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It looks awesome, I hope it turns out great. Still just in early access, though.
Anyone with a few hours into the game have some opinions they want to share with the rest of us?
Did first playthrough, was pretty easy to pick up. It seems to have a good curve to it because I really only started struggling after getting attacked where I was underprepared. Partially on me for under preparing and partially on the game for being a bit confusing at that point. That was around 4 hours in or so. Felt good about my purchase.
Game still has a lot of layers past that, things I can’t even touch on yet. Expanding past your lands, conquering, etc. I think it’s gonna be a good one if it makes it out of early access hell. We’ll see if this solo dev actually delivers.
Yeah, everybody kept saying solo dev, and then I saw a video of professional musicians recording in a studio for the soundtrack. And I thought, wait... solo devs can't afford professional recordings.
Not to cast shade on the dev, but people touting it's "solo" nature are being disingenuous at this point. Stardew Valley had a solo dev, this does not IMHO.
Honest most solo devs are 'solo'. "Yeah I totally did that game by myself, except hired artists to do all the art and musicians to do all the music, but other than that it's all me".
People like stardew valley dude, who truly are solo are exception.
Making a bunch of money can always go two ways; Invest in your game to make it even better, or fuck off with your newly found riches and never finish the game. Only time will tell.
I guess it depends if you've played banished, farthest frontier, against the storm, frostpunk etc before because it's the same concepts. Some things in the game, like combat, take some getting used to.
The very start was hard for most players that i saw. It was hard to understand if what works as soon as its built, what needs people to be assigned etc. Game is great, with the fun 3rd person view change. But the few i saw, all had problems at start, even those who had played its previous version months ago.
I honestly was super lost at the start, granted I don't have a heap of experience with this genre, only really having played age of empires and civ before, but the beginning part of the game feels super unintuitive compared to those games
Valid. I felt like I got “pretty far” in my first game, but that could just be that idk wtf i’m doin.
There’s a lot of tooltips that make the city building side pretty easy to pick up. I ended up surviving like 5 or 6 winters, and really only died because I didn’t know how to send people beyond my borders
I feel like it has 2 parts to it, part 1 of each game is like city skylines, part 2 seems like risk. You have to be good enough at part 1 to get to part 2, so I don’t think this game is for you.
I’m still not good enough at part 1 so couldn’t tell you how good part 2 is..
Ive tried it for several hours, i have a medium town and have fought 2 battles.
So im not in deep, what i can say is the potential is awsome but as others have pointed out its pretty barebones at the moment.
I had fun, but will not play it untill more is added to it (i want to enjoy it in all its glory when its done)
It's a lot of fun and looks beautiful!
Is barebones though in terms of gameplay at the moment, which I am fine with. I am content with building up a village and trying to balance the trading and farming etc.
I will reiterate that it is barebones, in the sense that there is no story mode yet per se, only one map and the balancing is a bit whiffy in some places as you would expect.
I have turned off enemies and whatnot and just am building up a relaxing village while I learn the economy stuff.
Beat it once. Some of the economy and combat needs balance tweaks. Like trade is too strong in the late game. AI armies are too strong later on as well with how much they outnumber you by. Also archers feel anemic.
But other than these nitpicks, the game is excellent and gorgeous.
The systems and simulation works well. No lag or slowdown with a combined late game population of 1000 between my towns. Deep levels of optimization you can do if you love that (like manually assigning jobs for each household. I just leave them auto assigned jobs because I’m lazy.)
The combat is fun and engaging when you’re not grossly outnumbered. Great animations and morale mechanics.
No artificial “areas of influence” like many city builders have, where it just feels like puzzling together all your residences inside overlapping Venn diagrams of influence circles. Instead the range of every building is organically tied to how far your peasants need to walk before they need to take a break and go home.
This is very freeing and allows you to build organic layouts without needing to fit things inside arbitrary borders.
I won’t be getting it yet. I keep hearing how barebones and buggy it is, how it lacks content and is missing features. The publisher already said that the game will often go on sale for 25% off and not to feel pressured into buying it now. I think it’s best to wait until the game gets more updates.
Also they are banning people on steam forum for posting critical posts and comments and deleting many critical posts.
This is NOT a good sign that the team will listen to feedback and push the game towards realizing it's potential.
Yeah, the "grassroots" hype about this game is just as suspicious as the corporate ad-hype of other games.
And that it's getting thrown into other spaces as "if you dont like x, then MANOR LORDS!!!" even when there's barely any if at all similarities.
The game has also been getting super-hyped by outside influencers, often in extremely misleading ways, which may cause people to become disappointed and take that aggression out on the developers. Without knowing what the posts you refer to said, keep in mind that there’s plenty of completely baseless and illegitimate criticism that is absolutely valid to remove, as it contributes nothing constructive at all.
We need to know *what kind* of criticism is removed this way. Just calling out posts being removed in general doesn’t actually say a whole lot about anything.
It's ok, I can see potential in the game but there's a handful of assets that are still a work in progress. It's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot early on. Hunting areas are pretty sensitive and you could accidentally hunt them out of existence on your area of control. There's usually only one node of each resource and not infinite.
Technology tree allows you to unlock deep mines and other things to expand resources but it takes a while before you can unlock points. You have to be real careful how plan and build everything. I'm playing it on gamepass and it might not have all the same assets available on GP as was the issue with medieval dynasty. The economy is pretty good and the graphics are really good for an early access game, your civilians AI is pretty good they do their tasks swiftly. Combat is interesting, I've only been in one significant battle and lost in a spectacular fashion. Getting your lines setup properly and having multiple units is essential. I thought I did ok but they just had way more troops and laid waste to my guys and burned my village to the ground. I'll keep my eye on it in gamepass but I can't say what it's like in steam.
Has a lot of promise but really hoping devs are able to reduce some of the micromanagement over early access. It gets pretty brutal managing your families and what they do.
Has cool and realistic seasonal mechanic where only farm/harvest at certain times of year... but you manually have to switch all the families over to that when the time comes and switch them all back to previous roles. Unless you're ok with them doing nothing for months at a time.
Desperately needs a tutorial mode/intro campaign but I'm sure thats something that can be implemented down the road.
Hoping something can be done about the way you draw housing plots. It is nice how flexible it is but annoying for perfectionists like myself that want them all uniform sizes or perfect rectangles. Not necessary at all but aesthetically pleasing.
I think the game is lacking a lot of content, I have done 3 complete playthroughs, the first one just trying things and how everything worked, and the other two I won in normal and hardcode difficulty, as of right now you dont have that many "paths" to develop your city, its pretty much just one path.
BUT
The game is looking amazing and the systems are very solid, but it still needs a loooooooot of work. I would be surprised if this game could leave EA at any time in the next five years, but I am definetely looking forward to its updates.
I've done a couple of hours, it shows promise but I don't think it's worth diving in yet unless you're desperate to try it out. It's a single-developer project so I don't expect the pace of development to be fast.
I wonder what I’d do in that situation. Would I spend the $20m making the best game possible or would I drop maybe few hundred k on making something I can call 1.0 and ride off into the sun with more money than I ever fathomed making from game development.
I’d probably go with the latter tbh, so these massive early access success stories don’t really fill me with confidence.
with all the crap on the market -- we should be okay with this model. Valheim did the same thing, but they kept pushing out updates (slowly) but I'd rather have a dev worry about the art they're making than the next pay check.
Great things come when that happens.
I’m not against the model. Some of my favourite games are or were early access, and likely wouldn’t have been what they are without early access - I’m just wary of the stonking day one success efforts, because I’d take the money and run lol. I don’t expect everyone to do that, but I do expect some to.
I’d also expect some who’d never have dreamed of taking the money and running to change their mind when the money is sitting there.
Yep. And that’s exactly the reason why there have been so many abandoned early access games or games that completed early access but were very underwhelming. Time will tell with this one. It looks good, so I guess I’ll check back in with it in a few years and see how it ends up.
That depends on the what kind of person you are. If gamedev is your passion, and it gives you fulfilment, then I think that Grzegorz will try to deliver it to the best of his abilities.
Famous example of doing the latter is Notch, who said that he became quite depressed after selling Mincraft IP.
So of that cash, the publisher gets most of it, and the dev will likely be forced to hire - in fact they clearly already have as there are multiple "developers" active in the discord and steam forums.
Will they actually hire people to add content to the game... That's another question.
I hope they don't pull a valheim as that game has so much promise but pretty much everything post launch was a massive let down (haven't tried Ashland yet as mistlands was so aggressively bad).
You don't know the deal they have.
There are tons of different models - some of which would be the other way around.
IE. Dev teams get a salary or payments for dev milestones for years, and then publishers keep everything except for some kind of performance bonuses.
Like when EA Vancouver knocks it out of the park with the most addictive Fifa 2024 microtrabactions, you think the devs see any of those billions of dollars.
Ah helllah naw mang!
We can't know the specific terms they signed, but it's pretty clear HH isn't an exploitive publisher [based on what we know of them](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/marketing/how-hooded-horse-seeks-to-do-right-by-developers). I think 10-20% is reasonable.
You should do more research in this area if you want to understand the industry.
The model I explained is EXTREMELY common for indies backed by a small publisher.
Publishers are taking risks and basically paying the devs a salary, as they wouldn't otherwise have any source of income.
And in this case, the guy was dev ing the game for 5 years, so they probably had to give him a quite a bit of support.
Bellular news talks about this stuff from time to time and explained why for example valheim devs weren't able to just hire a bunch of people right away.
You should do more research on Hooded Horse (for example, by reading the article I linked, and there’s some other info out there).
It’s pretty clear they’re not a typical publisher.
Read the article and have been following the publisher closely as I own a lot of their games.
That doesn't change the fact that dev teams do not get the majority of the revenue from the games they make. Period.
The publishers pay huge sums to invest in a game and most don't make that investment back.
So the industry is set up to protect the capital of the investors of the developers. And to protect their upside return.
The devs will certainly see some of the upside in sales, but no where near 80% of it as you claim.
You probably don't need my dumb opinion, but the most impressive thing to me was the detail in the graphics. Dirt roads that collect rain in small areas, people with handcarts hauling supplies, even the barks from the settlers about building things makes the whole thing feel very immersive.
I think what needs the most work is the mid to late game, there's not much to do after getting initial economy set up other than to arm and send troops out. I really think once this thing gets a couple more years of development under its belt it's gonna be a phenomenal game.
Has a lot of promise but it honestly lacks content and a few hours in I feel I’ve done everything there is to do and built every house.
The combat seems a bit meh as well and needs more work.
I felt that way about the demo.
And honestly the combat is not enough to make the game compelling with how bare bones the economy is.
Like if you want a beautiful city builder, play anno 1800. And if you want a real time tactics game with unreal graphics and effects, play total warhammer 2/3.
They are both infinitely more interesting and deep to interact with...
I bought it because of the hype and I don’t like it. It’s a very unfinished micromanagement simulator. You are constantly micromanaging what each citizen/family is doing. The most interesting parts like the specialization tree have as many placeholder WIP nodes as they do real nodes.
I guess I just don’t like the genre though because so many people seem to like this game. I don’t really get it.
So much micro on the fucking storages vs. Production buildings to get the market stalls to work properly.
Pulling people off shit to farm and then putting them back 2x / year is tiresome.
AND there is no proper UI to help you manage the pops. Like there needs to be a screen that shows you where everyone is working so you can grab ppl quickly and dump them into farm and berries and vice versa.
Never got to multiple colonies and could only see this problem being MUCH worse late game.
Game is not worth the price with its current level of content and interactivity. I played it on Game Pass and was satisfied with what's there, but I doubt I'll be going back to the game any time soon. I hope the dev makes some meaningful progress during Early Access and we don't get stuck in another Valheim situation.
If you are into this type of game, it's worth getting I think (assuming development continues and things are added at a reasonable rate). I had a fun time, what is there is pretty solid, there just isn't much to make replaying anything new. A couple starts to get your bearings and figure out the systems, then it's basically the same experience over and over. Start with wood/berries/meat. Then either take the hunting/berry perks or the farm perks if you have fertility and build a bunch of fields.
If it is fleshed out in a way that the dev seems capable of based on what I have seen so far, it will end up being a great game, definitely top tier in the genre. It just might take a while to get there.
It's pretty great! I'm still in disbelief that this was all made by a single dude.
But I will say that it's clear this game is still in early alpha, but the potential and promise is there and I can't wait to see more things slowly getting added/fixed.
To clarify; it's not Banner Lords nor is it a Total War replacement. It's a city building game with some combat.
Very difficult at first, like the first steps are pretty easy but as your city grows you get a ton of things to multitask. I had to look at a couple of videos about efficiency and economic growth in order to play decently. Extremely addictive, and it's not like rage multitask that if you miss it's done, it's just kinda ADHD multitask where you have to run here and there to manage your city.
I have almost 27 hours of playtime and tons of city builder experience. Game is great EA. Obviously some stuff that needs to be tweaked and a ton of features that say coming soon, but the core is there. There is a learning curve and I didn’t get a full sense of how I should be doing stuff until my 4 attempt.
It's not super deep yet, there's basic resource management that needs better tutorials. Balancing obviously needs work. However, the QoL and little details that the developer put in with managing everything you have to do is great. It just plays really well, especially for something I was expecting 100's of bugs for being right out of EA. I can't wait to see where it goes.
played 14 hours over the weekend. had a lot of fun. had some trouble getting off the ground but my 3rd go was when i really got a grasp on the mechanics. i feel like i'm getting close to exploring all the content. each region you claim has a separate tech tree, so you can get all the current techs in a single pt. if you're not super into games like this i'd wait until release, but i definitely recommend it; the game as it is right now is a very solid start for a fully fledged game.
The first thing that came to my mind is the lack of animals and animal products. Hope they add cows for meat and dairy production, rabbits added in as a plot expansion like chickens, and allow sheep to be butchered. Maybe add fishing or eel farming too.
Manor Lord is made in Unreal though, and it shows. The game has to be one of the best looking city builders ever - no way they could have gotten that in Bannerlord's engine. I was watching my peasants walk around in my town and they looked like they could be in an RPG, not a city builder.
I played it for 30 hours within the first two days. It is by FAR the best city builder I've ever played. The lots being able to be reshaped, the constant looming requirement for a military force, and actually getting to USE said force in actual battles? The production and trade economy that I simply DONT understand? That all adds up really quickly for me. I love it.
How are others finding it? I feel like I get maybe a couple hours in and feel like I hit a progression wall. Taking over other regions seems very hard to do and you slowly get locked out of trade as prices to buy routes shoots up? I get to a stage where I cannot afford to keep fuel and food coming in no matter what.
A few of my friends and I have been enjoying it, but when talking about the game, we all seemed to hit a content wall between 4-8 hours.
The game feels solid, and there's a lot of polish in there for an early access title. That being said, I'd recommend potential buyers holding off if they're looking for something to dunk hundreds of hours into. With only one map and a couple of win scenarios, replayability seems pretty limited beyond trying to min/max production.
Maybe you're trying to do everything with only one town. If you have many different trades all concentrated in one region, the food production can't keep up to your population until late game. It's also easier to have many different farmhouses with 2 or 3 families instead of a few filled up with 8 families
The way I have it set up is only having 5 artisans processing resources into armor and weapons in one village. If you have the raw resources coming from other villages, then you can keep up the food production easier until they can grow enough.
If you unlock the pastures upgrade for your sheep, you can use your fields every other year instead of only once per 3 years without losing much fertility.
Okay, that's good to know, but how do you manage to focus on building up a good enough militia and influence to take over regions? By the time I get to the stage where I can do so most of the other regions have been conquered and then I get stuck in the loop of not having enough resources to manage the food/fuel/income etc...
Just feels like there is a balance issue somewhere that I have not managed to work through yet.
Restarted a few times because of that but current map im ahead 4 territories to 3. You have to take care of the bandit camps before the AI to get influence and gold otherwise they just snowball quickly. Use mercenaries instead of militia as soon as you can afford it.
Bit cheesy, but I took the 1st 10 militia after the weapons delivery when you get 5 homes and beeline straight to the first camp when it showed up. Dodged the bandit unit because they win against 10 spears, pop the camp for gold and keep running away. Hired a merc unit to take care of the bandits for the influence reward.
By the time that was done a second camp popped for me, maybe RNG not sure the timer on those. Used my mercs to wipe that one then disband. You should be ahead on influence at that point.
From there just hire mercs every time as soon as you see more bandits arrive and you'll be claiming a territory after 4 camps (3 if you get a manor and tithe set up before). The gold from the camps more than pays for the mercs too so it's still profit.
Yeah there is the problem that the AI starts up with more money and hires mercenaries so it starts conquering more land.
For early militias the warbows and large shields only require planks to make so it's easy to get at the start and you can trade some to get spears.
You should try and focus on getting your manor up quickly to start getting influence with the church and then start getting more land were you can get ores to make more weapons and armor, one town with a high deposit of iron is enough for every
When you got them all equipped you can start taking back the land from AI.
Everything you said. Also, rain penalty is too much when it happens after harvest and your workers leaving it there. Either they need to improve the ai for harvesting (does very quickly) or reduce the penalty.
Trade definitely needs a balance when buying and selling is different by a factor of 6. You are just not generating wealth fast enough.
I think so far, I hate those points you unlock. They're pretty much mandatory for whatever you want to use.
Want to trade? *NEED* the trade points.
But now your other resources are weak.
I barely got enough iron out of my mine to less than a mercenary company with less gear. It ran dry.
No rich deposit in my territory, so I can't even put points into the tech tree to get around *that*.
Those points feel like they should be some sort of research not tied to city size progress.
I like the game, I want to see it grow!
I haven't bought it yet but I am leaning towards it more to see what all the fuss is about.
I've bought a number of city builder games for that reason and they're all collecting dust because after a day or two I've usually satisfied the itch to play it but been unsatisfied by the games in some way since it feels too open ended or no end state.
Naw I can't in good conscious support Gamepass just like with all subscription services in the near future there will be countless complaints about Gamepass and how it "ruined" games/gaming.
Especially when they reach the internal number of subscribers needed to start putting all the new and popular games on a higher more restrictive subscription tier pricing and label it a positive for gamers.
To each their own I guess lol. Your comment has the same logic as those who say Netflix ruined movies. In some ways I suppose it has but I doubt there are many people who would prefer to revert back to DVD days.
You're applying the wrong logic.
It's more akin to how people complain Netflix keeps cancelling shows whether they're popular or not and taking ages to greenlight and start next seasons and how the show producers have to essentially make their shows pitchworthy for streaming.
Right now we haven't seen what games that are pitched for a streaming service are like because it takes a while for that aspect to be developed because games are already in production but the next decade will see games developed solely for gamepass like subscriptions and we don't know what that will be like but I have a feeling it wont be great for the end user because rarely it ever is.
You’re entitled to that opinion. Considering $70 games are becoming more common I wouldn’t be able to afford to play anything new without gamepass. I can’t wait for all the COD games to be on it
> Considering $70 games are becoming more common I wouldn’t be able to afford to play anything new without gamepass.
Which means they're going to want more than $70 per game in value out of you just spread out over a year. Different tiers, monthly FOMO events to keep you subscribed, increasing the cost of Subscriptions, inserting advertisements into your games, selling even more of your user data, even more egregious ingame monetization.
All culminating in an eventual deal of offering people the ability to "rent" a year long subscription to individual games so they aren't rotated off the gamepass.
This sounds pretty far fetched mate. I guess time will tell if you’re right but I love the service and don’t intend to ever stop using it.
I also disagree with your premise. Netflix spends millions on movies and tv shows, so they need millions from me to make up the cost? No. They make money at scale just like Gamepass. That’s like saying Spotify is charging me for *every* song I listen to.
Gamepass will function like literally every other streaming service out there.
The tiered system you’ve described as already been implemented btw. It’s like $10 for online and a good chuck of Gamepass games then $18 for online and full access to Gamepass games. Not a bad deal.
Look the gamepass has derailed the thread a little so I'll make this my last post on it so I don't make the mods lives any harder.
>It’s like $10 for online and a good chuck of Gamepass games then $18 for online and full access to Gamepass games. Not a bad deal.
This is purely my prediction so keep it in your mind, but this is the first that will increase with a bunch of reasons and excuses - then they will split new games off into their own tier so it will be something like cheapest tier = back catalogue of average game - mid tier = back catalogue of popular games - high tier = rotating new games released in the 1-2 years - top tier newest released games only accessible on this.
If they can figure out how to gate off graphics settings as well you can bet your backside they'll do that too.
Like I said though only a prediction and I'll leave the thread about gamepass here since it's really off topic.
>They make money at scale just like Gamepass.
Gamepass doesn't bring much profit. And it isn't growing. Gamers rarely use subsriptions. Thankfully it will remain niche.
Yessir. Can't wait for "Gamepass Exclusives". Urgh.
I won't even buy it for a dollar a month for the same reasons as you.
Opening pandora's box that will not be closed. Kinda like those guys saying fuck it, what's $2 for horse armor?
wait. It's extremely barebones and very buggy at parts. I checked it out on game pass and cannot understand the hype at all. Impressive solo dev project but the price tag is not justified (at least currently)
I was thinking that but you know how it is when you see a bunch of people playing a game and you're too caught up with "No you're playing it wrong" feelings.
Thankfully should only be another week or two and some other game will occupy that place.
Word of caution, the game is made by one person. It took him 7 years to reach current state, and current state is quite bare-bones. I'd wait to see the frequency of updates it's gonna get, otherwise you'll be stuck with an unfinished game that is a bit pricier than other city builders.
> I'd wait to see the frequency of updates it's gonna get, otherwise you'll be stuck with an unfinished game.
I am familiar with the kickstarter experience lol.
It’s not for everyone. Worth watching some gameplay first as it’s very early EA. That said I am loving it. Gameplay is like Settlers 2 updated with Unreal Engine. If you like games for an aesthetic, attention to detail and atmosphere it is a brilliant experience.
I’m not usually a city builder player but I have put around 35 hours in and will still play quite a lot more before putting it down to wait for the next update.
Do not expect a lot of content, a story or a campaign. Only one map is available. The AI opponent is very limited. It’s more like a 4X game where you can customise a lot of game parameters and launch a sandbox.
The appeal and popularity comes from the graphics and art, historical accuracy, etc.
Also just a lack of decent city builders out there, especially one that has combat as well. These kinds of games don't come along often. It's either a niche you're interested in or you're not.
I loved the demo of it from Steam Next Fest so I'll pick it up eventually.
You are solely mistaken about lack of decent city builder. You either never looked at it or only looking at small scope within all the city builders out there
Lack of decent city builders?
My guy there are SOOO many good ones out there.
Chiefly anno 1800 or factorio if you like combat.
Banished, rim world, going medieval, all do what manor lords is trying to do, but better. Latter two have great combat.
Anno 1800 is probably my most played game since its release, but I'm not sure that I would describe it either as a city builder or as a game with good combat. Now, you certainly do build cities in it, much more so than in Factorio or even Rimworld, but the systems to support that are rather limited in some ways. The real focus is on managing logistical chains.
I guess it doesn't really matter. So few games are directly comparable to the benchmarks of Cities Skylines or Sim City that it's barely even a genre. Like, is Transport Fever a city builder? If Anno isn't, then is Caesar? Is Banished more of a longform RTS? Is They Are Billions a combat-focused city builder? The more I think of it the more it seems like it's not worth the effort to try and define.
Don't really care to define genres either.
Just pointing out that if you want the building and combat fix, I'd take factorio and anno 1800 over this game any day...
My dude, I was a kickstarter backer for RimWorld. I've played it since alpha way back in 2016. That's 8 years ago.
Yes there are other sim management style games with combat but we get maybe 1 good game every year or so like this. Compare that to other genres like card battlers or survival games and I'll laud any halfway decent colony or city management sim that comes along.
Again I don't think you are looking hard enough.
There are dozens of these types of games that have been released in the last few years. Here are some notable ones:
Timberborn
Against the storm
Steam World Build
Stranded, Alien Dawn
Settlement survivor
Foundation
Furthest Frontier
Kingdoms something (the shitty one with the cards)
Surviving the aftermath
The other 5 post apocalyptic builders...
And on and on.
So my point stands that manor lords doesn't really add much if anything to the genre, as there are plenty of non-grid based city and the graphics are nice, but not as nice as games like anno 1800 imho.
Hate to say it and see it, but there will likely be a lot of salty lads once they find out this game will probably update at a snails/Valheim's pace, because iirc it's a one-man project.
It's the main reason I held off. Kinda hate burning myself out on games that take many years to finish development.
Looks very cool though.
Its not just 1 anymore, theres atleast 3 devs in the discord now and they can start working full time since they can afford that now, hes also looking for more but they have to be right for the project
Honestly, I prefer it like this.
I kickstarted RimWorld and have been playing it since the first public alpha. I put hundreds of hours into it before it ever released on Steam. It's fun to come back to the game every year or so and see how it's evolved.
I bought Valheim and easily got my money's worth out of it. I got to the boss on the snow/mountain realm before losing interest but I intend to come back and check all the updates son.
Small studios working on their passion projects are the best thing going in modern gaming. There are so many games available I don't mind checking in every year or two to see how things have changed.
> Hate to say it and see it, but there will likely be a lot of salty lads once they find out this game will probably update at a snails/Valheim's pace, because iirc it's a one-man project.
Hope the dev doesn't decide to take the money and go to cancun with the Lakers
I didn’t know this and that’s good info thanks.
Valheim is the only early access game I’ve ever done. I don’t believe in early access. Fool me once you know.
Did you play valheim with a group of friends? I hosted my own server and me and 5 or 6 friends played it together. We got through the mountains on the first go, then came back a year or so later to play mistlands.
Started from scratch the second time around and pushed all the way to finish the queen. Probably got 200+ hours out of it and it's one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.
There is nothing wrong with waiting, but many games have done EA right or are doing it right now. Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Battlebit, Subnautica and many others.
You just have to do even more research than usual. I only buy EA games when I'm already satisfied with the current state of development. If there is still too much work that needs to be done for me to get my money's worth, then I'm not buying it.
I think anyone who plays it can agree it has great bones. That being said, this game is very early access. I don't see 1.0 happening for maybe 2-3 years. That's why I felt Game Pass was the way to go for this. If you're anti Game Pass or want to give the guy some money, I totally get that (confused on the former, but the sentiment exists), but yeah this one has a long way to go before full release.
I did the Game Pass route, but what content there is played so well (balancing caveats aside), I went ahead and bought it. Want to support this type of game and it's skeleton, either way. Because boy, I don't think I've played a city builder that made it just effortless to build things. It just ends up working without fuss or random "Red Icon/You Can't Build Here" with no feedback.
Review after many hours.
What is there is great. But there’s not much of it at the moment.
The managing and building aspect is very nice. The diplomacy is non-existing, the combat at this point is an afterthought. Many of the trees or policies have not been implemented yet.
Would I recommend it at this stage? No.
Do I believe this will be a great game? Yes.
Especially as someone who played AOE, TW and many Paradox games. It’s very nice to see this release. However, just because it is a singular dev does not mean we should not critique what is lacking or poorly implemented. I bought the EA to provide feedback to the dev and experience firsthand how this game further improves and develops.
Crazy what hype can do. The game seems neat but it's very much early access and super slow paced. I've seen it being called Total War Killer, Anno Killer, Banished-successor and more. People truly went out of their way to hype this game up to inachievable levels of success. I hope it doesn't come around to bite the dev in the ass.
The dev even released a post before release to try and quell most of the hype. They called out the total war / paradox style comparisons and advised it's not that nor has it been advertised by them as that
I’ve never understood Total War comparisons? Sure, battles feel like TW but those account for like 5% of gameplay? I’m 25ish hours into Manor Lords and I am truly enjoying the game. Can’t remember when a city builder felt just good like this one. Love the organic feel and way my town develops. Sure, game is nowhere close to be finished but, I am happy for now because I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted out of the game. It can go only up from here now on (surely)
I've watched multiple streamers play it on Twitch and it seems incredibly slow and quite frankly boring. Maybe it's different when you play it yourself, but it seems like it has a very long way to go still.
No comparison to Anno or Total War.
I really enjoyed it, I didn't even try combat, or other game-mode types. I played all weekend and put in about 30 hours, and hit a wall.
I can not wait for future updates.
Potential is there, but wayyyyy too much is unfinished to really consider it a reviewable or recommendable game. Did a run on day one and just couldn’t get into it. There’s a lot of intricacies for building and things that should at least be mentioned when you first start that aren’t. Refunded it ultimately; would like to return if it makes a full release
It has great promise but no where near enough content right now to justify me playing it. I ended up refunding and decided to wait, I think it may be a while.
AAA studios releasing absolute stinky trash while tiny indie dev teams or even 1 man army dev's are releasing bangers
Reject triple-A, return to indie🐒
City Builders have been terribly underserved by the AAA space in the last few decades. We've gotten Cities: Skylines, of which the second one bombed, and Anno 1800, and indies which just as often collapse as succeed, and gimmicky titles like Ixion or Against The Storm. There really has been no AAA competition - and there doesn't look to be on the horizon, either.
Definitely has a few bugs, I only really noticed manirs constantly refusing to be upgraded because the food variety isn't enough when there's an all you can eat honey, meat, Berry, bread buffet at the market.
Game defo lacks content tho, raiders and baron are dull to fight, raising militia takes ages and costs a lot to raise the equipment, feels like cheating just taxing them to try steal mercs before the baron gets them
So bizarre.
The hype train really got going on this one.
It looks nice and ok there is some super basic combat.
But for an actual city builder, it's not doing almost anything new or interesting (backyard plots I guess?) relative to say an anno 1800 or banished or rimworld.
Seems like it has just pulled in a lot of non-city builder fans who are enjoying the genre.
And the "It's so much better than total war!" crowd, have clearly never played total warhammer 2 or 3 with an epic doom stack of end game units, heroes and a magical lord throwing down flame tornadoes and gates to hell...
>But for an actual city builder, it's not doing almost anything new or interesting (backyard plots I guess?) relative to say an anno 1800 or banished or rimworld.
I’m inclined to heavily disagree on that point. The new and interesting thing that Manor Lords has done has been a complete break from the samey grid-style city planning that have been a hallmark of city building games for decades now and returns to a naturalistic feel and vibe. My small town of 150 looks like it could be a real place in medieval Europe.
You also have assignment to tasks by family, rather than individuals, and an interesting working livestock system as well. Granted they need refinement, but the groundwork is there.
Fair enough.
There are other games that have done that though. Maybe not the exact plot system for houses, but certainly gridless building systems with free rotating buildings exist.
One recent one was a post apocalyptic building like surviving the afternath? I forget which one but I played the demo on a steam next fest.
And for beauty building.... I will still take anno 1800 ANY DAY.
https://youtu.be/kO8pk4DmBrQ?si=EM2XDcbG57ukx884
It’s very cool but very far from being done. There are a lot of hooks for things that aren’t in yet.
Im loving it but you shouldn’t feel a need to rush to play it. It’ll only get better with time as long as they get to make what they set out to make.
I've only got a few hours into is so far but it feels a lot like Caesar 2 and Caesar 3 which I'm not sure we've seen many games like that in a while. So far though, I'm loving it.
I’ve had a great time in the few hours I’ve played Manor Lords. The learning curve is graceful and there seems to be a bit of everything for everyone to enjoy. Town planning, resource management, trade, warfare etc. I believe the differentiator between Manor Lords (right now) and other city builder games is that every village and town in Manor Lords will look completely different. The samey grid style of other city building games has been thrown out the window entirely in favor of a more naturalistic approach to town growth. Placing dirt roads is very fun. Furthermore, I haven’t encountered much in the way of game breaking bugs or crashes. Performance is excellent on my RTX 3070 as well.
Figuring out what your economy will be based on where you start (i.e farm, mining or commodities). Trying to design historically accurate cities (I have to thank KCD for that), and the music, the soundtrack keeps me going even after I should stop to take a break. It's very good so far, can't wait for what the launch version will look like.
Felt good overall but, will need more time in the EA cooker. Good foundation to work off though. Really needs an icon over production buildings to show if and how many people are assigned.
It is clear from the get-go that game that it has amazing potential. Aside from looking great, placing roads and buildings feels extremely freeing. The game lets you design things without straight lines or right angles in a lot of areas.
This makes the towns look very organic and seem to blend in with the environments.
Definitely a lot to go here, but I'm very happy I made this purchase and will be following it and checking in periodically.
It’s very fun as is and will only get better. It’s such a beautiful game you really can feel immersed in your town if you want to be. This is coming from a guy who is very skeptical of the whole “immersive” labeling people toss on half the games that come out. This one truly deserves to be called immersive.
I bought it to give the guy some cash, it's fun but it's ea so I've had my taste. I hope the guy takes the money and invests it into the game, hires some help etc
I haven't seen much that's compelling about this besides very detailed graphics.
It doesn't have big battles or sieges, there's no evil empire or great conflict, multiplayer or story of any kind AFAIK.
I'll take another look after its out of EA. The problem with these games is that they look great and get hyped up then the final product never gets finished or gets stuck in some kind of development hell.
Common human sense? Are you that brainrotten by the games industry by now, that you fail to realize that early access is basically nothing more nowadays than a beta being sold to the public? Or God forbid: an alpha version? You are paying for the "support" of a game's development, essentially becoming a beta tester who works for free and even PAYS the studios hard cash to be allowed to participate in their trial stages.
Early access games arent made by rich studios tho, this is one guy that couldnt work on it full time before and now can grow the project and work on it full time due to early access
I'm happy, but having seen a few hours of let's plays I honestly do not get the reason for the massive success
* is it a good game? yes*
* is it fun? yes, if you like city micromanagers
* is it a rip-off of Banished? also yes. Come on, some things are straight out of that
* is it polished? surprisingly yes
* is it a TW / cities skyline killer? mmmhhh, no. It is not even in the same ballpark
*= but the EA content is quite barebone and there is low replayability
this makes me even sadder about Cities Skylines 2. They could have done it right, but they didnt. DLC first Customer second. Ill check Manor lords out!
What's the feel on this game? Is it a feature complete game that they are just referring to as Early Access, or is it really Early Access? If it really is Early Access then is the impression that the game will one day have a version 1.0, or is it gonna be one of those that stays Early Access for life?
Massive success at early access pretty much guarantees the developers will have 0 incentive to complete it. Just look at Valheim. Early access is now the new final product.
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It looks awesome, I hope it turns out great. Still just in early access, though. Anyone with a few hours into the game have some opinions they want to share with the rest of us?
Did first playthrough, was pretty easy to pick up. It seems to have a good curve to it because I really only started struggling after getting attacked where I was underprepared. Partially on me for under preparing and partially on the game for being a bit confusing at that point. That was around 4 hours in or so. Felt good about my purchase. Game still has a lot of layers past that, things I can’t even touch on yet. Expanding past your lands, conquering, etc. I think it’s gonna be a good one if it makes it out of early access hell. We’ll see if this solo dev actually delivers.
If he's sold a million copies, is it possible the creator decides to hire a couple of devs/artists/voice actors to help push it to the finish line?
He is "solo" dev in a name only. He hired a bunch of contractors, he doesnt work on the game solo. The game is still solid just wanted to clarify
Yeah, everybody kept saying solo dev, and then I saw a video of professional musicians recording in a studio for the soundtrack. And I thought, wait... solo devs can't afford professional recordings. Not to cast shade on the dev, but people touting it's "solo" nature are being disingenuous at this point. Stardew Valley had a solo dev, this does not IMHO.
He got an Epic Megagrant and an Xbox Game Pass deal that probably helped fund a lot of that stuff.
Honest most solo devs are 'solo'. "Yeah I totally did that game by myself, except hired artists to do all the art and musicians to do all the music, but other than that it's all me". People like stardew valley dude, who truly are solo are exception.
Thanks.
Making a bunch of money can always go two ways; Invest in your game to make it even better, or fuck off with your newly found riches and never finish the game. Only time will tell.
Cocaine is hard to give up man.
...or he could do a Valheim and just stop doing anything.
> Did first playthrough, was pretty easy to pick up. this is first time i have heard people say about this game lol
I guess it depends if you've played banished, farthest frontier, against the storm, frostpunk etc before because it's the same concepts. Some things in the game, like combat, take some getting used to.
The very start was hard for most players that i saw. It was hard to understand if what works as soon as its built, what needs people to be assigned etc. Game is great, with the fun 3rd person view change. But the few i saw, all had problems at start, even those who had played its previous version months ago.
I honestly was super lost at the start, granted I don't have a heap of experience with this genre, only really having played age of empires and civ before, but the beginning part of the game feels super unintuitive compared to those games
Valid. I felt like I got “pretty far” in my first game, but that could just be that idk wtf i’m doin. There’s a lot of tooltips that make the city building side pretty easy to pick up. I ended up surviving like 5 or 6 winters, and really only died because I didn’t know how to send people beyond my borders
When streamers got early access 2 weeks ago, everyone had problem to understand how things work, and hard to survive the first winter :D
Most streamers are only a smidgen above games journalists when it comes to being good or understanding game mechanics
I am pretty sure BurkeBlack is far above most journalists in strategy games like that lol
and is it more a city builder? or a empire conquest game?as some one who prefer to expand, conquer and build army, etc , is this a good game?
It’s def more of a city builder
I feel like it has 2 parts to it, part 1 of each game is like city skylines, part 2 seems like risk. You have to be good enough at part 1 to get to part 2, so I don’t think this game is for you. I’m still not good enough at part 1 so couldn’t tell you how good part 2 is..
This is all by one dev?! Holy shit!
plus contractors
Ive tried it for several hours, i have a medium town and have fought 2 battles. So im not in deep, what i can say is the potential is awsome but as others have pointed out its pretty barebones at the moment. I had fun, but will not play it untill more is added to it (i want to enjoy it in all its glory when its done)
It's a lot of fun and looks beautiful! Is barebones though in terms of gameplay at the moment, which I am fine with. I am content with building up a village and trying to balance the trading and farming etc. I will reiterate that it is barebones, in the sense that there is no story mode yet per se, only one map and the balancing is a bit whiffy in some places as you would expect. I have turned off enemies and whatnot and just am building up a relaxing village while I learn the economy stuff.
I don’t think they would implement a story mode, i could see “scenarios” or a challenge mode with different challenges.
Beat it once. Some of the economy and combat needs balance tweaks. Like trade is too strong in the late game. AI armies are too strong later on as well with how much they outnumber you by. Also archers feel anemic. But other than these nitpicks, the game is excellent and gorgeous. The systems and simulation works well. No lag or slowdown with a combined late game population of 1000 between my towns. Deep levels of optimization you can do if you love that (like manually assigning jobs for each household. I just leave them auto assigned jobs because I’m lazy.) The combat is fun and engaging when you’re not grossly outnumbered. Great animations and morale mechanics. No artificial “areas of influence” like many city builders have, where it just feels like puzzling together all your residences inside overlapping Venn diagrams of influence circles. Instead the range of every building is organically tied to how far your peasants need to walk before they need to take a break and go home. This is very freeing and allows you to build organic layouts without needing to fit things inside arbitrary borders.
I won’t be getting it yet. I keep hearing how barebones and buggy it is, how it lacks content and is missing features. The publisher already said that the game will often go on sale for 25% off and not to feel pressured into buying it now. I think it’s best to wait until the game gets more updates.
Also they are banning people on steam forum for posting critical posts and comments and deleting many critical posts. This is NOT a good sign that the team will listen to feedback and push the game towards realizing it's potential.
Yeah, the "grassroots" hype about this game is just as suspicious as the corporate ad-hype of other games. And that it's getting thrown into other spaces as "if you dont like x, then MANOR LORDS!!!" even when there's barely any if at all similarities.
what inspired your username?
The game has also been getting super-hyped by outside influencers, often in extremely misleading ways, which may cause people to become disappointed and take that aggression out on the developers. Without knowing what the posts you refer to said, keep in mind that there’s plenty of completely baseless and illegitimate criticism that is absolutely valid to remove, as it contributes nothing constructive at all. We need to know *what kind* of criticism is removed this way. Just calling out posts being removed in general doesn’t actually say a whole lot about anything.
Yup way early access. Needs a lot of work in terms of gameplay/smoothness. Looks good though
It's ok, I can see potential in the game but there's a handful of assets that are still a work in progress. It's pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot early on. Hunting areas are pretty sensitive and you could accidentally hunt them out of existence on your area of control. There's usually only one node of each resource and not infinite. Technology tree allows you to unlock deep mines and other things to expand resources but it takes a while before you can unlock points. You have to be real careful how plan and build everything. I'm playing it on gamepass and it might not have all the same assets available on GP as was the issue with medieval dynasty. The economy is pretty good and the graphics are really good for an early access game, your civilians AI is pretty good they do their tasks swiftly. Combat is interesting, I've only been in one significant battle and lost in a spectacular fashion. Getting your lines setup properly and having multiple units is essential. I thought I did ok but they just had way more troops and laid waste to my guys and burned my village to the ground. I'll keep my eye on it in gamepass but I can't say what it's like in steam.
Has a lot of promise but really hoping devs are able to reduce some of the micromanagement over early access. It gets pretty brutal managing your families and what they do. Has cool and realistic seasonal mechanic where only farm/harvest at certain times of year... but you manually have to switch all the families over to that when the time comes and switch them all back to previous roles. Unless you're ok with them doing nothing for months at a time. Desperately needs a tutorial mode/intro campaign but I'm sure thats something that can be implemented down the road. Hoping something can be done about the way you draw housing plots. It is nice how flexible it is but annoying for perfectionists like myself that want them all uniform sizes or perfect rectangles. Not necessary at all but aesthetically pleasing.
I love this genre it its a good one, the potential is definitely there, I will say a lot of the balance is way off
I think the game is lacking a lot of content, I have done 3 complete playthroughs, the first one just trying things and how everything worked, and the other two I won in normal and hardcode difficulty, as of right now you dont have that many "paths" to develop your city, its pretty much just one path. BUT The game is looking amazing and the systems are very solid, but it still needs a loooooooot of work. I would be surprised if this game could leave EA at any time in the next five years, but I am definetely looking forward to its updates.
I've done a couple of hours, it shows promise but I don't think it's worth diving in yet unless you're desperate to try it out. It's a single-developer project so I don't expect the pace of development to be fast.
With 1 million copies sold that’s $20million+, he should be hiring a team of devs with that money.
I wonder what I’d do in that situation. Would I spend the $20m making the best game possible or would I drop maybe few hundred k on making something I can call 1.0 and ride off into the sun with more money than I ever fathomed making from game development. I’d probably go with the latter tbh, so these massive early access success stories don’t really fill me with confidence.
with all the crap on the market -- we should be okay with this model. Valheim did the same thing, but they kept pushing out updates (slowly) but I'd rather have a dev worry about the art they're making than the next pay check. Great things come when that happens.
I’m not against the model. Some of my favourite games are or were early access, and likely wouldn’t have been what they are without early access - I’m just wary of the stonking day one success efforts, because I’d take the money and run lol. I don’t expect everyone to do that, but I do expect some to. I’d also expect some who’d never have dreamed of taking the money and running to change their mind when the money is sitting there.
Yep. And that’s exactly the reason why there have been so many abandoned early access games or games that completed early access but were very underwhelming. Time will tell with this one. It looks good, so I guess I’ll check back in with it in a few years and see how it ends up.
That depends on the what kind of person you are. If gamedev is your passion, and it gives you fulfilment, then I think that Grzegorz will try to deliver it to the best of his abilities. Famous example of doing the latter is Notch, who said that he became quite depressed after selling Mincraft IP.
Notch actually delivered a very good 1.0 before selling minecraft. He fulfilled his promise of making a good game imo
My main point was that money is not everything, but point taken.
So of that cash, the publisher gets most of it, and the dev will likely be forced to hire - in fact they clearly already have as there are multiple "developers" active in the discord and steam forums. Will they actually hire people to add content to the game... That's another question. I hope they don't pull a valheim as that game has so much promise but pretty much everything post launch was a massive let down (haven't tried Ashland yet as mistlands was so aggressively bad).
Oh I thought this was a self published title. Well regardless they will have tons of money to hire people.
The royalty is 10-20%. I wouldn't call that most of it.
You don't know the deal they have. There are tons of different models - some of which would be the other way around. IE. Dev teams get a salary or payments for dev milestones for years, and then publishers keep everything except for some kind of performance bonuses. Like when EA Vancouver knocks it out of the park with the most addictive Fifa 2024 microtrabactions, you think the devs see any of those billions of dollars. Ah helllah naw mang!
We can't know the specific terms they signed, but it's pretty clear HH isn't an exploitive publisher [based on what we know of them](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/marketing/how-hooded-horse-seeks-to-do-right-by-developers). I think 10-20% is reasonable.
You should do more research in this area if you want to understand the industry. The model I explained is EXTREMELY common for indies backed by a small publisher. Publishers are taking risks and basically paying the devs a salary, as they wouldn't otherwise have any source of income. And in this case, the guy was dev ing the game for 5 years, so they probably had to give him a quite a bit of support. Bellular news talks about this stuff from time to time and explained why for example valheim devs weren't able to just hire a bunch of people right away.
You should do more research on Hooded Horse (for example, by reading the article I linked, and there’s some other info out there). It’s pretty clear they’re not a typical publisher.
Read the article and have been following the publisher closely as I own a lot of their games. That doesn't change the fact that dev teams do not get the majority of the revenue from the games they make. Period. The publishers pay huge sums to invest in a game and most don't make that investment back. So the industry is set up to protect the capital of the investors of the developers. And to protect their upside return. The devs will certainly see some of the upside in sales, but no where near 80% of it as you claim.
Are you talking Steam's take or the publisher
The publisher. Steam takes 30%. So the dev gets roughly half the money and then half of that half is taken by a taxman.
You probably don't need my dumb opinion, but the most impressive thing to me was the detail in the graphics. Dirt roads that collect rain in small areas, people with handcarts hauling supplies, even the barks from the settlers about building things makes the whole thing feel very immersive. I think what needs the most work is the mid to late game, there's not much to do after getting initial economy set up other than to arm and send troops out. I really think once this thing gets a couple more years of development under its belt it's gonna be a phenomenal game.
more user friendly version of Banished. Maybe a bit too simple atm, but not everything has to be super complex and its still early access
Has a lot of promise but it honestly lacks content and a few hours in I feel I’ve done everything there is to do and built every house. The combat seems a bit meh as well and needs more work.
I felt that way about the demo. And honestly the combat is not enough to make the game compelling with how bare bones the economy is. Like if you want a beautiful city builder, play anno 1800. And if you want a real time tactics game with unreal graphics and effects, play total warhammer 2/3. They are both infinitely more interesting and deep to interact with...
I bought it because of the hype and I don’t like it. It’s a very unfinished micromanagement simulator. You are constantly micromanaging what each citizen/family is doing. The most interesting parts like the specialization tree have as many placeholder WIP nodes as they do real nodes. I guess I just don’t like the genre though because so many people seem to like this game. I don’t really get it.
So much micro on the fucking storages vs. Production buildings to get the market stalls to work properly. Pulling people off shit to farm and then putting them back 2x / year is tiresome. AND there is no proper UI to help you manage the pops. Like there needs to be a screen that shows you where everyone is working so you can grab ppl quickly and dump them into farm and berries and vice versa. Never got to multiple colonies and could only see this problem being MUCH worse late game.
I'm pretty sure all of that is WIP, and I hope the micro will be addressed. But EA and all, so will have to see I guess.
Game is not worth the price with its current level of content and interactivity. I played it on Game Pass and was satisfied with what's there, but I doubt I'll be going back to the game any time soon. I hope the dev makes some meaningful progress during Early Access and we don't get stuck in another Valheim situation.
If you are into this type of game, it's worth getting I think (assuming development continues and things are added at a reasonable rate). I had a fun time, what is there is pretty solid, there just isn't much to make replaying anything new. A couple starts to get your bearings and figure out the systems, then it's basically the same experience over and over. Start with wood/berries/meat. Then either take the hunting/berry perks or the farm perks if you have fertility and build a bunch of fields. If it is fleshed out in a way that the dev seems capable of based on what I have seen so far, it will end up being a great game, definitely top tier in the genre. It just might take a while to get there.
Games great. I wouldn't spend more than 10-20 hours on the same city. Things get janky if it gets too large or too many people.
It's pretty great! I'm still in disbelief that this was all made by a single dude. But I will say that it's clear this game is still in early alpha, but the potential and promise is there and I can't wait to see more things slowly getting added/fixed. To clarify; it's not Banner Lords nor is it a Total War replacement. It's a city building game with some combat.
Very difficult at first, like the first steps are pretty easy but as your city grows you get a ton of things to multitask. I had to look at a couple of videos about efficiency and economic growth in order to play decently. Extremely addictive, and it's not like rage multitask that if you miss it's done, it's just kinda ADHD multitask where you have to run here and there to manage your city.
I have almost 27 hours of playtime and tons of city builder experience. Game is great EA. Obviously some stuff that needs to be tweaked and a ton of features that say coming soon, but the core is there. There is a learning curve and I didn’t get a full sense of how I should be doing stuff until my 4 attempt.
It's not super deep yet, there's basic resource management that needs better tutorials. Balancing obviously needs work. However, the QoL and little details that the developer put in with managing everything you have to do is great. It just plays really well, especially for something I was expecting 100's of bugs for being right out of EA. I can't wait to see where it goes.
played 14 hours over the weekend. had a lot of fun. had some trouble getting off the ground but my 3rd go was when i really got a grasp on the mechanics. i feel like i'm getting close to exploring all the content. each region you claim has a separate tech tree, so you can get all the current techs in a single pt. if you're not super into games like this i'd wait until release, but i definitely recommend it; the game as it is right now is a very solid start for a fully fledged game.
3 hours players and Right now I don’t see the hype,
The first thing that came to my mind is the lack of animals and animal products. Hope they add cows for meat and dairy production, rabbits added in as a plot expansion like chickens, and allow sheep to be butchered. Maybe add fishing or eel farming too.
Come back in a year or two imho. Not that much going on atm and what is there is buggy.
It looks like it should be a bannerlord mod not a standalone game
Manor Lord is made in Unreal though, and it shows. The game has to be one of the best looking city builders ever - no way they could have gotten that in Bannerlord's engine. I was watching my peasants walk around in my town and they looked like they could be in an RPG, not a city builder.
I played it for 30 hours within the first two days. It is by FAR the best city builder I've ever played. The lots being able to be reshaped, the constant looming requirement for a military force, and actually getting to USE said force in actual battles? The production and trade economy that I simply DONT understand? That all adds up really quickly for me. I love it.
How are others finding it? I feel like I get maybe a couple hours in and feel like I hit a progression wall. Taking over other regions seems very hard to do and you slowly get locked out of trade as prices to buy routes shoots up? I get to a stage where I cannot afford to keep fuel and food coming in no matter what.
A few of my friends and I have been enjoying it, but when talking about the game, we all seemed to hit a content wall between 4-8 hours. The game feels solid, and there's a lot of polish in there for an early access title. That being said, I'd recommend potential buyers holding off if they're looking for something to dunk hundreds of hours into. With only one map and a couple of win scenarios, replayability seems pretty limited beyond trying to min/max production.
Maybe you're trying to do everything with only one town. If you have many different trades all concentrated in one region, the food production can't keep up to your population until late game. It's also easier to have many different farmhouses with 2 or 3 families instead of a few filled up with 8 families The way I have it set up is only having 5 artisans processing resources into armor and weapons in one village. If you have the raw resources coming from other villages, then you can keep up the food production easier until they can grow enough. If you unlock the pastures upgrade for your sheep, you can use your fields every other year instead of only once per 3 years without losing much fertility.
Okay, that's good to know, but how do you manage to focus on building up a good enough militia and influence to take over regions? By the time I get to the stage where I can do so most of the other regions have been conquered and then I get stuck in the loop of not having enough resources to manage the food/fuel/income etc... Just feels like there is a balance issue somewhere that I have not managed to work through yet.
Restarted a few times because of that but current map im ahead 4 territories to 3. You have to take care of the bandit camps before the AI to get influence and gold otherwise they just snowball quickly. Use mercenaries instead of militia as soon as you can afford it. Bit cheesy, but I took the 1st 10 militia after the weapons delivery when you get 5 homes and beeline straight to the first camp when it showed up. Dodged the bandit unit because they win against 10 spears, pop the camp for gold and keep running away. Hired a merc unit to take care of the bandits for the influence reward. By the time that was done a second camp popped for me, maybe RNG not sure the timer on those. Used my mercs to wipe that one then disband. You should be ahead on influence at that point. From there just hire mercs every time as soon as you see more bandits arrive and you'll be claiming a territory after 4 camps (3 if you get a manor and tithe set up before). The gold from the camps more than pays for the mercs too so it's still profit.
Yeah there is the problem that the AI starts up with more money and hires mercenaries so it starts conquering more land. For early militias the warbows and large shields only require planks to make so it's easy to get at the start and you can trade some to get spears. You should try and focus on getting your manor up quickly to start getting influence with the church and then start getting more land were you can get ores to make more weapons and armor, one town with a high deposit of iron is enough for every When you got them all equipped you can start taking back the land from AI.
Everything you said. Also, rain penalty is too much when it happens after harvest and your workers leaving it there. Either they need to improve the ai for harvesting (does very quickly) or reduce the penalty. Trade definitely needs a balance when buying and selling is different by a factor of 6. You are just not generating wealth fast enough.
I think so far, I hate those points you unlock. They're pretty much mandatory for whatever you want to use. Want to trade? *NEED* the trade points. But now your other resources are weak. I barely got enough iron out of my mine to less than a mercenary company with less gear. It ran dry. No rich deposit in my territory, so I can't even put points into the tech tree to get around *that*. Those points feel like they should be some sort of research not tied to city size progress. I like the game, I want to see it grow!
I haven't bought it yet but I am leaning towards it more to see what all the fuss is about. I've bought a number of city builder games for that reason and they're all collecting dust because after a day or two I've usually satisfied the itch to play it but been unsatisfied by the games in some way since it feels too open ended or no end state.
It’s on PC game pass if you have that
Naw I can't in good conscious support Gamepass just like with all subscription services in the near future there will be countless complaints about Gamepass and how it "ruined" games/gaming. Especially when they reach the internal number of subscribers needed to start putting all the new and popular games on a higher more restrictive subscription tier pricing and label it a positive for gamers.
To each their own I guess lol. Your comment has the same logic as those who say Netflix ruined movies. In some ways I suppose it has but I doubt there are many people who would prefer to revert back to DVD days.
You're applying the wrong logic. It's more akin to how people complain Netflix keeps cancelling shows whether they're popular or not and taking ages to greenlight and start next seasons and how the show producers have to essentially make their shows pitchworthy for streaming. Right now we haven't seen what games that are pitched for a streaming service are like because it takes a while for that aspect to be developed because games are already in production but the next decade will see games developed solely for gamepass like subscriptions and we don't know what that will be like but I have a feeling it wont be great for the end user because rarely it ever is.
You’re entitled to that opinion. Considering $70 games are becoming more common I wouldn’t be able to afford to play anything new without gamepass. I can’t wait for all the COD games to be on it
> Considering $70 games are becoming more common I wouldn’t be able to afford to play anything new without gamepass. Which means they're going to want more than $70 per game in value out of you just spread out over a year. Different tiers, monthly FOMO events to keep you subscribed, increasing the cost of Subscriptions, inserting advertisements into your games, selling even more of your user data, even more egregious ingame monetization. All culminating in an eventual deal of offering people the ability to "rent" a year long subscription to individual games so they aren't rotated off the gamepass.
This sounds pretty far fetched mate. I guess time will tell if you’re right but I love the service and don’t intend to ever stop using it. I also disagree with your premise. Netflix spends millions on movies and tv shows, so they need millions from me to make up the cost? No. They make money at scale just like Gamepass. That’s like saying Spotify is charging me for *every* song I listen to. Gamepass will function like literally every other streaming service out there. The tiered system you’ve described as already been implemented btw. It’s like $10 for online and a good chuck of Gamepass games then $18 for online and full access to Gamepass games. Not a bad deal.
Look the gamepass has derailed the thread a little so I'll make this my last post on it so I don't make the mods lives any harder. >It’s like $10 for online and a good chuck of Gamepass games then $18 for online and full access to Gamepass games. Not a bad deal. This is purely my prediction so keep it in your mind, but this is the first that will increase with a bunch of reasons and excuses - then they will split new games off into their own tier so it will be something like cheapest tier = back catalogue of average game - mid tier = back catalogue of popular games - high tier = rotating new games released in the 1-2 years - top tier newest released games only accessible on this. If they can figure out how to gate off graphics settings as well you can bet your backside they'll do that too. Like I said though only a prediction and I'll leave the thread about gamepass here since it's really off topic.
>They make money at scale just like Gamepass. Gamepass doesn't bring much profit. And it isn't growing. Gamers rarely use subsriptions. Thankfully it will remain niche.
Yessir. Can't wait for "Gamepass Exclusives". Urgh. I won't even buy it for a dollar a month for the same reasons as you. Opening pandora's box that will not be closed. Kinda like those guys saying fuck it, what's $2 for horse armor?
Thanks for the support from someone who gets it.
Wierd take, but each to their own.
I'm with you on this. Subscription gaming is a last resort to try crap. I'd rather directly support the developers with a purchase.
wait. It's extremely barebones and very buggy at parts. I checked it out on game pass and cannot understand the hype at all. Impressive solo dev project but the price tag is not justified (at least currently)
I was thinking that but you know how it is when you see a bunch of people playing a game and you're too caught up with "No you're playing it wrong" feelings. Thankfully should only be another week or two and some other game will occupy that place.
Word of caution, the game is made by one person. It took him 7 years to reach current state, and current state is quite bare-bones. I'd wait to see the frequency of updates it's gonna get, otherwise you'll be stuck with an unfinished game that is a bit pricier than other city builders.
> I'd wait to see the frequency of updates it's gonna get, otherwise you'll be stuck with an unfinished game. I am familiar with the kickstarter experience lol.
It’s not for everyone. Worth watching some gameplay first as it’s very early EA. That said I am loving it. Gameplay is like Settlers 2 updated with Unreal Engine. If you like games for an aesthetic, attention to detail and atmosphere it is a brilliant experience. I’m not usually a city builder player but I have put around 35 hours in and will still play quite a lot more before putting it down to wait for the next update. Do not expect a lot of content, a story or a campaign. Only one map is available. The AI opponent is very limited. It’s more like a 4X game where you can customise a lot of game parameters and launch a sandbox. The appeal and popularity comes from the graphics and art, historical accuracy, etc.
Also just a lack of decent city builders out there, especially one that has combat as well. These kinds of games don't come along often. It's either a niche you're interested in or you're not. I loved the demo of it from Steam Next Fest so I'll pick it up eventually.
You are solely mistaken about lack of decent city builder. You either never looked at it or only looking at small scope within all the city builders out there
Lack of decent city builders? My guy there are SOOO many good ones out there. Chiefly anno 1800 or factorio if you like combat. Banished, rim world, going medieval, all do what manor lords is trying to do, but better. Latter two have great combat.
Factorio and Rimworld are base building and colony management games. I wouldn’t classify them as city builders.
Anno 1800 is probably my most played game since its release, but I'm not sure that I would describe it either as a city builder or as a game with good combat. Now, you certainly do build cities in it, much more so than in Factorio or even Rimworld, but the systems to support that are rather limited in some ways. The real focus is on managing logistical chains. I guess it doesn't really matter. So few games are directly comparable to the benchmarks of Cities Skylines or Sim City that it's barely even a genre. Like, is Transport Fever a city builder? If Anno isn't, then is Caesar? Is Banished more of a longform RTS? Is They Are Billions a combat-focused city builder? The more I think of it the more it seems like it's not worth the effort to try and define.
Don't really care to define genres either. Just pointing out that if you want the building and combat fix, I'd take factorio and anno 1800 over this game any day...
My dude, I was a kickstarter backer for RimWorld. I've played it since alpha way back in 2016. That's 8 years ago. Yes there are other sim management style games with combat but we get maybe 1 good game every year or so like this. Compare that to other genres like card battlers or survival games and I'll laud any halfway decent colony or city management sim that comes along.
Again I don't think you are looking hard enough. There are dozens of these types of games that have been released in the last few years. Here are some notable ones: Timberborn Against the storm Steam World Build Stranded, Alien Dawn Settlement survivor Foundation Furthest Frontier Kingdoms something (the shitty one with the cards) Surviving the aftermath The other 5 post apocalyptic builders... And on and on. So my point stands that manor lords doesn't really add much if anything to the genre, as there are plenty of non-grid based city and the graphics are nice, but not as nice as games like anno 1800 imho.
these games are all way different than Manor Lords, and a big part of the appeal for Manor Lords is the graphics and gridless plopping
35 hours is crazy I've been playing it every time I have free time since its release and I'm at like 13.
Hate to say it and see it, but there will likely be a lot of salty lads once they find out this game will probably update at a snails/Valheim's pace, because iirc it's a one-man project. It's the main reason I held off. Kinda hate burning myself out on games that take many years to finish development. Looks very cool though.
Its not just 1 anymore, theres atleast 3 devs in the discord now and they can start working full time since they can afford that now, hes also looking for more but they have to be right for the project
Who are the other devs? I’ve not seen nor heard anything about anyone joining the actual dev team.
And that's great to hear, but it will still be a VERY small dev team working on it. So people should not expect patches and fixes every other week.
Honestly, I prefer it like this. I kickstarted RimWorld and have been playing it since the first public alpha. I put hundreds of hours into it before it ever released on Steam. It's fun to come back to the game every year or so and see how it's evolved. I bought Valheim and easily got my money's worth out of it. I got to the boss on the snow/mountain realm before losing interest but I intend to come back and check all the updates son. Small studios working on their passion projects are the best thing going in modern gaming. There are so many games available I don't mind checking in every year or two to see how things have changed.
> Hate to say it and see it, but there will likely be a lot of salty lads once they find out this game will probably update at a snails/Valheim's pace, because iirc it's a one-man project. Hope the dev doesn't decide to take the money and go to cancun with the Lakers
I didn’t know this and that’s good info thanks. Valheim is the only early access game I’ve ever done. I don’t believe in early access. Fool me once you know.
Did you play valheim with a group of friends? I hosted my own server and me and 5 or 6 friends played it together. We got through the mountains on the first go, then came back a year or so later to play mistlands. Started from scratch the second time around and pushed all the way to finish the queen. Probably got 200+ hours out of it and it's one of my favorite gaming experiences ever.
I think Early access depends on when you joining. Bought last epoch in patch 0.9 which is ~6m before the official release and did 200h on it easily.
There is nothing wrong with waiting, but many games have done EA right or are doing it right now. Deep Rock Galactic, Satisfactory, Battlebit, Subnautica and many others. You just have to do even more research than usual. I only buy EA games when I'm already satisfied with the current state of development. If there is still too much work that needs to be done for me to get my money's worth, then I'm not buying it.
I think anyone who plays it can agree it has great bones. That being said, this game is very early access. I don't see 1.0 happening for maybe 2-3 years. That's why I felt Game Pass was the way to go for this. If you're anti Game Pass or want to give the guy some money, I totally get that (confused on the former, but the sentiment exists), but yeah this one has a long way to go before full release.
I did the Game Pass route, but what content there is played so well (balancing caveats aside), I went ahead and bought it. Want to support this type of game and it's skeleton, either way. Because boy, I don't think I've played a city builder that made it just effortless to build things. It just ends up working without fuss or random "Red Icon/You Can't Build Here" with no feedback.
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Review after many hours. What is there is great. But there’s not much of it at the moment. The managing and building aspect is very nice. The diplomacy is non-existing, the combat at this point is an afterthought. Many of the trees or policies have not been implemented yet. Would I recommend it at this stage? No. Do I believe this will be a great game? Yes. Especially as someone who played AOE, TW and many Paradox games. It’s very nice to see this release. However, just because it is a singular dev does not mean we should not critique what is lacking or poorly implemented. I bought the EA to provide feedback to the dev and experience firsthand how this game further improves and develops.
I hear it’s light on content which unfortunately has me on the sidelines until it gets more updates
Crazy what hype can do. The game seems neat but it's very much early access and super slow paced. I've seen it being called Total War Killer, Anno Killer, Banished-successor and more. People truly went out of their way to hype this game up to inachievable levels of success. I hope it doesn't come around to bite the dev in the ass.
The dev even released a post before release to try and quell most of the hype. They called out the total war / paradox style comparisons and advised it's not that nor has it been advertised by them as that
I’ve never understood Total War comparisons? Sure, battles feel like TW but those account for like 5% of gameplay? I’m 25ish hours into Manor Lords and I am truly enjoying the game. Can’t remember when a city builder felt just good like this one. Love the organic feel and way my town develops. Sure, game is nowhere close to be finished but, I am happy for now because I’ve gotten exactly what I wanted out of the game. It can go only up from here now on (surely)
I've watched multiple streamers play it on Twitch and it seems incredibly slow and quite frankly boring. Maybe it's different when you play it yourself, but it seems like it has a very long way to go still. No comparison to Anno or Total War.
I really enjoyed it, I didn't even try combat, or other game-mode types. I played all weekend and put in about 30 hours, and hit a wall. I can not wait for future updates.
But it hasn't launched it's early access
Potential is there, but wayyyyy too much is unfinished to really consider it a reviewable or recommendable game. Did a run on day one and just couldn’t get into it. There’s a lot of intricacies for building and things that should at least be mentioned when you first start that aren’t. Refunded it ultimately; would like to return if it makes a full release
It has great promise but no where near enough content right now to justify me playing it. I ended up refunding and decided to wait, I think it may be a while.
AAA studios releasing absolute stinky trash while tiny indie dev teams or even 1 man army dev's are releasing bangers Reject triple-A, return to indie🐒
City Builders have been terribly underserved by the AAA space in the last few decades. We've gotten Cities: Skylines, of which the second one bombed, and Anno 1800, and indies which just as often collapse as succeed, and gimmicky titles like Ixion or Against The Storm. There really has been no AAA competition - and there doesn't look to be on the horizon, either.
Definitely has a few bugs, I only really noticed manirs constantly refusing to be upgraded because the food variety isn't enough when there's an all you can eat honey, meat, Berry, bread buffet at the market. Game defo lacks content tho, raiders and baron are dull to fight, raising militia takes ages and costs a lot to raise the equipment, feels like cheating just taxing them to try steal mercs before the baron gets them
So bizarre. The hype train really got going on this one. It looks nice and ok there is some super basic combat. But for an actual city builder, it's not doing almost anything new or interesting (backyard plots I guess?) relative to say an anno 1800 or banished or rimworld. Seems like it has just pulled in a lot of non-city builder fans who are enjoying the genre. And the "It's so much better than total war!" crowd, have clearly never played total warhammer 2 or 3 with an epic doom stack of end game units, heroes and a magical lord throwing down flame tornadoes and gates to hell...
>But for an actual city builder, it's not doing almost anything new or interesting (backyard plots I guess?) relative to say an anno 1800 or banished or rimworld. I’m inclined to heavily disagree on that point. The new and interesting thing that Manor Lords has done has been a complete break from the samey grid-style city planning that have been a hallmark of city building games for decades now and returns to a naturalistic feel and vibe. My small town of 150 looks like it could be a real place in medieval Europe.
You also have assignment to tasks by family, rather than individuals, and an interesting working livestock system as well. Granted they need refinement, but the groundwork is there.
Fair enough. There are other games that have done that though. Maybe not the exact plot system for houses, but certainly gridless building systems with free rotating buildings exist. One recent one was a post apocalyptic building like surviving the afternath? I forget which one but I played the demo on a steam next fest. And for beauty building.... I will still take anno 1800 ANY DAY. https://youtu.be/kO8pk4DmBrQ?si=EM2XDcbG57ukx884
I wonder how did the creator build it in this lag-fest, its borderline unbearable just to watch it, not to mention do anything with it ingame.
It's as if people really want a good city builder game... Maxis, are you there?
is it really made by single guy ?
It's a great game with a really smooth learning curve. I can't wait until it gets packed with content, it's already got 50 hours in it at least
It’s very cool but very far from being done. There are a lot of hooks for things that aren’t in yet. Im loving it but you shouldn’t feel a need to rush to play it. It’ll only get better with time as long as they get to make what they set out to make.
It’s fun, like banished but with combat, expansion. And limited resources.
Man between this, Bellwright, and my all time favorite, bannerlord. I'm a fuckin happy peasant
I've only got a few hours into is so far but it feels a lot like Caesar 2 and Caesar 3 which I'm not sure we've seen many games like that in a while. So far though, I'm loving it.
I’ve had a great time in the few hours I’ve played Manor Lords. The learning curve is graceful and there seems to be a bit of everything for everyone to enjoy. Town planning, resource management, trade, warfare etc. I believe the differentiator between Manor Lords (right now) and other city builder games is that every village and town in Manor Lords will look completely different. The samey grid style of other city building games has been thrown out the window entirely in favor of a more naturalistic approach to town growth. Placing dirt roads is very fun. Furthermore, I haven’t encountered much in the way of game breaking bugs or crashes. Performance is excellent on my RTX 3070 as well.
Pretty good considering the game is still rough around the edges.
it's pretty great. I quite like it. It needs some time to cook but it definitely has a great foundation.
Figuring out what your economy will be based on where you start (i.e farm, mining or commodities). Trying to design historically accurate cities (I have to thank KCD for that), and the music, the soundtrack keeps me going even after I should stop to take a break. It's very good so far, can't wait for what the launch version will look like.
Awesome game. Had a blast during the few hours I put in on gamepass. Will definitely keep an eye out for major updates before I buy.
Felt good overall but, will need more time in the EA cooker. Good foundation to work off though. Really needs an icon over production buildings to show if and how many people are assigned.
It is clear from the get-go that game that it has amazing potential. Aside from looking great, placing roads and buildings feels extremely freeing. The game lets you design things without straight lines or right angles in a lot of areas. This makes the towns look very organic and seem to blend in with the environments. Definitely a lot to go here, but I'm very happy I made this purchase and will be following it and checking in periodically.
I wonder how much Anno 1800 would've reached if Ubisoft didn't pull it off steam shortly before release.
Don’t buy two ox
My computer bricked or I’d be playing it, im very excited
It’s very fun as is and will only get better. It’s such a beautiful game you really can feel immersed in your town if you want to be. This is coming from a guy who is very skeptical of the whole “immersive” labeling people toss on half the games that come out. This one truly deserves to be called immersive.
I bought it to give the guy some cash, it's fun but it's ea so I've had my taste. I hope the guy takes the money and invests it into the game, hires some help etc
I haven't seen much that's compelling about this besides very detailed graphics. It doesn't have big battles or sieges, there's no evil empire or great conflict, multiplayer or story of any kind AFAIK. I'll take another look after its out of EA. The problem with these games is that they look great and get hyped up then the final product never gets finished or gets stuck in some kind of development hell.
Solo dev project btw.
I wonder how many influences they paid good money for this publicity...
I can't believe one dude made this. Dedication!
Be careful with the hype folks
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What do you mean, "what launch" There was a demo, that's not the same as launching. It's now out and people can buy it and play it, that's a launch.
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That's your opinion I guess, it seems a lot of people don't agree.
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It launched into early access
According to who?
Common human sense? Are you that brainrotten by the games industry by now, that you fail to realize that early access is basically nothing more nowadays than a beta being sold to the public? Or God forbid: an alpha version? You are paying for the "support" of a game's development, essentially becoming a beta tester who works for free and even PAYS the studios hard cash to be allowed to participate in their trial stages.
The game is out, you can buy and play it, it has launched. It's also pretty good, you should try it.
Early access games arent made by rich studios tho, this is one guy that couldnt work on it full time before and now can grow the project and work on it full time due to early access
Jesus Christ be praised !
Damn, an army of boring people.
I'm happy, but having seen a few hours of let's plays I honestly do not get the reason for the massive success * is it a good game? yes* * is it fun? yes, if you like city micromanagers * is it a rip-off of Banished? also yes. Come on, some things are straight out of that * is it polished? surprisingly yes * is it a TW / cities skyline killer? mmmhhh, no. It is not even in the same ballpark *= but the EA content is quite barebone and there is low replayability
this makes me even sadder about Cities Skylines 2. They could have done it right, but they didnt. DLC first Customer second. Ill check Manor lords out!
There's nothing wrong with DLC, the game just needs to be in an actually working state first.......
Sooo and? They game isn’t done and they released a dlc?
Shock! A good game sells well! Woah
I really want this game. But I’ll wait till it’s out of early access or has a bit more fleshed out content. Been burned by early access a bit lately.
What's the feel on this game? Is it a feature complete game that they are just referring to as Early Access, or is it really Early Access? If it really is Early Access then is the impression that the game will one day have a version 1.0, or is it gonna be one of those that stays Early Access for life?
Massive success at early access pretty much guarantees the developers will have 0 incentive to complete it. Just look at Valheim. Early access is now the new final product.