This past weekend saw the launch of medieval city builder and battle sim Manor Lords on Steam, selling over 1 million copies in a single day.
Slavic Magic and Hooded Magic have been hard at work, hyping up their latest medieval city builder and battle simulator game. And to no avail, Manor Lords has lived up to the hype! The game launched its early access on Friday, April 26, 2024, after allowing fans to wishlist for a while on Steam. Those wishlists were not slept on because the game saw over one million copies sold in just one day. It even saw a peak of 173,178 Steam concurrent players, making this the highest player count of concurrent players for a city-building game on Steam.
The city builder genre has always had a cult following of players jumping to the next strategic style of game, including but not limited to GSG/4x/Colony Sims. The fact that Manor Lords took the top spot in concurrent players for the genre means that it has beaten the giants that launched Civilization games and Cities: Skylines. It has even surpassed the massive medieval battle sims of Paradox Interactive’s Crusader Kings III or Europa Universalis IV.
If you do not know the general gist of Manor Lords, it is a medieval strategy game featuring in-depth city building, large-scale tactical battles, and complex economic and social simulations. It was developed by Slavic Magic, a one-person studio founded by Greg Styczeń. Sources have also found that this success marks another precedent of an enormous launch for mid-priced games this year. Other games in a similar price bracket this year were Pocket Pair’s Palworld and Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2. So, this says a lot about where gamers are flocking and shows that triple-A titles may need to step up their game by making their games more bang for their buck.
Manor Lords have even had some funny stories told. One player survived an epic battle, and he created a fake Wikipedia article about it. As I said before, Manor Lords is not only a fantastic medieval city-building and management sim, but you can also take part in wars and skirmishes for land and resources if you want to.
Player Galaxy661 shared his experience on Reddit of how only five villagers managed to hold off a total of 36 bandits until the militia arrived. To commemorate the battle, Galaxy661 decided to create a Wikipedia article. Even though Wikipedia’s editors quickly took down the hilarious pseudo-historical in-game battle, a screenshot of the battle’s timeline was captured and lived on Galaxy661’s Reddit thread.
Essentially, the Wikipedia article was called “The Second Battle of the Firewood Pass,” in which five villagers faced off against a bandit camp that had cut off the town’s supply lines. This caused a lot of unrest and starvation in the town. In a miraculous turn of events, four of the villagers died holding off the bandits and one was seriously injured. The heroics were just like in real life!
Galaxy661 wrote on how the devs could make moments like these better, noting, “It would be fun to be able to build statues commemorating important events that happened to the town, be it a really harsh winter, an exceptionally successful harvest, or a brutal battle. I think they could be purely cosmetic or maybe add something like +1 happiness to the town.” It is not a bad idea, and I hope the devs add something like what this player described.
Styczeń has already tweeted what to expect with the next patch for the game:
Manor Lords is currently out on Steam for sale! If you are into this genre of games, the game has been met with great reception so far. The introductory sale says it will run until May 10th, so get a copy ASAP.
