Manor Lords Experimental Patch Out Now, Buffs Archers and Nerfs Trade

The experimental patch tunes the AI’s retreat distances and makes several changes to trade after reports that they make the game too easy.

With over one million copies sold and 173,178 peak concurrent players on Steam, Slavic Magic’s Manor Lords has received a new patch to address multiple issues. It’s available on Steam’s experimental branch, and though accessed in the Betas tab, players should back up their saves. Some balance changes are also “still experimental”, and there may be stability issues.

Some balance changes include your people picking random food instead of eating in a fixed order and merchants no longer spawning at the nearest trade point when establishing a trade route. The Trade Logistics development branch also now lowers new trade costs by 50 percent instead of capping them at 25. The ranged attack damage of war bows is increased from four to 12, and the retreat distances of AI are tuned to reduce “how often its archers get into the loop of attack-retreat.”

Check out some of the patch notes below and full details here, though remember that many of these could change further or not even make it in. Manor Lords is available for PC via Steam Early Access.

Version 0.7.955>0.7.960

Major changes:

The King’s Tax is now enabled (or Annual Royal Tax, can’t decide on the name)
a) This tax is collected annually from all players (main player and AI) and goes to your liege. It’s counted per population and therefore should become a counterbalance for players who hoard huge wealth despite having nonoptimized economies.
b) [WIP] For now the player can go in debt without consequence, but in the future the player will lose king’s favor and eventually the king’s army will show up as enemies for players who refuse to pay
Global/Local trade switch for trading posts
a) The player can now switch trade to “local only” in the trading post for each type of good if they want to use the trading post to exchange goods between their own regions but ignore the free merchants.
b) For now 2 trading posts (both regions) are still required to make it work.
c) Employed traders will prioritize to travel to the place with best prices to commence trade, and yes potentially including regions owned by other Lords. This can have interesting consequences in the future. For now I reduced the transport distance from the calculation in order to make it more predictable for the player where the traders will go (to the place with the best price).
d) Regional wealth is still required for exchanging goods between regions with a trading post since I want to keep the regions as independent economic units which in my view a more realistic simulation of economy.

Gameplay & balance:

[Experimental] When consuming food, people will now pick a random food resource instead of eating food in a specific order
[Experimental] Fertility is no longer drained after crop growth reaches 100% so that always micromanaging early harvest is no longer a preferred strategy. Yield may still increase over 100% growth if max yield is not reached.
[Experimental] When harvesting, the crops are directly added to the field inventory instead of the villager inventory. This was done to ensure that harvesting walk times aren’t the main bottleneck for farming, especially for large fields. [Side note: moving harvest season to August is also possible in a future patch if needed]
[Experimental] Prioritized Oxen plowing over transporting resources back to the granary & warehouse to reduce the ox walking back and forth from the plowed field every time a new batch of resources is available for transport
Plowing shed now adds 2 livestock worker slots
Lowered the rate of the Baron claiming regions and adjusted it to better reflect the game settings
Removed the worker camp upgrade it was meant for colony regions and will be readded when they are properly implemented
Food producing residential plots no longer stock up on their produce before they share with the marketplace
Increased sawpit log storage space to 5
[Experimental] When establishing a trade route, the merchants will no longer all spawn in the nearest tradepoint. Instead, the game will distribute the merchants to circle between various tradepoints in order to make building trading posts right on the edge of the region less optimal.
Increased warbows ranged attack from 4 to 12
[Experimental] “Trade logistics” development branch now lowers the cost of new trade routes by 50% instead of clamping it at 25
[Experimental] Cost of opening new trade routes now scales exponentially with every opened trade route
[Experimental] Base cost of opening a trade route was increased from 12 to 20 (that is before the good value multiplier)
[Experimental] When market is oversupplied, the player can still export stuff, although for much lower price
[Experimental] The price multiplier for oversupplied goods is now 0.75x for oversupplied and 0.5x for critically oversupplied
[Experimental] How fast market is oversupplied no longer depends on the value of goods because it punished having high value trade routes. Now the oversupply rates are equal for all good types.
[Experimental] Better deals development branch reduces the foreign import tariff by 50% instead of removing it completely
[Experimental] Reduced ale consumption by 75% (around 1/3 per family per month)
[Experimental] Made the building placement steepness limits harsher cause the trading posts and churches often looked super janky on very sharp slopes
Soldiers no longer trigger “unburied bodies” approval factor when corpses are in their proximity
[Experimental] Hitching post is free again, to reduce chances of players getting stuck with no ox, no hitching post and no ability to order an ox

Minor changes:

Applied the “mindfulness” system that was initially designed for the oxen to the free merchants. This system is used to reduce clumps and traffic jams.
Moved the location of trades further off map to make sure there is some space for all the trade wagons even if the players place the trading post right on the edge of the map
If a trading post is clogged, traders are allowed to make transactions without entering the shed, as long as they are within the general building bounds
[Experimental] Changed default AA under DX11 to TAA
Added a spatialization update call when recruits are sneakily teleported home when rallied to ensure collisions are properly calculated after teleportation
Added a check for idle villagers to avoid hanging around the graveyard for random conversation since it looked weird
Made “is close to camera” value update on setting follow mode to make sure the game doesn’t optimize animations or sound effects thinking the character is still far from the camera
Disabled fire damage for people who have water buckets and are actively firefighting + redued the fire damage amount
When all resource visualization slots are “filled”, villagers will transport to a random one instead of the first one found. This ensures less traffic jams for instance at the churchyard if all graves are “full” already.
Firefighting villagers will now ignore anticlogging behavior (waiting their turn at narrow pathfinding points)
Added a “mourning period left” UI element in the residential panel to display how many days of mourning are left until the burgage plot can bring in more family members again
Added mourning icon to the building floater
Made sure mourning period is properly added to save data
After continuing the game after a victory the camera should go back to the player’s main region instead of levitating over the map edge
[Experimental] Disabled the ability to quicksave during the game over / victory cinematic
Disabled the ability to manual save the game after being defeated & added a tooltip explaining why saves are disabled
Disabled quick save and autosave if game was lost
When ox gathers a log, it will prioritize immediately bringing it to the sawpit before bringing it to the logging camp unless construction reserve forbids it
Improved marketplace logistics efficiency and optimization
Tuned the AI retreat distances in an attempt to reduce how often its archers get into the loop of attack-retreat
Added the missing trading post building thumbnail
Minor unit in-town pathfinding updates
Swapped the old UE4 destructible system for a new, UE5 friendly, chaos based debris system. For now it’s just used for chopped firewood cutter logs.
Further tweaks to properly choose the right default AA/upscaler during the first time launch correctly for specific GPUs (eg. RTX properly defaulting to DLSS)
Added kings tax rate multiplier to the game setup settings
Due to mismatch in global market supply stock values, old saves (from builds 0.7.9540.7.956) will have their market supply reset on loading
[Experimental] Due to changes in how food is consumed, a popup “Food consumed” may no longer appear if a building is selected while a food is being consumed from inventory
[Experimental] Made the sheep flock a bit more closely together to look more like a herd
Steepness limits no longer apply when placing rally points
Players can now rally their militia on fields and pastures
Trading posts will now display a price range for imports in case they can buy it both from other regions AND from foreign trade sources
Increased the sheep & lamb collision radius
Capped the number of workers who supply a single market stall at the same time to 2 to reduce markets getting completely clogged with the new upped market supply frequency
Further optimized the market supply functions to make late game towns run smoother
Optimized the function that searches for a friend to do idle tasks with (like conversations)
Optimized the door opening animations
Increased the precision when checking whether a character is inside a building on fire and should take damage
Unified the currency icon in the mercenary company panel to make it clearer that you’re paying with treasury and not regional wealth
Added accommodation call after fire is started and turns people homeless so that they can be re-accommodated to other available burgage plots immediately
Since almost all families have more than 1 family member, I made the “workplace/reassign” buttons aligned vertically instead of horizontally in the family list
Fixed old fonts being used in the family entry widgets

Crashfixes:

Fixed a crash when doing a sequence of livestock import, export and import, because “home” wasn’t cleared properly during export and the same animal was reimported
Fixed a rare crash if a handcart fails to spawn, probably if the trading post was build so that part of it crosses the map edge
Fix crash on startup if OpenXr sdk is installed