Being a medieval peasant had some advantages. For example, Twitter hasn’t been invented yet, so your exposure to the worst opinions in the world is very limited. But all in all, there are a lot more negatives. Health is a bit problematic. You don’t have central heating. Strenuous labor is the norm. And if you live in my village of Manor Lords, you’re probably getting really tired of eating eggs and stepping over corpses.
Manor Lords is a medieval city-building game that I’ve been eagerly awaiting for a while now, and with an early access launch on the horizon, I donned a stylish cloak and began leading my people to prosperity. There were some bumps in the road.
The city-building boom has seen many developers introduce some dramatic twists on the genre, like building a society on the back of a giant creature in The Wandering Village or letting villages grow organically. Basis—Manor Lords feels a little more traditional at first. You start with a camp and a few homeless settlers in a densely forested map, and from there you work your way down roads and buildings, from houses to sawmills, as you try to expand while keeping your villagers both alive and happy.
As you upgrade the houses, more demands are placed on you. Your villagers, who were once content with water, food and clothing, now expect a more varied diet and suffering in the tavern. bread, fruit And beer? I know, this is ridiculous. So you build more buildings, but this requires more villagers, which then need to be housed and fed, which means you have to start building extra farms and more logging camps, which need more villagers and the cycle continues .
But within these traditions, Manor Lords do some very interesting things, such as making sure a house is not just a simple dwelling. While most buildings are placed individually, for houses you need to drag a box where the size determines how many buildings appear. The wider the box, the more houses there are. Meanwhile, the height of the box determines how much space each family will have to develop their property.
work from home
Once a house is built you can go to the building menu and start giving it more benefits. This way, your villagers can grow carrots in their gardens, develop apple orchards or raise chickens, easing the burden on your food production and making winters when foraging and farming are impossible much less deadly. The larger the plot, the more fruit trees, land and chicken coops they can fit into it. Villagers will also work in their gardens when they are not busy in other buildings, so this does not remove a family from the workforce.
You can’t expect someone to make 20 spears and then do some work in the fields.
The higher the level of a house, the more benefits you can bring to it. In the second phase, you can turn houses into workplaces by creating blacksmiths to arm your militia or brewers to supply your tavern. But doing this creates families of craftsmen, which means they can’t work in other buildings. You can’t expect someone to make 20 spears and then do some work in the fields. As a cruel medieval nobleman, you might probably expect this, but you really shouldn’t.
That’s why everyone in my village eats so many eggs. Look, food production is hard. A small village is easy to maintain, but after a certain point you won’t be able to make any surplus for the winter just by hunting and gathering. That’s when you should start thinking about farming, but it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming. Workers must cultivate the land, plant seeds, wait for them to grow, and then harvest. This takes months. They then need to turn the wheat into grain and deliver it to the mill; Here, a different group of workers turns it into flour and puts it in storage. Finally, bakers will turn that flour into bread and sell it in the market.
The bread-making process can take 14 families out of the labor pool and requires some micromanagement when they have nothing to do later in the year, so they must be placed in new roles. Instead, I decided to fill everyone’s garden with chickens. This may be an era of feudalism, but my villagers are a group of community-minded proto-communists. They control the means of production and then take and share what they harvest in the village warehouse, which can then be distributed in the market for everyone to benefit from. Eggs for everyone!
I love eggs now. On some toast. In a bowl of ramen. It is made entirely of chocolate. Eggs are amazing. If I only eat eggs, I might get a little bored of them. My villagers felt the same. While very few non-egg products were sold in the market, my villagers began to grumble and my approval rating dropped. It also became harder to attract new homes, and as the food variety diminished, I couldn’t renovate any of my existing homes. My initially very promising, seemingly forward-thinking egg strategy turned out to be devastating to society. Progress stalled and I looked like a complete idiot.
death and taxes
It certainly didn’t help that the village was dealing with some sort of body problem. In the default early access scenario, you are encouraged to play at your own pace, as your only opponent, your lord, will largely leave you alone. You’ll see their armies marching around, and you may get a little annoyed when they wipe out areas near you, but you never need to face them until you’re ready. But bandits are a different matter. At first the existence of their camp drains resources thanks to their sticky fingers, but eventually they will start attacking your village.
The good news is that bandits are pretty terrible at fighting, and you’ve got enough guns to form a small militia right out the door. Once you have some iron, wood and craftsmen you can create so much more or just create a trade route and buy what you need. You will be able to easily defend a single village with two or three units of 20-30 soldiers. But fighting is still a risk. When members of the militia die, this means, not surprisingly, that they are unable to work; so you’re stuck with a family that doesn’t pull their weight until they can replace their deceased loved one. I haven’t encountered many peasant deaths yet, though; The problem I’m having is actually due to the effectiveness of my little warriors.
Apparently bodies don’t disappear the moment they hit the ground. Who knew? When a peasant dies, he is buried in the church cemetery, but bandits do not deserve this honor. They are thrown into a pit of corpses. A corpse pit that I finally remembered to build but forgot to activate by hiring a villager. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to walk among rotting cadavers on your way to a bar or on your way to work in the morning, but judging by the reaction of my villagers, it’s not a very pleasant experience. They still find being taxed much worse, they admit, but in my village, dead bodies are high on the list of things they hate about living.
In some city builders these problems could mean the end of my village, but Manor Lords is not a brutal survival city builder. Winters can be harsh, deaths can cause setbacks, and you can’t thrive by eating eggs alone, but other than that, it’s pretty forgiving. A little bit of trading can usually solve most problems. For example, if you’re also overinvested in eggs, it’s simple enough to start exporting whatever you have in excess and then import some food. By spending a little money, you can also create convenient trade routes to ensure a more regular supply.
Winters can be harsh, deaths can cause setbacks, and you can’t thrive by eating eggs alone, but other than that, it’s pretty forgiving.
You can also create an internal trade network by capturing other regions and developing more villages. Frankly, this is very important. Each region has the basic resources you need, but this will not be enough in the long run and will require the development of a settlement further away. The impetus for my first expansion was drink. There was nowhere suitable to grow barley in my starting area, so I had to use my influence to stake a claim next door. Now my villagers are all drunk and they hate me less; Hooray!
All this talk of death, taxes and eggs paints a bleak picture, but Manor Lords is an engaging city-building game that will leave you in complete awe of what you’ve built. As a nobleman, I spent a fair amount of time wandering around, and even outside of this mode you can go from looking at the map of each district down to street level without any problems. If you’re hopelessly obsessed with taking screenshots like me, you’ll probably also appreciate the ability to remove the HUD by pressing CTRL+C. Clearly a lot of work has gone into portraying the villagers, and the variety of outfits and activities are surprisingly diverse. For a game where you’ll be spending a lot of time zoomed in, it’s also impressive how much fine detail it has, like market stalls displaying real goods or villagers being covered in snow when they go for a stroll in winter.
Manor Lords looks pretty polished as early access links go, and the only issue I’ve encountered so far is some of the houses in my second village being razed to the ground by bandits. I couldn’t rebuild them, and when I demolished the vacant lots they essentially became “temporary” storage areas that were permanent and impossible to move. Meanwhile, the villagers refused to move into the empty houses I had generously built for them, choosing instead to freeze to death when winter came. My villagers are hardworking but not very smart.
While the current build is missing many upgrades and policies that allow you to fine-tune Medieval society, I’ve still found myself extremely busy over the past few days and have a lot more to explore before improving. I have enough courage to declare war on my opponent. I’m sure my villagers are eager for more corpses.
Anyway, harvest season is coming soon, so I’d better get back. But do you know? Before I start, I might as well make myself a delicious omelette.