Looking for some tips and tricks to help you get started in Manor Lords? It’s quite astonishing, what Slavic Magic – predominantly a one-person dev team – has done in creating Manor Lords. The newest city-builder on the block does a whole lot of things rather differently to most games in the genre, with a gridless building and roads system and the inclusion of Total War-style combat being the main two features players have talked about ahead of release.
But as with many city-builders (and perhaps here more than most), it can be difficult to understand exactly what needs doing and when. There’s already a lot of content in Manor Lords, even in early access, and not much in the way of tutorials that teach you how everything actually works, or the best strategies to employ to build your settlement from nothing to greatness.
In this guide, we offer 16 (well, actually more like 40) of the best Manor Lords tips and tricks for both beginners and advanced players alike. We’ll go over everything from family management and road placement to the different seasons, trade, warfare, and much more. So let’s get started!
Note: these tips cover all aspects of Manor Lords in a more generalised manner. For an in-depth walkthrough to help get you through the first few months of your game, check out our beginner’s guide to Manor Lords!
At any point in Manor Lords, you can hold the TAB button to bring up the additional information overlay. This overlay gives you a lot of extra detail at a glance about all the buildings in your settlement, including where your families are working, the current Approval requirements of your citizens, the rate of growth of your crops, and more.
Every couple of minutes I hold TAB and scan my entire settlement to see how everything is doing. It’s a fantastic and essential feature that helps you quickly spot any potential issues with your growing town.
The basic unit in Manor Lords is the family, and you can set families to work in different buildings by clicking on the building and using the plus (+) and minus (-) icons to assign or unassign families. But if you are in the process of building any new buildings anywhere, don’t assign all your families to work, because only unassign families will build for you.
You can check how many families are assigned or unassigned to jobs by looking at the first two numbers in the top hotbar. The first icon (next to the hammer) is the number of unassigned families who will carry out any building jobs around your settlement.
Weather can be deadly in Manor Lords, and rainfall is common. When you first start a Manor Lords playthrough, you need to quickly move your starting supplies into a Storehouse and Granary so they are protected from the next rain.
If you don’t do this, then those crucial starting supplies (including your food) could be ruined within the first few days of your playthrough. Make it a priority to store resources that are out in the open as quickly as possible.
Seasons are very important in Manor Lords. Not only will Winter prove a more difficult survival challenge thanks to double Firewood consumption and the need for Clothes to keep everyone warm, but you also need to synchronise your farming with the different seasons. You should aim to do all your harvesting and sowing during the Autumn months (September, October, November), before leaving them to grow over the Spring and Summer months.
You can hover over the current month displayed in the bottom-right corner of the screen to get a full breakdown of the different seasons and their effects on your settlement in Manor Lords.
Roads aren’t just fun to place in Manor Lords. They make movement much faster for your populace, and so it’s important when placing roads to give your citizens the shortest, quickest journey between where they are and where they’re going. For example – when beginning a new game, make a conscious decision to build a straight road from your Logging camp to the area you’re going to spend most time building, so that your families waste as little time as possible ferrying Timber to and fro.
Manor Lords is full of finite resources. Iron and Clay deposits can disappear over time; Berries will only grow at certain times of the year; Wild Animals can be hunted to extinction; even trees and forests are limited resources on the Manor Lords map.
So for each of these resources, you should be very careful not to run yourself out of them entirely. Learn the best ways to prolong these resources. Here’s what we suggest:
Families do all the important work in Manor Lords, so to really kickstart your settlement, you should try to maximise their efficiency. This tip is actually two tips in one, but both are related and of equal importance:
Click on a Burgage Plot and select the “People” tab, then click the “Show Workplace” button with the cog icon. This shows where that family is working. If they work far from home, click the button next to the cog to “Reassign family to a different workplace”. If you do this regularly, then your entire Population will become much more efficient because far less working time will be wasted on travel.
If you don’t have any construction jobs, then don’t leave any families unassigned: set them to work. If your Berries are depleted for now, unassign the families at the Forager Hut. If you don’t have Ale, then there’s no need for families to work in the Tavern. Move your families around as needed to grow your settlement more quickly.
Thanks to the flexible plot system, not all Burgage Plots are created equal. It’s a very good idea early on to place down Burgage Plots so that they have Living Space Extensions (the small house with the plus icon). You can get these Plots more easily by reducing the plot divisions before you place down a Burgage Plot.
With a Living Space Extension, you can double the capacity of a single Burgage Plot by selecting it and clicking the “Expand Living Space” button. It costs 2x Timber – the same as creating a new plot – but the benefit is that you only have to upgrade the one plot instead of two. And upgrading is expensive, so prioritising Living Space Extensions will save you lots of resources in the long run.
Likely the biggest bottleneck early on in expanding your settlement will be ferrying resources to where they’re needed. This is predominantly the job of your Oxen, but with just one Ox and one Hitching Post, you’ll never get things done in a timely manner.
Spend the 25x Regional Wealth early on to get an additional Ox, and your productivity will soar. Suddenly buildings will get built so much quicker. It’s also a very good idea later on to build additional Hitching Posts and Stables in different areas of your settlement, so that Oxen don’t spend ages travelling to where they’re needed.
Another efficiency tip that escapes many new players’ notice: Marketplaces are essential for the happiness of your families in Manor Lords. Families will themselves set up Market Stalls inside Marketplace areas, but they have to physically travel there in order to sell their wares. Minimise their travel time by creating multiple smaller Marketplaces throughout your settlement, so that every Burgage Plot in the vicinity is near a Marketplace.
Learning how to trade is an enormous part of any Manor Lords player’s first playthrough. To start trading, build a Trading Post and enter the Trade tab of the building to set various resources to be imported and exported.
There’s no point in building a Trading Post before you have items to sell, but the instant it feels like you have a good surplus of any item, start exporting. You’ll need all that Regional Wealth later when it comes to purchasing weapons and armor, or settling new territories.
Once you’re past the early-game of Manor Lords, by far the best way to get oodles of Regional Wealth is by crafting and exporting Warbows. Each Warbow is made from just 1x Planks, and you can start crafting them as soon as you’ve got one or two Burgage Plots with Bowyer’s Workshops as their Backyard Extensions.
Warbows are amazingly easy to make, and each one sells in the Trading Post for 5x Regional Wealth. For reference: if you just export the 1 Plank it took to make the Warbow, you’d only gain 2x Regional Wealth. That’s a 150% markup. Business is good.
It may be tempting when you first start farming in Manor Lords to just place down one giant farm and say “there, that’s all my food needs for the time being sorted”. But large farms are very tricky. Everything has to be done in accordance with the seasons, so your workers have a limited amount of time to do every part of the farming process.
Therefore, it’s best to start small with your first couple of farms. Farm sizes are measured in “Morgens”, and we’d recommend your first farm stays at around 1.0-1.5 Morgens. The bigger farms can come later on.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why you’re building that Malthouse before you’ve even got Barley? Or why you’ve got a Sheep Farm before you’ve imported any Sheep? Most of the buildings in Manor Lords are available to build from the start of the game, which can trick you into thinking you should build them all as soon as possible. You don’t.
Building more than you need is a fantastic way to run yourself out of Timber and stall production of your settlement. Play it slow, and build what you need when you need it, and not before.
Development Upgrades form the tech tree of Manor Lords, and some of them are very, very powerful. We go over the most important of them in our best Development Upgrades guide, so we won’t repeat ourselves here. But remember that, at least when you first start a Manor Lords game, Development Points are rare and precious, and you should invest them where they’re most needed. Having an Ox plough a farm sounds cool (and it is), but it might not be your top priority.
Your first brush with the Total War-esque combat of Manor Lords will likely come into play when Bandits first start appearing on your map. These Bandits should not be left alone to do their thing. The moment the first Bandit Camp appears nearby, you should make it your priority to import whatever equipment you need to raise an army and crush those Bandits without mercy.
Dealing with Bandits as quickly as possible is good for two reasons. First: it is the only way to prevent them from stealing your valuable resources. Banditry happens automatically; there’s no stopping it until you destroy the Bandit Camp. And secondly, killing Bandits and plundering their camps is a great way to earn Treasury and Influence.
Finally, here’s a selection of more specific and advanced Manor Lords tips that we couldn’t fit into any of the sections above. How many do you know?
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