Manor Lords’ medieval micromanagement means making many messes

Do you ever look around at modern civilization and boggle at the sheer complexity of it all? Do you ever think about the generations of backbreaking labor needed to turn acres and acres of untamed wilderness into the layers of interconnected systems needed to provide basic necessities—much less luxuries—to both early settlers and their generations of descendants?

All that infrastructure work is much harder to take for granted after playing Manor Lords. The Early Access version of the game—which netted a million Steam sales in its first 24 hours last month—forces you to do a lot of the heavy lifting that many other city builders tend to gloss over. And while there are still a lot of Early Access rough spots, what's already there can make you appreciate just how hard it is to build a functioning society from nothing but raw materials and hard labor.

Let go of my hand

In many other city builders, you act as something of a detached, bureaucratic god. Lay down some roads, set aside some zoning, and watch as the microscopic masses automatically fill in the details of the housing, commerce, and industry needed to create a functional society.

Not so in Manor Lords, where micromanagement is essential to survival. The five starting families in your initial settlement must be specifically guided to their tasks, spreading themselves thin between farming, resource gathering, and construction before the harsh winter sets in. There's no easy residential zoning here—you have to lay out the four corners of every individual "burgage plot" that will be used to house a single family.

Getting your settlement this thriving takes a lot of learning by doing.

Credit: Slavic Magic

Assigning settlers to their necessary tasks isn't exactly a "set it and forget it" matter, either. You have to direct your hard-working families' efforts to where they're most needed, as the town's requirements change with the seasons. This is especially true throughout that all-important first harvest season, where the meager stocks of bread you start don't go nearly as far as you might like.

And don't expect Manor Lords to hold your hand through a first tutorial run, either. The Early Access version decidedly does not instruct you on the basics of survival, throwing your settlers into an open clearing with minimal tooltip instructions for what you need to do. That means figuring out the correct mix of agriculture, mining, and construction needed for survival can be a matter of trial and error in the early going.

Learning the hard way

My first run at building a Manor Lords settlement ended in a disaster of harvest timing. After building my first field and farmhouse, I went multiple in-game months before realizing I had to specifically tell my settlers to start planting wheat for the coming harvest. By the time I forced a meager early harvest, my citizens were already going hungry, and I started over so I didn't have to watch them slowly starve.

I started the planting earlier in my second run, but my meager group of settlers still started going hungry in the summer, months before the wheat would be ready to harvest. This time, I forced my citizens to tough it out through the lean months, building a windmill and a communal oven to be ready to make delicious bread when the time came. But when the harvest started, those buildings steadfastly refused to start processing the wheat and baking the food my citizens desperately needed.

I had to consult the Internet to figure out that my farm workers were mysteriously not threshing the gathered wheat so it could move down the bread production line. Forcing the farmers to focus their work on the farmhouse somehow shocked them out of this reverie, but not before the hungry citizens had tanked the approval level needed to help my settlement grow.

Preparing to survive that first harsh winter is not a simple matter.

Credit: Slavic Magic

With a little more reading (and yet another restart), I eventually figured out how to use backyard chicken coops and berry foraging to help smooth out the hunger pangs my citizens felt in that difficult first year. But as soon as I had fed my citizens, I had to prepare for a band of raiders that were a few months from sacking my town.

Attracting the new population to staff that militia wasn't a problem. But outfitting them with weapons proved confusing for me; the smithy shop that I thought would be useful for weapon making just cranked out useless sets of tools.

More Internet sleuthing revealed I needed a backyard blacksmith to make new spears. But all of my sufficiently leveled plots were built too small to have backyards, leaving me with precious little ability to arm my citizens to protect against the disastrous raid. On my next run, I made sure to establish the backyard space I needed for a blacksmith, but my sawmills utterly refused to build the planks I needed to construct the shop.

The struggle is real

This is the kind of cycle that has defined my experience with Manor Lords so far. I'll hit some wall of necessary production, look online to see if it's caused by a glitch or a simple lack of knowledge, and then restart, hoping I can be forewarned and forearmed to get through it the next time.

Part of my struggle is just part and parcel with evaluating a game that's still in Early Access, even after the solo developer's seven years of development work. Further updates will likely lay out a more explicit and complete tutorial for setting up the basics of everyday life for your settlers and fix the many glitches that have slowed my progress so far.

With mere survival taken care of, it's on to more important things, like battle!

Credit: Slavic Magic

But part of the struggle is obviously by design, providing a carefully crafted web of interrelated pieces that mimics a threadbare frontier settlement. After enough trial and error, the process starts to fall into place like fine-tuned machinery: Crafting weapons means having upgraded houses, which means you need a marketplace with clothes, which means you need pelts and a hunting lodge for pelts and a tannery for leather. That means you need wood, plus the time for construction months ahead of when you actually need the weapons.

After a few successful seasons, you can attract enough new citizens to create a relatively self-sustaining little village where you don't have to sweat the small stuff as much. That's when you can move on to bigger and better things, like building up an army that can expand your territory into neighboring areas through battle or trading with nearby locales through a barter system.

Those eventual conquests are made all the more satisfying for the early struggles Manor Lords forces you through to build your town up from nothing. This level of hardscrabble city-building existence isn't for everybody, especially in the game's rough Early Access state. But for those who want to get a feel for the logistical nightmare that was building a pre-industrial settlement from the harsh wilderness, Manor Lords provides an interesting take on the genre.