops, but when building your manor itself, the game puts you into a building segment specifically for different aspects of your manor. Though limited at the moment, I’m excited to see how far this feature is taken before the game’s launch.
My only complaint about Manor Lords is the fact that we aren’t at launch yet.
Developed by a single person, Manor Lords has an insane amount of promise, and even with everything available now, I simply want more. Though there is plenty to do now, you can clearly see the greater scope of the creator’s vision to come as the game is worked on. Aspects to the playable game modes and AI opponent options are still being worked on, progression trees still have plenty of locked skills, and as I said earlier, there are areas like manor building that lack a little content but are clearly intended to be expanded on later.
This game deserves all the time in the world needed to accomplish its true vision, which is clearly something spectacular and deeply engaging, but I’ll be damned if I don’t get a pressing sense of impatience thinking about everything to come. Manor Lords has me absolutely hooked, as I’m sure it will have you as well, and while updates may be a little slow, I’m super excited to see them come.
Pros:
- Phenomenal City Building mechanics that break away from grid-based norms and straight lines to let you truly make a stunning-looking village
- Challenging RTS strategy paired with settlement management that will keep any player stimulated
- Beautiful graphics and an unprecedented focus on customization and player expression make the game feel truly unique.
Cons:
- A current lack of promising features that will come later in the game’s Early Access development time
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