What is Manor Lords (and what is it not)?
Manor Lords is the most wishlisted game on Steam EVER. Find out what it is - and what it's not.
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Posted 4 months ago. Filed under
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Manor Lords
What you'll read in this post:
No settlement in Manor Lords is the same.
This is not by chance, but a design choice. With every map generation come different resources, different fertilities and different locations for everything.
It seems trivial, but is a very important part of the Manor Lords gameplay. This way, you need to rethink your strategy every time you start a new game. Better yet, you need to rethink that with every region you claim!
Specialised Regions
According to an interview with the developer, there is a reason behind it. With different regions spread out across the map, you will need to specialise those regions for your rule to be successful.
For instance, you won't start massive weapon and armour production chains in a region with barely any iron.
Likewise, you won't start farming in regions where fertility is incredibly low.
This leads to the need for making strategic choices. Those choices manifest mainly in how you spend your development points.
What are development points?
Manor Lords development points are the way you can really specialise your regions.
Every time your settlement reaches a next level, you gain a development point. Those points can be used to unlock specific parts of the development tree.
First ring of development options in Manor Lords
The development tree is split up in 4 branches:
- Natural food
- Farming
- Trading
- Industry
Depending on the region's rich resources and the way you want to specialise, you can unlock the corresponding research items in the development tree by spending your available development points.
How do you get development points in Manor Lords?
The main question is, how do you get development points? Do they magically appear?
Basically: yes. They just show up, but at certain points in your region's development. They're not called development points for no reason.
Those development milestones are purely related to the amount of Burgage plots you have in your settlement. Every milestone unlocks a new village level and a new development point.
Every regions starts off as a Settler's camp. At 5 level 1 burgage plots, your region becomes a small village and you gain 1 development point.
For every region level and the requirements, refer to the table below.
| Level | Settlement level | Requirements |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Settler's camp |
|
| 1 | Small village |
|
| 2 | Medium village |
|
| 3 | Large village |
|
| 4 | Small town |
|
| 5 | Medium town |
|
| 6 | Large town |
|
Important to know is that the above requirements are all minimal requirements. So to upgrade your settlement from a small village to a new village, you need 5 level 1 burgage plots or higher and 2 level 2 burgage plots or higher.
This means that you effectively only need 5 burgage plots to reach the Medium village settlement level:
- 3x level 1 burgage plots
- 2x level 2 burgage plots
The same is true for reaching the Large town settlement level. It looks like you need 30 + 20 + 15 Burgage plots (at least 80 families). But you only need 30 Burgage plots:
- 15x level 3
- 5x level 2
- 10x level 1
Also, these are burgage plots we're talking about, not families. So if you've been upgrading all your plots, only to realise you didn't have enough plots to begin with, you can just build new ones. You don't have to wait for new families to move in to reach the next level!
And again, these are burgage plots we're talking about, not the amount of families that can live on a plot. A plot with the expanded living space add on still counts as 1 burgage plot towards your development counter.
