Manor Lords Preview

Let me paint you a picture: Manor Lords is a city-builder sprinkled in with some 4X-like elements, where you'll grow a settlement from the very basics into a sprawling, gorgeous mediaeval town. From base-builder elements where you'll gather resources and work the land to ensure you're not overusing or abusing it to full-scale warfare, you'll be able to experience it in the way you want to. It started the year as the top-wishlisted title on Steam, and it's finally out in Early Access.

...Yet, it's being developed by a single person. Does it have the capability to meet all of the promises and keep every gameplay element that's been planned whilst still ensuring there's polish? Let's find out.

I'm a sucker for anything mediaeval — I was the first in line excited to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and if you sell me a title with the words "mediaeval" (especially "mediaeval fantasy"), I'll be sold without you saying anything else about it. Naturally, Manor Lords was up there in my list of titles that I wanted to try, and the more I learned about it, the better of an experience it sounded; I avoid Early Access titles like the plague, but I made an exception for this one. That should tell you how excited I was about the game.

Starting off, you begin your story by creating your character and banner, and from there, you can choose from one of three opening scenarios that are currently available, each representing a different game mode for the game. The first is Rise to Prosperity, where you start your journey in humble beginnings, and your goal is to reach a "Large Town" settlement level. It works as your base-building experience, allowing you to shift into Endless Mode once you've accomplished that initial goal. It’s essentially your tutorial, and the beginning where every Manor Lords player should start their journey, even if you're a veteran of the genre.

The reason? Simple: it seldom works like a tutorial, and Manor Lords leaves you to fend for yourself through a few pointers here and there, and then off you go to face the wilderness, oh m'lord/m'lady. It's a brutal upbringing that has you fighting for your life akin to how it's supposed to be — what sort of mediaeval simulator would it be if it held your hand? No one told Henry VI how to rule England, and we all saw how that went.

Starting up your village will require a few things: an entirely passive world so that no one kills you (more on the combat and other modes shortly), patience to understand the mechanics, basic base-building- and strategy-title knowledge... oh, and several-dozen pages on the official wiki filled with all of the information you'll need that the game doesn't want to share with you. Pretty much everything every monarch of the past had to expand and rule the world, of course.

The lack of tutorials had me plunging into the wiki quickly, though not because there aren't any tutorials whatsoever, but because the game has a few unique mechanics that fail to be explained. The prime example of this was the time I got stuck trying to grow because I couldn't quite create clothes — my peasants ran amok wearing glorified leather hunted and produced by the tanner with little sense of style. Of course, their clothing habits were nothing of concern to me — I was trying to keep them alive for the next winter! — but it wasn't until they demanded actual clothes and shoes that I got stumped. I'm trying to save us from famine and frostbite, and they have the audacity to want amenities like a tavern?

You see, to create things like the clothes, the shoes, and the taverns, you need specialised artisans in the trade that'll work on them, alongside a few other buildings that'll give you the materials to create the aforementioned items. From malt comes ale, from leather come shoes, and from linen comes clothes, but who makes them is hidden behind a unique mechanic I didn't quite get until I stormed into the wiki: building housing residences gives you the capability to provide them with either a backyard or a front yard. These two aren't purely cosmetic, either, as a front yard allows you to expand your burgage plot into more housing in the front or an artisan workshop in the back. 

This is an essential part of building your entire village, as without it, you can't have a blacksmith for weapons and a tailor's shop to not traumatise the youngsters. The only indicator of this element? An in-game tutorial when you open the burgage plot, in the second bullet point as a passing thought, "Oh, and by the way, y'know, you can create expansion upgrades. S'no big deal". So, I went out of my way to create several dozen homes with no expansion, which meant we had no shoes, we had no clothes, and — most importantly — we had no ale. If we can't get drunk, we can't do anything.

This pretty much extends to the entire gameplay elements, and though it's great to learn hands-on, I felt that Manor Lords sorely lacked that tutorial to help you get somewhere. Food and famine are an easy foe to beat — stupidity, however? That's kind of difficult, and Manor Lords forgot to account for the human factor of the tutorials.

Each time you start a game, you'll begin with a random region, each of which has a deposit of wild animals, berries, stone, iron, and clay, alongside a set "ground fertility" that'll indicate how good you'll be at farming. The reason you start with the Rise to Prosperity difficulty is because all of this is simple to manage... once you actually know how to do it. Whether you have a rich deposit of food or fertile land will determine your primary source of alimentation, whilst the others will become more of a backup and a way to cheer up your peasants by providing them a choice between food: an egregious amount of berries, one loaf of bread, or meat. 

This randomised element gives you the capability to play and replay, and it's a fantastic addition once you've already acquainted yourself with it. Your goal will become to expand into a region that has the resources you're lacking and ensure you can prosper and grow — I needed fertile land, and without it, I couldn't create ale, which stopped my growth until I could expand. Having a steady flow of deer in my rich wild animal deposit meant I had so much leather that I became rich once I understood the trading mechanism. It gives you various gameplay opportunities and varieties while somehow juggling a jaw-dropping world of graphics that had me taking screenshots quite frequently.

The city-building elements are to die for, and I haven't had this much fun with a city builder in quite some time — the way the world looks, the resource management, and growing overall feels satisfying and fun. You'll need influence to grow, regional wealth to purchase items, a treasury to create new cities, and then establish trading routes among them, all of which look gorgeous... so it's a shame, then, that the other game modes are so broken.

Enter Restoring the Peace and On the Edge, the last two game modes you'll be able to experience, culminating in a little over a dozen hours, depending on your expertise. These two incorporate bandits, raiders, and an AI lord that closely resembled Henry V while you're over here, still struggling like Henry VI.

I'm a shy and reserved ruler in pretty much every expansion game. I like to create a citadel so large that I can grow troops and eventually overtake everything with a massive army. I bask in taking my time and enjoying the city-building aspect that games tend to give you, with a particular affinity to food-gathering. So, when a year into building my comically large farm turned into facing an army of a little under 100 soldiers while I only had about 20, I — rightfully — panicked.

I started my playthrough of Restoring the Peace, knowing that the AI overlords are more like Genghis Khan than anything else — focused on expansion by the dozens, minus the pillage and personal harem. I began on the default difficulty, and it felt like no matter what I did, I needed to micromanage everything I could to even stand a chance against my opponent, as elsewise, they'd begin overtaking everything and, eventually, me. This is paired with the fact that you're fighting a couple of seemingly invisible bandits, with no counterplay aside from trying to grow your militia enough to fight back against them or spend your treasury hiring mercenaries monthly. But before you can do that, you'll need a manor to have taxes, and then lower your town's approval rate, and if it lowers below 50% you won't get any new members, and then you won't be able to tend to your ridiculously large farm, and then you'll die of famine.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm a smidge too dumb to enjoy these games at higher difficulties. I'm better at reactionary combat and gameplay than I am at planning and managing resources, and Restoring the Peace demands that you are consistently expanding with a single goal in mind: wage war and win. Sure, that's the point of the game, but having no other option but to face an uphill battle at the end of it all and have a comeback story loses its replayability when you can't adapt, as instead, you'll be forced to min-max your way to victory, even on the default difficulty

It's easy to fall in love with Manor Lords — spend two hours in the game, and you'll be fawning over it as if you'd been struck by Cupid's arrow. The city-building is beautiful, it has stunning landscapes, it has fun mechanics, and the music is surprisingly gorgeous (I bought the soundtrack and am listening to it right now) — Manor Lords is so great, it's easy to forget this was created by a single developer. But, despite the high praises I sing like a lovestruck bard, the balancing and combat are askew and require tweaking, and there isn't much to do at the moment aside from three scenarios that boil down to repetitive gameplay. It impresses and certainly does not fail to meet the expectations of the top-wishlisted game on Steam — it continues the industry trend of indie developers outperforming AAA companies by a landslide... but I just can't wait until it releases, the bugs are fixed, and it has more of a variety of gameplay.