Manor Lords makes families matter more as housing gets a new upgrade

Manor Lords update six has arrived, bringing with it a new location to settle, and an increased emphasis on nurturing the families in your town. Slavic Magic and Hooded Horse’s lush medieval strategy game has been bulked up once again, with big changes to the way housing works at the top of the list. In case you’ve not been keeping up with beta testing, the developer has introduced a new burgage plot level that now sits at rank three, pushing the old tier-three design upwards to level four. You’ll need to finish this upgrade before you’re able to make use of the cobbler and baker extensions.

The way living space is calculated is also changing in accordance with these new ranks. Rather than the burgage plot expansion doubling its available space, it will now add one extra living space regardless of level, keeping the scaling smoother. Crucially, your Manor Lords settlement level now no longer looks at the status of your burgage plots, but rather the level of the families that are living in your region. Reach the ‘admired’ and ‘revered’ approval tiers, and your level three and four plots will see an additional income bump.

Speaking of regions, there’s a new map, perfect if you’re looking to start fresh with the update. It’s called ‘Twin Lakes,’ which should give you a rough indication of what to expect from the layout. If you experienced this during testing, you’ll notice that Slavic Magic has made some adjustments to its design, including turning some of its rock cliffs into dirt ones, adding some more hills, and bringing the height of the lakes down slightly. The Devil’s Hill map has also been given a fresh coat of paint, with new roads, cliffs, hills, and shrubbery.

When conflict hits the battlefield, you’ll spot some alterations to how encounters work. All squads that are inside an active battlefield will now always be visible. As the fight wears on, the surrounding area outside of the main zone where units are still considered as ‘participants’ will gradually shrink. The game will also attempt to put down battlefields in a way that overlaps existing settlements.

Enemy AI has been given some more upgrades. It will no longer carelessly add more militia squads without considering the military equipment at its disposal, and will be willing to export any excess military goods that it deems aren’t needed for its current or future plans. It’ll now correctly defend its owned but unsettled regions, but will no longer look to settle additional regions “until that mechanic is properly implemented.” Slavic Magic has also slapped a temporary cap on the number of families a computer-controlled region can support.

The rest of the patch notes include a range of smaller behavior and function changes, along with improvements to the UI. Wording on resource deposit tooltips and burgage plots have also been improved. Idle workers won’t immediately go home if they’re able to sit down and rest at their workplace instead, while those at the granary and storehouse will now recalculate how much of a resource they should collect when they reach their target building.

There’s a higher regional limit for goods in the trading post. Pathing to gather water from wells now chooses the shortest route rather than the closest location as the crow flies. Families are allowed to plow their vegetable gardens in November. Dead soldiers may be buried together in a single pit if one is much closer than a church or in the aftermath of a big battle. Unit collision avoidance works a little better on the whole, and wild animals should be less likely to retreat into cliffs or ponds.

Manor Lords update six is out now. Slavic Magic says its next update is due “relatively soon,” including an overhaul to pathfinding and more optimization. Beyond that, it’ll be updating the construction process and adding another level for the church, before returning to work on its much-anticipated improvements to the perk system, which are planned to include a focus on “trade privileges.”