Summary

• Manor Lords skillfully combines city building and real-time strategy elements, making it a unique and engaging gameplay experience.
• City building takes precedence over RTS combat in Manor Lords, with battles having significant consequences on city priorities and goals.
• While combat plays a smaller role in Manor Lords compared to city building, its depth and complexity provide a challenging and rewarding experience.

Manor Lords boldly blends two different, but closely related, strategy game genres into one. In it, players take control of medieval lords, overseeing all the tasks that come along with that particular historical preoccupation. They direct their serfs to build new structures, work in different trades, and honor new policies in the next Total War game.

So Manor Lords is part real-time strategy, part city builder - but what's the precise breakdown? It clearly contains shades of both genres, but it's not immediately obvious whether players will spend more time plowing their fields or plowing through their enemies. And when rival armies do clash on the battlefield, it's even harder to know exactly what to expect. Here's a rundown on how Manor Lords' combat works, how often players can expect to engage in it, and how it affects the game's overall genre classification.

Manor Lords Is A City Builder With RTS Elements

A Bold Blend Of Genres Leans More To One Side

Ultimately, Manor Lords is more of a city builder than an RTS. That's partially because city building makes up the majority of its playtime. But the combat mechanics even tie back into and are completely defined by the city building mechanics. The player must achieve certain city building goals in order to raise and strengthen an army. Win or lose, the results of each battle have resounding consequences for their city building priorities and goals moving forward. As a result, building is central to the Manor Lords experience, making it a city builder first and an RTS second.

How RTS Combat Works In Manor Lords

Manor Lords' Combat, Explained

Manor Lords contains a pretty standard system of RTS combat, featuring a host of mechanics that'll be familiar to fans of PC strategy games ranging from StarCraft to Crusader Kings. Players primarily muster militias by crafting the requisite supplies: they'll need a blacksmith to raise a spear battalion, and a fletcher to raise an archer battalion. They can also hire mercenaries and, after building a manor, establish a retinue. As they increase their settlements' resources, they can upgrade their units by crafting better equipment. Helmets may raise a spear militia's defense, while sidearms provide archers with greater flexibility.

Since militiamen are drawn from the civilian population, the potential size of each unit is determined by the village's population. Players must ensure all villagers' needs are met and that empty burgage plots are available to grow their population and increase the pool of militia recruits.

Battles can occur anywhere on Manor Lords' map, including in player settlements. Once a battle begins for any reason, players must rally any units they wish to command via the military menu. It's possible to pause the game, choose where each unit should spawn, and then resume the game for optimal placement at the beginning of battle. From there, combat unfolds in real time with a pause function. Players can direct one militia at a time, or multiple at once, by clicking and dragging. Players can not only determine where a unit stands, but also how its line up.

The majority of Manor Lords' battle strategy is contained within its Formations, various orders players can give to their militias in order to define their tactics. Activating a defensive Formation will cause a unit to stand in place, attacking enemies who come close. Offensive Formations will cause units to rush forward, pushing their enemies back. Others are more subtle, directing militias to raise their shields and defend against archers, or spread out to cover more ground. Other important combat mechanics include Fatigue, which increases as certain commands are given and gradually reduces a unit's efficacy, and terrain advantages.

As a result of these varied and detailed features, Manor Lords' combat goes deep, and its flexibility allows players to pull off some incredible tactical maneuvers. However, it's also pretty complicated, and requires a lot of experience to understand fully. Thankfully, the early-game battles are pretty easy, which gives players the time they need to experiment.

What's especially interesting about Manor Lords' combat is how it interacts with the city building elements. If, say, a band of raiders burns down a village's church, its people will become dissatisfied with their living conditions, and population growth will slow until the church is rebuilt. If a ruler wipes out their rival's army, it'll result in an equivalent population decrease, which could slow production of important resources like food, clothes, and shelter. Winning battles also rewards players with Influence, which they can spend to negotiate with other rulers or claim new territory.

How Much Of Manor Lords Is Spent In Combat?

How Often Do Battles Occur In Manor Lords?

But despite the attention to detail in its combat, most of Manor Lords is spent on the city building aspects of the game; there's definitely less focus on combat. It takes time to raise a militia. Players aren't likely to engage in combat at all during their first two years of Manor Lords, unless they go out of their way to start a fight. This can be done by attacking bandit camps, which appear randomly across Manor Lords' map. If there's one close to a player's settlement, certain supplies will occasionally turn up missing until the camp is destroyed.

In the second year and beyond, NPCs become more aggressive, and players are more likely to be thrust into battles whether they like it or not. Bandits will begin not just sneaking off with supplies, but ransacking villages. In these cases, players will have no choice but to defend their towns, lest all their hard work be erased. Later on, rival lords may also begin pressing claims on the player's territory, trying to take it over for themselves. Some game modes even include off-map rivals, who exist as a sort of boss for players to build up to.

But once battles begin, they often last for a long time - although battles with other lords are usually longer than battles with bandits. And there are ways to increase the frequency of combat for those who'd rather spend more time fighting. When starting a new game of Manor Lords, players can adjust a number of difficulty settings that determine, among other things, how many bandit camps appear on the map, how aggressively NPC lords behave, and how long they'll wait before raiding the player's settlement.

Still, just because RTS isn't the primary feature of Manor Lords doesn't mean it's underdeveloped. Combat may take up less time when compared to city building, but it's just as detailed, not to mention fun. Even though it leans further toward the city builder side of the scale, Manor Lords is every bit as qualified as an RTS.