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文:Rynii | 编辑:Rin
Town simulation management game must have heard of it somewhat, starting with a stronghold and a few scattered villagers, watching their settlement slowly grow into a small village, then into a small town, and finally a big city, a sense of accomplishment arises spontaneously. Maybe we are not mayors in reality, but in the game we can use our imagination freely, you can be a good village chief who loves the people like a child, or you can play the capitalist who oppresses the people, it all depends on what genre you want to play.
If such a game that simulates the development of the city and adds a war gameplay, players can grow and grow while allowing them to build weapons and equipment, train an army of their own, occupy other plots of land on the map, and unite towns and settlements to develop into a county, will this make the heart of your old farmer pounding?
Medieval old village chief simulator
Manor Lords is a management simulation game that incorporates real-time tactical elements. Similar to games like Cities: Skylines and Exiled City, in Manor Lords you'll also have to build your territory from scratch.
At the very beginning of the game, you have a wanderer camp and five homes. The camp is a temporary house, and the camp disappears after the five old farmers have their own houses. In addition to the five original shareholders, you also have some food and building materials and an old cow tethered to a stake, but you have to put all the resources into the warehouse as soon as possible, otherwise the rain will cause a certain loss of resources in the open air.
As the saying goes, if you want to get rich before you get rich, you have to choose a suitable location to build a logging camp before you waste the initial gift of wood. Once the logging camp is built, you'll need to get people in and cut down the trees.
In "The Manor Lord", the villagers are not based on "individuals", but on "households", which means that if you send one family to cut down trees, you are actually sending three people. Of course, this does not mean that all three of them will honestly cut down trees. Usually, the husband is responsible for cutting down the trees, while the wife does other things, such as taking care of the family's vegetable garden, assisting other villagers in carrying resources, or setting up a stall in the market to increase the coverage of consumable resources. Anyone who is idle can go and lead an ox to help transport building materials, hauling materials such as wood onto unfinished buildings, but only the entire family that is idle can do the construction work.
In addition to the logging camp, you will need to build a logging yard to produce firewood, followed by warehouses and granaries. Once you've done that, you'll be able to build a road to connect the buildings. At this time, you need to build houses for the villagers, which will not only improve their satisfaction, but also give them some side hustles, and by the way, improve the town's economy.
The villagers' own houses are called "forts", which are inhabited in front and can be expanded into vegetable gardens, chicken pens and other outbuildings in the back. When the resident satisfaction rate is above 50% and there are empty rooms, the population grows. As the number of households increases, the number of workers at your disposal gradually increases. When you don't have to worry about food and clothing, you can make some money by doing some trade.
After starting the game, the player's spawn point is a random plot. Although each plot will have resources such as berries, animals, stones, clay, iron ore, etc., the two rich sources of each plot are different. If the source of bounty is food, then their cap will be increased, and with the skill of adding food, there will be almost no shortage of food, and if the source of bounty is mineral, you can even dig indefinitely. Once you've built your manor and unlocked the tax feature, you'll be able to earn your first pot of gold by selling your excess resources.
Choose your troops, capture the strong, kryptonite, or recruit in the void
In terms of combat, the shadow of the Total War series can be clearly seen in "Manor Lords". In the game, soldiers are divided into three types: militia, retinue, and mercenary. The militia are the husbands and sons of every family in your territory, and you'll need to equip them with basic equipment such as bows, spears, and shields, as well as armor later in the game. They are the most basic soldiers, as long as they have enough population and equipment, they don't have to cost anything, after all, you are the lord, and they are just tools under your rule.
Similar to reality, war will slow down the speed of development, and when husbands and sons go out to fight, only wives are left at home, and the efficiency of each unit will be greatly reduced. Once a soldier dies in battle, you lose the villager forever and have to wait a long time for the widow to start a new family. The retinue is your personal guard, they do not participate in production activities, and are usually stationed in your manor and never show their faces. When you build the manor, the manor will come with two waste farmers who are not involved in production and can only assist in carrying and pulling cattle, and give five retinues whose combat effectiveness is one level stronger than that of the militia.
After that, if you want to expand the retinue, you can only spend money, each retinue needs to spend 50 treasury gold to recruit, and equipping them with a full set of armor requires additional treasury gold, so it can be said that the retinue is the elite of the elite. These retinues with a small number of strong combat effectiveness are equivalent to the generals in "Total War", and you can see them in the game that their attribute column says "Skills are under development", and they will definitely be added in future updates. Although the retinue is strong, if you want to raise a full retinue team, the amount of treasury gold that needs to be consumed is huge, and the regional wealth that needs to be obtained to earn these treasury is even more astronomical.
Mercenaries are the main force in the mid-game game. Recruiting mercenaries doesn't affect the development of your territory, and you don't need to pay for them to equip them out of your own pocket, as long as you pay for it, you can spawn a team of soldiers from the void for your use. However, the recruitment fee for mercenaries needs to be deducted from your treasury every month, and if the family runs out of money during the war, they will simply disband in place when the new month comes. The money consumed to form a team of mercenaries is naturally cheaper than raising an entourage, as professional soldiers, they all bring their own weapons and equipment, and death will not cause you any losses, it can be said that they are pure consumables. I have spent all the money, and if I don't use them to death, won't I be sorry for the people who pay the taxes?
There are two types of money in the game, one is regional wealth and the other is the treasury. Regional wealth is a voluntary tax paid by the villagers for the construction of the area, such as renovating the backyard of the fort, buying cattle and horses, trading goods, and so on. The treasury is the lord's small treasury, and if you want to get the treasury money, you can only reduce your satisfaction to collect land taxes, and embezzle a certain percentage of the acquired regional wealth into your own pockets. In order not to drop too much in terms of satisfaction, this is usually only 10%~20% of the wealth of the region.
Even if you are a lord, you may not be able to beat the bandits
Unlike the leisurely and comfortable simulation gameplay, the combat difficulty of "Manor Lord" is relatively large. In the third year of the game, a wave of bandits will attack. Of course, players can set up a peaceful game mode at the beginning, but I think players should experience the original game with the default settings at least once and then modify it to their liking, otherwise the game experience is incomplete. So what is the combat effectiveness of this wave of bandits? My rating is, rookie killer. In my budding stage, this wave of thieves made me so angry that I almost deleted the file.
Two teams of 18 bandits, with a total of 36 enemies, were very difficult to deal with with in the early stage with only five retinues and a long spearman. Since it mimics the battles of the Total War series, the more core combat method in the game is actually to reduce the enemy's morale and make it collapse directly than the war of annihilation. If a newcomer wants to break the game in the third year, the routine in the early stage will be very fixed. One is the evil routine I learned online, the mercenary stream. Needless to say, after you have saved enough money, you can shoot the trading post immediately, and then you can either rub the board, use the second-level fort to make a longbow or shield and sell it, or sell the resources directly according to the rich production area in your territory.
At the same time, it is necessary to build estates as soon as possible and accumulate the treasury through the collection of taxes. After prompting the detection of the enemy, he immediately recruited mercenaries, dragged the bandits at home with a dozen militiamen and five retinues, and waited for the mercenaries to directly counterattack. Using mercenaries as consumables, the death of mercenaries will not affect their development speed, but obviously this early mode is too boring, and the trade of shield longbows is too lucrative, and sooner or later it will be weakened.
The other is my own play, high-pressure development flow. This kind of play requires abundant berries or abundant animals to ensure that there is no shortage of food in the early stage. In the early stage, it is also necessary to sell resources at the trading post for money, in addition, it is necessary to build a central market, and then auction forts around the market, build two large guarantees to grow vegetables, one fort to make shoes, one fort to make bows, and the other forts to raise chickens and sheep. No tax collection can maintain a high level of satisfaction, reaching 75% with two new farmers moving in every month. By the third year, counting all the fathers and sons, there will be about thirty peasants to be recruited, and since the early system will send 20 spears and 20 shields, we have a total of 5 retinues, 20 spear militiamen, and a few bow militiamen.
The idea of breaking the situation of the development flow lies in the tactics of the sea of people and the street fighting, with five followers in the open and the militia hiding in the dark. The retinue stands in a row in the open and sticks to the mode, blocking the narrow intersection can force a whole team of 18 bandits, at this time the 18 bandits will be attracted by the entourage, and will not change the combat goal, so that the other team of bandits can be carried by 20 spear militiamen. At this point, the situation is clear, the player only needs to operate the Bow Militia to go around the rear of the enemy and shoot the ass, although the Bow Militia damage is extremely low, but as in the Total War series, the blow to morale from the back attack is huge, and the enemy will collapse on its own without any damage.
However, this genre is extremely challenging to develop, and it requires flexible allocation of various resources in the early stage of the game to deal with this wave of bandits, which is actually contrary to the slow-paced gameplay of traditional SimCity management games to observe the lives of NPCs, but is closer to real-time strategy games. After 11 hours of playing, I finally ate these two teams of bandits head-on for the first time, before I played several saves, once killed by bandits into a widow's village, and once gave up resistance and was burned down.
There is a bug in the bandits' arson, that is, the peasants whose fort land has been burned will not live in the new fort and will not be able to return to the rebuilt fort, but will indicate a displacement deduction at intervals. There was a stall where the bandits slaughtered my village and burned down the house.,I just resisted the debuff of no one to collect the corpse and the bug of displacement.,20% satisfaction、The villagers defected to the point that only two manor abandoned farmers and a widow's rotten archive were saved.,Hang your last breath until the whole map is occupied by NPCs.,Only this last plot is left.。
With the NPC claiming my territory, I had to give up the headwind that I had been painstakingly managing for several hours, raise the strength of the whole village, scatter all my family wealth to recruit mercenaries, recruit half a team of militia and two teams of mercenaries, and step into the enemy's encirclement in the tragedy of defeat. But then again, as long as the player can stop the first wave of bandits with very low losses, the game can be broken. Needless to say, the Bandits' Treasury, and reputation rewards, this win will give players a few more years to grow, until the next wave of Bandits arrives, and players will have the money to hire two teams of mercenaries to protect their territory.
At that time, I directly spent 90 yuan to buy three teams of elite soldiers, intercepted the bandits halfway, and easily beat the morale of the two teams of thieves. And then the player is basically not afraid of thieves, as long as he doesn't take the initiative to provoke NPCs, he is basically an invincible existence, as long as he develops with peace of mind and saves money to build a higher population. When you are fully sure, call the mercenaries together and directly consume 2000 reputation to declare war on the NPC's plot, and you can grab the territory.
An infinite future is possible
Is Manor Lords fun? The playability is there, but it can still be seen that it is a semi-finished product. It has a lot of obvious bugs, in addition to the aforementioned people who are burned in the fort will always be displaced, there are also bugs that will always occupy the stalls of the cowshed after the cow dies, the bug that the hired robbers keep deducting money after they fled, and the bug that the game cannot end after the battle is declared after the last plot is declared, etc.
In addition, its combat difficulty is also very uneven, and without any teaching guidance in the early stage, directly sending two teams full of bandits to beat players is obviously a failure to persuade newcomers to quit. If the player does not deliberately prepare for the battle from the beginning, and wants to use the five minions and 20 spear militia sent by the system to repel two teams of bandits without losing their vitality, I think it is impossible for newcomers to do it.
But "Lords of the Manor" is not without its merits. If you play it as a real-time tactical game with a large map, obviously it won't even reach 50 points. However, as a management simulation game, "Manor Lord" has a unique family unit, based on the movement of materials carried by NPCs, and large logs that must be dragged with the help of old cows, which are all features worth mentioning.
In addition, compared to other village-building games, the graphics quality of "Manor Lord" is also unique. In the lord's third-person mode, players can stroll through their own territory, observe the farmers' every move, or stand next to the soldiers as a cheerleader during the battle to watch the battle up close, the game graphics are so fine, the action is complete, as if it is a third-person ARPG game, I even look forward to a future version, maybe the lord himself can also go to the battlefield, just like the action game, as a hero unit to turn the tide of battle.
Although it's a half-finished product, it still shows me a lot of possibilities and makes me think that Lords of the Manor will eventually become a great game over time.