Even though it’s been out for only a few days, Manor Lords has lived up to its expectations and then some. The popular strategy-cum-city builder has finally launched in early access. As you begin playing, you’ll quickly realize it’s quite different from your average city builders. As I continuously build new settlements through trial and error, I’ve realized that Manor Lords has its nuances. If you’re a new builder enthusiast just jumping into Manor Lords, keep reading as I give you the Manor Lords starting guide in the form of the best tips and tricks. So, with that, let’s begin!
1. Choose the Correct Difficulty
One of the best tips I can give you early on in Manor Lords is understanding the game’s difficulty. The game currently provides three scenarios with three different conditions. These are:
- Rise to Prosperity focuses on the building aspect of the game.
- Restoring the Peace focuses on dominating other regions of a map.
- On the Edge is similar to Rise to Prosperity but with more combat.
I suggest picking Rise to Prosperity to enjoy city-building and understand the game. Once you grasp the game, pick the following two maps. Consider picking the three scenario maps if you don’t want to tinker with the robust difficulty selection.
If you want to choose one of the difficulty templates you see above, there’s that too. The game currently provides three difficulty templates – Relaxing for the city building enjoyment, Default that gives you the standard rules, and Challenging that focuses on politics and battles. So, choose the one that suits your needs and begin!
2. Build a Granary and Storehouse as Early as Possible
Once you get on the map, your first task should be to build a granary and storehouse. Granary helps you store food and grains, protecting them from rain and other weather conditions. This is because items in Manor Lords degrade based on the weather conditions. Similarly, build a Storehouse early to ensure you move the construction materials under the roof.
You can build a Granary for 2 Timber and 10 Stones and a Storehouse for 2 Timber. Trust me, you don’t want to see your items get destroyed early on, at least until you build some production structures yourself. To avoid that, quickly get on this construction job.
3. Don’t Upgrade the Homeless Tents
One of the things a lot of Manor Lords players are currently doing is upgrading the homeless tent in Manor Lords to a Worker’s Camp. While I understand your rush, I suggest holding off for now.
There is currently a big making the rounds where your Homeless won’t move to a Burgage when available. Hence, avoid doing it and focus on building your first few structure foundations. This brings me to another important Manor Lords tip I’ll discuss below.
4. Get the Lay of the Land
The land in Manor Lords holds the utmost importance, and you shouldn’t ignore it under any circumstances. Failing to plan can make or break your mid-game to late-game progression. When you click the build button, You’ll get an overlay on the right side of the screen.
This allows you to check your underground water reserve and individual soil fertility based on crops. When placing structures, always leave as many green patches of land as possible. The more green a patch of land is, the more fertile it is to accommodate a particular crop.
Furthermore, each map will have something I like to call “Hot Zones.” These areas house resources specific to your chosen map. Hence, use that advantage for gear production and prosperity based on those resources.
5. Build Production Structures Close to the Civilization
If you’ve played enough city builders, you might be in the habit of building your production centers as far away from your residential area as possible. While I appreciate your safety concern, this is the 20th century.
If you want your structures and towns to be efficient, build your storage buildings and even essential structures near a house and hitching point. Since humans and oxcarts carry everything around, the farther a structure, the longer the wait time. There are specific structures you cannot help but build farther away. For that, I suggest you plan accordingly.
6. Build Essential Structures Early On
Instead of sheltering your Homeless in houses, focus on production materials. These will ensure that the early town survives through the first year of winter. Focus on making the logging camp and a woodcutter.
Once these are made, turn your attention towards utilizing the stone deposits in your region (if any) and setting up a Hunter’s Camp at the wild animal area alongside a Forager’s hut where berries grow frequently. Once you have these structures, start focusing on building houses. Following this handy starter guide tip order will ensure a good mix of balance and structure in Manor Lords.
7. Plan Your House Builds
Building a house plot, or Burgage, as they are called, requires a road and some empty fields. Depending on your plot points, you can adjust how many houses you can build. The best advice I can give while building a Burgage is to make it long.
Doing so will give your Burgage plot a backyard, which you can utilize by upgrading the house to produce food. This allows for more food variety, ultimately increasing the family’s happiness and favors. Hence, make them long and preferably large.
8. Don’t Employ Everyone Everywhere
Most city builders treat their citizens as individuals where everyone can multitask. However, Manor Lords treats the system differently. When you assign a citizen to a structure for work, they will bring their entire family to that work. This leaves zero free citizens to build structures.
To avoid this, always assign one family to essential structures at a time. If you don’t keep a family unassigned, you won’t have workers to build your future structures in Manor Lords. Hence, always try to keep a few families unassigned. If you don’t have any extra family, rotate them throughout the seasons, which brings me to my next tip.
9. Manor Lords Is Seasonal
Manor Lords follows a seasonal system for item production and yield. This means you have to keep an eye on your production and manually make sure things get done. For instance – your Forager hut is technically useless during the Winter, as berries don’t grow in the cold.
Similarly, farmers don’t have any work during the winter, and they are mostly needed from summer to autumn. During such cases, you can always shut down production at a structure and assign that particular family to another important structure to let that prosper. You can check the current month in-game at the bottom right of the screen, on top of the time controls.
10. Create a Trading Post for Fast Money
Making money in Manor Lords is easy enough. If you want to make money, you have to create a trading post. The Trading post allows you to import and export items from the neighboring regions. So, if you are short on a structure, bring in some items for money. If you have a surplus of many items, export them to make money.
Chances are, you’ve built yourself a Forager hut near the berry deposit on the map, and you have many of them. Export these berries to make some quick money. The best time to do this is around the end of autumn and winter. By this point, your settlement should have a lot of berries you can afford to give away. Doing back and forth will ensure you make a lot of quick bucks in Manor Lords.
We hope that with this all-in-one starter guide for Manor Lords, you have the best tips and tricks at your disposal. Once you follow these, you can start building the army and participate in skirmishes. But that is for another day. With new content coming out soon, the developer will fix some pressing issues in the next patch.
So, what is your wishlist for future content in Manor Lords? What do you want from the game? Let us know in the comments below.
