City builder Manor Lords is off to a strong start on Steam, but its developer is already polling players on how they feel about the game’s global market supply mechanic, and whether they want it adjusted if not outright removed.
Manor Lords launched in Steam Early Access just before the weekend on April 26, and is all about building your own city in 14th century Franconia, as well as forming an army to defend your home and conquer other territories. One important and key method for obtaining resources and items is via trading, but lead developer Greg Styczeń has concerns that it’s too harsh (via PCGamesN).
In a post on Discord, Styczeń explains how press and content creators who got to play an early build of Manor Lords described trading as “too cheesy/exploity,” prompting him to add a market oversupply mechanic to balance it out: “If you start selling one type of item a lot, its price will keep falling until the exports stop completely. Same for the opposite, if you keep massively importing some type of good, its price will rise and it will become very expensive.”
Styczeń admits though he was never entirely sure about introducing this change in the first place, since he “thought specializing regions in producing certain goods is how the game should be played.” However, if players can import any items they need with little to no consequence, then there’d be no reason for them to build supply chains and thus some mechanics could be completely ignored. As such, he’s turned to the player-base itself for guidance, polling them on whether the global market supply mechanic should be removed, tuned down to be less harsh, or left as is.
At the time of writing, the majority of players prefer the second option, with over 13,000 of them voting for the mechanic to be tweaked. So, you should probably expect a balance update in the future, though you can let your own opinions be heard by joining the official Manor Lords Discord for yourself.
At the very least, Manor Lords should hopefully be getting a patch to address the admittedly few bugs it currently has. For instance, there’s a pesky issue that renders some citizens homeless even though they have a house to live in, but there’s fortunately a simple method to fix this homelessness bug yourself.
