I waited literally years for Manor Lords. The theme, the visuals, and the atmosphere are exactly what I have always wanted in a city builder. The early game is incredibly relaxing and fun to play. But that illusion shatters the moment your town hits 100 or more people. The mid and end game transitions from a fun city builder into a frustrating, buggy mess where satisfying basic needs feels impossible.
The biggest pain point is the trading system. Inter-region trading through pack stations is horrible to manage. There are no proper limits, so you go from needing a few specific items to drowning in thousands of them in a matter of minutes. External trading with merchants is even worse because the AI constantly gets stuck on roads. The only workaround for trades actually going through is forcing yourself to play on 1x speed, because the moment you speed the game up, the merchants just freeze again.
Then you look at the economy and the prices. Supplying drinks for a town of 500 people is mathematically insane. Importing a single beer costs 28 regional wealth, but the items you craft from local resources sell for 1 wealth each. I have to export 28 tools just to afford one beer. When a town consumes 200 beers a month, the economy completely collapses. Yes, you can produce the beer or other drinks by yourself, but even when I have 20+ apple plots in huge areas and 10+ brewery, still impossible.
Farming and food production are just as broken. I watched dozens of tutorials on crop efficiency and rotation. Even with three fully staffed farmhouses holding 24 families, they completely fail to manage nine fields of 1.5 morgen each. It is impossible. Vegetable plots are the only reliable food source, but they overwork the families so much that they abandon their actual assigned jobs. Meanwhile, backyard chickens and bees are completely useless unless you build massive amounts of them. My grandmother has 30 chickens and supplies half her village. I have 200 chickens in this game and cannot keep a single egg in stock for a month.
The rest of the features feel equally half baked. Combat looks nice, but the AI is completely dumb. Building a castle serves zero gameplay purpose and is just there for visuals. It is incredibly frustrating to see development time spent on adding a new church tier and useless level 4 houses when the core simulation is this severely broken.
I love the concept, but this is simply not the way. I have tried starting over many times and always hit the same wall of stupid bugs and terrible balancing. I am done with Manor Lords for now. Sadly, with the current pace and development priorities, I feel like if I reinstall this in two years, it will still be exactly the same game.
