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 438
I don't think the reviews saying the developer has been on "radio silence" are particularly fair. They've communicated pretty well throughout as far as I'm concerned. I think some people have quite unrealistic expectations and that's led to disappointment.
Personally I have enjoyed the game a lot since launch and I've felt very excited to play again each time there's been a new update. Did the last major take longer than expected? Yes. Did I put it down and play other things while I waited? Yes. Was any of that a problem? No.
Steam User 332
Normally don't write reviews but seeing the recent ones are mixed felt obligated to chip in.
I myself have spent hundreds of hours in this game, albeit in custom difficulty modes. Customization is good here; I've crafted a difficulty scenario where I am not being mercilessly attacked nor having my territory taken, but fighting the AI Lord is still a challenge. That being said...
The level of depth in the Burgage plots alone is what drew me to this game. It's Banished but with real upgrades that mean something. You can build burgage plots that are just big enough for a backyard, and plan that entire family around becoming a tailor/butcher/brewer etc. to boost your economy and resource production. The fact that at level 1 these plots can be made MASSIVE and turned into a vegetable field (Or Orchard!) while simultaneously housing up to 2 families is amazing!! It allows such a wide variety of strange and natural shapes to exist within your town, and can help keep village designs from turning into grids.
The learning curve here is similar to every colony sim IMO, you just kinda have to face smash the first few colonies until you understand how to quickly setup the things necessary for a taxable village, then mercenaries and retinue can be aquired to fight the bandits and prepare for later combat with the AI Lord. The difficulty here is that if the AI Lord is "aggressive" he will be able to claim your starting territory before you can get any troops gathered, and it's kinda game over from there. Changing that setting alone will make the game much more playable. I recommend playing with just bandits for a bit to get the feel for quickly getting troops together.
The graphics are amazing, and among the best I've seen in a colony sim. The villagers hammer and saw on structures and individual beams and walls get added on as the construction goes on, which is an incredible touch. Animation of the villagers is good from afar or up close. On the larger villages (50+ level three burgage plots) you can get some chugging, but that could also be my dated CPU.
All in all this is one of my favorite colony sims I've ever played, and I eagerly await the updates. From the begining this has been a very small team, but they've always done great work and listened to the community. I get the feeling that some of the updates they are working on are more challenging than the last, but I have faith that this game will be carried through to it's potential!
Steam User 277
Rating this game is a little bit difficult.
The game has awesome visuals, amazing animations, and really good graphics.
In short, it’s not a bad game about the Middle Ages.
However, the game doesn’t have real enemies, and that’s very important.
We only have a “nominal enemy” outside the map, and it gets boring asf.
There is also a real problem with architecture in big cities.
The game has a maximum of only three building models for level 3 buildings (the highest level).
As a result, the cities feel soulless and repetitive, with boring buildings everywhere.
BUT LISTEN! The developer already knows about these problems, and real bots are being added in the beta test, along with a lot of other content.
So I know this game is not abandoned and has a real future.
For an early access game, it’s really good.
Steam User 247
Alright, so I have a love/hate relationship with this game. Its a fun game and if you wanna spend alot of time developing a nice city and doing all that then this is great for you. But somethings to be aware of:
- The economy is ****EXTREMELY**** broken. You could be selling swords, spears, helmets, boots, cloaks, veggies, beer, dyes, charcoal, wool, linen, wooden parts and both types of shields. But if you need Barley & grain it'll sink your regional wealth. Which in turn bankrupts you. So basically if you cant build a town that is 100% self sustaining then you may as well quit and start over.
- The enemy will spawn directly into your town. Wether it be bandits or the opposing Lord. Sometimes they'll spawn other places but majority of the time they are going to spawn from off map, directly into your region. So prepare to have your town completely wiped several times a game.
- When the off map Lord decides to attack, don't just assume you won because you won the first battle. Give it about 60 seconds and he will spawn a completely new and fresh army to attack you with. So you could of spent ridiculous amounts of money mainlining a standing army of your own, supplementing it with mercenaries, and it'll likely not be enough. So get ready to lose. Also understand that you will never have a retinue as large as his. He will have around 30+ and max you can get is like 24. Plus have several bands of mercenaries with him. Which again, will all re spawn fresh and ready to go.
- If you have mercenaries spawned on the map be prepared for your carts/oxen to get caught in them. So keep an eye on them or it'll cause a clog.
- Resource distribution is wild in this game. A house directly next to a fully stocked market might get the resources from it. Maybe. But one a few blocks down the road will definitely get them.
- Keep an eye on production. If you don't set limits on what your specialists make then they're going to drain every last resource you have and its not physically possible to keep up.
- Lately unassigned workers have been disappearing. Why? who knows. You'll have 10 unassigned families and they will all disappear.
- The villagers are MASSIVE drunks. Your most valuable resource in the entire game is ale. Everything comes to a screeching halt without it. You cant upgrade buildings. You cant get perk points. You'll lose. But again you cant really import it because it'll bankrupt you. So good luck.
- DON'T BOTHER WITH APIARIES. They are worthless and a massive waste of time. Streamers say they're great but they're lying. You get maybe 3 honey a month from them. Which is instantly gone and you don't see a benefit from it because its burnt through so fast. So do yourself a favor and pick a different perk. It doesn't matter how many you place down or how many families you assign. You re only getting a max of 3. Period. End of story.
- Also don't bother getting the hunter traps or double meat perks. They don't work either. You cant physically produce enough meat to sustain a villages wants. So forget it altogether and focus on veggies, berries and apples. Maybe if you're lucky you might get good farm land and can grow some wheat and barley. But don't count on it. Farmers will consistently not plow half a field or wont plant most of it. I've found it best to make small .3 size plots for farming. But the problems still persist regardless of how many farmers, oxen and time you devote to it.
For all of its flaws it is a fun game. Sometimes you'll do alright and somehow survive long enough to complete a map. But odds are you wont. Get comfortable with the idea of spending hours, even days, working on one really awesome town. Then it's going to be levels by bandits and the rival lord will take it over and then you'll have to start all over. For a single developer its a very beautiful game and has some seriously solid bones. But obvious being in early access its gonna have issues. Apparently there's a complete rework being made so maybe soon all of these issues wont even be a thing anymore. Fingers crossed cause I do enjoy it.
Steam User 408
the solo developer took 10 months to develop an update that doubles the content in the game and hire team members, and the games reviews fell into mixed in that time period.
anyways the game is best-in-class for colony management and medieval combat.
Steam User 77
I'm sitting at about 115 hrs and there is a lot I could say about this game but I will try to keep it as short and sweet as possible. I LOVE the concept of this game (city builder / RTS / economy & resource management / I can grow wheat and bake bread) it literally scratches multiple itches for me. At first I was really excited to learn how devoted and active the devs are...but at times it seems like a curse for this game.
There have been several overhauls of systems (I'm happy to see the skill tree gone) but I absolutely can't fathom why the trading system is being reworked (it works just fine) before the devs give me any reason to expand my town past the first development point. I see it echoed throughout the community and I hope the devs are listening but I'm not super confident (I.E "here's a new map and burgage plot level that literally nobody asked for") but I really really hope they take a beat, and fix / improve things that already exists and would bring so much replayability to the core came play loop. I'm really having a hard time bringing myself to starting another game when I know there is no real motivator to grow my town past the first 5 burgage plots.
I know I'm being dramatic but if we get yet another map before additional development points I might lose it. All that being said, I very much still recommend this game and I think it already has a lot and hopefully is going to turn into one of the best games across multiple genres. Devs if you read this I appreciate the work you're doing and am proud of your success, but please listen to the community.
Steam User 105
I really want to love this game, and I think there is a strong core / framework / foundation for the city-building, but unfortunately everything outside of that feels woefully shallow and/or unfinished. That's understandable in an EA title, but even in the newest beta update (which I understand is mostly refactoring/reorganizing) these kinds of core issues aren't addressed to any degree.
In short, the good/great:
- Great city-building mechanics
- Interesting resource allocation, management and progression
- Very cool building tile system and specifically the use of core burghs/houses which can upgrade several levels or be specialized
- Interesting new perk and environment system which looks promising, but only available through a single perk (for now)
- The scale and building animations are great
The bad:
- Diplomacy is non-existent and shouldn't even be in the game in it's current state
- The UI is clunky at best. It desperately needs an update for things like the Help pages, where tabbed content doesn't have any kind of logical organization and you can't search, only to find in many cases extremely vague and curt descriptions some of which end with where this resource comes from but don't bother stating what it's used for and what you do with it (like Wax).
- Population management becomes a chore and there's no menu that lists out all the families in a town and lets you unassign at will, instead forcing you to meticulously point-and-click search through buildings to see where spare families might be. This becomes very unwieldy once you reach 40+ families.
- Family assignment to buildings is too simplistic, and inevitably causes you to babysit buildings like farmhouses where workers are only relevant for 6/12 months of the year. Since you can't assign a family to multiple roles with any kind of priority/seasonal system (farm until harvest, plow/sow, then go chop wood during winter instead of sitting around doing nothing for the next 9 months) you have to heavily micro-manage.
- Resource nodes are too scattershot and random in the region-system of the game. As of the beta you're guaranteed to at least get stone and food, but if you don't have rich iron, clay, or etc, you have no way to gain these except trading, where fees are exorbitant and trickle even with 4 traders on horses is very slow.
Unfortunately I could go on and on with more and more nitpicks, and it feels like this is yet another case of an indie game with fantastic potential that is simply trying to cram too many mechanics into itself instead of having a more concentrated and focused core gameplay loop. Maybe this will change in the future with the newer team and all this refactoring and promise of smaller more consistent updates, but as of now, it struggles under the weight of it's own ambition.
I'm giving it a Recommended, but a very tentative one. There's a lot of potential here from someone clearly very talented, and it's a smart idea to get a team together, but the game desperately needs entire sections of itself (almost every aspect of the in-game UI, diplomacy, etc) overhauled or replaced because it feels and very obviously is placeholder content.