Manor Lords is another one of those games that suddenly explodes onto the Steam charts without the benefits of a carefully planned hype campaign, trailer drops, placement on major sites, or preview campaign. Suddenly, everyone is playing it and it’s outranking major games you’ve heard of from major publishers. And what I learned from D.A.R.E. is this: Peer pressure is good and do what all your friends are doing, so when everyone else is checking out Manor Lords all of a sudden, I feel I have to check out Manor Lords.
That went double when I started investigating: I like city builders. I like war games. I like weird indie shit written by one guy. I’m also a smug noble and like ordering peasants around. Manor Lords is a city builder and colony manager game where I get to be Lord of the Manor, master of my domain, king of the castle, with Total War-style combat made by a single guy. You’re singing my song. It’s a 7 year passion project now in early access? Oh, yeah, baby. OH YEAH!
As the youths say (I am very much down with the youth slang), I am all about vibes, so when I was setting up my character and saw I could create my coat of arms like so…
Vibes status: immaculate
Soundtrack: gorgeous and choral
End goals: Choice of: Domination (claim everyone else’s territory), Conquest (conquer EVVVERYTHINNNNG), none (chill), Growth (build a big ass city)
Threats: Other nobles (haters), bandits and raiders (losers)
Maps: Only one for now because it’s Early Access
Look at this, I feel good about this:
And this kind of thing while choral music plays in the background?
COME ON AND SLAM! AND WELCOME TO YE OLDE JAM!
FROM THIS LITTLE ENCAMPMENT, MY MIGHT WILL RISE!
As you may have anticipated, your little group of families need food and fuel (firewood) just to survive, but like most peasants, they also want lots of things, and making them happy will increase your approval, attract new migrants, and expand your powerbase. But before we get to that, take a look at this nasty overlay action.
Oh yeah, look at that, we are looking at land fertility, we are planning some farms, we are gonna rotate some crops.
You think this is a game?
Farming is never a game.
I have a camp full of hoboes but yearn for regional domination.
Once you’ve got some basic food production going–and even at this early stage, you have options ranging from “hunt some animals” to “gather some berries” to “plant some food” to setting up milling grain and baking bread to letting your peasants keep chickens for eggs–there’s so many choices to make. Like you should probably get those supplies and food out of the rain, but you want to get more people, but those bandits are stealing your supplies so you may want to work on getting the militia up and running, but that iron deposit over there is tempting, and you could get iron production online, hey there are trade routes, oh that noble is talking mad shit and oh we could do with some more houses…
However, the key difference is the macro view: We don’t just stop with running a town or city. As you develop your little area, you work up into regional management by earning development points that allow you to specialize each region in various things like food production, building things, crafting, and that kind of thing. Building your manor also unlocks policies, meaning you can decree what the region should do.
So you go from supervising a bunch of muddy peasants to lording over your empire. Eventually. Assuming the peasants survive the winter. Which is going to be tricky when the local banditry keeps stealing your food, which I noticed kept happening. So I summoned the militia. The battle would be bloody…but look at that discipline.
Yes, truly my boys would cover themselves in glory…
…okay, it turns out that sending a bunch of lightly armed peasants to fight a bunch of seasoned and heavily armed outlaws doesn’t go well. Y’all heard about this? And of course, when most of your farmers and resource collectors die, it’s what we in the Lord-ing trade call a “welp” moment. There is a tutorial, but there’s so much depth to this game that it can’t really explain it all. As us Dwarf Fortress weirdos say, losing is fun. Also, you can eventually hire mercenaries ranging from “Probably the same bandits stealing my stuff” to “Serious business”, so lesson learned. Losing is fun!
The planning is thorough but pretty intuitive. After you bumble through a couple of games, you figure out things like “I should check out the local water sources before I build houses” and “I should check the fertility of the land before I start building farms.” There may be things you don’t know, but there are few “video game bullshit” moments. For example, you need logs to build things, and it can be tricky when you have like 5 dudes early on…but if you lay down a plan in a wooded area, they will just use the trees they chop down to clear the lot rather than standing around waiting for your single lumberjack to track down trees. Sensible!
For a one man passion project that’s in Early Access, while allowing for things like “There’s only one map,” Manor Lords is in pretty good shape. Much of the game just works. The tutorial doesn’t explain a lot of the more subtle mechanics, but the game is stable and runs. The AI didn’t seem especially wonky. The core game is there. As usual, I consider Early Access titles based on the “If the guy takes off with all the money and never does anything else, how is it?” scale, and this one is in pretty good shape. If he jets to a non-extradition country, the single map would get old eventually, but there’s a lot of depth to explore and a lot of realm to conquer.
