Manor Lords update 0.7.965: more militia squads, less sheep and more farming

Another week, another release for Manor Lords. And, another patch announcement!

Today, Tuesday May 21st, Beta patch 0.7.965 has been made available on the Steam platform for testing.

The release list is about as extensive as the previous 0.7.960 patch . It also adds some great new things. 

More militia

Raising an army was kind of flawed. Where the initial thought was that you could raise a maximum of 6 militia units at a time, this limit was reached sooner than expected. 

That's because not only the militia units counted, but also the retinue and mercenaries. 

Even worse, if you'd lost your full retinue in a war and destroyed the manor, the empty retinue would still take up one slot and mean you would be able to muster less militia than needed. 

Beta patch 0.7.965 fixes this issue. It promises you can hire 6 militia squads, even if you already have a retinue and mercenaries employed. 

Side note: there are plans to make this limit relative to the Lord's rank, so that might make for some interesting changes!

Allow market stall setup

Lead developer Greg also added a new, experimental, feature to this release. 

You know how sometimes, you don't want your families to immediately sell their products? Now you can! Disabling the new feature Allow market stall setup will restrict assigned families from setting up market stalls. 

Theoretically, this means you can decline the Weaver from setting up a market stall, so that the Linen can be used to make Gambesons instead. Let's see how this is going to work out!

Less sheep and more farming

Agriculturaly, Manor Lords can use some tweaking. In this version 0.7.965, a few changes will be introduced. 

First, the Sheepbreeding development branch. It is now capped and no longer spawns sheep exponentially. This is kind of sad news, as the 1000 people and 1000 sheep thread over on Reddit was a lot of fun to read 😂

Secondly, fertility overlay and crop prediction should be a lot more accurate in this release. Also, Ox and worker behaviour should be better. Which is great, because that's the main thing about farming that is still bugging me. 

Lastly, the maximum yield per plant is increased to 4 (was 2). That means double the yield! Also doubled the fertility regeneration rate effect on fallow fields and from fertilization.

Other changes

More things were changed. If you want the full report, read the post over on Steam. 

But, to name a few notable others:

• Better marketplace distribution and some barter/trading fixes
• Some changes on the King's tax
• More buildings can set a construction reserve (those using planks, thank God!)
• Bumped up Archer specs even more
• Slower tree growth rate