Carefully chopping down trees, building taverns brick by precious brick, meticulously balancing all your resources – I suspect playing Manor Lords feels a lot like developing it. But the strategy game from Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń has just taken a giant leap forward. With Civilization 7 about to arrive and Cities Skylines 2 bringing up the rear, the huge new Manor Lords update makes the medieval city builder feel basically brand new. If you haven’t tried Manor Lords yet, or you checked out after early access, now’s the time to give it a shot.
We haven’t reached the Manor Lords 1.0 launch yet, but the new update feels like a significant step in that direction. Virtually every aspect of the strategy and city-building game has gotten at least some attention. The big additions are two new maps, named High Peaks and Winding River. However, these also come with accompanying gameplay changes.
Helpful for Winding River, you now have the ability to build bridges over water, allowing you to expand your settlements across further outwards. For High Peaks, there’s a new system for more accurately identifying rough terrain and cliff edges; if you’re trying to lay out fresh constructions in an area with steep inclines, Manor Lords’ building tools should be a lot more intuitive now.
Thanks to the new update, you can also upgrade the stone well and build the coveted level 2 tavern. Also, as part of an ongoing effort to improve Manor Lords’ in-game economy and simplify the marketplace, the fuel and fabric stalls have been merged and from now on, only the owners of service buildings can establish complementary storefronts.
“There was too much confusion about who owned what and works where,” Slavic Magic says. “It was very difficult for players to understand, for instance, that a gravedigger could have a food stall. Only the storage building workers can set up marketplace stalls now.”
You can also overstock buildings now as a way to prepare for upcoming shortages, and set storage filters to make sure that goods you have saved up won’t be consumed. The marketplace UI has been updated so that it will show the number of assigned families in storage buildings and the amount of space available to each stall has been reduced, incentivizing the need for a greater number and variety of stalls, and a more vibrant market.
You’ll get a prompt now to approve taxes even if there is no money to tax, something Slavic Magic says is “more intuitive for players.” In the event of a drought, fishing from ponds will automatically be disabled and abandoned stalls are no longer factored into the calculation for product availability, making the overall state of the marketplace easier to understand.
There are dozens of other small fixes, nips, and tucks in the complete Manor Lords update, but given that it combines two beta updates into a single release, this feels like a practical reinvention of all the game’s main systems.
You might also want to try some of the best strategy games, or maybe the best medieval games on PC.
You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.