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 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 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.
Steam User 322
I've clocked thousands of hours in Cities Skylines (and predecessors) and Civilization (and predecessors) so my reviewing expertise is mainly in quality as a sim builder and medieval sandbox.
Manor Lords is very representative entry in the gaming landscape over the last decade--tiny teams of indie developers producing games that clean the clocks of AAA studios. We are in a very weird era of underbaked, obviously bad, insanely expensive games from major studios that violate basic rules of game design. And next to those, we're getting staggeringly impressive games like Valheim.
Based on how enjoyable the last (checks notes) 84 hours have been, Manor Lords will be a staggering achievement when it's finished.
The core mechanics of Manor Lords are fleshed out, the rest is less than half done--but it's already more fun and gives more hours of playtime than most of the AAA games out right now. Electronic Arts would release this as finished for $50 and charge $50 for every improvement.
Perhaps the thing I find the most striking about the game is that you can shove your buildings pretty close together, at whatever angle you want, and roads can go anywhere you want, and plopping feels natural. If you're a city builder then you know that you normally have to mod your game to give yourself any real building freedom--Manor Lords bakes it in. As someone who has plopped down (checks notes) tens of thousands of little roads and buildings in Cities Skylines and Planet Coaster, I appreciate a developer who makes plopping down roads and buildings easy. Tool-tip style buttons let you tweak number of buildings. (I hope for the addition of an option to turn off collision entirely, along with the other conventional toggles you'd find in a sim cheat menu.)
The choices in gameplay are great. The balance is currently incomplete (as of March 2025), but all the paths to medieval success are different in style and weird and fun for their own reasons; each path shapes the town (literally!) in its own way. Right now the math is not mathing for breeding sheep, but just plopping them them down for aesthetic reasons alone feels enjoyable, and I look forward to building around pastures.
Battles are fun. I don't fully understand the strategy yet, but I look forward to them when they happen, which says a lot, since I'm a city builder person and have no experience with any grand battle games. Literally none. So if you don't either, don't worry about it, you'll be fine. The mercenary mechanics are great, as is the retinue system, as is the equipping the citizens system, which really connects the city you build with the army you make. It's really just very inspired, which is kind of hilarious, in that... the game literally just cloned historical accuracy.
If this game is remembered for anything, it will be for correctly deciding which pieces of historical accuracy to keep (answer: the fun ones).
Unless the developer were to make an incredible error in judgement, unlikely given the game's quality to this point, I assume the game will be made easily moddable when it's finished. Manor Lords has the same quality that The Sims and Cities Skylines do, which is their inherent appeal as a platform for expansion. I could see how modders would expand on elements like pastures, or trading, or resources, for a mini Stardew Valley situation for those who wanted it. And of course, modders can do what game developers can't, which is provide an infinite source of building skins for maximalist realism.
As of 3/15/2025, core features are missing due to the early access status. The castle building system is very much in progress, the UI is sparse in terms of allowing you to do things like find buildings and trade routes, and diplomacy systems and other enemy AI components are missing.
If you like builders or medieval sandboxes, and are relying on such things to give yourself some sense of control in an out of control world, you can go ahead and buy Manor Lords now. If you need a game to be finished before you buy it, then wait until it's done (or buy now if you want to be a patron). Quite a few game components are yet to be added or have the balance to make them functional.
As far as the political statement of the game--that's why the game is worth reviewing now and releasing in early access. Much of the world's recent tumult and fiction has been idealizing benevolent monarchies--framed in both liberal ideals of Bridgerton to right wing technocratic autocracy in post 2024 politics. Manor Lords engages the brutal rules of survival and the savage violence of the medieval era, its expendable mercenary war economy, the equivalent autonomy of computer variables and medieval peasants. You play through the costs and whys of those systems, and watch your people get pillaged with not much imagination required to guess what actually happens to civilians in war.
Twenty years ago, an ostensibly apolitical, historically accurate game about medieval times wouldn't have registered much as a statement, but it certainly does now. 9/10, with it on track to ding several "of all time" lists when it's finished.
Steam User 696
It is like Tropico with medieval battles.
And no mustaches.
The real question though is… will Henry come to see us?
Imagine an entire gaming company with the same amount of passion as the guy who made this game. One can dream… This game, made by one single person, is more fun, more complete, and has a more clear vision than most triple A garbage. Example: Ubisoft.
This game is Stronghold+Banished +Total War and I love all 3 of them and all 3 of them had something missing in them, and that was the other two games. Now someone made a fusion of all 3 games and it is awesome. Strongold lacked battle tactics and deeper survival aspects.
Banished lacked anything military.
Total War lacked anything city building and micro managing your town. It's like the perfect answer to when you’re playing Crusader Kings 3 and you really wish you could just jump right into one of the cities on the map! I was very much ready for this game.
Firstly though, are you the kind of person who will be upset about bugs, missing content, unbalanced game mechanics, and slow updates? If yes to any of these then wait for the game to develop further first. It's a single person making the game so you should be expecting updates to be slow and there are plenty of issues that need to be fixed.
Are you ok with all that and enjoy city builder/resource management games? If you're a city builder fan and want to follow along with progression of a potentially phenomenal game then give it a try. Even with the current state of the game there is plenty of fun to be had. It looks great, runs great, and is a really solid foundation for the dev to continue building on. It says a lot about a game where it's not close to a final state yet is so addictive. As long as you have realistic expectations of an Early Access game being developed by a single person then buy it and have fun with it.
There’s a lot of comparison to Banished but I think Manor Lords is more impressive. The atmosphere is amazing. Just the wilderness and the music and the way the peasants interact with the environment, really nails it. The framework of additional gameplay is there and I can’t wait for more to be added. Diplomacy and the need to expand into other territory and defend it is exciting. Manor Lords systems are simple, but it’s a system of systems. Balancing everything is where the challenge comes. Personally this game scratches an itch I have to set up a town and manage it. I find fun in the tinkering. Somehow I don't need a story or reason. It's just living life. I don't want to conquer or fight anyone. I want more people to move into my town and I like to watch it prosper. I have consoles and PC and many games, but all I want to do is manage my burgages.
It is so fun, it feels oddly satisfying to see your city grow, the buildings improve, the economy stabilising especially if you set up a trading post and start exporting and importing goods, etc. The combat is also surprisingly enjoyable, not because it is that complicated, but more because it is a people and army that you create. It’s a settlement management game like with RTS elements. Just don't expect full Total War levels for the RTS part. Your townsfolk are also your militia, so they will be farming and blacksmithing one day and then marching off to war the next. Any combat losses actually affect your workforce, because they are one in the same. You’ve got to gather the resources and craft (or trade for) your weapons and armor, so if your economy fails, so does your “war machine”. Their morale in battle is directly affected by their happiness as townsfolk etc. It’s all pretty clever and well-done.
You can make the AI really agressive and when you do I think it’s more enjoyable than Total War. Sure there are only a few unit types right now but that will change and honestly the battles are more satisfying. Having to arm all your men yourself makes you more invested. I’m honestly surprised so many people don’t mention the combat side of the game much, I think most people play on the default easy mode and never challenged the baron or tried to raid bandit camps. I’m willing to admit the combat side of the game needs a lot more but I think what’s aleady there is still immensely satisfying.
This is a single Dev so I was happy to throw him $30 out of support! He's been at it for years, and just now getting some return for his work, I don't see any reason for him to stop now, especially with some fresh capital to work with. He's got a great start and could turn this into a classic for the ages. I highly recommend buying it, but understand wanting to wait for a more complete version. It has its problems and if you are one of those people that gets frustrated when things don't work you might want to take a pass for now. I'm addicted to the game and love it bugs and all and I can see myself playing it for years and years to come.
Long story short it's a buy, but will drastically improve as time goes on so don't feel pressured to buy today, however a good buy nonetheless. It's an awesome game, if you are a true fan of the medieval era and if you are a contemplative gamer don’t hesitate on giving it a try!
9/10