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Manor Lords |Early Access OT| Good manors are made up of peasant sacrifices

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Finally beat a lord and took some land. But I thought I would gain favor and influence. I got none.
You only get influence by winning battles and with the tithe mechanic via your taxes panel. You did get the land, though! :messenger_smiling_horns:

I caved in and bought it. Playing it without combat to get a feeling for how the game works.
About 5 years in. Somehow managed to trade all my wheat and smash all my berries into dye just as winter set in. Mass starvation erupted but my little people harvested the fields in Dec-Jan, built a 2nd mill and pumped out just enough grain and bread so no one died. It was nail biting and I loved it.

The "easiest" way to get early food is to start in a region with rich animals, and then spec two points into the "trapping" and then "double meat" development talents. Rush your manor and set the first policy - the one that doubles the rate of animal reproduction. Congratulations you have infinite food.

You can also get a ton of berries, even on a normal berry patch, by flooding it with foragers for the spring and summer months. The berry regen is super fast, and you can get hundreds of berries per season with this method. When I have the manpower to sustain it, I have 2 foraging huts and 8 workers set to forage during spring and summer, with a staffed granary next to them that is set to only accept berries.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
If anyone's having trouble navigating villager happiness and marketplace stock, I think this is the most effective way to do it -

Keep as much of your production buildings and granary/storerooms as close to the marketplace as you can. Trade building too.

Only have one marketplace, and increase its size as your town grows.

Designate a marketplace area with roads (a space that's big enough to hold 40 or so stalls), and for your first marketplace, make one that only has 3 stalls in it. When your town grows big enough so that those 3 stalls can't fulfill everyone (usually around 30-40 families), demolish the entire marketplace and remake it in the empty space with 6 stalls. Repeat as your town scales up.

If a food production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a granary instead. If a firewood production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a storeroom instead. If a clothing production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a storeroom instead. Ideally you want market stalls to be staffed by storage workers, not production workers, since they have an easier time refilling the market stalls.

If you ever have problems with your marketplace, just delete it and remake it bigger.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Keep as much of your production buildings and granary/storerooms as close to the marketplace as you can. Trade building too.

To elaborate on this, the biggest bottleneck isn't the ability for houses to get marketplace goods, it's the ability for the marketplace to be stocked in the first place. I think it's unintuitive because most people at first thought would try to optimize the marketplace by making them in range of houses. Marketplaces in fact, have infinite range, so houses don't even have to be close to them to get the benefit. However, if the market stall is not properly refilled in a timely manner, the houses will suffer. Like G did.

If a food production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a granary instead.

This is how you do this - click on the production building. Click "people". The worker with a market stall should have a market stall icon attached. Click on the icon that looks like a recycle symbol to reassign that worker, and then click again on the relevant storage building that is close to a marketplace.
 

AJUMP23

Parody of actual AJUMP23
I wanted to show off my most successful town. I even got to %100 approval at one point. A good army finally and lots of food and barley.

bRPXBj9.jpeg


qfHkJKg.jpeg
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
If anyone's having trouble navigating villager happiness and marketplace stock, I think this is the most effective way to do it -

Keep as much of your production buildings and granary/storerooms as close to the marketplace as you can. Trade building too.

Only have one marketplace, and increase its size as your town grows.

Designate a marketplace area with roads (a space that's big enough to hold 40 or so stalls), and for your first marketplace, make one that only has 3 stalls in it. When your town grows big enough so that those 3 stalls can't fulfill everyone (usually around 30-40 families), demolish the entire marketplace and remake it in the empty space with 6 stalls. Repeat as your town scales up.

If a food production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a granary instead. If a firewood production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a storeroom instead. If a clothing production person creates a market stall, change that family to work at a storeroom instead. Ideally you want market stalls to be staffed by storage workers, not production workers, since they have an easier time refilling the market stalls.

If you ever have problems with your marketplace, just delete it and remake it bigger.


Actually I might have a different approach now. Still testing.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
A few observations:

Total firewood capacity in the marketplace is one firewood per burgage plot. That means if you have 20 burgage plots, you will only ever see 20 firewood in your marketplace, max. That's why you may be seeing empty stalls.

Total clothing capacity in the marketplace is one type of clothing per burgage plot. That means if you have 10 burgage plots and 50 leather in your storage, you'll only ever see 10 leather max in the marketplace. This is where variety comes in handy here. If you also have 50 linen in storage, you will then have 10 leather and 10 linen in your marketplace, effectively doubling your ability to keep your villagers' houses needs fulfilled.

Total food capacity in the marketplace is one type of food per burgage plot. If you have 5 burgage plots, your marketplace will only every have 5 max of each food type in stock. Given the priority of food eaten, if you always have meat, berries, bread, and eggs in stock, your villagers will never eat veggies, apples, or honey.
 
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Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Only have one marketplace, and increase its size as your town grows.

Actually multiple marketplaces are okay. Either they fixed the bugged behavior, or what I thought was bugged behavior actually isn't, and I just didn't understand fully how they worked yet.

edit: Actually maybe not. Sometimes they work okay. Sometimes they don't. It's strange. For troubleshooting purposes, just stick to one marketplace and save yourself the headache.
 
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Puscifer

Member
Is the non combat more implemented yet? Worse case scenario I'll just buy it now to support him like I did Timberborn
 

Puscifer

Member
Compared to when? As it currently stands, you can build a decent quaint little village. If you want to min/max and build a huge city, you'll find some jankiness under the hood, but most people won't really get to that point.



Arnold Schwarzenegger Handshake GIF


Pbs Nature Beaver GIF by Nature on PBS
Timberborn took the idea of banished, fleshed out to the max and implemented beavers.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
Fuck it, I bought manor lords.

I hope you enjoy it! Speaking for myself, I think it's great, and the developer has shown a commitment to player satisfaction. Those are qualities that I want to support in order to stave off the AAA MTX hell bad ending for a little while more.
 

Puscifer

Member
I hope you enjoy it! Speaking for myself, I think it's great, and the developer has shown a commitment to player satisfaction. Those are qualities that I want to support in order to stave off the AAA MTX hell bad ending for a little while more.
Agreed 100%

Already this year Balatro is my GOTY

I've bought finished several retro games like System Shock 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon Classic

Got Hades II Early Access

System Shock Remake was purchased after I read about the changes they made

I'd rather give my money to stuff I want than the nonsense being released, Street Fighter 6 was of zero interest to me when I saw they had the nerve to sell a season pass but you have to buy stages separately.

I'm just over it, give me GAMES not products
 

AJUMP23

Parody of actual AJUMP23
patch incoming.


- The rate of Hildebolt's claims

- The famous "None" people spawning in huge numbers and refusing to do any work

- The clogged Trading Posts

- The game being stuck at the summary screen after a victory / game over

- Very weak archer damage

- Inefficient sawpits which also triggered "generic storage full" problem banners

- Problems with optimizations in large cities (still some work to do here)

- Inefficient marketplace supply

- Problems with farming, like crops erasing in the winter & inefficient harvests

- Too harsh oversupply/undersupply systems

- People and/or livestock staying homeless even though there is living space in the settlement

- Overly high ale consumption
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
How is overly high ale consumption a negative for a peasent village

In terms of lore, it was fine, but in terms of gameplay it was out of whack.

To put it simply

If you needed one wheat field of one morgan in size to reasonably supply your town with bread for a year, you also needed ten times that amount to grow enough barley to satisfy your town, too. Given the jankiness of farming, it was nearly impossible to sustain a town by only farming barley.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
New new patch


Hi everyone,

Here's a changelog with the latest fixes. The new patch is available on the main branch, so if you participated in the pre_release, remember to set betas to "none".

Version 0.7.972->0.7.975


Gameplay & balance:

-Food cart & Firewood cart will now keep importing until it reaches their storage limits
-Made livestock order imports slightly faster by reducing the livestock merchant's travel distance
-[Experimental] Added 4 more handcarts to the lv2 storehouse [Side note: Considering handcart resources or handcart upgrades costing wooden parts in the future - opinions welcome]

Minor changes:

-Improved loading times
-Added a concurrent sound limit to hoe & sow sound effects (they clogged the audio buffer when too many people were farming in the same spot)
-Added the localization key & icon missing for item_143 (Honeycomb)
-Chimney smoke won't generate very far from the camera where it was barely visible
-[Experimental optimization] Animal random pathing calls reduced very far from the camera where they can't be observed
-[Experimental] Bumped up pathfinding priority of farming tasks
-Blood cover should now disappear from clothes on disbanding
-Further farming optimizations

Crashfixes:

-Fixed a weird crash caused by a character somehow triggering import of a non tradable item (Timber)
-Fixed a crash related to a barter building being invalid

Bugfixes:

-Fixed workers stuck in the transport task (for instance at the malthouse) because the task targetRotation didn't account for ground slope adjustment
-Fixed livestock being stuck at following task if the livestock trader gets unassigned mid journey
-Fixed the pause toggle not being visible on the fields
-Fixed characters sometimes loading with a weird rotation
-Fixed free traders clogging pathfinding and making a lot of villagers and/or traders freeze because they were waiting in pathfinding queue
-Fixed character sometimes ghosting through walls to their ungarrison location
-Fixed Food Cart showing as "abandoned"
-Fixed people not consuming food from the Food Cart
-Fixed the "pause" toggle not working on the Firewood Cart and Food Cart
-Fixed Dyers setting up Food stalls (because they had Food stored at their workplace)
-Fixed trading post workers not respecting the export trade rule in case where the goods are already transported to the trading post for export but the player changes their mind
-Fixed the interior box being visible during the construction process of a townhouse (variation G)
-Fixed the building card border scale animation
-Further fixes for broken character rotations
-Fixed livestock import not working if the target surplus has never been set and the player is using orders
-Fixed livestock imports ignoring other region trade rules
-Fixed custom livestock orders importing form on-map regions
-Fixed livestock order merchants trying to import horses that trade route merchants were riding on
-Fixed pasture/stable space not updating when exporting animals
-Fixed resources mined in surface and deep mine not registering as produce, leading to storehouse workers ignoring them sometimes
-Fixed recruits stuck in a loop of moving armaments between burgage plots

Cosmetics:
-Field material adjustments to reduce tiling artifacts

The next step


For the first month after release I tried to be careful not to make any risky changes, my goal was to stabilize the main branch (get rid of the most common, annoying issues). I'll keep reading the feedback too see if that build is stable enough to last us a bit longer, I'd be a nice time to go into the "dev cave" and do some more fun experiments & changes to push the game forward and finally add some new features.

Thanks for playing!

Greg Styczeń
Lead dev
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores
I experimented with honey on my latest playthough, I it's really good. The description that you can only build two apiaries per region isn't accurate. As long as you have villagers emptying the hives consistently, you'll produce lots of honey among multiple apiaries.

Apples and vegetables are a good source of food that don't require lots of people, but they take a while to ramp up.
Apiaries are a good source of food that can come online quickly, but it needs a proper building arrangement and requires lots of available families to scale up.
 

Rentahamster

Rodent Whores

Full changelog (Version 0.7.975 -> Version 0.7.987 )

Major changes:

-Upgraded the game to run on Unreal Engine 5:
a) A lot of old engine bugs and crashes should no longer occur, including random crashes during loading a saved game or certain resolutions breaking the game
b) [Experimental] A new "virtual shadow map" system that produces very sharp, high resolution shadows
d) New volumetric clouds and atmosphere rendering
e) GPU based LOD for Instanced Components

-Added a trade overview in the development screen which lists all the previous transactions done by the region

-Food spoilage mechanic:
a) Each food type decays at a certain rate per month, for instance fish decay faster than bread
b) Certain buildings affect spoilage, for instance storing in a granary is better than storing in the workplace's pantry
C) Weather events can affect spoilage rates (droughts make food spoil quicker)

-Fishing:
a) Added a new resource node: Fishing pond,
b) Made so that the ponds freeze in the winter
c) Added a new development branch: Winter fishing, that enables fishing all year round
e) Added a new food resource: Fish
f) Added a new workplace: Fisherman's hut, with new job (fisherman)

-Crossbows:
a) Added a new military resource: Crossbows (made in bowyer workshop)
b) Added new unit types: Light Mercenary Crossbowmen and Militia Crossbowmen
c) Added a new ranged low tier mercenary group: "The huntsmen"

-Butchers
a) Implemented the butcher artisan conversion. Butchers take surplus sheep and lamb and convert them into meat
b) Added new deposit (salt) and readded the salt resource which is mined with the surface/deep mine
c) Added a new resource: Sausage (1 salt + 1 meat = 2 sausage). It is made in the Butcher workshop and has much lower spoilage rate than Meat.

-Added a system of production limits and reserves for workplaces crafting goods

-Removed the individual limits (construction limit, hunting limit) and rerouted everything to the new reserve UI in the "advanced" tab. This way, Fisherman huts now also get a fishing limit to avoid overfishing.

Gameplay & Balance:
-Adjusted deposit spawning, should be (per region): 1 clay, 1 iron, 1 deer, 1 berries, 1 stone + 1 random, then either 2 of them or 1 and farming fertility get promoted to a rich deposit
-Brought rich deposits closer to the starting camp on first spawn (if possible) to make the starts a little bit more balanced
-Added a Pantry to the Malthouse
-Malthouse now actually requires refueling
-Advanced Skinning development branch doubles the Meat from butchers as well
-First butcher workshop built will set a sheep & lamb reserve automatically to a half of the population in order to avoid butchering the whole flock

Minor changes:
-Rewrote the random node algorithm to reduce cases where it fails to find an appropriate spot and spawns an object in a wrong location (eg. spawning a bandit camp on top of a pond)
-Added multiple paragraph breaks to wiki descriptions
-A setting was added to display Resource Node (Deposit) icons in construction mode only.
-Made "advanced" tab highlight every time an artisan workshop is created so that the player notices the new settings of production focus and reserve for butchers
-[Experimental] A new way of spawning bandit camps that is more randomized and should now avoid spawning them on top of ponds
-[Experimental] Moved production focus to the "advanced" building panel tab and livestock assignment to the "livestock" building panel tab
-Added missing Lambs icon
-Wiki text and tooltip updates
-Fish pond water level should lower during droughts
-Added drought impact to the spoilage tooltip
-Added new coat of arms symbols
-Added new character portraits
-Lowered the interface scale on smaller resolutions to reduce the top region panel overlapping with the lord's panel & screen edge.
-Improved collision avoidance if two characters are already extremely near collision distance or in collision

Optimization:
-Added advanced culling for transform updates (should make high population sessions run much faster)
-[Experimental] Fireplace light simulation LOD added
-[Experimental] Optimization of surface checks and fire reaction checks
-[Experimental] Optimized unit rotation smoothing far form the camera
-[Experimental] Ground height checks optimizations
-[Experimental] Locomotion velocity & animation speed calculation optimizations
-Unit static collision system optimizations
-Grass system optimizations
-Significant crowd animation system optimizations
-[Experimental] Distributed unit motion calculations over multiple frames to make the framerate smoother
-Optimized calculation of push forces in combat
-Reduced stutter after loading a savefile by moving the loading of the construction assets into the loading screen (in consequence making the loading screen a bit longer)
-Pathfinding optimizations
-Optimized memory usage

Crashfixes:
-Fixed a crash when the player deleted a squad by RMB during the rallying tool being active with that squad
-Fixed a crash when relocating a forager with a herbs garden while one of the workers has a task related to the garden and then reassigning the worker in the relocated building
-Fixed a crash for saves that had a bugged 0 yield field because the player placed such a narrow plot it couldn't be triangulated properly

Bugfixes:
-Fixed the deer not migrating back to their lair location if the camera is far due to optimization introduced in 0.7.975
-Coat of arms editor "field E" not displaying text properly
-Fixed saving erasing ownership data of items in the inventory, leading for instance to woodcutters transporting log pieces to the storehouse
-Fixed: Rounding up influence value shown in UI may give an impression that claiming territory is not working correctly
-Fixed: Placing a road over carts permanently remove them from game
-Fixed: Limiting Farmhouse's work area does not prevent workers from gathering already harvested crops from fields
-Fixed: After destroying the well, buildings do not lose water access
-Fix attempt for militia potentially not unequipping their military gear if they are disbanded while still inside their houses, leading to "animData not found" errors for civilian actions happening when dressed in military type body
-Fixed bloomers overrefueling their workplaces
-Fixed castle modules costing too many resources (To confirm whether it was already present in the public build)
-Fixed the extension/conversion sound signatures not applying the volume settings
-Added a temp workaround for snowflakes not displaying on AMD GPUs
-Fixed black shrubs occurring during a drought
-Fixed "snap to roads" checkbox not doing anything when placing plots
-Added a fix attempt for players being to place fields that are almost self intersecting, leading to them being unselectable and/or having 0% fertility
-Fixed "save game" and "load game" header texts getting mixed up in the load menu
-Fixed deer getting stuck if bandits are near
-Fixed deer getting scared of birds and running away, potentially forever (fun one)

Cosmetics:
-One handed combo animation polish and two handed idle pose polish
-[Experimental] Changed back the deposit icons to be all flat shaded for unification
-Made drought transitions smoother
-Added turning animations for oxen so that they appear less stiff when moving
-Spring color palette tweaks to overall appear less yellowish
-Main menu scene reworked for better historical authenticity
-Two handed combat animations cleanup (attack-defend-attack-defend combos)
-Further Field material art direction & specular variation
-More precise height calculation on landscape deforming meshes like mines
 
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