Manor Lords
Manor Lords is a strategy game that allows you to experience the life of a medieval lord. Grow your starting village into a bustling city, manage resources and production chains, and expand your lands through conquest.
Inspired by the art and architecture of late 14th century Franconia, Manor Lords prioritizes historical accuracy wherever possible, using it to inform gameplay mechanics and visuals alike. Common medieval tropes are avoided in favor of historical accuracy, in order to make the world feel more authentic, colorful, and believable.
Manor Lords provides a gridless city-building experience with full freedom of placement and rotation. Building mechanics are inspired by the growth of real medieval towns and villages, where major trade routes and the landscape influenced how settlements shaped and developed.
- Spreading outward from a central marketplace, build your residential, commercial, and industrial districts following the natural lay of the land. Establish farms based on soil fertility, position hunting grounds according to animal populations, and ensure access to adequate resource deposits and forests to provide the raw materials needed for growth.
- Assign areas for housing and watch your residents build their homes in accordance with the historical burgage plot system. Each region will be subdivided based on your roads and the allotted space, and homes will scale accordingly.
- Build extensions behind larger homes to generate income and resources that would not otherwise be available. Homeowners don’t just pay taxes – they grow vegetables, raise chickens and goats, and otherwise supply themselves and other townsfolk with essential needs beyond what your managed farms, pastures, and industries can provide.
- Guide your settlements through the unique demands and opportunities of each season, enjoying the bounty brought by spring rains and preparing for the harsh snows of winter.
From boots to barley and hides to honey, Manor Lords features a great variety of goods fitting of the era. Materials need to be transported and processed into finished products through production chains, and you must balance the basic needs of your people against the desire to produce luxury items to ensure happiness, manufacture trade goods for export, or forge arms and armor to aid in your conquests.
- Resources are littered across the map, encouraging you to expand and establish multiple specialized settlements. Extract valuable ores from your mining colonies, while villages devoted to agriculture, herding, or hunting supply the grains and meats needed to feed your growing population.
- Unchecked expansion will have a direct effect on the environment. Herds of deer will migrate away from encroaching civilization, lack of crop rotation will worsen soil fertility, and cutting down too many trees will result in deforestation.
- Sell surplus goods to traveling merchants or establish trade routes of your own. Manufacturing and exporting quality goods will provide wealth to upgrade your city, pay taxes to your liege, hire mercenaries, and unlock technologies for new industries, products, and tools.
Yours is but a small parcel of land in a vast territory, and the competing ambitions between you and neighboring lords will inevitably lead to conflict. Lead your people into battle, not as expendable units to be easily replenished, but as your beloved loyal subjects where every death is a cost worth considering.
- Train a retinue of skilled warriors to fight battles alongside the levies you raise from the town militia. At times these soldiers will be needed to crush rebellions or suppress banditry, and at other times you will lead your men into battle to conquer or defend territory. When needed, mercenaries are a costly option to bolster your ranks.
- A robust diplomacy system will allow you to communicate with other lords, using influence or threats to sway their actions. These competing lords have their own goals and will seek you out as well, and your response to their offers or insults can mean the difference between war and peace.
- Command real-time tactical battles, taking into consideration fatigue, weather conditions, and equipment. Position your troops wisely – a smaller force can defeat a larger enemy, if commanded well.
- Feel the cost of battle, even in victory, as each fallen soldier represents a lost person from your city. A pyrrhic victory can spell economic doom, or a winter of rationing food and firewood.
This game is a passion project started by a solo developer. You can reach out to me and share your opinions, ideas, and criticisms – I listen to your feedback.
Steam User 516
To the devs. If you're reading this, do NOT give up on this game. Bought it for myself as a Christmas gift and now I can't put it down. It feels like a real game, it feels fun, and you can feel the passion that went into it.
Steam User 281
Early Access Review - July 9th, 2024
First off, I am going to rate this game positively, but I am mainly going to be putting criticism in this review. I am also only going to state what is in the game when posted, and not what it could potentially have. It's a beautiful and fairly well optimized game. Great for relatively casual play. However the game does not last as long or as challenging as I would like, making the price a bit steep for what it is currently.
For me, the game has me a bit perplexed. On one hand, I like how the management is not overwhelming for the individual towns. On the other hand, it means there is often a lot of times where this is very little for the player to do. A lot of people are going to over-optimize their towns, but there is really very little reason to do so as the game naturally solves the problem quite easily. It's basically best to try and build your towns to resemble medieval towns, level 3 houses around the market, level 2 on the outskirts, and level 1 in little hamlets around the region.
The main difficulty is that you are basically forced to make every town completely self-sufficient. It is realistic, but for unless you are in one of the two fertile regions on the map, it is very difficult to make grain crops to have a supply of bread for a whole year, leaving you weirdly more dependent off of vegetables, eggs, berries and hunting than what should be expected. While in theory you are supposed to optimize each village to an industry, the exporting and trade system doesn't really balance out between the regions, making the small exporting towns quite rich, while population centers to be fairly poor, due to the exporting towns not needing goods from larger towns. Due to this, the game somewhat encourages the development of only one region, then has the player just take over all of the rest, which I don't think is intentional at all.
Combat is also far simpler than I would have liked. While arches have been buffed from early access release, they are still underwhelming. The current combat scale is a bit too small to make positional warfare an important strategy, making the simplest strategy to just have spear militia to pin the enemy and retinue charge and break them. Unless you can get silver VERY fast, mercenaries are largely out of the question for the player.
The other thing is that the physical map stays the same, though each time you start the game the resources and fertility are randomized. I would recommend restarting the game until you have a starting region that you are happy with. However, even with this, the game doesn't really encourages me to do a second playthough after fully restoring the peace. I might build another settlement on that playthrough just to try and make a better ale production, though in reality, most likely I will just have to crash the global demand for ale with this new town just to the price is cheaper for all my other towns to import it.
Once again, I did enjoy this game. Most of the enjoyment is from watching your town grow, and walking around. Don't try to meta this game too hard, just try to relax and take your time with it. Other than the occasional bandit raid or claim being pushed on you, it is actually a fairly relaxing game to wind down to once you have the necessities built and families assigned. Further expansion of required goods and services to the towns will likely make it more interesting in the long run, as well as more diplomacy and other AI towns on a larger map. I am willing to see where this game will head in the future, though it will likely be several more years until a more complete vision will be realized.
Also, feel free to ask me any questions on this game in the comments below, and I'll gladly answer them!
Steam User 1125
as of 24/12/2024, i have seen some adverts from a game called "king of Avalon," on youtube using footage of this game. however i cannot report it and i suspect that the footage is being used without consent. i do not know how to contact the devs about this.
Steam User 188
I love this game. The atmosphere, graphics, the possibilities.... But it deserves much more content and improvements from the dev. So please, dude, don't give up on Manor Lords! At least give the modding kit to community, so the game won't just die in EA.
Steam User 176
A Flawed Gem with Immense Potential
I wanna start off by saying—I love this game. With all its imperfections, things that need repolishing, or straight-up reworking, Manor Lords is still fun. I’ve spent over 50 hours in under three weeks. It hooked me fast, even if that excitement slowly faded over time.
Pros :
Cons :
Great graphics and art style. It's genuinely one of the better-looking city builders out there.
Slow updates. This is the main issue. The game has been sitting in Early Access limbo. I looked at it six months ago, and honestly? Not much has changed. Yes, the dev released a preview for an upcoming update—and it looks promising—but until it drops, I have to call it like it is: the game lacks innovation right now.
Flexible building system. The modular housing and placement freedom are a joy to work with.
Bugs that won't go away. I haven’t had as many issues as some others, but I’ve still seen families disappearing, or burgage plots refusing to build despite having all the materials and workers ready.
Trading system has potential. Imports/exports work well enough, but the packing station (used to trade between your own regions) is basically useless right now.
Micromanagement gets tedious. There’s no way to manage multiple buildings of the same type in bulk. Setting work areas for each logging camp or forester one-by-one gets old fast. Also, each new region starts from scratch with its own progression tree, which kills the pace. If I’ve built up one region, I should be able to transfer that momentum.
Helpful tooltips. Most buildings have a "?" icon that explains their purpose and requirements. Super handy when you’re learning the ropes.
Optimization is rough. Could be on my end, but I’m running an RTX 3060 and i5-10500, and this game runs worse than Cyberpunk or RDR2. Even on medium settings I get frame drops, and x12 speed turns the game into a slideshow.
A lot of people have pointed out the €40 price tag—and honestly, I get it. For an Early Access title, it is steep. I managed to get a key for just under €20, and I don’t regret it one bit. At that price, there’s more than enough content to justify the purchase. At €40? Not quite yet. Manor Lords is far from polished—but even so, I still recommend it. With the right updates and some much-needed refinement, it has the potential to become something truly special.
Steam User 127
Manor Lords is a relaxed, slow-paced experience about creating the perfect town.
This is one of Manor Lords’ most striking features from the get-go: its deliberate slow-paced gameplay, which expertly captures the slow and steady rhythm of medieval life. Buildings take time to construct, as your villagers need to transport the necessary materials to the building’s location, and some other villagers need to go there and work on it. More complex buildings take longer to build because more material needs to be carried over and a lot more manpower is necessary to complete the task.
In this vein of keeping things slow, but steady, the construction tab might seem rather underwhelming at first, with little more than a couple dozen buildings. No not- I repeat- do not be fooled by this. You see, in Manor Lords, things work a bit differently than other games of the genre. While Anno and Frostpunk have specific buildings for each step of the production chain, Manor Lords’ buildings can serve several purposes.
This game is different. It scratches an itch I haven’t had scratched in a long time, just sitting and watching the progression of my village, the construction, the survival of my people just feels so…real.
It may sound cheesy but I can’t help but feel like a real Lord managing a real town, in a time that happened long ago. The relaxing nature and organic feel of the city building, coupled with the realism of it all makes me feel very, full. Like I can see myself putting hours into this game in this mode alone. My honest review is that this Early Access game, feels so complete despite being incomplete.
Graphics are gorgeous. Ambiance is fantastic. Music is excellent!
Overall for an early access it exceeded my expectations. I highly recommend it to all city builders.
P .S. They just announced more updates and game will be running on UE5 soon!
Steam User 169
It would be great to add a court system for villagers who commit crimes. And we can decide what punishment to give. So, prisons and gallows can be built near the settlement. Also, people living in the settlement can be happy or disappointed according to our decision. Because, if we decide to kill criminals for every crime, society may lose trust in justice and therefore there may be a decrease in happiness.