Manor Lords dev wants you to decide whether the game should allow egg monopolies
No egg puns exist, unfortunately
“Given the opportunity, players will become a merciless egg baron and sit chuckling on a throne of shells while medieval Europe cowers beneath their imperious yolk,” is what I assume Soren Jonson once said, and it looks like Manor Lords is proving this timeless adage right once more. Despite shifting over a million units and hitting the highest concurrent player count of any ‘city builder’ on Steam, creator Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Styczeń is already looking to the future of how the building game handles trade.
As spotted by cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, Styczeń has been chatting with players on the Manor Lords Discord server about pre-release feedback from press and content creators, discussing how trade could trivialise the game’s economy, letting players “just sell one type of good and make your town uber rich that way.”
To combat this, Greg introduced a fix before the game's early access release where, if players focus on a single good “its price will keep falling until the exports stop completely. Same for the opposite, if you keep massively importing some type of good, its price will rise and it will become very expensive." Sounds sensible, although this surely begs for a challenge run in which Manorheads compete to see who can pay the most for a single loaf of bread, which they then hang from a flagpole as an opulent monument to their prosperity.
Styczeń’s still not convinced this is the best way forward, though, so he’s taken it to a vote on Discord, saying:
“I thought specializing regions in producing certain goods is how the game should be played. There are other possible ways to make sure players have what to spend their fortunes on in future builds. But of course there is a risk players just won't have to build production chains at all if they can basically import everything without any consequence, possibly not having to interact with certain gameplay mechanics at all."
There are three poll options: A) keep things as they are B) keep them as they are, but make the system a little less harsh C) remove the above trading mechanic entirely. At the time of writing, the most popular poll option by a country morgen is B, meaning players agree with the spirit of the current fix, but would still like to become somewhat of an egg baron, for which I can hardly blame them.
I touched on the joys of focusing on farming rather than importing everything in my review, but I’m reminded here of a piece Robert Purchese recently wrote for Eurogamer about the hidden risks of early access. In short, I hope Styczeń can keep players happy without straying too far from his vision, his ideal game, and the single appropriately priced egg that shines at the center of his mind palace.