This is not a genre I play until Anno 1800, but it's one I'm looking at. Manor Lords is what everybody's talking about, and rightfully so, its a brilliant idea that looks like it has super high production value. Manage a feudal fief like an extremely involved city-builder, then fight small-scale private wars (like a baron vs a baron) with your private army in Total War fashion. Looks really good.
now, I saw in the Steam NextFest that there's two historical city-builders coming up that are both kind of like that, except with none of the production value. One is Builders of Greece, and I'm all like "holy shit yeah I want a Greek manor lords," I want that more than Manor Lords itself. And who knows how any of them will shape up, but Builders of Greece just clearly doesn't have the graphics and looks much more shallow anyways, which is a shame because ruling a polis (or an altepetl, or a Mesopotamian city-state, or Italians, I love all city-states equally) is a no brainer.
And we're also getting some thing called Colonize, which basically looks like Banished, except the pseudo-Puritan setting is actual edutainment English North America content. Campaigns to play as Plymouth, Providence, something in Pennsylvania I think, Williamsburg, something down in the Caribbean, etc. And that's really cool, it doesn't look quite as jank as Builders of Greece and all of these things have the war aspect in common. Colonize is also a bit more military, focus on war and diplomacy with Indians and other proto-colonies pose a threat to you. I'm curious, though - and preparing myself for disappointment - if the game will make any effort to reflect the very, very different cultures the colonies had.
I kind of feel like Manor Lords will just end up being better than any of them with some total conversion mods, though, if people make them. I think there's this sort of waste of effort when it comes to making new games if you have a good base to build on. It's kind of the central problem of the grand strategy and Total War esque genres, on one hand if you make an entirely new game you can sell it and hence afford higher quality, BUT you have to develop your own skeleton - the engine, a lot of basic assets, UI, etc. - from scratch, and you'll still be competing against someone that's willing to do it for free with all of that heavy legwork already done for them. So how can you get ahead? Hence people put more effort into trying to rape Victoria II into a Cold War game (instead of just making one), or you get Bronze Age and Thirty Years War mods for Total War games instead of separate titles, and so on. I hope Manor Lords comes out in a good state and with a good community that we can get variety with it, and not just Medieval autism.
store.steampowered.com
