Manor Lords Preview | Total War Meets Medieval City-Building

Manor Lords is the latest game within the city-building genre landscape where you try to carve your path by kickstarting your settlement and wrestle control of all regions before another Lord stakes their claim upon those lands. However, that’s not all that this game offers its players, as, besides the city-building aspects, you can also control your armies in real-time just like in the Total War franchise. 

This Manor Lords preview will take a closer look at the features currently available in the game, ranging from building your settlement to developing your armies and managing the resources you can gather in the game. Let’s begin.

Manor Lords will be available on Steam for $14.99 as an Early Access Game on April 26, 2024.

Story | A New Beginning

Manor Lords gives the freedom of choice to the players when it comes to what they want to be, so unfortunately the story suffers a setback due to this freedom. However, in turn, we can select our appearances, though as of now it’s mostly cosmetic without actual meaningful impacts on the overarching story within Manor Lords.

The game begins by putting us in charge of a handful of vagrants and refugees in one of the sub-regions of the map, and our task is to build a proper civilization with limited supplies and manpower, and power through the many winters and adversaries. While I didn’t expect a full-blown story in a city-building game like this, it still feels wasteful to not delve deeper into the characters that are present in Manor Lords, particularly the one who wrote a letter to us during the early stage of the game.

I genuinely hope that the developers can build a proper story, as a game like this can benefit from having at least flavor texts and background events to elevate the game’s interesting premise. 

Selecting Your Character and Banner.

Gameplay | A Mesh of Two Genres

What intrigues me the most about Manor Lords is its gameplay, as the developer promises many things, which include a mesh between city-building aspects and real-time strategic battles that you can fully control. A love child between Total War and Cities: Skylines.

For this Manor Lords preview, I will talk about those two aspects and see what their strengths and weaknesses are, as well as what makes this game the first of its kind.

Real-time Battles

The first element of Manor Lords‘ gameplay is the way it presents the opportunity to lead your armies to real-time battles while also managing your city without pause. Yes, you heard that right. There won’t be any pause screen or switching to another map for battles: You juggle between micro-managing your troops while also having to look out for your villagers.

And that’s the beauty of what this game is trying to do. Usually, a game like this, notably the Total War series, lets you leisurely manage your territories without having to worry about the battles unless you are trying to initiate one or being attacked by the enemy AI, and vice versa. But in Manor Lords, oh boy, you will need to attend to both matters at the same time.

Creating Your Armies.

Suppose you enable a setting that will allow you to receive a weaponry shipment during your playthrough. In that case, forming your first army is practically easy to do as you just need to hover over the Army screen and select Shieldmen, and 20 troops will join your cause as the first Militia unit. If you want to use them, then you can place them on any point of the map by using the Rally Banner, where the troops, a portion of your villagers, will gather and form ranks according to their unit types.

Once you gather the troops, you can mobilize them anywhere on the map, although you can only attack clickable entities, with the most notable example of this is the Bandit Camps, which are your biggest adversaries during the initial year or two within your playthrough. During the mobilization, you can order your troops to either use the March stance (which will deplete their Stamina and in turn, reduce their Effectiveness) or have them use the Stop stance to recuperate, though they might become vulnerable to sudden attacks.

Overall, I enjoy how seamless and fluid the battles are in the grand scope of things within Manor Lords‘ map, and I have to applaud the developer for successfully pulling off this daring task of having real-time battles without having to switch screens and make us multitask if we decide to initiate a battle.

Dominate Your Enemies.

City-Building

The next section of this Manor Lords preview will discuss its city-building gameplay elements. While I can’t find any major fault in the game’s real-time battles, some things plague its city-building aspect.

The first major downside I noticed is that you cannot get any points for the Development Trees unless you upgrade certain buildings, which snowballs into an expensive and extensive process that yields minimal results. Manor Lords promotes growth and ensures that your villagers are sufficiently provided for and can sustain themselves throughout the years, and this system is just counterproductive to what we as the players are tasked to do.

However, once the veil of drawbacks is gone, Manor Lords’ city-building aspect is quite solid. You can’t just build whatever you want (Favoring more houses while neglecting resource-gathering buildings); you have to think about how to balance between growing your population numbers and keeping them well-fed and protected through the winters.

The game challenges the players to plan out their development plans before enacting them, as demolishing your building will be time-consuming and just adds the resource requirement that might deplete your supplies.

Development Trees.

Graphics and Sound Design | All Things Medieval

For the last part of this Manor Lords preview, let’s take a look at its graphics and sound design. Honestly, I didn’t expect much going into the game, so I initially thought that the graphics and sound design departments would suffer in favor of Manor Lords’ gameplay. It’s suffice to say that I was proven wrong.

The graphics, although not the nicest ones out there, provide enough realism to make the setting believable. The NPCs’ designs are great, the buildings are surprisingly delicate and detailed, and the seasonal effects help elevate Manor Lords‘ graphical aspect.

Moving on to the game’s sound design, there aren’t any moments where I can stop and just feel the soundtrack. They are barely noticeable and don’t elevate any of the scenes that I’m playing through, including the battles. I hope that the developer can improve upon Manor Lords‘ sound design, as there are many moments in the game that should’ve been paired with an illustrious soundtrack, but they weren’t, and I felt that was a missed opportunity. 

This Manor Lords preview is possible thanks to the game key provided by Hooded Horse.