New Manor Lords Patch Changes Everything Full System Rework

After a long break Manor Lords creator Greg Slavic Magic Styczen has confirmed that a big new update is coming.

Back in April we last heard from Greg Styczen also known as Slavic Magic and his team working on Manor Lords. At that time they made some big improvements to the game. They worked on things like how characters move (pathfinding) how the camera works how the menus look (user interface) and even small things like how stone works in the game and how castle pieces fit together. It was one of the biggest updates the game had received so far.

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Since then the team has been mostly quiet. Manor Lords which is a medieval city-building game like Cities Skylines or Age of Empires 2 didn’t share much news for a while. But now Greg has confirmed that a new update is coming soon. And not just any update it will change some of the core parts of the game.

Even though more than a year has passed since Manor Lords was first released it’s still doing very well. Steam users continue to give it very positive reviews and thousands of people still play it every day. However some fans hoped to see more frequent updates like small patches or quick fixes released regularly. Greg explains why that hasn’t happened.

Instead of working on lots of small updates the team has been busy with many large changes behind the scenes. These big improvements take more time to build and test.

Greg says I know it’s been a while since the last update maybe longer than you expected. I want to explain what’s going on and share a bit of what we’ve been working on in the background. You’ve waited a long time and the reason is simple we’re updating a lot of systems all at once.

There are a lot of big changes coming to Manor Lords. It’s not just one or two small updates this is a major upgrade to the whole game. Things like how buildings work how resources are produced and how the environment reacts are all being redesigned. Because of these huge updates the developers haven’t released smaller patches recently. If they did it could cause problems or break parts of the game that are still being worked on.

Another cool thing the team is working on is see-through fortifications. These might let players look through walls and plan better during battles. The developers are still testing this idea to see how well it works.

But the biggest change is to the affinity system. This system is being rebuilt to add more depth to the gameplay. The goal is to make it more complex and different from other city-building or strategy games. The lead developer Styczen says they want Manor Lords to feel fresh and offer something new that players haven’t seen before.

The biggest change in Manor Lords is how the new affinity system works. According to Styczen the main developer of the game the team wanted to create something more advanced and different from what we usually see in other city-building or strategy games.

He explains that they were trying to design a system where buildings have more realistic and deeper relationships. Not just with each other but also with the land and surroundings where they're placed. At first they tried what most city-building games do using effects in a circular area or zone around a building. For example placing a building in a circle to get certain benefits. But they realized this didn’t work well with how Manor Lords lets you place buildings freely on custom plots. Trying to fit square or rectangular plots into a circle just didn’t feel good. It also made it harder for players to be creative when building their towns.

So they came up with a better idea. Instead of using circles or zones they created different types of environments on the map like meadow, woodland, farmland, rural and urban areas. Now buildings gain benefits based on the environment they are placed in. This system makes the game feel more natural and realistic. For example if you build an apiary (a place where bees live) it will do better if it's placed in or near a woodland area because bees benefit from trees and wildflowers.

This new system gives players more meaningful choices when placing buildings and encourages smart planning based on the land.

We made the system even more detailed during testing Styczen explains. Now some buildings can make other nearby buildings work better. For example if you build apiaries (which are homes for bees) they can improve the effects that orchards get from nearby meadows. In another case building houses and other city structures will boost something called urban affinity. On the other hand if you cut down too many trees your forest affinity will go down. So if you depend on industries that need forests you’ll need to take care of your trees and avoid cutting too many.

The next big update for Manor Lords will change a lot of the game’s core systems. That’s why the update is taking longer to finish. Styczen also said that once this major update is released the team will change the way they release new content.

The idea is that after this big update we’ll be able to release smaller updates more often Styczen says. Before that wasn’t possible because we had a smaller team. But now we’ve grown and that should help. Right now we’re focused on finishing this big update and we’re working really hard to make sure it’s worth the wait.