The best medieval-ish city builder. I happen to be a historian specialising in the Middle Ages, and games that market themselves as “historically authentic” often leave a lot to be desired as such games often don’t even try to emulate the time period beyond basic aesthetics. Since a lot of the hype around Manor Lords comes from its commitment to historical accuracy, I'll be reviewing it from that perspective. This game, although there is room for improvement, is clearly an earnest attempt to enable players to recreate reasonably authentic medieval towns and villages and gets closer to that goal than any of its rivals. After spending about a dozen hours building a large town, it's very much unfinished but what's there is good.

There is currently one map with some RNG elements, such as your starting location and the starting location of a rival lord who also wants this land and whom you will eventually have to fight. You will build houses which can, as was typical in the Middle Ages, have a productive plot of land to the rear for a vegetable garden or household animals like goats or a chicken coop, and the system for building them is intuitive, flexible, and a joy to use. You’ll have to manage trade with off-map settlements as well as maintain a militia to deal with bandits or the rival lord. On the whole, I really like it.

There are some issues with the mechanics of the game:

1. There is no way (that I can find) to limit the production of certain goods without micromanaging employment. It would be good to say “have a stockpile of 50” like you can in other settlement management games, and like you can with the trading system. I would like to not have to micromanage 14 houses just to regulate what planks are used for.

2. Combat is trivial assuming rough parity between the size of the armies. You have to try to lose a battle to lose a battle.

3. Bandit raids on your village happen off screen a lot of the time. Like, you can’t defend your settlement, you just get a notification that you’ve lost goods to bandits. Let us defend ourselves please, or let us have a bailiff to reign in the thieves.

4. Trade is overpowered, you can get to a point where the player can run the whole settlement through trade. Trade has no risks, so the game steers the player toward relying on trade rather than managing their villages.

5. The rival lord expands far too aggressively, even on its lowest settings. By the time you can claim a single neighboring parcel of land, you’ll be lucky not to have been boxed in completely. The AI takes one parcel a year, there are 8 provinces, and it starts with two while you start with one. This means that by year 5 the AI has the map locked down entirely while you’re still trying to get a decent harvest in. This sucks and is the game’s biggest problem right now.


The game has a remarkable ability to enable the player to create authentic medieval town layouts, and you could probably recreate some medieval towns in the game pretty accurately. However, the game seems to be based on central Europe around 1400, so it does tend to lean toward villages and towns from that time and place. While you can emulate, for example, Norman town planning with its focus on commercial high/fore streets, you cannot build a medieval Italian town in this game because plazas are not a thing (yet), while building a village around a central green would be aesthetic rather than the functional heart of the village.

This leads on to an area where the game and its commitment to historical accuracy will hopefully improve as development continues, which is forest and land management. In most medieval-ish town planning games (this one included) you put down a logging hut and they just cut down trees, then a forester plants new trees. This is not how medieval people generally managed their woodland, if only because it’s remarkably inefficient prior to mechanised forestry. Although the villages are historically authentic, the same effort has not been put into those villages’ relationship with the land (yet). Some suggestions:

1. Coppicing. Coppicing was the practise of cutting a tree down to the stump to stimulate the growth of shoots around the stump, essentially tricking one tree into growing many trees. This would result in a large amount of harvestable wood within 7-10 years. However, the shoots were vulnerable to being eaten by deer.

2. Pollarding. The same idea as coppicing, but it’s done about 2m up the tree trunk. You get less wood that’s harder to access, but deer won’t eat it.

3. Deeper deer management. Of course, if deer keep eating everything you could just kill all the deer. Deer culling was (and still is) an important part of forestry. Although the game does have deer management it is as simple as “don’t over-hunt”. It would be good to see this expanded to reflect the real world impacts of deer overpopulation or underpopulation.

4. Wolf management. When creating new villages, they often encroached on the habitats of wolves. Wolves don't usually attack people, but if they get used to human contact and become habituated, they do. A mechanic for wolf packs similar to deer migration (except rather than going further away when bothered, they attack) might work well. It would be nice to fight something other than the tropey RNG bandit camp.

It’s got a lot of promise, I’m sure I’ll enjoy sinking hundreds of hours into it over the years, but you might want to wait a year or so until it’s further along development.

I can rebuild Skalitz now.

fulfills my male urge to practice sustainable forestry and manage crop rotations