Hi all,

You can now access a new experimental branch of Manor Lords (0.7.960).

To avoid any potential issues, it’s recommended to make a backup of your save files before switching to a beta version.

• Press Win + E
  
• Paste %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\ManorLords\Saved\SaveGames into the search bar.

If you'd like to try it, please follow these steps:

• Open Steam
  
• Right-click on Manor Lords in your library
  
• Select Properties
  
• Go to BETAS tab
  
• Enter the password: veryNiceBasket
  
• Choose "pre_release" from the "Beta participation" drop-down list
  
• Wait for the game to update the files (if nothing happens, restart the Steam client)
  
• Launch the game

The new strings are not localized yet and stability hasn't yet been thoroughly tested. Some balancing changes are still experimental.

To discuss please join the official Discord server https://discord.gg/manorlords. You'll find a channel specifically for discussing the ongoing pre_release branch.

My first goal was to fix all the most common reported issues:

- The rate of Hildebolt's claims
- The famous "None" people spawning in huge numbers and refusing to do any work
- The clogged Trading Posts
- The game being stuck at the summary screen after a victory / game over
- Very weak archer damage
- Inefficient sawpits which also triggered "generic storage full" problem banners
- Problems with optimizations in large cities (still some work to do here)
- Inefficient marketplace supply
- Problems with farming, like crops erasing in the winter & inefficient harvests
- Too harsh oversupply/undersupply systems
- People and/or livestock staying homeless even though there is living space in the settlement
- Overly high ale consumption

Additionally, to make trading between Regions easier, I made sure that the players can use Trading Posts to trade between their own regions without using Barter / Pack Stations.

Each good type now has a switch that disables trading it with Free Merchants / Tradepoints in case the players wants to only trade with another Region. The displayed import price will adjust dynamically, showing the lowest possible price found (and NA or not available if there is no good of this type anywhere to be found).

Trade related development branches were nerfed drastically because players argued that it made the game too easy.

Whenever a person dies, there is a 30 day mourning period that blocks growth. You can now preview this in the Building Panel of the Burgage Plot or by pressing TAB.

Carried corpses now have a visual representation.

New upgraded retinue armor variations were added.

I reimplemented a mechanic called "Annual Royal Tax" or "King's Tax" (still deciding on the naming). It's a tax that is collected from the Treasury once per year, goes to the King, that is calculated per resident and in theory should slightly punish bad workplace optimization and make it more difficult to hoard huge amounts of cash.

The Large Granary building got a rework. The doors now properly animate.

A new unit patron was added - St. Maurice

Full patch notes below:

Version 0.7.955->0.7.960

Major changes:

-The King's Tax is now enabled (or Annual Royal Tax, can't decide on the name)
a) This tax is collected annually from all players (main player and AI) and goes to your liege. It's counted per population and therefore should become a counterbalance for players who hoard huge wealth despite having non-optimized economies.
b) [WIP] For now the player can go in debt without consequence, but in the future the player will lose king's favor and eventually the king's army will show up as enemies for players who refuse to pay

-Global/Local trade switch for trading posts
a) The player can now switch trade to "local only" in the trading post for each type of good if they want to use the trading post to exchange goods between their own regions but ignore the free merchants.
b) For now 2 trading posts (both regions) are still required to make it work.
c) Employed traders will prioritize to travel to the place with best prices to commence trade, and yes potentially including regions owned by other Lords. This can have interesting consequences in the future. For now I reduced the transport distance from the calculation in order to make it more predictable for the player where the traders will go (to the place with the best price).
d) Regional wealth is still required for exchanging goods between regions with a trading post since I want to keep the regions as independent economic units which in my view a more realistic simulation of economy.

Gameplay & balance:
-[Experimental] When consuming food, people will now pick a random food resource instead of eating food in a specific order
-[Experimental] Fertility is no longer drained after crop growth reaches 100% so that always micromanaging early harvest is no longer a preferred strategy. Yield may still increase over 100% growth if max yield is not reached.
-[Experimental] When harvesting, the crops are directly added to the field inventory instead of the villager inventory. This was done to ensure that harvesting walk times aren't the main bottleneck for farming, especially for large fields. [Side note: moving harvest season to August is also possible in a future patch if needed]
-[Experimental] Prioritized Oxen plowing over transporting resources back to the granary & warehouse to reduce the ox walking back and forth from the plowed field every time a new batch of resources is available for transport
-Plowing shed now adds 2 livestock worker slots
-Lowered the rate of the Baron claiming regions and adjusted it to better reflect the game settings
-Removed the worker camp upgrade - it was meant for colony regions and will be readded when they are properly implemented
-Food producing residential plots no longer stock up on their produce before they share with the marketplace
-Increased sawpit log storage space to 5
-[Experimental] When establishing a trade route, the merchants will no longer all spawn in the nearest tradepoint. Instead, the game will distribute the merchants to circle between various tradepoints in order to make building trading posts right on the edge of the region less optimal.
-Increased warbows ranged attack from 4 to 12
-[Experimental] "Trade logistics" development branch now lowers the cost of new trade routes by 50% instead of clamping it at 25
-[Experimental] Cost of opening new trade routes now scales exponentially with every opened trade route
-[Experimental] Base cost of opening a trade route was increased from 12 to 20 (that is before the good value multiplier)
-[Experimental] When market is oversupplied, the player can still export stuff, although for much lower price
-[Experimental] The price multiplier for oversupplied goods is now 0.75x for oversupplied and 0.5x for critically oversupplied
-[Experimental] How fast market is oversupplied no longer depends on the value of goods because it punished having high value trade routes. Now the oversupply rates are equal for all good types.
-[Experimental] Better deals development branch reduces the foreign import tariff by 50% instead of removing it completely
-[Experimental] Reduced ale consumption by 75% (around 1/3 per family per month)
-[Experimental] Made the building placement steepness limits harsher cause the trading posts and churches often looked super janky on very sharp slopes
-Soldiers no longer trigger "unburied bodies" approval factor when corpses are in their proximity
-[Experimental] Hitching post is free again, to reduce chances of players getting stuck with no ox, no hitching post and no ability to order an ox

Minor changes:
-Applied the "mindfulness" system that was initially designed for the oxen to the free merchants. This system is used to reduce clumps and traffic jams.
-Moved the location of trades further off map to make sure there is some space for all the trade wagons even if the players place the trading post right on the edge of the map
-If a trading post is clogged, traders are allowed to make transactions without entering the shed, as long as they are within the general building bounds
-[Experimental] Changed default AA under DX11 to TAA
-Added a spatialization update call when recruits are sneakily teleported home when rallied to ensure collisions are properly calculated after teleportation
-Added a check for idle villagers to avoid hanging around the graveyard for random conversation since it looked weird
-Made "is close to camera" value update on setting follow mode to make sure the game doesn't optimize animations or sound effects thinking the character is still far from the camera
-Disabled fire damage for people who have water buckets and are actively firefighting + redued the fire damage amount
-When all resource visualization slots are "filled", villagers will transport to a random one instead of the first one found. This ensures less traffic jams for instance at the churchyard if all graves are "full" already.
-Firefighting villagers will now ignore anti-clogging behavior (waiting their turn at narrow pathfinding points)
-Added a "mourning period left" UI element in the residential panel to display how many days of mourning are left until the burgage plot can bring in more family members again
-Added mourning icon to the building floater
-Made sure mourning period is properly added to save data
-After continuing the game after a victory the camera should go back to the player's main region instead of levitating over the map edge
-[Experimental] Disabled the ability to quicksave during the game over / victory cinematic
-Disabled the ability to manual save the game after being defeated & added a tooltip explaining why saves are disabled
-Disabled quick save and autosave if game was lost
-When ox gathers a log, it will prioritize immediately bringing it to the sawpit before bringing it to the logging camp unless construction reserve forbids it
-Improved marketplace logistics efficiency and optimization
-Tuned the AI retreat distances in an attempt to reduce how often its archers get into the loop of attack-retreat
-Added the missing trading post building thumbnail
-Minor unit in-town pathfinding updates
-Swapped the old UE4 destructible system for a new, UE5 friendly, chaos based debris system. For now it's just used for chopped firewood cutter logs.
-Further tweaks to properly choose the right default AA/upscaler during the first time launch correctly for specific GPUs (eg. RTX properly defaulting to DLSS)
-Added kings tax rate multiplier to the game setup settings
-Due to mismatch in global market supply stock values, old saves (from builds 0.7.954-0.7.956) will have their market supply reset on loading
-[Experimental] Due to changes in how food is consumed, a popup "Food consumed" may no longer appear if a building is selected while a food is being consumed from inventory
-[Experimental] Made the sheep flock a bit more closely together to look more like a herd
-Steepness limits no longer apply when placing rally points
-Players can now rally their militia on fields and pastures
-Trading posts will now display a price range for imports in case they can buy it both from other regions AND from foreign trade sources
-Increased the sheep & lamb collision radius
-Capped the number of workers who supply a single market stall at the same time to 2 to reduce markets getting completely clogged with the new upped market supply frequency
-Further optimized the market supply functions to make late game towns run smoother
-Optimized the function that searches for a friend to do idle tasks with (like conversations)
-Optimized the door opening animations
-Increased the precision when checking whether a character is inside a building on fire and should take damage
-Unified the currency icon in the mercenary company panel to make it clearer that you're paying with treasury and not regional wealth
-Added accommodation call after fire is started and turns people homeless so that they can be reaccommodated to other available burgage plots immediately
-Since almost all families have more than 1 family member, I made the "workplace/reassign" buttons aligned vertically instead of horizontally in the family list
-Fixed old fonts being used in the family entry widgets

Crashfixes:
-Fixed a crash when doing a sequence of livestock import, export and import, because "home" wasn't cleared properly during export and the same animal was reimported
-Fixed a rare crash if a handcart fails to spawn, probably if the trading post was build so that part of it crosses the map edge
-Fix crash on startup if OpenXr sdk is installed

Bugfixes:
-Fixed victory status not resetting after starting a new game, leading to a game over screen not appearing if the player lost/won multiple games without turning the game off
-Fixed crop transports not accounting for the farm work area
-Fixed crops dying in the winter instead of actually increasing yield by absorbing nutrients from the snow as it was intended for winter crops
-Fixed oxen sometimes "ghost plowing" a field when they are waiting on their guide
-Fixed plow and ox sometimes misaligning on 12x game speed
-Fixed farm workers not accounting for oxen plowing the farms in some situation, leading to a lot of unnecessary collisions on the field
-Fixed crop rotation unplowing the fields
-Fixed disbanded mercenary group becoming immediatley available again after save/load cycle
-Fixed the trading post export transactions not moving regional wealth between the regions correctly if owned by the same lord
-Fixed paused taverns fullfilling the entertainment requirement
-Fix attempt for never ending fires if a fire was triggered after the building was already on fire
-Fixed problem banners not erasing after an entity gets erased (for instance an animal runs away and leaves a "not enough pasture space" banner)
-Fixed "update task" sometimes triggering before a character gets assigned their region
-Fixed livestock sometimes being unaccomodated after order even though there is stable or pasture space due to being transfered to the region twice (once when buying and once when livestock merchant brings it to the building)
-Fixed livestock traders trading between on-map regions possibly sometimes paying twice because the ownership changing function was called both on pickup of livestock and on dropoff
-Fixed the game getting stuck on the game summary screen infinitely after winning or losing the game
-Fixed "none" people populating the town after a raid sometimes who just stand around waiting forever and possibly crash the game while reloading
-Fixed the blurry desktop icon
-Fixed the save/load menu header not translating after changing the language
-Fixed dead animals triggering the mourning period in burgage plots, halting growth
-Fixed mourning period halting homeless accomodation
-Fixed migration/growth of family members ignoring the 30 day mourning period sometimes
-Fixed the game getting stuck after you click "continue in sandbox" until any main tab is pressed
-Fixed the front lighting not being visible in the retinue editor if bounced light approximation is turned to low or off
-Fixed floating feedback text spawning during the cinematic mode
-Fixed autosave triggering during the cinematic mode
-Fixed "storage full" triggering for wrong buildings sometimes (for example sawpit having 1/1 logs)
-Fix attempt for oxen bringing too many logs to the sawpit and crossing the storage limit
-Fixed free merchants sometimes getting stuck if a trading post was build so close to the edge that a portion of it was outside of any region bounds
-Fixed horse wagon rotations getting a bit too wonky on slopes
-Fixed a bug where a unit could no longer move due to being forever stuck in "waiting for pathfinding to finish" if another unit with a lower squadID got completely destroyed
-Fixed the wrong yarn basket carrying animation
-Fixed traders not importing from on-map regions even though the price is better than buying from tradepoints
-Fixed farm workers & farm oxen stealing planks from fields which are getting "fenced up"
-Fixed "homeless" problem banner not disappearing after upgrading homeless camp to a worker camp
-Fixed animals not getting removed from stable space / pasture space after death
-Fixed animal corpses not disappearing over time
-Added a dirty fix for families moving into homes but not registering correctly and not displaying in the UI, leading to a "secret" family living in one of the burgage plots. The reason is still unknown and being investigated.

Cosmetics:
-Added a new patron saint banner graphics: St Maurice
-Added a carried dead body visualization
-Made debris piles align to ground slope
-Fixed the throw torch animation ending abruptly
-New upgraded retinue helmet variation: Pointy bascinet
-Fixed the armor clipping through the leg of the upgraded retinue puffy sleeve jupon body variation
-New upgraded retinue body variation: Coat of plates
-New upgraded retinue helmet variation: Hounskull bascinet with a gilded cover
-Increased location precision for animals standing in the stables
-Fixed the praying animation
-Fixed the wrong door orientation for LV2 cottage variation B (with a planked gable)
-Adjusted the two handed weapon default idle pose to have a more natural stance
-New militia helmet variation - banded bascinet with a mail aventail
-Fixed some mail armor variants clipping with helmets on T3 militia units (militia mail will get their own unique variations soon)
-Reworked lv2 granary model with proper animated doors

Thank you,

Greg Styczeń
Lead developer (?), Slavic Magic

Manor Lords has now released! The game will be 25% off for the first two weeks, and you should be able to see the discounted price in your currency below:

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/1363080

We also have a new release day trailer for you to check out:
I want to add a personal note of thanks. You have all been incredibly supportive of Manor Lords, this city builder started by a solo-developer, and taken it to 3.2 million player wishlists. Your support of developer Greg and his game has already been huge, and so I want to say: please, don't feel any pressure to buy the game if waiting is better for you. If money is tight right now or you're still uncertain, we'll run those 25% discounts often and give you plenty of opportunities to get the game later as well, no one should feel any fear of missing out or any kind of pressure. Or if you'd just rather wait some time and jump in later after some patches and updates have come out, that's fine too -- Early Access isn't for everyone, if you check back later the game will just keep getting better and better. We want you to make the right decision for you, without any pressure or rush of any kind.

But if you do choose to jump in now and join in the Early Access process, that's awesome -- please leave your feedback and suggestions in reviews and comments, and we look forward to getting your help in making the game better together!

Tim
CEO, Hooded Horse

Hey everyone,

It's been quite a journey so far, but it won't stop on April 26th. During development, the core tester group was around 130+ people. Given the popularity of the game, I'm pretty sure there is going to be a wave of feedback that I will need to address after the early access launch.

I wanted to address a few things for everyone who intends on buying the game on April 26th...

What this game is not.

-Manor Lords is not a Total War competitor. It's a citybuilder with battles. Yes, battles are there, but not as huge or as frequent as some of you might expect. The majority of gameplay is focused on citybuilding and management.

-It's not a Empire Management style Grand Strategy game either. The map has regions, but you won't be able to conquer the whole Europe, nor have marriages or anything like that. The game is designed to play at a much smaller scale.

-It's not an RPG either. If you played KCD or Mount&Blade, ML is a different type of game. There is a visit mode in Manor Lords which allows you to walk around your town, but it's an experimental, cosmetic bonus feature, the game is really meant to be played from the "bird's eye" perspective, like a strategy game (almost always) should. There won't be any first person gameplay.

-It's not a competitive, fast paced RTS like Age of Empires or Starcraft. A lot of the game mechanics focus on aesthetics of your town and resources take some time to be transported around the map. This results mostly in a more of a relaxed experience, with high intensity moments spicing up atmospheric citybuilding rather than the game being at high intensity all the time.

This will be an early access release.

Yes, it must be disappointing, but I think it's the right choice. It's my first serious game and not only some stuff is still unfinished, but I bet you guys will ask me to change some things you don't necessarily like. But I want to pursue an open development strategy of a back and forth between me and you, I think it worked great for the game so far (I'm comparing to times where there wasn't even a testing group and I was developing in a bubble).

The publisher and I recently shared the game with content creators all over the world. Feel free to check out numerous streams and let's plays out there before buying to make sure this is the game for you!

That said, the reception has been super positive so far for which I’m very grateful. I think the game should find a way into the hearts of players who expected Manor Lords to be what it is, a realistic, organic, authentic city builder with real time battles.

Roadmap

I do not plan on releasing a roadmap yet. I've made a mistake once or twice before, of promising and working on a feature only to find out that the testers didn't care as much as I did and that they actually wanted something else. So even if I have a plan, I want to adopt the philosophy of "listen, verify, implement". This way I expect the first month of patches to be just bug fixes and polish. During that time, together with Hooded Horse, we’ll be collecting your feedback and then prioritizing work based on what we hear.

I'm still considering whether to keep the testing of future patches closed or open, my current idea is to have an open pre_release beta branch so that everyone who owns the game can check and test the most recent pre-release unstable version of the game and contribute if they want to. And keeping the main branch as the previous most stable version. Though let me know, maybe you'd prefer me to keep the unstable versions to a closed testing group?

As always, thanks for following and all the support. I’ll certainly keep the updates more frequent here once the early access officially starts.

Have a good one!

Greg

We recently passed 2 million wishlists from Steam players. I’m continuously surprised and grateful for all the interest in Manor Lords – I could never have imagined this, thank you.

I’ve been hard at work as we prepare for our April 26th release date. If you missed it, here’s our release date announcement trailer from a couple months ago:

Thank you to everyone for all the support – wishlisting, testing, providing feedback, and just generally being a part of the journey. I can’t wait to share more news in the months ahead – we've been exploring additional goods and supply chains to add ahead of launch, and there have been some great conversations about mechanics to add and tweak. It’s both a busy and exciting time, and I’m glad to have the chance to share it with all of you.

I hope everyone had a great New Years!

Slavic Magic

Hello everyone,

We're thrilled to announce the release date for Manor Lords! You will be tasked to govern a land of great peril and promise on April 26, 2024!

The initial Early Access release will feature:

• Organic City Building – Manor Lords provides a gridless city-building experience with full freedom of placement and rotation. Building mechanics are inspired by the growth of real medieval towns and villages, where major trade routes and the landscape influenced how settlements shaped and developed.
  
• Medieval Warfare – The competing ambitions between you and neighboring lords will inevitably lead to conflict. Lead your people into battle, not as expendable units to be easily replenished, but as your beloved loyal subjects where every death is a cost worth considering.
  
• In-Depth Management – From boots to barley and hides to honey, Manor Lords features a great variety of goods fitting of the era. Materials need to be transported and processed into finished products through production chains, as you leverage technological advancements and policies to help determine how your city grows
  
• As well as a small selection of different modes and scenarios.

We can't wait to grow and develop the game together with your feedback as players!

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/1363080/Manor_Lords/

Hi everyone! Manor Lords and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out!

Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale

In celebration of Next Fest, Manor Lords will be streaming gameplay on the store page. Come join us!

Discord: https://discord.gg/RRD55RZdB7

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/1363080

I'm very excited to announce that during the Steam Next Fest (3-10 October) you'll be able to try the citybuilding part of Manor Lords for free!

I'm looking forward to letting you see first-hand what I've been building, hearing what you think... And in the meantime, join us over at Discord: https://discord.gg/RRD55RZdB7

As always thanks for the support everyone!

It's been over one and a half year since I decided to delay the launch and rework major parts of the game. In this post I will attempt to summarize the most most significant changes I have been working on and what lies ahead.



Before that change, whatever I did, I couldn't get the towns to look quite as real as I wanted. This was partially because of the lack of integration between the houses and their surroundings. After studying medieval settlement layouts as well as drone footage I decided to try and adapt the mechanic I was using for organic field placement and apply it to form residential zones.

If you ever heard about medieval "burgage plots" this is what inspired me.

Currently you place the residential plots by placing four points[imgur.com], and the edges try to conform to surrounding roads, creating more organic shapes. In the backyards, if you leave enough space, there is room for "backyard extensions" - vegetable gardens, goat sheds & chicken coops.


I went through a lot of iterations of late game towns. I tried procedural generation but ended up using a more standard approach with randomized pre-made buildings.

However, another subject I tackled is that in a late game town, the high level production buildings like Bakeries and Tailors were located on the outskirts - cause they were placed last.

"Artisan conversions" mean that after you upgrade your residential plot to a certain level, you can convert it to a artisan workshop - brewery, blacksmith, tailor or a cobbler. This means that high level jobs remain in the very center of the town. It also "locks" the artisans from how you appoint normal peasants to work, as they become permanently attached to their profession.

Don't get accustomed to the architecture style though, more on that below...


Manor Lords originally started as more or less a classic medieval RTS. In 2018 it had a grid, a fog of war, and the camera was similar to what you can see in Age of Empires series. But what I really wanted was to make the towns look and feel more real, I ditched the grid, the fog, and divided the map into regions. But since the camera was low, the regions were therefore quite small too - I hoped it will be interesting to work with the limited space.

In early 2020, the region sizes were more or less symbolic, reminiscent of games like Northgard

Time and time again during conversations with the community and later on with first closed testers giving feedback it became clear that people expect more realism. I kept making the regions larger, so in effect the amount of regions was getting smaller (we're down from 50 to around 11-12).

There is room to make bigger maps, but that I leave for a later update. Keep in mind however that due to gameplay functionality and technical limitations, it won't ever be 1:1 to real world, so those 4 square kilometers of landscape are meant to represent a bigger area.

Aerial view of one of the starting regions after reworks. WIP.


Another very challenging request from the early testers was to free up the camera. The technical problem comes from the fact that you could already zoom in pretty close - so now I had to try and make the game look good from close, medium and far, while all being optimized. It's like art directing 3 games at once.

But you can't treat it like 3 games or it's unoptimized, so it's all about being creative with the complexity of the terrain shader. In a game like this, the terrain covers the whole player's screen (the bigger the area covered by the object, the more expensive it is to render as it has to calculate all the nifty shader tricks per pixel). Additionally, the terrain textures shift throughout the seasons, and can be influenced by the player during play.

Furthermore typically you flip far trees to flat billboards. Freeing up the camera means you can view the trees straight down from high up. To solve this I had used a technique developed by Ryan Brucks (for Fortnite actually) called Octahedral Impostors, but with the dynamic seasons it was a large extra headache.

Those birds loved to glitch out.


When I started the project I wasn't quite sure where I'll end up. I always said that it's "inspired by history" and you can see in the first announcement trailer that it's a big mix of styles and periods. I wanted something similar to Age of Empires, where as you unlock technologies, your soldiers and buildings change their look.

However, this ended up looking very messy to anyone who's even partially interested in history. Even in the 2021 gameplay trailer you can see both knights wearing plate armour and "viking" style mercenaries. It had to be resolved and it cost a lot of time and effort to rework this.

In the end after consulting with the community I decided that end of XIV century and Holy Roman Empire (roughly the Franconia region) will be a fairly good fit so I went with it. It's still "inspired by", but it is definitely less chaotic and anachronistic.


The first aspect of this was to replace the architectural mix of my Anglo-Saxon pit houses, Tudor and French timber framing and overall random influences. Luckily I met Jakob on the Discord, who specializes in medieval architecture of southern Germany and offered to help redesign all the buildings in the game in a accurate fashion.

Nowadays Jakob draws the desgins for me and I do the 3D models


Parallel to this I moved to characters. I've been very obsessed over optimization of the game and a lot of my character models were rough and very low poly. I definitely did not plan to model individual fingers as I thought nobody will ever see it in a strategy game. I kept thinking about this ever since Mack from the WorthABuy channel mentioned it in his reaction after I posted the announcement trailer.

For this I was lucky to meet Marcos, a AAA character artist who previously had the opportunity to work on characters for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, who was happy to bring the characters to another level.

Community on the history channel on our Manor Lords discord server guided us for historical accuracy, with one knowledgably member: Eol sacrificing his time to draw concept art on how the armour could still be good for gameplay progression but also historically accurate.


Marcos' work was mostly about clothing and armour. Before the changes I simply used 3D scanned heads bought online. They looked somewhat OK, but there was a limited amount of them and they often looked too young or had modern looking haircuts.

I scrapped what I had here and tried another workflow. I generated head photos with deep learning AI which allowed me to pick and choose faces that would be more fitting. Then I used Character Creator software to convert it into 3d models efficiently - the benefit here is that it has a unified texture topology, so I was able to randomly swap the textures and models to create multitude of unique variations. Then I added hair as a separate mesh and again followed the community guidance on what hairstyles were popular at the time. The effect of all this is less obvious repetition in how peasants look, and if I want I can easily generate more variations.


When I posted the announcement trailer in July 2020, Manor Lords was a far simpler game. There were no "late game towns" yet. I never expected the player to get to a high enough population for large battles so the only units that were in the game - all that you see in that 2020 trailer - were mercenaries. What would probably shock you today is how they were spawned too:

I had reasons for it, first one was the population limits, but also I wanted the player to have multiple ways to develop economically instead of just going for iron and making a ton of weapons. Wealth being the sole requirement for hiring units helped to achieve that. However I was later convinced to change it completely. Players really wanted to send their peasants to battle.

Therefore I added a Militia rally system and a personal Retinue system.


The first version of the Retinue had two major problems. One is the lack of historical accuracy that I already mentioned, and another one was unification of equipment. Initially I've made the customization system so that you pick a weapon, eg a "sword" or a "war axe" and it would effectively create a unit of "swordsmen" or "axemen". Such unification wasn't really in medieval spirit.

After a few debates I decided to finally go for variety over unity and the game instantly became more authentic looking. This however limited some customization as there was no longer a 'swordsmen' unit with a single helmet type. More variety & randomness, less customization, but more authenticity.

However I left room for future specializations weapon types divided into categories (types still in the works, for now they are planned to be mixed, long polearms, short polearms, pavise infantry, cavalry). Furthermore I implemented [WIP] a system where armour can be upgraded individually per member, giving even more individuality to the soldiers. It's still a WIP though.


If you've seen the battle trailer, you know all the features I've been working on. However it might not be clear to some that none of these features existed in the time when I published the first announcement. If you missed it...

And if you're curious, here's how combat looked before (note: the map is a test map, it won't be present in the early access launch).

The addition of occasional finishers and synchronised mocapped animations really helped, but I made sure to keep it minimalistic and not over the top as I know that many Total War fans dislike that units "wait their turn" as their animations have to be synced.


After Marcos worked on the new character models, we had to adjust the animation skeletons - a foundation that you use to animate the characters.

I used my friends mocap system for capturing motion and sadly, because it is more of a budget solution, it created some less-than-perfect bone placements that had to be manually corrected. Unfortunately that meant that a lot of animations broke, cause the length of the arms changed. This had to all be manually fixed.

In the end every animation in the game got recorded again, and most of them had to be further manually altered. It took forever, and I still would love to revisit some of them, but I fear I won't have enough time. Perhaps with the new funds I can find some help - more on that later.

Endless mocap cleanup and tweaks are not my favourite thing to do.


In March 2021 I started gathering a small tester group on the Discord. I started from my close friends, other game developers who were interested in helping out, and Discord moderators who did a lot of work for me managing the community there. Overall it was around 20 people.

Another major feedback of theirs was that the farming system was too repetitive and micro heavy. Basically what I had is a three element system, the Ox Farm for ploughing, a Field for sowing and harvesting, and a Barn for transporting and storing the wheat. This meant that if a player has 10 farms, every in game year he has to micromanage peasants to plough the fields, then sow them, then harvest, and every field was handled separately. That was a lot of clicking.

Here I had to try several systems but what we ended up with is a central "Farm" building. You employ the workers there and they do their thing automatically. You can however set each field's priority and crop type. If they all have the same priority, the peasants will split proportionally. It required a whole AI subsystem of Farms dividing the workforce "intelligently" and due to extra individual AI autonomy it wasn't as easy as it should be.

The testers weren't fond of the Ox mechanics too. There was some frustration due to the limitations of how the ox farm worked. After discussion on the Discord I introduced hand ploughing and plan to reintroduce Ox Ploughs differently soon.


Which brings me to the livestock. In previous builds it was simply bound to the building, you constructed a Sheep Farm and the Sheep just periodically spawned there. I didn't expect people to want realism here, but they did.

I had to invent a way to buy and sell livestock so I introduced travelling livestock traders and livestock markets.

However, livestock traders caused some traffic jams as they squeezed their way through the narrow town streets with their herds. Also, the livestock market was an empty, ugly looking place 99% of the time. So I scrapped the whole system and created a livestock trader building instead - a trader who handles import and export of animals.

I also added an age to sheep, so you can buy lambs if you wish to invest long term. More livestock management functionality still needs to be done.


Which brings me to the trade system. Originally I had two trade buildings:
a) A merchant, sometimes called a trading post. The workers imported goods from other regions to your region.
b) A market stall. Merchant visit market stalls to buy stuff, so if you want to export something, you have to build a stall and hope that a merchant will visit you.

This added some trade competitiveness as whoever attracted more merchants had more money. You couldn't just click a 'sell' button to generate money.

The problem was that it made trade between regions very cumbersome. So instead I introduced a trade overview where you can set your export/import limits and the workers handle the rest. The market attractiveness still matters, because using your own peasants for export takes more time and effort than attracting foreign ones.


One of the things that annoyed me that due to handmade map, when players landed on the same spot, their towns tended to look the same. To combat this I introduced an underground water vein layer. The well has to be placed on top and since the well marks the town center, the towns are always a bit different too.

Lately I've done the same for crop fertility. Here you can see various overlays showing how fertile the land is for different types of crops (emmer wheat, flax, barley and rye - not sure if rye will stay though as it's basically a clone of the wheat resource).

Rotating the crop type improves the fertility and yields, but it has to be semi-automated in the future cause the testers tend to ignore this mechanic.


The announcement trailer version had individual market stalls. Each stall sold one type of good. This was fine for a couple of stalls, but in longer sessions players tended to create these awful snake market roads that required a ton of micromanagement.

Because you placed stalls individually by the nearest trade route, it resulted in these long market stall trains

What I tried to do instead is utilize the field system again, and create a centralized market zone. It looked cooler and solved the boring micromanagement, but had two problems:
-You had to setup a large empty plaza in the beginning of the game where you only need one or two stalls.
-The market was placed in the outskirts where there is a lot of space.

I really wanted it to be in the town center instead, as it was often in reality. So I ended up combining the well and the market into a one town square building that provided water and slots for stalls.

A "circle" market version with a central well.

What I disliked about it is that every market square looked the same. It was also a bit awkward to place plots around it as I noticed testers struggling to fit them perfectly. So I did yet another take and split it into individual modules.

The core module is a well and stalls are additional modules. You still have a central UI for making decisions, but more control over the look of your town square. Oh and coloured cloth unfolds when you employ sellers!


Another thing players did that I did not like is they upgraded every single building in town to the max. In real towns you get nicer town center and less developed outskirts, but why should player do that if he or she has the means to upgrade everything eventually?

Even in 2021 the lack of variety and hierarchy really made larger towns flat and boring

My take on it was a wealth propagation system. When a good is sold on the market, the wealth "propagates" outwards to nearby homes. And you can only upgrade the buildings that have enough wealth stored. However I've been receiving feedback that this system is unclear and confusing ("why can't I upgrade this? I have enough silver"). It did however produce far more organic towns. Maybe another twist on this mechanic is needed that is more clear but achieves the same result?


The ability to zoom in is a frequent curse in places where you wouldn't normally expect it. Wood in strategy games tends to be just that. It's a symbol meant to represent everything from huge construction timber to arrow shaft sticks. It becomes weird if you can zoom and peep on what's happening with it.

In previous ver., I had "wood" and "timber". Wood was a generic resource, used for fuel in the winter and to create timber, which was used for construction.

What annoyed me about it is that it was represented differently depending on where it landed. After chopping the tree it was these small logs that people could actually physically transport. After becoming timber I represented it visually as planks. But of course when the construction animation is happening you see it as huge timber beams. It's not a *big* problem but, I always wondered if I can fix it. The appearance of wood flip flopped constantly between different visuals depending on what it was used for, and that caused it often to magically get longer or shorter.

You do not want too many similar resources cause they clutter the UI and make the game harder to learn. It also requires extra safeguards to prevent a situation where there is no 'firewood' and peasants freeze just because they have a lot of the wrong 'wood' resource. Again not all huge problems, but extra headaches.

What I ended up with for now is "Timber" and "Firewood". Timber is the large logs and must be transported by Oxen. Firewood is the chopped wood and can be transported by people. I thought that 3 wood resources clutter the UI too much so for now these are the two left in the game. I have a hunch people will like planks back however.


Ambience proved to be more difficult than expected. The map is large and the seasons are changing in the game, the ambience has to adapt and evolve. The player can fly around like a madman, zoom in, zoom out in a split second. If two ambient nodes with the same sound synced by a very rare chance, it produces weird phase cancellation issues, aka sounds terrible and weird.

What I tried is to separate the ambiences into individual bird calls and noises that could be combined to create an ambient flow. However for some reason individual birds never quite sound like a forest. I dabbled with ambisonics 360 audio but the availability of sounds was limited, the equipment too expensive and the Unreal implementation didn't sound as amazing as I expected (maybe it was the samples?).

So I ended up with a 5 point node system that probes what's around the player and adjusts accordingly. It never uses the same sample to avoid any phasing. Together with the incidental individual sounds and noises it's seamless enough and reacts to the player, aka if you rotate the camera, the ambience rotates, which is far superior to what I had before.


To boost the organic look of towns I added an eroding paths system. The paths were created wherever peasants walked. However during a long gameplay it did not quite looked as cool as I expected - for example people took many trips to the forest to chop trees and it created these weird patterns.

Turns out if you simply erode the grass wherever peasants walk, after a long time you get weird geometric results like this.

Due to the size of the map the resolution of the path texture had to be high and was never enough. I ended up scrapping this system and instead take more care to place more small paths between buildings in a more controlled fashion.


At the time of the announcement trailer, when Loyalty of the Region dropped to -100, you lost control over it. When you lost all Regions, you lost the game. It wasn't enough fun to lose, and therefore I couldn't amp up the challenge without it being frustrating.

I managed to add a rebellion mechanic where a part of your population would split and form a band of brigands. Those brigands would loot your town, burn some buildings and eventually, after they collect enough loot, leave. This also paved the way for a raiding mechanic in future updates.

Subsequently I added the ability for peasants to run to the nearest well, grab buckets of water and to fight the fires.


For the OST I partnered with a company called Pressure Cooker Studios. They're working with high profile companies like Epic Games or Netflix and were eager to be a part of Manor Lords. We worked on a limited budget and it took a few iterations to find a perfect balance between 'cinematic' and 'authentic'.

We've been going through each track and revising it. While the music in the trailers I am very happy with, in the gameplay I think we had problems with too lighthearted of a mood and in places a lack of authenticity to the sound. We brought new talented musicians who helped us boost the "medievalness" of the OST while keeping some cinematic flavour and not making it sound like your typical medieval fair.


In the old system all you had to chose was a color and a symbol. It was "good enough", but a lot of players were interested in something more, so I created a more advanced coat of arms creator.

The unit banners in the game will display your coat, but part of the banner should remain individual per every unit. The unit symbol is their personal insignia helping to identify them in a battle, so I'm cooperating with a few artists to bring a variety of designs.

Evolution of one of the patron saints, St. George.

The symbols don't show up on units anymore however. I know, some of you will dislike it, but after the reworks I was all about individuality of soldiers and I think it is the best, most realistic choice to make them non-uniform.


Every single change I made meant that the AI become obsolete. Residential plots? It can't build houses anymore. New market system? It can't trade. New recruitment system? It can't fight. So for the most part I stopped working on the AI altogether all until I know that the core reworks are more or less done. Lately I've been able to teach the AI to use the systems again but I still need a couple of months to make it fully competitive.


Keep in mind that for every major feature, there are 10 minor fixes or quality of life improvements. You don't see it in the trailers cause it's not flashy, but that's what makes the game good in the end.

I wanted to talk about victory conditions, tech progression, storage, diplo, dynamic sfx cues, AI autonomy - but turns out I hit the maximum word limit. Maybe it's for the best - next time!


A while ago I promised another video update that I didn't make in the end. That's because in the midst of character, animation and architecture rework, the game looked like a mess. However there were some big announcements that I missed to share.

1. Manor Lords has received an Epic Megagrant!

It was a no strings attached financial boost from Epic Games. The only requirement is that I am to continue working on the game and utilize Unreal Engine. This was really great news. For the first 2-3 years of the development I still worked at my filmmaking company, I had a lot of flexibility but Patreon and the Megagrant really given me the opportunity to pause my day job and focus on the game + still have some funds for outsourcing artists like Marcos.

2. Manor Lords on GOG

Since we're on Steam, I don't want to advertise it too much but the game is now also available on that one friendly Polish game store. GOG also supported the development of the game, for which I am very thankful.

3. Cooperating with Nvidia

First we cooperated on getting DLSS implemented in Manor Lords. Nvidia was kind enough to provide a newer GPU for me since I was still on my trusty 1070. I also received confirmation that Manor Lords will be available on Geforce Now which is great news for anyone with an older PC but a reliable internet connection.

4. I partnered with Hooded Horse publishing!

I was very lucky to meet a lot of great people from the industry who offered help after I announced the game. I planned to stay independent, but in the end due to certain chain of events I decided to partner with Hooded Horse. It's a publisher dedicated solely to strategy games (you may know them from Old World or Falling Frontier) with relatively short history, but growing rapidly and most importantly sharing the same values as me. I also have retained full freedom. They'll help with translations, marketing and given me more development budget to play with. "Finally!" some of you will surely say.



I'm looking for players who would like to help with the development, test the game, give feedback and participate in discussions.

If you have a lot of free time and are passionate about the project, it would be great to have you in the closed alpha group.

However, if you just want to simply play the game earlier/for free - please wait instead, as you'll only be frustrated because of the unfinished state. Same if you don't want to participate in internal discussions or votes. Ability to record footage is also a plus.

If you'd like to join the Closed Alpha:
1. Join the Manor Lords Discord server https://discord.gg/RRD55RZdB7
2. Find a bot called AlphaBot.
3. Send a private message to the bot with the command !alpha
4. The bot will ask you a couple of questions.
5. Wait for an e-mail confirmation. I plan to pick new testers irregularly so don't worry if you don't receive a message immediately - as always patience is appreciated.

If you're applying and you're a Patreon supporter please make sure to connect your Discord account in the Patreon settings. If you joined Patreon before but aren't there now, or if you're a long time supporter who just followed the game, first of all thank you, secondly please mention it.

Note: If you can't send the message, please check this setting:

I really appreciate all your patience and I hope you now better understand why it takes longer than expected. I didn't have to rework all this stuff, but I wanted to and I took a risk. I think all the major reworks are behind me, but first I wanted to hear feedback from more testers before I make the early access public, and there are still some buildings left to redo and the AI to improve.

For now I hope you'll excuse me for leaving the release date as: To be announced.

That's it for today, thanks for following and all the help!