Manor Lords has a quirky bug that makes dead animal corpses stay in your village and contribute to your in-menu numbers, but the game's lead developer says the bug has already been squashed and awaiting deployment.
Manor Lords’ extreme authenticity made it Steam’s most anticipated game, but how does it play?
26.04.2024 - 14:19 / polygon.com / Greg Styczen
Do you know what dimidiation is? Unless you happen to be a scholar of medieval heraldry, you probably don’t. It’s an older method of combining two or more coats of arms into a single shield to denote a union of, say, two families. In dimidiation, the two coats of arms would be cut down the middle, so you might end up with a shield featuring a griffin’s head stuck to a horse’s rear. Later on, it became more common to simply feature the two coats of arms side by side (a practice known as impalement), which is less confusing and more aesthetically pleasing, but also less funny.
Why do I know all this? Because Manor Lords’ heraldry design tool has a dimidiation check box.
Manor Lords is a medieval city-building and strategy game that just launched in early access on PC. To call it a labor of love is an understatement. It represents years of work by a solo developer, Greg Styczeń, who goes by the moniker Slavic Magic, and its authenticity has struck a chord with Steam players, where it racked up a record 3 million wishlists. It’s an earthy, extremely intricate, and thoroughly researched feudal life sim with a dedication to historical accuracy that borders on the academic — hence the dimidiation inclusion.
Here’s another detail, one that has more to do with the core gameplay. Manor Lords’ basic unit of housing is called a burgage plot. At first, this is just a house with a yard, but once it has been leveled up, the yard can be developed as a sort of small-business venue for the residents, even if they’re employed elsewhere at the farm, the mill, or the storehouse. On this plot, you can set up a chicken coop, a vegetable garden, or a brewery; the residents then take their produce to trade with neighbors at the market. (A marketplace is one of the first requests village residents will make, along with a church.) Healthy market trade generates regional wealth — which you, their lord, can then tax.
The burgage plot illustrates one of the most striking ways Manor Lords differs from the pictures of human society painted by other city-building games. In this world, work is distributed, local transport is slow (very slow), and prosperity is grown from the ground up, rather than generated by efficiently designed systems. It is, in short, a simulation of a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society. As such, it can be difficult to get your thoroughly post-capitalist, industrialized head around.
In a sense, the game’s title is a misnomer. It’s true that you play a lord, and will eventually build yourself a manor. The game’s marketing has also leaned heavily into its blend of city-building with military strategy; in two of the game’s three scenarios, you’re vying for control of a series of contiguous regions with one or
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