A new Manor Lords update makes a wealth of changes to the recently released medieval strategy game, including several notable tweaks to trade and a new annual tax. The latest patch from developer Slavic Magic is full of dramatic changes, and has been made available to play now on Steam via the game’s experimental beta branch for testing.
Launching to a very positive reception, Manor Lords has so far delivered on the promise that saw it earn the title of Steam’s most-wishlisted game before launch. It’s still early days, however, and the developer of the early access strategy game is continuing to make plenty of changes as it works on new features and gameplay balance. Among those addressed in this update are adjustments to Manor Lords trade, which has been at the forefront of community discussion thus far.
Top of the list of changes from Slavic Magic is a number of the most commonly reported issues for Manor Lords. These include an issue causing huge numbers of ‘None’ people spawning and refusing to work, clogged trading posts, hard swings in trade values based on supply and demand, families refusing to move into empty living space, and a seemingly unquenchable thirst among your villagers for vast quantities of ale.
There’s now the option to change trading posts to exchange specific types of goods locally between your own regions, rather than globally. By default, traders will now prioritize traveling to the destination offering the best prices – even if those are in regions owned by other lords. Opening trade routes is now more expensive, and the cost will scale up exponentially with each additional route you set up.
In addition to this, a new annual royal tax (currently called the King’s Tax, although the name is under consideration) will be collected from the treasury once per year. It’s based on your number of residents and is designed to “slightly punish bad workplace optimization and make it more difficult to hoard huge amounts of cash.” For the time being, there’s no consequence for going into debt on this, but future updates will cause missed payments to incur the king’s wrath, with his army eventually showing up to collect by force.
There are plenty more changes to dig through in the full patch notes. You’ll no longer need to micromanage early harvesting for optimal results, villagers will eat food in a random order, harvested crops will go straight into the field inventory to remove the bottleneck caused by workers transporting it, you can now track the mourning period after a person dies, and the speed at which the Baron claims regions has been slowed somewhat.
You can test out the new update now via the experimental branch of Manor Lords – simply right-click on the game in your steam library, go to properties and then betas, and enter the password ‘veryNiceBasket’ (note that it’s case-specific) to enter the ‘pre_release’ beta branch. Slavic Magic recommends making a backup of your save files before doing so.
Still trying to increase your Manor Lords population? We’ve done plenty of testing to help you out, along with our guide to Manor Lords burgage plots and plenty more tips, tricks, and techniques in our Manor Lords beginner guide.
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