The comprehensive beginner’s guide for Manor Lords. We go over every aspect of Manor Lords in detail and step-by-step. I apologize for any trouble this may give, but it shouldn’t be a big deal. I also have a video that goes along with the text, so there may be times when you can tell it was intended for video.
Guide Contents
Beginners Guide to Basics
The Basics and UI
Welcome to the ultimate Manor Lords beginner guide, where we’ll go through, step-by-step and with chapters, every part of Manor Lords, enabling you to establish a healthy and growing medieval town, and understanding its economy and warfare systems. What’s nice about Manor Lords is that you’re allowed to take your time, and as long as you play on the regular speed 1, it’s unlikely that you’re going to mess up too much at any stage in this game, unless of course you don’t understand anything at all. But that’s why I’m here, so relax, and let’s do this together. For the best experience, please have the game open while referring to this guide, or watch the video simultaneously.
Manor Lords is all about mechanics working together to either help or challenge you, and as we begin our little adventure, you don’t begin with much. First of all, at the top of the screen, we get a nice overview over all of our resources, essentially how well we are doing at any given moment. If you over these symbols and numbers, you’ll even get a detailed run-down of every sub-resource within that section, so while the food tab refers to total food in the region, by hovering over it, we get to see just how much of the different food types we have available, and the same goes for every other one of the resource-groups.
The middle part here refers to the region at hand, meaning that the information changes based on the region you’re currently in. The information on the top right, refers to your personal wealth and power. The information on the bottom is where the action happens, and by opening these various windows, we can build roads, create our town, raise armies when the applicable, view helpful information about various parts of the game, and change in-game settings.
By zooming in we can get a detailed view of the world up-close, and by zooming out, we eventually reach the campaign map, where we have easy access to the entire world, to get a better look at where different resources are located, or indeed where there exists bandit camps, and where the AI lord has control. When we eventually gain influence by taking out bandits and raiders, we get to claim other regions for ourselves, and can begin creating entirely new towns in the regions we claim.
Opening Moves and Priorities
Let’s say we begin with the default stockpile of goods, it’s not gonna be more than a few dozen units of your most basic resources, in fact you only begin with 8 units of lumber, which is the most important thing in the very beginning, as they have to be used carefully.
The first thing I recommend building, is a storehouse, and a granary, and both can be found in the storage section in the building menu in the bottom corner of the screen. This is because a storage house allows the dry and safe storage of goods, and a granary does the same for food. This is vitally important, because let’s say you begin your game in spring, which is the natural season to begin the game in, you’re very likely to encounter rain within a month or two.
Rain is dangerous actually, because it will damage your unprotected stocks that’re just laying on the ground, meaning these two buildings will secure your current and future goods, especially since both can be upgraded to contain even more storage later on. And once they’re finished, let’s assign one family to work at each building for now, so we’re sure they pick up those goods and store them safely.
Of course, now that we have built these two buildings, we’re left with less timber than we started with. A big threat to your early game survival is the lack of timber, because you want to do two more essential things with it. You see this little number up here? That’s approval. You begin with 50% approval, meaning that your people are neither happy, nor discontent. However, in order to grow and create a large bustling town, the reason we’re here after all, we need to raise that approval, because that’s what attracts new citizens – that, and available housing.
You begin with no houses at all actually, yet we start with 5 families, which makes them homeless, and over time, this lowers approval. At the same time, building these houses first will completely cripple us, since without a lumber mill, which demands lumber to build, we cannot get more lumber. In other words, we must build a lumber mill, preferably near a forest and not too far from our storage house. Let’s also connect everything with roads, which costs nothing to build, but feels awesome to lay down. Remember also assign a family to the mill.
With more lumber coming in over time, we should have two families left to work on construction and leading the oxen, which is important work, and you should more or less always take care to have one such unassigned available family for this type of work. As lumber comes in, we can now begin to build houses, as many as your lumber allows for, and I’d advice you to do construct nothing else that demands lumber, until you’ve played down between 5 and 10 houses. I say 10 here, because to attract more families which we desperately need, you need surplus accommodation, meaning available living space.
10 houses will give you some breathing room in this way for a little while. Notice how we can scale and drag how many units we want or how large their plot is at the same time, which is a really handy tool, especially because that second house symbol that pops up, means our unit gets a plot of land to build extra work space on, and we’ll get back to that soon. Remember to also place a well close by so people have access to water.
But if you find yourself running low on fuel, which you will soon, make sure to place down a woodcutters camp, and place down a family there too, who will produce firewood. At this point, you might be running low on food. Now is a very important time to look for easy sources of food, namely meat and berries, which should come naturally to all regions. So we place both of those down when we can, and connect them to roads. However, we only have so many workers left right now, and the ones who are housed, need to get to our goods easily.
In other words, I’d say to remove one worker from the granary, since that was mostly for emergencies, place them on the berry deposit to get a quick surge of food, and create your first market. The market is where your families will place down stalls related to their profession, and allow your people to easily grab what they need in order to indeed fulfill their need. This means that soon enough, the firewood-choppers will offer fuel, and the berry pickers will offer food, and the same goes for any other types of resources within the groups of food, fuel, and clothing.
Early Trade and Development
Indeed, with more families coming in as our approval heightens and housing is available, we should place one worker in the hunting camp, because this is when things get interesting.
You see, hunters gather not only meat, which is a great source of early game food, but also hides, meaning you can start tanning leather. This means that again, once enough families have arrived, we should create a tannery, meaning we’re going to get leather. You see, there are several ways to success in Manor Lords. For most intents and purposes, success is measured in mostly five ways, and you should ideally be doing well in all of them. These are; how rich your town is, your surplus of food, your surplus of fuel, the market access of your people to these resources, and how rich and mighty you are. In most ways, the four first ones, result in the fifth and final one, meaning it’s often smart to begin by making sure your town is doing well.
This is why we’re building a leather tanner, because it not only relates to making clothing available to your people, which raises their approval, but it also relates to trade. Trading is by far the best way to make money, and frankly goes a very long way in feeding your population as well if you can maintain a positive trading balance. This is why we should build a trader at our earliest convenience, and trade away our leather, because leather will make us a lot of money. Notice however, that in order to do so, we need to pay gold to establish a trade route.
We begin with 50 gold, so make sure you keep at least enough to open this first route. By the way, you might’ve noticed that the second you managed to establish your first five houses, that you gained a town level, and with it, a development point. Development points lead us to what is Manor Lords development tree, a group of bonuses you can attain over time to help you on your way. There are many paths here, from allowing you to create more complex armor, to grow apple trees, honey, and use oxen to plow your fields. But the first and most important perk I highly recommend getting at this point in time, is the Trade Logistics Perk.
This is because to begin with, establish new trade routes can come to cost insane amount of gold, but with this perk, those prices tops out at 25 gold, meaning you’ll save a ton of money down the road. But even more than that, is that this perk leads to the arguably best perk in the game, Better Deals, which significantly decreases the price of importing goods, which is the only way currently, to make good money if you’re planning on establishing a positive trade balance while also importing goods. This becomes more relevant later on, but it’s certainly worth knowing already now.
Back to our tanner however, we cannot just rely on our hunting camp to bring hides to our tanner, that won’t really do. Remember those plots behind our houses?
Those can actually be used to bring in more food through vegetable farming or chicken-keeping, and later on when the houses are upgraded, even more specializations. But right now, if we can afford it, it would be wise to build a goat pen, since goats give us a passive yield of hides, allowing our tanner to make leather faster. This allows us to eventually build vegetable plots or chicken coops when we gain money from trading, so over a couple of weeks, our balance will once again be positive and we can focus on getting more food.
Household Needs and Approval
Until now we’ve mostly skipped it, but you might’ve noticed that we have touched upon approval and needs. If you however over a house, you can in fact see that house’s needs, and if we meet the requirements of the families within. For the first level of houses, we also have the most basic needs, but fulfilling them makes the family as happy as can be all the same, and allow us, if we have the resources, to upgrade the house to level 2.
These needs are water access, church level, fual stall supply, food stall supply, and clothing stall supply. Notice how these requirements either have one or two squares next to them, which indicates how many or the level of the chosen requirement they need. For the church level, they need the basic church built, hopefully not too far away so it doesn’t take the family ages to go pray. But for the food stall supply, they need two types of food to be content, meaning for example berries and meat, to be satisfied, contrary to the clothing demand, where one article, like leather, is enough.
Upgrading a house actually gives it living space for one more family, and begins to net you one gold per turn, per family in the house. But more than that, upgrading allows you to finally begin making complex items, like shoes, warbows, swords and spears, ale, heavy armor and so on, so in many ways it’s a great benefit to do so. Be aware however, than other than the cost of four timber which is rather cheap, a level 2 house will demand a lot more from you to maintain their approval, like the complex ale resource, the highest level of church which means you have to spend resources upgrading your current church, and even more variety in food and clothing.
Add on to that also the fact, that if you want to make use of these complex resources and become artisans by doing so, it won’t only cost you money and other resources to actually upgrade and even produce these new goods, but the families of that house will be removed from your larger workforce, meaning they become professional blacksmits, armorers, fletchers or cobblers. This is not to suggest that you shouldn’t upgrade, you absolutely should, but I would suggest not doing so before you can reliably fulfill more than half of these needs, and before you make sure you have enough families available to allow this one to become skilled workers.
Complicated Goods, Oxen, Level 2 Houses
Should you require stone however, even though we technically do begin with it, you could consider building a mine over the stone resource in your region, and the same goes for the other resource pits like iron or clay, which you will need later on. Notice as well that relating to trade, it can be wise to import a cheaper good, in order to manufacture a more complex and expensive good yourself.
For example, importing clay is cheap, but exporting rooftiles, which comes from clay after assigning a family to a clay furnace, is expensive, meaning you can easily get a positive trade balance from this transaction. Mixing and matching goods like this is a good thing, although I would say it’s often better if you’re able to produce a cheap lower good yourself, and then exporting the complex good for the ultimate cash boost.
Indeed, once we have enough meat, berries, and hopefully either vegetables or eggs from our backyard farms to fulfill our other needs, the church is the only one remaining. We do begin with most resources needed to build a church, except for the planks, which are different from timber and firewood. Planks demands another building be built, and this sawpit demands lumber to function.
Just like with the tannery then, we now have two production buildings which demands a lower-tier resource to build, and we must make sure to balance our need for these, with our need to maintain a healthy balance of the base good, to create a healthy ecosystem. Notice also that in order to move around goods like timber, planks and stone, which are the base building blocks for virtually any building in the game, you need an available oxen, which can take them to transport these goods from one place to another.
This is why I recommend having your sawpit close in proximity to your lumber camp, which cuts down on the travel time. You can get more oxen however, and you can even assign them specifically to work on the building of your chose, although this largely disables them from helping out elsewhere. To get more oxen, we can purchase one at the stable, but do be aware of the stable space, which should be upgraded before you purchase more livestock. With our planks, we can now build our church, and with our church completed, we have fulfilled our basic needs, our approval is increasing, and we may upgrade our homes to level 2.
Marketplace and Needs
Notice however, that even though you do have a surplus of various goods, that not necessarily all houses will be able to upgrade at the same time. This is because not every family has equal access or time to pick up their goods from the marketplace, so these needs will likely wax and wane in terms of being fulfilled, but if you continue to do well, they will get fulfilled at some point sooner or later.
Bandits, Recruitment, Weapons Industry
Thus far, we’ve mostly focused on the city-building aspects of Manor Lords, and following this tutorial will for the most part guarantee you a successful early game. But the other side of the Manor coin is warfare, and even at the early stage, you might find the need to muster your men and go to war. You see, as briefly mentioned, bandits roam the regions outside of yours, and even though they’re left alone, they will periodically come and steal various resources from you, which can significantly harm your progress.
Indeed, depending on your settings, bandit raids may even occur after a year at the earliest, meaning we need to either take the fight to the enemy, or prepare. Your army in Manor Lords, also known as your levy, isn’t just something you recruit – every person you field are actually taken directly from your adult male population, meaning you’ll be restricted to how large your village is to fill your ranks.
Now every bandit camp features one bandit group of about 16 men thus far, meaning you’ll do well to feature at least 16 or more men in your levy in this early stage. You’ll notice however that you don’t just need population to get a levy, but you need equipment. Now depending on your settings again, you can either receive a shipment of basic spears and large shields once you’ve reached the first town level upgrade when building 5 houses, which means that you can technically equip up to 20 men as spearmen, which I recommend doing, as they can easily take out the bandits.
However, if you do not get this shipment, getting a levy is a bit more complicated. You see, in order to produce weapons and armor yourself and create a certified arms industry, you’re going to need a combination of planks, which we already have, and iron. And to get iron slabs, we’re going to have to get iron ore, found in iron mines.
Just like with stone and clay, iron mines can be built on an iron deposit, and when a family is assigned to it, will produce iron ore. Iron ore can then be taken to a bloomery, where the workers there will create iron slabs, which will then be used by your blacksmiths and armorers to create iron weapons and armor. Remember though, that blacksmiths and armorers are tied to your level 2 and above houses, which means they are specializations. If you wish to create bows, you can do so fairly simply, since the only resource you’ll need are planks. If you wish to create complicated iron armor however, you’ll need to unlock the armorer perks for that.
Once you have your equipment ready, you can go to the army menu, and choose which type of infantry unit you’d like to focus your first levy on. For the most part you’d do well to pick spearman, since that’s the gear you get that free shipment of. If you pick more than one type of unit and have the equipment for it, your men will even out between them until they’re both full, which means that if you don’t have enough people to service both units, namely at least 72 adult men, your next unit will eat part of the numbers of the first one, so keep that in mind. You can have a maximum of 6 levy units at any give time, each one totaling 36 men.
However, if you gather enough lumber and planks and stone, you can also build the ultimate building, the Manor. You may only have one Manor per region, and it allows you to implement taxation of your region in percentage increments, and tithes to the church, sending a percentage of your food in return for influence. In this way, if you have a functioning regional economy through trade, you can end up making a ton of money from taxation. But perhaps the most important part of the Manor, is the ability to get your retinue, and to expand this retinue.
The retinue is your elite group of units, it begins at 5, goes up to 24 if you expand your manor with an expensive tower, and can recruit more of them by paying for them from your own pocket. In addition, you can even purchase better armor for them, either from foreign merchants, or from local artisans, but the latter demands that you produce this good yourself.
The retinue is particularly awesome not just because they’re elite, but because you can customize them with different helmets, weapons and shields, and even change their names, and the color of their equipment. What’s nice about the retinue is that because you’re paying for their service yourself in one-time payments, you don’t have to produce weapons or armor for them, so they’re kind of outside of that system if you don’t have an arms industry or import weapons.
If you manage to attain enough influence through destroying bandit camps and defeating raiders, you can even claim new regions on the map, build up entirely new towns, and establish new manors, each one with their own retinue native to that region. In other words, you can realistically field up to 5 or 6 retinues while the other lord remains on the map.
Diplomacy, Warfare, Tactics
The rival lord by the way is essentially an AI army that sometimes shows up to fight bandits, and who will either stay passive, claim neutral regions, or claim your regions, the latter being very rare. Diplomacy in Manor Lords is almost non-existent except for declaring war, and you don’t really have to bother with it at all at this point. So for the early to mid game, you don’t really have to bother with this lord until you want to attack him yourself, at which point you just claim his region with enough influence points, and wait for the game to give you a point on the map where your battle will be fought for the control of the region.
However, keep in mind that sending people out to battle puts their life at risk, but more than just risk, it stalls your production and productivity at home, because you’re suddenly left with a significantly lowered workforce. It won’t ruin your game if you send out the odd levy to get rid of bandits and if everyone survives, but if you leave them out there, it’ll likely became a big issue. For your first outing then, I recommend getting your levy together, destroy the bandits, and then raid their camp, which gives you a choice.
You see, the bandit camp has gold, and you can either send this gold to your nearest region, or you can pocket the money yourself. For this first camp raid, I highly recommend taking the money yourself, because this will give you more than a hundred gold, and that more than pays for the monthly salary of a mercenary unit. As soon as you lead your levies back to your region, you may disband them, which doesn’t destroy the unit forever, but simply lets them back into civilization, and you can always call upon them later.
However, the next time you need to destroy a bandit camp or defend against a raid, you can now open the mercenary menu, and pay for the group of your choice, preferably as cheap of an option as possible, but still one that will do the job. As long as you destroy a bandit camp with the unit, you’ll end up with more money than you began with. Just remember to disband the mercenary unit if you do not wish to keep it around, because you don’t just pay the upfront cost, you pay them on a periodic cycle, which can quickly drain that manorly purse of yours.
However and on the other hand, this means that if you’ve focused on trading and make a healthy profit, say by opening trade routes for your weapons industry, and decide to trade those weapons away instead of using them for war, you can become a proper merchant republic, or the Most Serene Republic of the Manor if you will, and decide to completely rely on mercenaries. This is a fun way to play actually, since if you actually build up that trading arms industry, you can always use those weapons for yourself later on, but since you’re not right now, you get to consistently keep high production rates, and keep your men safe from war. But let’s talk a bit more about how fighting actually works.
Seeing how the rest of Manor Lords for the most part allows you to take your time and ponder your decisions, the Battles of Manor Lords is the most intense and action-focused part of the game. But despite this moment to moment action, it’s fairly simple to learn, yet comes with some interesting mechanics for you to make use of.
Like most games out there, selecting units come easy – you can either simply click, control and click on multiple, or drag over multiple at a time to select one or more units at a time. Left clicking elsewhere unselects them, while right-clicking on a spot in the world, moves them to that spot. Double-clicking forces them to run to their destination, but remember that this depletes their stamina faster, so this can be a risk to do over time.
If you line up your soldiers in a cool formation, you can hold alt while right-click dragging, to send your army in formation to that spot. However, notice that each unit also come with commands. Some are special, so for bowmen, you can choose to have them shoot regularly for longer range, or shoot shorter, but for more damage. For some units with a shield, you can assume shield wall formation, giving you much better defensive stats when facing the enemy. You can also tell your units to pursue a balanced, defensive or aggressive stance, each one providing you with the best mode of fighting for any given situation.
Even though archers will sometimes refrain from firing from behind an allied unit when that unit is fighting an enemy in close quarters, you can make use of their fire while the enemy is somewhat further away. But no matter whether you’re using archers or not, it’s often wise to make use of flanking or hammer and anvil tactics, encircling the enemy and draining their effectiveness this way. You can also make use of terrain for height advantages, and yes, holding the high ground is a certified winner.
In other words, if you make use of formations, positioning and terrain, and field the proper units, you’re sure to go far in Manor Lords, whether you’re using your own levy, or go mercenaries only.
Farming
That does it for the early game of Manor Lords up the level 2 buildings, but the game doesn’t end there. So if you’ve followed along thus far, great job, you’ve succeeded in understanding Manor Lord’s basic concepts, and you may graduate to the mid and late game, because in many ways they are kind of the same at this point in time, if you understand the basic concepts.
For the most part, Manor Lords’ more complex mid and late game revolve around your homes, but also focus on farming and trading. And let’s begin with farming, because I think for a lot of people, this will seem like the intuitive place to begin even in the early game, but here’s why I caution you against that. Farming in Manor Lords is a lengthy process, it’s not just about putting down a farm building and bread comes out lickey split. No, what you need to do first, is place down a field. But even this is not that easy. An important aspect of Manor Lords is fertility, and every region on the map comes with varying degrees of it, more some patches of land being more suitable for farming than others.
You wanna place down your field in the greener zones for bigger yields, but consider also that different soil is better tailored to different crops, and there are four different crop types in the game – wheat, flax, barley and rye, namely for making bread, ale, flax, and bread again. Rye is unlocked through the development tree and is stronger than rye, giving you potentially better yields, so that is something to consider down the line.
However, we’re placing down our rye farm since we wish to reliably feed our population first and foremost. For ultimate optimization in the early game, consider making the field 1 Morgen, which is a decent size that most farmers should be able to plow, sow and then harvest in time for winter. However, this is just the beginning. You need farmers of course, and farmers work out of the farmhouse. Families must once again be assigned to the farmhouse to work the fields, but they’ll only work the fields between the months of March up to and including November, after which any remaining crops will rot and waste.
You can see the progress your farmers and fields have made in plowing, sowing, yielding and then harvesting the crops by clicking on the field itself, which is also where you can conduct upgrades by the way, a feature available to a select group of buildings storage sheds for more space, trade buildings for more horses, herbalists hut to enable herbs, and indeed fields and farms in order to do two important things when you have unlocked them in the development tree.
You see, plowing fields can take a long time, but by unlocking ox-driven plowing from a farmhouse, you can do this in a fraction of the time, giving a lot more time for the sowing and the yielding. Indeed, at a field, if you have unlocked the pasture development, you can after having important sheep, have them graze at your fields, which gives them back fertility a lot faster. That’s another thing by the way. After one season of harvesting, fields will lose their fertility, and will if you want it back, need to go fallow for a season in order to yield its maximum potential the next year.
This means that your fields won’t be working at all half the time if you’re careful with maintain fertility, which is another reason why supplementing your food supply with trade and other sources is so vital. That was a bit of a tangent but still an important one, so let’s get back to the bread-making process.
So say a few months have passed by, and the harvest is over. Your farmers will now take the wheat to the farmhouse, where they turn it into grain. The grain will stay there however, unless you build a windmill and employ workers there, where the grain will be turned flour. Now you need a baker’s house to finally create bread, with its own workers of course.
Now, as you can tell, this is a lengthy process that requires a ton of families just to get properly started, but getting bread will also often take a good 6 months between sowing and harvest. In other words, farming should ideally be done on a large scale, not just one plot. In my opinion, this is at least how to properly make use of farming and the investment it requires at the moment, since farming requires both a surplus of people, and that you have other food sources that can sustain you while you’re waiting for the yield to be turned into bread. I guess in essence, make sure to diversify your food sources. And to do so effectively, let’s talk a bit about trade again.
Advanced Trading
We talked about how trade can be a good way make early game income, but what’s interesting is that you really wanna make it big, trade becomes crucial for your food supply and possible other needs. You see, everything can be traded, and if you wish to keep upgrading your houses from level 2 to 3 for example, you’re going to need money to do so. One good which is a classic one to export is leather, and by extension, shoes, because there are relatively expensive goods and can be mass produced. Indeed, no matter if you’re going to raise your own levy or not, your arms industry is very likely to begin stockpiling weapons, which means they’re ripe for export.
Weapons like bows, spears, sidearms and shields will yield a ton of money over time, meaning we can begin paying for imports. Just remember that all of these higher tier goods are considered to be needing major trade routes, meaning they have to be paid for to be unlocked, which is all to say that the Better Deals perk is vital to keep those costs down.
In other words, our exports is what will pay for our imports, and our imports can be geared towards extending and diversifying that food supply. This can rapidly increase your storage of food much faster and more reliably than farming ever could, and is frankly the only way I’d recommend to go about building towns that are larger than a few hundred people.
What’s important to note though, is that in order not to bankrupt yourself or suddenly empty your export stock, you need to carefully balance what you wish your surplus of every good to be. This means that while you should consider exporting quite a lot more than you import, that you keep a base stock of goods left, say if you wish to be able to call on your levy later on, keeping a few dozen spears or shield and bows handy, would be very smart.
Over time, this has the potential net you enormous wealth, not just for your region, but also for you personally, since with that manor we mentioned earlier, we can actually tax our people in percentage increments. And with enough money and time, well, you too can become richer than you ever thought possible.
However, there are a few goods that I would recommend importing instead of making yourself, since currently, there’s almost no way you’ll make enough of it to satisfy those higher needs. Ale is one of them, and since ale has a lengthy production process, importing ale or even malt, is recommended as long as you can afford it, which alleviates space and workers for other projects. The same goes for clothing actually, because the more complex stuff can be hard to put together, demanding higher tier resources like flax or yarn which demands a relatively lengthy route to make. So again, at this time, I’d recommend important some of those types of goods to an extent if you have the money for it.
Advanced Housing/Burgages
In terms of our houses however, there are a few things you should know. As of right now, housing reaches their limit at level 3. The only truly meaningful upgraded however is at level 2, when you’re able to make the inhabitants into artisans, which also brings you one regional wealth per month, per family living there, and yes, at level 2, each house allows for the inhabiting of one additional family.
However, in terms of level 3 houses, they don’t come with that same transformative thing. Only, they of course now look insanely bad ass, and they now bring in 2 gold per family to the region wealth, which potentially significantly increases that monthly income when you have enough of them.
For a balanced economy that brings in more people, keeps them happy, and most importantly, fed and warm, it’s important therefore to focus on trade and local farming at the same time, develop your region with new technology, and using your higher tier exports to pay for the importation of lower tier goods like food first and foremost.
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