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Why medieval city-builder video games are historically inaccurate - Leiden Medievalists Blog
(www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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I was hoping the article would mention Manor Lords. It's a medieval city-building game where you fight against brutal changing seasons and invading enemies, hoping to eventually develop your own kingdom from scratch. And you can plan your city pretty early on or grow it from a single small farm. It's surprisingly difficult because there's not a set progression. A single bad winter can kill off your entire civilization.
The article mentions building curved roads rather than just straight plots of land. Manor Lords sort of plots its own roads based on where NPCs travel most. So if you put a well in a central location and a farm off to one side of a strip of homes, roads will automatically form in desire paths between resources and homes. Your city infrastructure can follow these desire paths while expanding, or cut them off and force your citizens to form alternate roads around new buildings.
I haven't played much of Manor Lords because it was so difficult. I was having trouble keeping a civilization alive with neighboring armies ransacking my villages, or not stocking enough resources before winter set in to survive the season. But it seems like a game the author of this article should check out.
The article is from 2020, Manor Lords was released in 2024 😅
Ah. Well, that would explain it. Folks usually share current articles, so I assumed this was written recently, not a half decade ago. That's my bad.
Manor Lords is probably the most realistic medieval city builder right now. Only the idea that people build new settlements from scratch isn‘t very accurate or at least very uncommon for the time. I know it‘s in the core DNA of the genre so it‘s fine. Still, maybe they could add other scenarios where you take over a settlement to improve it or rebuild one that has been attacked. That would be even more immersive.
It is pretty difficult at first! Like many other city builders there's a sort of, objectively-correct build order that you have to follow, and I find that building a trading post as soon as possible is pretty essential because you need to replenish on tools.
I'll go into the other stuff I've learned in the spoiler section if anyone is interested.
spoiler
Most territories give you access to Furs or Salt which are goods you don't need (salt is used in tanning later on) so it's best to just sell these at a trading post. If you have a route selling these or wooden products (machine parts / shields), you don't face any money problems.Since raising an army is impossible without iron, and very hard to do early on in the game, i believe the game expects you to utilise mercenaries quite early on. This is pretty easy to do when you have one of the afforementioned trade routes - you don't need as many mercs as you expect.
So to clarify, the build order is basically:
Some tips from previous updates that I think still stand:
There are many things i still haven't grasped with manor lords - beer economy and the farms (i don't get why the workers do nothing for winter, it's a bad system to have to reassign them all). I revisit it for about 4 days every 6-12 months.
Okay, you’ve sort of convinced me to jump into this game.
I’ve had it on my list for a long time, but these days, I’m so skeptical of anything that sounds like convenient praise, so I spent five minutes reading through your comments to make sure you were legit and not some AI bot made to pimp the game.
Manor Lords sounds a lot like the game Banished, but the dev of that game has long been radio silent and it won’t be getting updates. Manor Lords, however, sounds like what Banished would have become if it were continued and evolved further.
I blog about video games as a hobby (all my posts here on Lemmy are blog reviews of games I play), so I tend to write a lot when I'm interested in a game. I'll admit, this is the first time I've been accused of potentially being an AI bot, but I get your skepticism.
Manor Lords is not a game I'm particularly interested in, because as I mentioned, it was pretty difficult for me and I gave up pretty early on. But it was a unique style of gameplay compared to other city builder games, so the experience has stuck in my head.
When I read this article, every complaint about modern city builder games reminded me of Manor Lords, and I was disappointed that game wasn't addressed anywhere in the article. I had hoped to see the author's thoughts on it compared to other games in the genre.
I read your posts when I see them and they're better than the vast majority of game reviews I've read - even if they're not "formal" reviews.
Thank you! That's because I don't have corporate requirements for writing. Nobody's paying me, I'm just doing it as a hobby, so I'm not limited in my writing. I can gush about anything I want!
I try to stick to the format of walking readers through an introduction to a game. So many times, I see people talk about games but not explain what the game actually is. They assume their audience has some base level of experience with it. So I introduce the games I play so my readers are familiar with them when I get to gushing about why I'm enjoying it.
Plus, my posts started as sharing a bunch of screenshots of my gameplay, so of course, I try to share as many visual aids as I can while walking through the gameplay.