I tried to make a medieval paradise in Manor Lords but now it's just full of eggs and corpses

GamesCity BuilderManor LordsI tried to make a medieval paradise in Manor Lords but now it’s just full of eggs and corpsesWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A man pulling a cart surrounded by corpses

There are some advantages to being a medieval peasant. Twitter hasn’t been invented yet, for instance, so your exposure to the worst opinions in the world is pretty limited. But there are, on balance, a lot more downsides. Healthcare is a tad iffy. You haven’t got any central heating. Back-breaking labour is the norm. And, if you live in my Manor Lords village, you’re probably getting really bored of eating eggs and stepping over corpses.

Manor Lords is a medieval city builder that I’ve been looking forward to for a while, and now it’s finally out; at least in early access. So I’ve put on a fancy cloak and started to guide my people to prosperity. There have been some bumps in the road.

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A village street in winter

While the city-builder boom has seen a lot of developers create some dramatic twists on the genre—building a society on the back of a huge creature inThe Wandering Village, or letting villages grow organically inFoundation—Manor Lords initially feels a bit more conventional. You start with a camp and a few homeless settlers in a heavily forested map, and from there plonk down roads and buildings, from homes to sawmills, as you attempt to expand while keeping your villagers both alive and happy.

As you upgrade homes, more demands are thrust upon you. Once content with water, food and clothes, now your villagers expect a more varied diet and piss-ups in the tavern. Bread, fruitandbeer? I know, it’s ridiculous. So you erect more buildings, but that requires yet more villagers, who then need to be housed and fed, which means you’ll have to start building extra farms and more logging camps, which need even more villagers, and the cycle continues.

Within these conventions, however, Manor Lords does some very interesting things, like how a home is not merely a simple dwelling. See, while most buildings are placed individually, with homes you have to drag out a box where the size determines how many buildings will appear. The wider the box, the more homes. The height of the box, meanwhile, determines how much space each family has to develop their property.

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(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A village in the forest

Once a house has been built, you can go into the building menu and start giving it more utility. This way, your villagers can grow carrots in their gardens, develop apple orchards, or raise chickens, taking some of the strain off your food production and making winters—when foraging and farming is impossible—a lot less deadly. The bigger the plot, the more fruit trees, allotments and chicken coops they’ll be able to squeeze inside them. Villagers will also work in their gardens when they’re not busy in other buildings, so this doesn’t remove a family from the workforce.

You can’t expect someone to make 20 spears and then do a stint in the fields.

The higher tier a home, the more utility you can give it. At the second tier, you can turn homes into businesses, creating blacksmiths who’ll arm your militia or brewers who will supply your tavern. Doing this, however, creates families of artisans, which means they won’t be able to work in other buildings. You can’t expect someone to make 20 spears and then do a stint in the fields. Well, as a tyrannical medieval noble you probably can expect that, but you really shouldn’t.

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Anyway, this is why everyone in my village eats too many eggs. See, food production is tough. A tiny village is easy to maintain, but after a certain point you’re not going to be able to maintain a surplus for winter from just hunting and gathering. That’s when you should start thinking about farming, but that’s labour intensive and time consuming. Workers need to till the soil, plant seeds, wait for them to grow and then harvest them. This takes months. Then they need to turn the wheat into grain and deliver it to the mill, where a different set of workers turn it into flour and put it in storage. Finally, the bakers will turn that flour into bread and sell it in the market.

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A hunting camp

Now, I like an egg. On some toast. In a bowl of ramen. Made entirely of chocolate. Eggs are grand. If I only ate eggs, though, I might get a wee bit sick of them. My villagers felt the same way. With only a small amount of non-egg produce being shifted in the market, my villagers started grumbling and my approval rating plummeted. It also became harder to attract new households, and with less food variety I wasn’t able to upgrade any of my existing homes. My egg strategy—so tantalising initially, so seemingly forward-thinking—proved to be devastating for the community. Progress halted and I looked like a right old idiot.

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(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A woman visiting a grave

It absolutely did not help that the village was dealing with a bit of a corpse problem. In the default early access scenario, you’re encouraged to play at your own pace because your sole rival lord will largely leave you alone. You’ll see their armies marching around and you might get a bit miffed when they gobble up territory near you, but until you’re ready, you never need to confront them. Bandits, however, are a different matter. At first the presence of their camps just syphons off resources thanks to their sticky fingers, but eventually they’ll start attacking your village.

The good news is that bandits are actually quite shit at fighting, and right out the gate you have enough weapons to make a small militia. Once you’ve got some iron, wood and artisans, you can then create a lot more, or you can just create a trade route and purchase what you need. With two or three units with 20-30 troops, you’ll easily be able to defend a single village. Fighting is still a risk, though. When members of the militia die, unsurprisingly that means they can’t work, so you’ll be stuck with a family that’s not pulling its weight until they can replace their dead loved one. I’ve yet to be struck with too many villager deaths, though; the problem I’m facing actually stems from the effectiveness of my little warriors.

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

A battle

Winters can be harsh, deaths can create setbacks, and you can’t thrive on eggs alone, but it’s otherwise pretty forgiving.

(Image credit: Slavic Magic)

Wandering around the market

While the current build is missing a lot of upgrades and policies that let you fine-tune your medieval society, I’ve still found myself extremely busy over the last few days, and I’ve got a lot more to explore before I build up enough courage to declare war on my rival. I’m sure my villagers can’t wait for more corpses.

Anyway, harvest season is coming up soon, so I’d better get back to it. But you know what? Before I begin, I might just make myself a tasty omelette.

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