It’s almost here. Manor Lords, one of the most wanted games on Steam is about to enter Early Access. The city builder developed by the mostly one-person developer team Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse sure have a lot of hype behind it.
And after sampling a couple of hours in this new take on a city builder, I suggest fans to temper expectations should you jump into the Early Access release.
Manor Lords has a lot of interesting new ideas that breaks the monotony of a typical grid-based city-builder. And most of it hinges on the idea that cities, especially colonies of the olden times, are not build in neat grids. Manor Lords wants you to embrace the curvature of the land and road and don’t think too much about optimising space with how you plop buildings.
In fact, some buildings aren’t ploppable per se. The burgage plots (houses) are not of fixed size. Instead, you click in four points to make a rectangle of some shape. It’s pretty robust, in that it takes account of curved roads and curves the plot around it. And the way the building tools snaps at the right places makes building flowy villages much more intuitive.
And I love the little detail where roads where it’s expected to have high foot traffic, like the ones surround a marketplace, are organically wider than small trails only specific workers would go. It’s very easy to build appealing rustic villages in Manor Lords.
So far, only three city features uses this four-point land plot: the aforementioned burgage plots, the marketplace, and farmlands. Other buildings are the usual ploppable variety, though some have interesting road connections- the tannery has a road connection that goes across the building, for example. Again, Manor Lords nudges you to not build grid cities.
Also, you can zoom really, really close down the ground and see the peasants go around their daily life. Heck, you can even just be a player character, manifest the titular Manor Lord and roam about in what’s essentially an open world town.
The feature is marked with signage that there will be glitches, so this part of the game has yet to see any change since its limited-time demo that got everyone abuzz about the game. But still, you can appreciate how high fidelity it all feels, compared to other games in the genre.
Manor Lords isn’t just a city builder. It also has RTS-style combat. You can recruit an army- be it conscripting the male adult townsfolk or hiring a mercenary corps, and have them roam about taking out bandit camps, defend from raiders or engage with another another lord’s army.
The combat has some elements of Total War in that positioning and formation matters. You can have the troops line up horizontally, for example. And order them to hold position, advance forward, or slowly back away from their formation when engaged with enemy troops.
The one interesting thing Manor Lords diverge from typical city builders, aside from the freeform plots, is how some resource are crafted. You won’t know this until you’ve played the game a bit but some material can only be crafted at specific housing plots. You see, if you build a large enough plot there will be an extra room for a backyard in which the peasants can either engage in domestic-scale agriculture (like having a carrot farm or rearing goats) or be a crafter or artisan of some sort.
I was a bit lost in how to get my army all equipped with weapons and gear at first. As it initially the only way to get it seems to be by importing from the trading post. And that costs a lot, and making regional wealth (money) is a struggle in the first few years.
Apparently, the better way is to have some housing upgraded so that they can produce bows, swords and armour. You still need to have the raw materials- which requires me digging through the help menu to find what items require what. And some raw materials need to be processed to other buildings before it gets to the back of someone’s house.
I wish the production line of these commodities and items are made more clearer. I forsee less experienced players getting completely lost on not being able to build an army with the right equipment, or getting the food and clothing to the stalls.
This system is cool, but it really needs a few more passes to make it fun. What ended up happening on my first playthrough is that I accidentally upgraded too many houses to be a fletcher and now I have too much bows in my stock and I can’t sell them fast enough. I can’t seem to figure out if these houses can change production. And to find these houses I literally have to click through every little house to find the exact one.
Also, upgrading houses is a pain as you have to manually click each one and select upgrade. It’s understandable why it requires a button press as upgrading means spending more resources to construct the upgraded building, but when you have 20 houses or more I wish there’s a more convenient way of doing it.
Manor Lords have three game modes in this Early Access release. One strips out the RTS bits so you can play it simply as a city builder. The other two are the ones where you have to claim lands and force out the rival AI lord.
Throughout this Early Access release you will see a lot of “coming soon” or “WIP (work in progress)” features, some still uses the development string for its text. There’s only one map though your starting position is random so there is some variety. Anything regarding the monarch isn’t ready. You can build your manor but the editor is still a bit janky to use right now. When a region has its population in hunger, a message notification appears with text missing. I’ve contested lands where the enemy lord just surrenders before I can get my troops arrive on the battlefield, where the UI shows that their side was actually winning.
This game really is Early Access in that way, so many content and features are just not ready yet. Expect a lot of jank and uncooked features.
Closing Thoughts
When you consider Manor Lords is mostly developed by one person, this is shaping up to be a brilliant city builder RTS game and an impressive feat to have be in this shape after all the years in development. Even if the concept of a city builder with RTS and kingdom politics isn’t really new, it still has other neat ideas that makes it play a little different.
Though with all the hype that surrounds the game, I fear some fans may be expecting more out of this.
Manor Lords clearly has potential, and I can see people having fun with this release. But there’s still a lot more work need doing before we can see if it stacks up against the many, many city builders out there. Should you wish to get your hands on the Early Access release, I suggest to temper expectations and enjoy the unique quirks it currently has. And let’s hope the game’s potential will ultimately be realised.
Played on PC. Review code provided by the publisher.