I’ve only been playing the medieval strategy city builder demo for a few minutes Country houses when I felt a sudden surge of excitement. I had just created my first set of burglaries – residences that citizens can rent from their lord and landowner – which was a satisfying occupation in itself, although not what I am. For real be excited about.
You don’t just drop any house in Manor Lords, you draw a box with four corners so you can dictate the length and width of the zone, with the box automatically snapping to nearby roads and optimizing the space to fit the houses in it. It’s a nice system (there’s a gif somewhere below that shows it in action) and I can see that it comes in handy when a city is densely populated and you’re trying to squeeze extra homes between other buildings or roads.
Also very nice: just sit back and look at the houses and all the other buildings in the village, built by the medieval workers. It’s a very detailed process. A villager leads over an ox dragging a huge log behind him, the frame of the building rises little by little as busy builders hammer away, then the roof and walls begin to appear. You can see how buildings are built practically plank by plank, and there’s a bit of variation in the final product so houses don’t look quite identical.
But what really impressed me was that I could let villagers behind their houses have small gardens where they can grow vegetables and raise chickens. Yes, I am rightfully hounded about a garden.
It’s because I’ve been reading “Life in a Medieval Village” by Francis and Joseph Gies, and this is a beautiful and accurate detail to include. Although villagers worked on large communal farms, they also often had their own gardens behind their homes where they could grow vegetables and raise livestock. And here it is in Manor Lords (although the game warns that letting villagers take care of their own gardens could mean slacking off with other jobs, which also sounds correct). Usually with medieval city builders you can add gardens near houses, but (as in furthest frontier) they are purely decorative and give houses a kind of bonus. Here, gardens actually produce resources. Awesome!
Once I had finished admiring the small gardens, I continued to build my starter village. The first steps are quite typical for a city builder: set up a sawmill and assign one or two workers to cut down trees. Allocate a firewood splitter so that citizens can burn fuel to survive the winter. Build a gathering hut and a hunting camp to secure an early food source. People need water, so a well needs to be built, and a marketplace with stalls for food, firewood, and clothing gives your villagers a place to buy the goods they lack.
Once the most basic needs are met, more infrastructure options are available: tanneries to turn animal hides into leather, a mining operation to produce ore, fields for farming, a church, a pub, and so on. When the village has grown a bit, the king will notice and start taxing your medieval donkey, so trading posts and profitable markets should be preserved.
That’s all pretty standard for city builders, but there’s another cool feature in Manor Lords. Not only can you zoom in far to see people working, but you can also click the eyeball icon under your lord’s avatar and personally walk into the village to walk around and see things up close.
“Hello, grubby villagers, I am your lord and pretty sulk. Don’t mind me or my ridiculous pointed shoes! I’m not here to interfere, just to judge you in silence.”
Besides the finer details I enjoy in the demo, there’s a lot of ambition in Manor Lords. While expansion-related features are locked, you can at least look at the overworld map and imagine your village growing into a sizable medieval city, raising an army and levies, and conquering other areas. The map looks pretty big over a dozen different regions, with resources highlighted so you know which one is best to eventually take over.
With so much detail and scale beyond just managing and growing a village, I’m a little concerned about performance, although that’s a common problem in most town-building games. As you expand, cover more land and sometimes build hundreds of different buildings, GPUs can get hot and performance can get quite choppy. I’m curious how Manor Lords handles the pressure of so much fine detail when it’s in full release.
Manor Lords has been in the works for a while – we’ve got a gameplay overview back in 2020 – and since then it has become one of the top wishlist games on Steam. Developer Slavic Magic hasn’t announced a release date yet, but I hope it comes out soon. I’m excited to see more on a grand scale – real-time tactical combat, settlement of new regions, the diplomacy system with competing AI-controlled lords – as well as more of the finer details. I see there is a candle shop you can build which could mean beekeeping. I love beekeeping. (Although tallow was a much cheaper and more common source for candle making. Again, I’m reading a book.)
A important pity: you can’t save your game in the Manor Lords Demo, which is disappointing, because I would happily tinker with my village for the rest of the week. But my first village was a great pleasure to create, so I’m thrilled to just build another one.
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