Skyline + full battle, you can still sew like this
"The Lord of the Manor" became a very "steady" hit.
At 9 p.m. on April 26th, Beijing time, the EA version of the simulation urban construction strategy game "Manor Lord" made by a single developer was officially released, and it has become the best-selling game on Steam in the world as of press time, and the peak number of players today is also the highest among buyout games.
According to Hooded Horse, the publisher of "Manor Lords", the game sold more than 1 million copies in just one day of release. The reason why the explosion of "Manor Lords" is "stable" is because the game has maintained the top position on Steam's wishlist before its release, beating a series of popular products such as "Hades 2", "Black Myth: Wukong", and "Hollow Knight: Silk Song", it can be said that the explosion of "Manor Lords" is not unforeseeable.
Judging from the current player evaluations on Steam, players have given many positive reviews for the gameplay of the game, and the negative reviews are mainly focused on the lack of novice guidance in the game, the low completion of some systems, and the fact that the publisher sends the activation code to the anchor in advance, resulting in players being spoiled.
So, what is it about Manor Lords that has made so many players wishlist early and recognized by many players in the EA stage? Let's find out today.
Plot planning has a direct impact on production efficiency
First of all, even though Lords of the Manor is a single-player game, the game does sell very well. Unreal Engine's realistic graphics are as detailed as many major manufacturers, and the game's lighting and shadow effects are very detailed, and the natural environment is extremely varied, giving you the feeling of playing a medieval version of Frostpunk.
Different from other urban construction simulation games, "Manor Lord" not only provides a top-down perspective for easy construction, a quasi-first-person perspective that can show more details when zoomed in, and can even be incarnated as a lord to stroll through his manor, personally observe and feel the labor, action, and interaction of NPCs, and the sliding operation is very silky. This realism in detail is one of the important reasons why countless players paid attention to Lords of the Manor before the game was released.
On the whole, the main gameplay logic of "Manor Lords" has certain 4X elements, and players carry out resource collection, territory expansion, and layout construction (similar to the Ice Steam Age) through productivity allocation in the early stage, so as to continuously promote population growth and building upgrades, and gradually build an industrial chain to promote the overall development of the economy.
When we focus on the urban construction gameplay of "Manor Lords", we can find that the game has indeed achieved the ultimate in the pursuit of authenticity. Due to the lack of novice guidance in the EA version of the game, the author was really at a loss at first, and didn't know where to start, so he began to collect wood, food, and other survival resources according to the previous experience of playing simulation management games, and then gradually built residential and production facilities, but the production efficiency was always a little slow, and the lack of resources slowly appeared.
After further collecting information from all parties (checking the strategy), the author found that "Manor Lord" really implemented the concept of "to get rich, build roads first".
The game has a high degree of freedom in road planning
Players need "logs" to construct various buildings, and the logs are too large for a single NPC to move, so the NPCs will lead ox carts to transport the wood. However, due to the lack of manpower in the early production of the game, there is only one ox (which can be purchased to increase transportation capacity), so as long as the ox cart is transported faster, the overall construction efficiency will also be accelerated, and building roads is the key way to speed up transportation.
There is no cost to build roads in the game, and the focus is on testing the player's layout planning for the overall industry. If the player wants to maximize the efficiency of production and trade, it is necessary to ensure that the various buildings are connected by roads, and also consider the travel distance between the buildings with related functions.
Some players have even reported that if a family's place of residence and work is too far away from the camp, there may even be a "strike", and shorter travel and transportation distances can obviously increase the production speed more effectively.
Speaking of which, the overall framework of Manor Lords looks very similar to that of Sim Icepunk and other urban construction products, and one of the major features that sets Manor Lords apart from other games is that its workforce is based on families rather than individuals. When a family is assigned a job, two or three members of the family will have a corresponding family division of labor.
For example, when a family is assigned to pick berries, the children may participate in the berry picking according to the player's arrangement, while the wife may go to the market and set up a stall to provide the berries to the entire resident population, while the husband is responsible for transportation, which is closer to the real "small-scale farmer economy".
The game's main resources for survival include building materials (such as wood), food, fuel, crops, crafting materials, goods, and military equipment, and the main means of increasing the population is to increase prosperity and build [forts] to retain the population. In addition to the residential function, the fort can also provide some resources for the production of sub-occupations, including food, clothing, weapons, etc., to further multi-function the residential module.
With the continuous development of economy and technology, players can establish a production chain of "mineral mining-mineral processing-tool manufacturing", which is somewhat similar to the process of "mining-making iron ingots-producing tools and weapons" in "Phantom Beast Palu", except that the production line of "Manor Lord" is automated production, and there is no need for players to operate after the establishment is completed.
Battles and diplomacy are not finished, but the gameplay loop is still interesting
Of course, developing the wanderer camp into a town of hundreds or even larger through urban planning and simulation management is not the ultimate goal of the game. The player is not playing the role of a world-traveler with great benevolence, but a lord in troubled times, and naturally like other lords, he has an eye on other people's lands.
With interests involved, diplomacy and war are inevitable. In order to deal with the incoming enemy army, the player also needs to deploy male residents from the village to serve as the player's army.
In terms of combat, the game adopts a design similar to the "Full War" series, covering diplomacy, real-time strategy combat, battlefield command and other content. At the same time, thanks to the game's quality picture effect and very comfortable camera scheduling, it will even bring players the feeling of "riding and chopping" in terms of performance.
Unfortunately, "Manor Lords" is in the EA testing stage, and its combat and diplomatic content is weak, and it is far from the completion of the simulation management part. Therefore, this part of the performance does not represent the final quality of the product. When this part is really implemented, we will also bring you a detailed analysis and interpretation.
Although the current game has shortcomings in diplomacy and combat, it does not affect the ingenuity of this set of integration from the perspective of gameplay looping.
First of all, we have to be clear, how exactly does the transition from urban planning to combat converge, and that is population, that is, the population serves as both the player's productivity and the player's army reserve (of course, it is not as a martial setting, and only the male labor force in the game will be used as reserve soldiers).
In the process of operating in the game, the development of towns is the foundation of the player's progression of the game, in which defending the homeland is a necessary condition for stable development, and if the goal is to rule, the player needs to conquer other regional territories. In addition, each initial region has a limited number of resource types, and as the player reaches a certain level, they will need resources that cannot be obtained through gathering, and it may be better to expand the territory in addition to trade. The game has many rules and restrictions, so that players cannot completely circumvent the design of combat. Therefore, players need to take into account the development of urban construction and the reserve of military forces.
At this time, when we look back at the key role played by population in both, it is not difficult to find that it plays a role in the dynamic balance of the two gameplay contents. For example, when the player's urban construction development is in full swing, in order to prevent the fall short, it is necessary to form an army to prevent foreign enemies from invading;
From the perspective of circulation, if the player's urban construction operation is developing well, there must be a large population as a reserve of military power, and when the player uses the army to capture a territory, the increase in resources brought by more resource points will also accelerate the player's town construction. The two-way drive of urban development and combat expansion can also continue to capture players and advance the game progress.
Compared with the conventional gameplay fusion method, it does not strictly stipulate the operation mode of "who is the primary and secondary, who chooses", but through the matching and ingenious combination of gameplay, and then builds a gameplay loop that drives each other.
The sense of sophistication and immersion brought by the overlap of game and reality
Returning to the experience of the game, what surprised me the most was not the graphical effect of the game, but the game's definition of the unit of "population" as a "family" in groups of three. When the player assigns a family to an activity, the three members of the family will each do their part.
To take the simplest example, when the player sends a unit (family) to the hunting grounds, the father of the family will participate in the hunt within a fixed range, the son of the family will help bring the harvest (hides, etc.) to the market for easy use, and the mother will work on the family's ranch or farm.
Yes, the units here don't just do what the player tells them to do, but rather a sensible division of labor around the instructions given by the player - one character will follow the player's instructions, while the other two will do some supporting work.
When the author first came into contact with the game, he didn't realize the brilliance of this set of underlying logic, but it became the author's doubt. For example, why do I assign this family to work XX, but two of them have nothing to do at home?
But after reacting, I have to sigh at the ingenious design, which presents the virtual rules of the game in a more realistic and common sense form through the division of labor and refinement. As a simple example, in many sim games, when the player builds a house, the resources will disappear in the form of deducting numbers, while in "Manor Lords", the land is transported and built by the cooperation of individual families. Or to put it another way, in the game, with the division of labor and cooperation of the family, you can see the flow of each resource to the entire process of building the building.
In addition to bringing players a sense of design refinement, it also gives the members of the family unit a "human" agility. It's as if the player is really a lord who gives orders and the people obey and work together (which is weird to be immersed in a game like this, but it's really amazing). Of course, in order to build a complete industrial closed loop in the game content, players still need to manually place and control family units and building facilities everywhere.
Due to the limited experience time, the author has not yet been able to understand many details of the design of "Manor Lord", if there are any errors or omissions, please add corrections. However, in the short experience time, the author can still clearly feel the positive and negative feedback brought by the double-loop gameplay of "Manor Lord".
As an EA version, "Manor Lords" has fully let players see the future development potential of the game, and the main optimization content in the follow-up is to enrich the selection of talent trees, increase the number of troops, adjust the value income of farming and other gameplay supplements and corrections, such as the problem that the income from farming is far inferior to trade at this stage is often mentioned by players (but this also seems to be in line with the history of Europe's bias towards the development of commodity economy).
The features of the game's talent tree need to be further enriched
The author once mentioned in the article "The Apocalypse of the Phantom Beast Palu: Catching Pets, Two-dimensional and Match-3 under the Framework of Simulation Management" that simulation management includes two general elements of the game: resource allocation and unlocking and upgrading, which is very suitable for becoming a lubricant and linker for various types of gameplay to meet the diverse experience needs of players.
Now that we look back, "Manor Lord", "Diver Dave", and "Frostpunk Age", which have been more popular in recent years, are all similar in design, and the focus is to improve the rhythm and experience of the simulation management part of the game through the introduction of external factors or gameplay, so that players can get stronger and more immediate phased feedback (although Manor Lords has 4X elements, the current version focuses more on simulated urban construction rather than conquest).
For manufacturers who are in the process of setting up projects and making simulation operations and palu likes, "Manor Lords" may be a good inspiration reference template.