Manor Lords is a City-Builder / Real-Time Strategy hybrid released in 2024 by one-man studio Slavic Magic. You play the role of a local Lord in 15th century Franconia, and are tasked with asserting your control over the entire region using clever urban planning and strength of arms.
Starting only with a small camp, the player must develop their territory, attract additional settlers, extract the natural resources, trade for things they don't have, stockpile weapons and armor, and ultimately develop the wilderness into a thriving metropolis, all while dealing with bandit raids, harsh winters, natural disasters, and attacks by rival claiments.
The game features an ambitious free-form building system in which the player is not bound to any sort of grid, and is free to place any building anywhere in the game world, using a similarly free-form road system to connect those buildings and place footpaths and lanes between them, which will eventually grow into bustling city streets...
...assuming you make it that far. While the developer eschews typical Dung Ages stereotypes and has clearly Shown Their Work, the medieval world is still a harsh one, and the player still must pay close attention to the needs and wants of their settlement's inhabitants, or else they might end up leaving. This is accomplished through another one of the game's innovations, the Marketplace - as in real medieval settlements, the townsfolk will set up market stalls in a player-designated area and distribute their excess goods among themselves. This can result in well-planned settlements essentially running themselves after a certain point, and the player is encouraged to move on to other areas of the map, building more towns which can be connected as part of a trade network.
While the developer insists that Manor Lords is not a true strategy game, it does feature Total War-style battles which take place in real time in the game world. The player can deploy their citizenry as a militia, recruit mercenaries, or rely on their elite customizable Lord's Retinue.
The game is currently in Early Access, and many aspects are subject to change as development continues.
See also Banished, which Manor Lords takes heavy inspiration from.
This game provides examples of:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: While the game strives for visual and tonal authenticity, a completely accurate simulation of medieval life probably wouldn't make for a very fun game, and so some liberties are taken.
- Charcoal kilns, malthouses, dyeworks and tanneries can be built anywhere in your city, and their staff live among your other townsfolk without complaint. In real medieval settlements, such facilities were usually built on the edge of town because of the horrid smells they produced, and charcoal burners and tanners were sometimes treated harshly due to the perceived dirtiness of their jobs.
- Your town church does not need a priest, presumably because it wouldn’t fit in with the game’s system of assigning jobs to families rather than individuals. Families assigned to the church become gravediggers instead. Procuring a literate parish priest could sometimes prove to be quite a challenge for fledgling medieval towns, and they often went to great lengths to obtain one.
- Annoying Arrows: Due to overcorrection on some Beta feedback which claimed they were overpowered, archers were very weak in the release version of the game, often requiring multiple volleys to kill a single enemy militiaman. This was rectified in a patch shortly after release.
- Boring, but Practical: One of the easiest ways to get rich early in the game is building a joinery and having them make wooden parts which you can then sell on a trade route - the parts don’t serve any gameplay function, are incredibly cheap and easy to make, and being constructed from wood means you have a theoretically infinite supply of them. Goods with long production chains like bread, ale and cloaks will net you a little more cash, but the time and resource investment means you’re better off just keeping them for your townsfolk and selling the useless wooden parts instead.
- The Dung Ages: Very much averted. Access to well-drawn water is one of your settlement's most basic needs, and your citizens and their environs will look clean and well-maintained unless enemy raiders come calling or a fire breaks out.
- Due to the Dead: Dead villagers must be given a Christian burial in your church graveplot, and leaving their bodies to rot will cause a huge approval loss. Raiders, brigands or enemy soldiers, on the other hand, can simply be thrown in a charnel pit, but you can also opt to bury them in consecrated ground if you want.
- Elite Mooks: The Lord’s Retinue are this for the player and rival lords. They are equipped with the full-face helmets and chainmail, and can be further upgraded with full plate armor, making them more or less impervious to damage from spears and arrows. Unlike the part-time militias and opportunistic bandits, the Retinue are professional warriors, and even a small group of them will likely be able to rout a numerically superior force. The trade-off is that they don’t contribute to your town’s economy, billeting in your manor instead, although this also means you can send them to their deaths without worrying about leaving your vital operations understaffed.
- Recruiting the Criminal: As well as mercenaries, the player can recruit the very brigands that they would ordinarily be fighting against. They are much cheaper than typical mercenaries, but are poorly armed and armored, and won't be a match for professional fighters. They are best used for mopping up bandit camps, or bolstering your town's defenses during raider attacks.
- Refining Resources: Most resources acquired from production buildings need to be refined by at least one other structure before they become directly usable, while some like timber need to be refined to gain new uses out of them. To elaborate, logging camps produce timber from nearby trees, which can either be used directly for building or converted into firewood or planks, with the former being needed to sustain towns while the latter is used in advanced construction.
- Shown Their Work: The game's developer took pains to avert common tropes about the Middle Ages, consulting historical advisors to ensure that the era would be portrayed as accurately and faithfully as possible, while still taking some mechanical liberties to ensure the game is still fun to play.
- The game's portrayal of archers is in particular very accurate. Their animation shows them pulling back the knocked arrow using their back and shoulder, rather than simply tugging on the bowstring with their hand as in most games. By default they shoot in the typical ahistorical volleys, but you can tell them to shoot at will as historical archers did, albeit at a slight cost to their range.
- Villagers operating heavy plows will dig a furrow, then move to the opposite side of the field, dig another furrow in the opposite direction, move back to the first side and so on. This can seem strange to modern audiences, to the point where some players reported it as a pathfinding bug, but it’s accurate to how medieval heavy plows were used - having an asymmetrical share that only moved soil in one direction meant that plowing subsequent furrows alongside each other would just pack up the previous furrow with soil. This also means that the player is encouraged to build their fields in a way accurate to the period - long and narrow - to minimise travel time between both sides of the field.
- You Have Researched Breathing: The development screen, where you buy upgrades, is this. For instance, it's impossible for your sheep to breed or your farmers to put a fence around their field (to use fallow fields as pastures) unless you specifically invest in those upgrades.
