Manor Lords, the immensely popular medieval city-builder and real-time tactics game has received a big update promising to take your gameplay experience further than ever before with a nice teaser. Released on Steam Early Access back in April, the game has garnered quite a following amongst strategy fans for its depth and playability.
However, as play continued down the rabbit hole of development, players found themselves dealing with a laundry list of bugs and performance hiccups that dulled the experience. The development team has been busily working behind the scenes to address these and this latest update represents a major change in how the game continues its evolution.
The Unreal Engine 5 Upgrade: A Paradigm Shift
If you take a cursory glance at the patch notes, that would be moving CyberPunk to Unreal 5 from its current engine, versions of which underpin all Blizzard titles save for OW2. It is more than just a new console, it is also an overhaul that has fixed the vast amount of instability problems players experienced.
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The Manor Lords has also been upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, resulting in overall improved graphics and performance stability & fewer crashes leading to a much smoother gameplay experience with even more eye-candy!
Game improvements allowed by Unreal Engine 5
- Optimization, StabilityVarious: The new engine is truly a godsend in this regard – crashes are fewer and the most common ones such as loading screen/post-resolution change lockup aren’t so frequent. This should result in a far more consistent experience for players now.
- Virtual Shadow Maps (Experimental): A custom-designed virtual shadow map system that is used in conjunction with the game and produces higher-resolution, sharper shadows.
- Volumetric Clouds and Atmospheric Rendering: The update comes with new volumetric cloud systems as well as more improvements in atmospheric rendering which increases the overall look and feel of this immersive game.
- LOD Management on GPU: The GPU now manages the Level of Detail (LOD) for instanced components to increase performance, especially with many instances in a scene.
Fishing: A New Resource and Gameplay Mechanic Introduced
On top of the engine changes, Manor Lords has also been bulking up its gameplay mechanics with a new addition in fishing. As you’d expect, the new resource will bring variety to Last Oasis’ economy and allow players to face fresh struggles.
Fishing Mechanics Overview
- Fishing Ponds – Fishing ponds have been spread all over the world, these points can be used to harvest fish. These ponds freeze during the winter season, and players will have to prepare appropriately according to what time of year it is for fishing.
- Winter Fishing: A new technology branch, “Winter Fishing”, lets players fish all year round by allowing them to catch fish while the ponds are frozen over with ice in winter period so that they always have a food source even during hard winters.
- Fisherman’s Hut: A new workplace has been added to the village in this update called Fisherman’s Hut where villagers can now be recruited as fishes. This brings a new layer on the labor usage and allocation mechanics already present in high demand.
- Fishing: Food Spoilage mechanicsThis update introduces Fish, a new resource to the game, and with it comes our first draft of how we will handle food spoilage.
While food from each category will spoil over time, in general fish decays more quickly than other foods such as bread This brought in a new element to the strategy where players had to think about how they would keep food fresh based on how long it took them away from the market, and whether that was indoors or outdoors.
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Growing that Arsenal: Crossbows and Butchers
The update also expands the existing military and food production branches of Manor Lords with the inclusion of crossbows and butchers respectfully, which provides further specialization to how lands are built.
Archery and Military Units
- Crossbow Production: Players can now produce crossbows in the Bowyer workshop giving them a new tool to use against their adversaries.
- New Military Units: Light Mercenary Crossbowmen and Militia Crossbowmen are new unit types. There’s also a new squad of budget mercenaries to wail on, “The Huntsmen”, making ranged combat even scrub-friendlier.
and Butchers and sausage-making
- Original Butcher Artisan Conversion: the butcher is important now for turning sheep surplus with lamb into meat or even go further converting it to sausage.
- Sausage production: Sausages, which are prepared by adding meat with salt, have less spoil or waste than raw meats thus making them a useful commodity for preservation.
Crazy Maths & Balances Fine-tuning
In addition to the headline features, there are several changes elsewhere designed to enhance balance and gameplay as best
Food and Storage Production Limits
- Workplace: A new system has been established for the management of production limits and reserves on different workplaces. As a result, this guarantees players can exert better authority over the volume of crafting items they output to prevent their overproduction or resource theft.
- Balanced Resource Distribution The update changes the spawning of resource deposits to ensure a more balanced early-game experience, with richer deposits being set closer to camp when possible.
Quality of Life Improvements
- Advanced Skinning & Butcher management – The development branch doubles the meat output from butchers The first butcher workshop build will auto-set a reserve to not over-butchering your flock.
- Malthouse Pantry Additions – The Malthouse now features a working pantry for more control over resources, and ingredients needing to be refueled providing some extra layer of realism/management.
Minor Tweaks and Bug Fixes
The patch also fixes lots of small issues and bugs that have been reported by the community.
Modified Algorithm And Node Spawning
- Rewrote the Random Node (e.g. responsible for random object spawning) algorithm to prevent objects from being placed in wrong positions, like bandit camp on a pond.
- To help bandit camps spawn more fairly throughout the map and not where they shouldn’t, we added some randomness to their spawning.
UI and Interface Enhancements
- Advanced Tab Notifications: The building panel now highlights the “Advanced” tab when a new artisan workshop has been made, ensuring players don’t miss out on those fresh settings.
- Interface Scaling: Made changes to interface scaling on lower resolutions so as not to let UI overlap, to improve accessibility
V1.2 Performance Optimizations and Crash Fixes
Performance was the main area of attention for this update, as there are plenty of optimizations and crash fixes that were made to some modes to make gameplay even smoother.
Minimized CPU and Memory Calculation
- Perf Improvements – Advanced Culling and Optimizations: An update that brings advanced culling for transform updates, improving performance during high population sessions. Various other optimizations with regards to unit rotation smoothing, ground height checks, and pathfinding were also made.
- Optimization memory usage has been adjusted, which will allow the game to be more reliable and stable reflecting in busy sessions with a lot of units running.
Crash Fixes
- Fixed a crash related to players deleting their Squads while the rallying tool was active.
- Forager Move For Plugin Deadlock: Solved another crash that sometimes occurs when moving a forager with herb garden properly completes more complex tasks without making the game unstable.
Final Touches/Cosmetic Enhancements
To finish the changes, there have been some visual and animation tidying up across the board in the game.
Animation and Visual Tweaks
- Combat Animation Polish – While in combat, one-handed and two-handed animations have been polished to create more fluid movements that will be a rewarding visual experience during battles.
- Oxen Movement: Added turning animation for the oxen to look more natural and less like robots.
Enhancements to the Environment and Menu
- Slightly less-yellowed spring color palette: improved looking more natural in visual experience.
- Authentic Main Menu: A new main menu scene that highlights the historical authenticity of the game from the very beginning.
Conclusion: LOOKING AHEAD FOR MANOR LORDS
Manor Lords is an exciting game, and the latest update for it shows that they are more than willing to put in effort to make the gaming experience top-notch. Shifting to Unreal Engine 5, adding in fishing and several other gameplay improvements this update brings a lot more depth and fun for players.
While the game continues to mature in Early Access, players can expect a wealth of updates that will further polish and broaden this already engaging medieval city-builder.
[…] Also Read: Manor Lords Shifts to Unreal Engine 5 and Introduces Fishing Mechanics in Latest Update […]