Manor Lords and Total War can co-exist in harmony, dev says

Choosing the diplomacy option

Slavic Magic

Manor Lords is the most wishlisted game on Steam, but folks were apparently a bit confused about what the strategy game actually is. The sole developer at Slavic Magic making Manor Lords, posted a lengthy overview about the game on Steam and clarified what to expect from the city builder.

Because it is a city builder, he says. It might have combat, but it’s not aiming to compete with Total War. Strategy is at its core, but don’t expect fast-paced maneuvers like you get in Age of Empires. It’s also not a grand strategy game like Civilization. Surrounding counties and nearby territories are up for grabs, but in true medieval fashion, the ruler of a single demesne can’t feasibly expect their influence to stretch that far beyond their borders.

The Manor Lords dev says it’s not an RPG like Mount and Blade either, but I’m not sure how you could see any footage of Manor Lords and walk away thinking it was like Mount and Blade.

Anyway, the gist is that Slavic Magic isn’t trying to compete with any of the big, established names out there. The goal is creating something a bit more low-key.

“A lot of the game mechanics focus on aesthetics of your town and resources take some time to be transported around the map,” Slavic Magic said. “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.”

From what time I’ve spent with Manor Lords, that’s defintiely an accurate way to describe it.

Elsewhere in the post, Slavic Magic said he doesn’t have a Manor Lords roadmap in mind, though new features aren’t off the table.

“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.”

Manor Lords launches in early access on PC on April 26, 2024.