Manor Lords players are starting to find out about the dangers of reckless expansionism.
Each time you start a new Manor Lords save file, you'll be dropped into a region with a handful of nearby neighbors that make up the rest of the world around you. While you've got a starting point, however, you're not limited to it, and you can spread out into those surrounding regions to establish multiple settlements. Those don't really interact directly, but they can specialize towards different things, enabling a somewhat symbiotic relationship. Players are starting to learn, however, that expanding into a new area isn't always the total positive it might sound like.
In a post on Reddit, one player said they'd found out the hard way that there's no such thing as 'set and forget'. Manor Lords settlements can be set up for success, but over time, changes to the environment mean you'll need to be paying constant attention. After establishing a settlement with 500 citizens, 15,000 silver in the bank, and trade routes that should have left the population thriving, they turned their back for a mere two in-game years to start a new settlement. When they came back, the coffers were empty, and the population had dropped by 20%, proving that you can't simply ignore a region and hope it gets on by itself.
That sentiment was shared in another post, in which one player says that the game "fell apart for me" when they expanded into a new region. Complaining that "running a single prosperous region is a full time job as-is," they suggest that adding a second region simply amplifies the busywork - and the early access bugs. That complaint is accompanied by the idea that it's relatively clear that Manor Lords is still struggling with bringing the rest of the game up to par with the single-region experience, but it's clear that it's not as robust as some had expected.
As someone who's just about to start up their second settlement, that's not great news for me, personally. But given the existence of certain tools designed to facilitate inter-region trade, it does seem like a feature that's intended, but hopefully one that works a little more smoothly in future. We might have to wait a little while for it to work as intended, but such is the nature of early access.
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