Norland has a simple one-sentence pitch: What if Rimworld meets Crusader Kings. Marry the colony sim gameplay with plenty of interacting and interlocking systems with more social systems that a medieval setting provides. And it does exactly that.
Norland blends these two games into something familiar yet fresh. But not without its quirks.
The world of Norland is an established one. There’s unique lore and worldbuilding in place, the map has fixed zones with no procedural generation being used, and you don’t create your own unique building layouts. All buildings are ploppable. So you don’t have to place specific furniture and create rooms for buildings.
The way you control the characters also has some slight tweaks when compared to Rimworld. The lords don’t do manual labour, of course. But you have to assign them to various buildings as managers, so that they’ll give out instructions to the peasants on how to get work done. You can interact with the many peasants and slaves your settlement can house- like punishing them for doing crimes or paying them with sexual favours.
The way the peasants and slaves work is also intriguing. Unhappy peasants can turn into criminals and will start doing crimes and hurt your settlement, including breaking into homes to loot stuff. At first it feels like you should keep crime to a minimum by any means necessary. But having criminals, especially cutthroat ones, can be advantageous. These folks can be persuaded to go do kill other neighbouring lords and other dastardly deeds.
The lords can interact in various ways. Romance blossom or wane and you can instigate that or let the systems work it out. They develop various traits based on their way of life- one lord became a sublimate because they didn’t see enough action (of the sexy variety) for too long.
Norland has an overview map, and it plays a more prominent part of the game. You can see the movement of various nobles or armies, interact with villages, bandit camps and other kingdoms. You can send an army to go on raids or attack other armies where you can manually play out the combat sequence (which I find a bit fiddly) or have it resolve on their own Crusader Kings style. You have to manually engage in battle though, I think I left armies hanging for way too long thinking they’ll immediately go into combat once the enemy is within reach. You can even just have a noble go hang out in other settlements schmoozing with other noble houses, just as other noblefolks can pay you an extended visit.
There is a lot of systems that will push and pull your priorities in various directions. Peasants will regularly migrate into your settlement if you’ve been doing a good job keeping folks happy, but keep this up and you’ll be spending too much resources on building new dorms and houses when you should be building up your defences in case another kingdom fancies a war. And you can suppress the migration rate in various ways. I discover that by holding daily sermons in the temple that promotes religious fanaticism, the agonistics will straight up avoid going to service, and after enough time has pass, leave the place entirely.
Slaves can also attempt to escape if they wish to be free. And you can free them should you wish by having them be recruited into your standing army. And you can punish criminals to become slaves. There’s a lot of systems at play to play with here. So if you love your colony sims and know how to roleplay a specific themed colony, Norland gives you all the tools for you to play your little medieval sandbox your way.
If there’s a something I wish is changed is how tiny the resource UI is to the point I can’t make out what the icons supposed to represent without squinting my eyes. And maybe it’s just me but the wood supply is so integral to the early game that I think that even with the suggestion of have three lumbermills out I still find myself short of wood. And the soldier tax that you’ll have to pay when you trade with a Holy Caravan is brutal.
Overall, I enjoy my time messing about with this preview build of Norland. I’m not a good enough player to really get the most out of it.I still haven’t figured out a good way to build a strong army without going into debt. But there are many aspects of the game I find intriguing.
If you love colony sims, in particular Rimworld, and love to try out a different flavour of this kind of game, you should put Norland on your radar.
Norland launches in Early Access sometime in May.