Manor Lords Dev Asks Players: Should Egg Monopolies Be Allowed?

"Given the opportunity, players will become a merciless egg baron and sit chuckling on a throne of shells while medieval Europe cowers beneath their imperious yolk," is what I imagine Soren Jonson might say. And it looks like "Manor Lords" is proving this timeless adage right once more. Despite shifting over a million units and hitting the highest concurrent player count of any city builder on Steam, creator Greg ‘Slavic Magic’ Stycze? is already pondering the future of the game's trade mechanics.

As spotted by the cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, Stycze? has been chatting with players on the "Manor Lords" Discord server about pre-release feedback from press and content creators. The discussion centers around how trade could potentially trivialize the game's economy, allowing players to “just sell one type of good and make your town uber-rich that way.”

To combat this, Greg introduced a fix before the game's early access release: if players focus on a single good, its price will keep falling until the exports stop completely. Conversely, if you keep massively importing a good, its price will rise and become very expensive. Sounds sensible, right? Although this surely begs for a challenge run where Manorheads compete to see who can pay the most for a single loaf of bread, which they then hang from a flagpole as an opulent monument to their prosperity.

There are three poll options:

• A) Keep things as they are.

• B) Keep things as they are but make the system a little less harsh.

• C) Remove the above trading mechanic entirely.
  
  

  
  
  

At the time of writing, the most popular poll option by a country morgen is B, meaning players agree with the spirit of the current fix but still want to become somewhat of an egg baron. And honestly, who can blame them?

I touched on the joys of focusing on farming rather than importing everything in my review, but I’m reminded of a piece Robert Purchese recently wrote for Eurogamer about the hidden risks of early access. In short, I hope Stycze? can keep players happy without straying too far from his vision, his ideal game, and the single appropriately priced egg that shines at the center of his mind palace.