Manor Lords is getting a “full rework” with a new affinity system, map, shops and workstations
It’s been a long time since the last major Manor Lords update and it’ll likely be a while till the next. This might strike you as dismal news, if you adhere to the “death by a thousand patches” school of Steam early access, but you have to remember that Manor Lords is a city builder set in late 14th-century Franconia, when technology lolled along at the pace of a drunken ox. Also, the developers Slavic Magic are carrying out a “full rework” of the game, rather than doling things out in smaller patches. In particular, there’s a new building affinity system in development that may please fans of pollination. Any flowers reading this? The next update is for you, I guess.
“I know you’ve been waiting a long time, and the reason for the delay is pretty simple,” begins a Steam post from lead developer Grzegorz Styczeń. “We’re overhauling a lot of systems at once. It’s not just a new feature or two. It’s a full rework of how things like buildings, production chains, and environmental interactions function. Because we’re working on all these big changes, we haven’t been able to put out smaller patches. They would make things messy or break stuff that’s still being worked on.”
The developers plan to shift to smaller, more regular updates once the “full rework” is done.
Ever the giver, Styczeń closed the post with a few highlights from the forthcoming megapatch. These include a “more in-depth relational system” between buildings and between buildings and the environment. They experimented initially with applying building effects across a radius, as in many other city builders, but this disagreed with the Manor Lords plot system. Besides which, Styczeń feels that “fitting rectangular plots into circles is not pleasant, and it reduces the creativity the player has”.
Gah, I can picture how annoying this would have been. I can imagine the hours I’d have spent gnawing my fingernails over stray wedges and curls of unexploited affinity radius. How I’d have cursed your name, Greg. Such plagues I’d have called upon your houses.
Fortunately, Slavic Magic are going with a system of matching environment types, instead. So far, the types include Meadow, Woodland, Farmland, Rural, and Urban. Buildings have affinities with specific environments: apiaries like sharing a region with some woodland, for example. There are buffs and multipliers to ponder, too: apiaries increase the bonuses that pollination orchards get from meadows, while placing fresh houses appears to proportionately increase urban affinity.
Sweaty questions of infrastructure chemistry aside, Slavic Magic are working on a new map, Divided, which as the name suggests has a mountain range running down the middle. They’ve also shared screens of new shop fronts and artisan workstations, see-through fortifications for those who want to ensure that their castle guards aren’t nodding off, a new development perk card style, and a whole raft of reworked building cards. Consider all this subject to change, naturally.
Even in early access form, Manor Lords is one of our favourite city builders, and an appetisingly mucky simulation of medieval life. It even sounds like a flyblown heap of feudalism. I look forward to rearranging my apiaries.
