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 2634
The best medieval-ish city builder. I happen to be a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, and games that market themselves as “historically authentic” often leave a lot to be desired as such games often don’t even try to emulate the time period beyond basic aesthetics. Since a lot of the hype around Manor Lords comes from its commitment to historical accuracy, I'll be reviewing it from that perspective. This game, although there is room for improvement, is clearly an earnest attempt to enable players to recreate reasonably authentic medieval towns and villages and gets closer to that goal than any of its rivals. After spending about a dozen hours building a large town, it's very much unfinished but what's there is good.
There is currently one map with some RNG elements, such as your starting location and the starting location of a rival lord who also wants this land and whom you will eventually have to fight. You will build houses which can, as was typical in the Middle Ages, have a productive plot of land to the rear for a vegetable garden or household animals like goats or a chicken coop, and the system for building them is intuitive, flexible, and a joy to use. You’ll have to manage trade with off-map settlements as well as maintain a militia to deal with bandits or the rival lord. On the whole, I really like it.
There are some issues with the mechanics of the game:
1. There is no way (that I can find) to limit the production of certain goods without micromanaging employment. It would be good to say “have a stockpile of 50” like you can in other settlement management games, and like you can with the trading system. I would like to not have to micromanage 14 houses just to regulate what planks are used for. This has now been fixed, great job.
2. Combat is trivial assuming rough parity between the size of the armies. You have to try to lose a battle to lose a battle.
3. Bandit raids on your village happen off screen a lot of the time. Like, you can’t defend your settlement, you just get a notification that you’ve lost goods to bandits. Let us defend ourselves please, or let us have a bailiff to reign in the thieves.
4. Trade is overpowered, you can get to a point where the player can run the whole settlement through trade. Trade has no risks, so the game steers the player toward relying on trade rather than managing their villages. This has been overcorrected and dealt with in the wrong way I think. Trade is now a great way to completely wreck your regional economy because you'll be exporting tools and warbows for 5 gold while bringing in barley at 12 gold a bushel.
5. The rival lord expands far too aggressively, even on its lowest settings. By the time you can claim a single neighboring parcel of land, you’ll be lucky not to have been boxed in completely. The AI takes one parcel a year, there are 8 provinces, and it starts with two while you start with one. This means that by year 5 the AI has the map locked down entirely while you’re still trying to get a decent harvest in. This sucks and is the game’s biggest problem right now. It has been toned down a bit but I still feel unable to compete.
The game has a remarkable ability to enable the player to create authentic medieval town layouts, and you could probably recreate some medieval towns in the game pretty accurately. However, the game seems to be based on central Europe around 1400, so it does tend to lean toward villages and towns from that time and place. While you can emulate, for example, Norman town planning with its focus on commercial high/fore streets, you cannot build a medieval Italian town in this game because plazas are not a thing (yet), while building a village around a central green would be aesthetic rather than the functional heart of the village.
This leads on to an area where the game and its commitment to historical accuracy will hopefully improve as development continues, which is forest and land management. In most medieval-ish town planning games (this one included) you put down a logging hut and they just cut down trees, then a forester plants new trees. This is not how medieval people generally managed their woodland, if only because it’s remarkably inefficient prior to mechanised forestry. Although the villages are historically authentic, the same effort has not been put into those villages’ relationship with the land (yet). Some suggestions:
1. Coppicing. Coppicing was the practise of cutting a tree down to the stump to stimulate the growth of shoots around the stump, essentially tricking one tree into growing many trees. This would result in a large amount of harvestable wood within 7-10 years. However, the shoots were vulnerable to being eaten by deer. It has been used as a means to harvest firewood in Europe for over 1000 years.
2. Pollarding. The same idea as coppicing, but it’s done about 2m up the tree trunk. You get less wood that’s harder to access, but deer won’t eat it.
3. Deeper deer management. Of course, if deer keep eating everything you could just kill all the deer. Deer culling was (and still is) an important part of forestry. Although the game does have deer management it is as simple as “don’t over-hunt”. It would be good to see this expanded to reflect the real world impacts of deer overpopulation or underpopulation.
4. Wolf management. When creating new villages, they often encroached on the habitats of wolves. Wolves don't usually attack people, but if they get used to human contact and become habituated, they do. A mechanic for wolf packs similar to deer migration (except rather than going further away when bothered, they attack) might work well. It would be nice to fight something other than the tropey RNG bandit camp.
It’s got a lot of promise, I’m sure I’ll enjoy sinking hundreds of hours into it over the years, but you might want to wait a year or so until it’s further along development.
Steam User 280
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 384
I went into this game having already played the demo when that was a thing.
I learned important lessons about food and fuel during that, and thought I was ready for this...
I was wrong.
Things went smoothly for my first 10 or so winters, biding my time and slowly building up.
I managed to keep the supply chain going, having no issues with food, fuel, or other goods needed for upgrades and further expansion.
My subjects were a happy bunch, who worked hard and partied harder.
The forests were well kempt, the fields were flourishing, and people had the extras a plenty.
The one thing I failed to account for was the brigands, who decided I was a juicy target.
Their first band was beaten by the Baron's army before they even got to my territory, a great success for my unprepared militia.
A couple of springs later, they returned in force. My militia was even less prepared for this attack, and ended up being nuked by the bastards. They proceeded to destroy nearly the entire village, and stole most of my food-stores.
I worked diligently to rebuild the lost homes, workplaces, markets, and church.
The loss of all that food resulted in the village starving from October onwards, and it didn't get any better after that following fall's harvest.
My people spent yet another winter starving, but steadfast and faithful that the situation would improve.
Boy were they wrong.
Following that winter's starvation, the brigands came once more during the summer.
New crops were well on their way, and things had the potential to look bright.
The people's (and mine as a result) hopes and dreams were crushed in yet another devastating battle for my reformed militia and tiny retinue.
It was a massacre. The blood of poor farmers, cobblers, hunters, brewers, loggers, and many more was spilled across the houses and fields. The young were annihilated in the second sacking of the church. The manor's walls were swiftly torn down. The burgages, farmhouses, and markets were burned to a fine crisp. The pandemonium was palpaple as I hopelessly watched all I built be torn to the ground.
To round of the brigand's attack, that bastard Baron decided now was the time to claim my land. He swiftly moved in and finished of the remaining brigands, and destroyed what little the brigands had yet to destroy of my now defenceless village.
I could only watch in 12x speed horror, as his army celebrated on what once was a bustling, up-and-coming, town.
The pain in my heart is untenable, my sorrow unquechable, my desire for revenge impossible to ignore.
I will avenge this loss in my next attempt at besting that Robber-Baron, I swear on my un-born children's soul that it will be done.
Game is well worth its current price. 10/10, would die to brigands and starvation again.
Steam User 125
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 703
I've been involved with the development of this this game as a researcher and tester, when I heard that a medieval city builder was coming that involved a developer who actually cared about historical accuracy I wanted in.
ML is a GORGEOUS game that depicts the middle ages on an authentic level that is rarely seen in gaming or film/tv. etc.
Almost always the middle ages are dirtier, grittier, backwards, violent, etc. than they ever were or they add something silly like dragons or other fantasy nonsense.
Which is fine if you're into that sort of thing but I want real history.
Anyway, even in this Early Access state it's already a great game that is a lot of fun, I've put over 230 hours into it and will spend many more.
And although everyone keeps reminding each other that it is not a war game and battle isn't as big a part of it as some may think, I also rather like the battles and think they're impressive, exciting and fun.
But above all this is just a superb city builder that shows us a medieval life that's quite realistic and wonderful to look at.
But it's also just a better city builder, ML has ruined so many other city builders for me that insist on still using grids & straight only roads!
FRRREEEDOM!
The game has insane graphics, superb detail and, as I can tell you as someone who has had a peek behind the scenes of the making of the game, that has been researched, researched and then researched some more.
If you love medieval history, you'll love this game.
And this is just the beginning, more is going to be added!
I was very excited when I first heard about this game and was not disappointed.
I love it.
Remember it's early access and will continue to develop, improve and have new stuff added to it, yet it's already such fun to sink a lot of time into.
10/10, would have my village burned down again.
PS: if you think the middle ages were just filth, mud, backwardsness and no progress, read this;
Steam User 106
Pretty amazing for a City Builder. Everything feels so satisfying. Armies and Combat overall is very awesome to experience. There's not too many enemies in the game yet for endless War with different people. The only thing is once you have a big city there's not much else to do since it's pretty early in development and a lot of stuff still says "coming soon".
If you want to experience an amazing city builder you can casually build in I'd 100% recommend. But, if you're looking for more things to do within this game, I'd hold off for another year or so for more content.
Steam User 108
Manor Lords Review: A Comprehensive Guide to Doing Medieval Chores in Stunning 4K
If you’ve ever thought, "I wish I could micromanage a village full of peasants who constantly look like they regret their life choices," then Manor Lords is the game for you.
The graphics are so realistic that you can almost smell the dirt and desperation of your villagers. Watching them gather wood and stone is surprisingly therapeutic, until you realize you've spent three hours constructing a market that four people use—because apparently, medieval trade is even slower than my Wi-Fi.
The combat system? It exists. Sort of. You command your troops like a medieval football manager, but instead of scoring goals, they just die in highly cinematic ways. Strategy is key, by which I mean hope for the best and blame your peasants when everything burns down.
In short, Manor Lords is the perfect way to fulfill your dream of living in medieval Europe without risking plague, famine, or the actual responsibility of running anything. 10/10 would delegate tasks to virtual followers again.