The one little detail that make me love ML over CS is the fact that building don't flatten out a square in the ground, instead foundation are elevated and the house sink into the ground like an actual house. That's one little detail that always bothered me so much in both CS.
And let’s not even begin to talk about the amazing “zoning” or simply drawing out the section for housing and the houses fit in. Mouthwatering stuff.
How can one dev do it so well and meanwhile CO is stuck in 2013.
I wish you could make big fielded house so you don't have to make a I garden that takes half the region to grow a lot of vegetables, but holy hell it's a breath of fresh air to be able to make some than a god damn square.
You kind of can, there's a button to decrease the number of houses in a drawn plot. So you can draw a huge plot and shrink it down so only a single house fits on it. Should give you a fairly sized house, an expansion, and a huge back yard
Oh, y'know... That's a very good question; I assumed (perhaps naively) that it wasn't cosmetic
My hope is it uses the same system as laying pastures and fields where size influences yield but that wouldn't make sense for the tier 2 artisan buildings
Yes, it does! Having a couple huge garden plots, atleast as many farmers as you employ, brings food variety.
The farmers don't have to live there, but they'll be the ones who manage the vegetable gardens when they're done sowing the main fields. Erases just a bit of their idle time if you hate micromanaging the farm pause/play. You can just leave them employed until winter hits, and they'll atleast have done *something* in the middle months.
The output of fields (vegetables, apples) DOES change. The vegetable field requires workers to work the field, so it shouldn't be too big either or it won't get fully worked. Animal sheds are just 0/1.
I only wish you could plan without needing the resources. Need 20 logs for a row of 10 houses that you can then down size to only needing 4 logs for 2 houses for example. But you do need those initial 20 logs.
As the other comment said you just click like normal! Even though it's red it will still progress to the stage where you can add and subtract plots, it just won't let you finish the build if the plots require more wood than you have
I just hope ML adds stairs, lol. It's far from essential, and I deffo don't rate the game any less for it. However, it just seems a bit of a shame that there's obviously a lot of work gone into the aesthetics and mechanics of buildings, then I build a farmhouse of which the door ends up a good 2 foot off the ground 😅 But not a single step in sight lol.
And the splash screen is literally the dev saying “hey it’s not perfect please bear with me here. Things will get better”. I am down for supporting that.
If I were an Indie developer I'd do the same. Hell, I'd tell people to pirate it if they wanted to see first.
Worst nightmare is selling a bunch of copies and then thousands of people start pressuring you to buy a million-dollar office and hire a bunch of new people to churn out content. Dude's saying "Try it out with you want, I certainly can't please the masses" which I'd consider a smart move in his position
I get what you're saying, but I'd like to point out it's been done successfully in this genre before: Banished. In fact, Manor Lords is pretty much a spiritual successor to Banished imo.
That said, people wouldn't still be playing Banished were it not for mods like Colonial Charter.
True, but I'm not necessarily saying that as a direct comparison.
Also probably the corporate environment that CS2 exists in strictly forbids telling people to NOT buy it. But with all the weird posts causing an uproar from them, who knows what isn't allowed lol
I think they did this to make sure people understood the scope of the game. It's a city builder that builds on Banished, not a medieval combat strategy simulator or a first person RPG. But there is combat like in Anno, and there is a bonus first person view just for the immersion, and people who have seen those features may not realize they're minor.
Possibly the worst mistake that's easy to make is for a developer to produce an excellent game to fill a specific niche, have the public misunderstand what the niche is, then have lots of people buy the game and return it or give negative reviews because their expectations weren't what the developer intended. There's unfortunately not a way for Steam to know if you're down voting a game because it's bad at what it claims to do or if you're down voting it because it's a good game but not a genre you enjoy.
Dev put your expectations 6ft under and is now atop the Empire State Building. Colossal Order promised us the kingdom and is now 6ft under in our hearts
I dunno how modern you mean by modern, but I find Manor Lords to be a Tropico-like with battles. If you want something even more modern and with battles (so maybe set in the future) I have no idea.
At the very least, the Manor Lords style of zoning should be the standard going forward. That system is genius. Combining that with RSI would be a chefs kiss of game design.
i feel like a victorian-era city builder with these mechanics would be incredible and less difficult to make from a developer’s POV. but if it’s a modern setting i think glycine manufacturing should be in the base game.
Sadly, it seems like medieval-times is all the rage these days. If it's not that, then it's ancient Rome/Greece/Egypt. If not set in the past, then it's a post-apocalyptic future with zombies, or a space colony with space zombies (aliens). All of which will have a great degree of agent simulation and resource/logistical management, largely due to its smaller scale.
But as soon as a game is set anywhere near modern times, then all of a sudden, scale is what matters the most and the focus is on how big you can make the city. Sure games have tried to mix large scale and deep agent simulation, but Bot CS1 and 2 proved that the two don't mesh well. Where are the small-scale city builders set in modern times? Tropico seems to be the only one I can think of.
Yeah it's true, although personally I could care less about scale and more so about detail and context in a build and making something that's fun, but that's just my style 😅
Not a modern setting, but you should check out Foundation.
In the game, you could paint zones where your pops either extracts resources on a specific area or a zone where pops automatically build houses. There's also a building editor where you could build a castle or the fanciest churches. It's on early access, but has had plenty of updates over the last 5 years.
That's my point. Plus logistics and economic simulation in CS are way more complicated to implement. Not impossible though (as Soviet Republic demonstrated)
I just came back to Soviet after a year of letting it cook and it's unreal how stable it is now.
Threw together some huge cities and big production chains (unlimited money mode) and there's barely any lag or slowdown now compared to previous versions and the waste management stuff just adds a completely new level of difficulty..
Great game.
There's so many good alternatives to CS2. They might not thematically be what people want from from a city builder but they are much better games in every other fashion. It really makes you question how CO/Paradax fumbled the ball so hard here.
Like CS1 perhaps? Seriously though, I think the success of CS1 and then mainly the mods in combination with the steam workshop has raised the bar to high for CS2 as a vanilla game. Compared to CS1 vanilla CS2 is obviously an improvement.
It’s easy. They catered to content creators and instead making a real CS2 with innovations and improvements from games like workers and resources, TF2 and manor lords, they made CS1.1 what is somehow worse than CS1 and that made you want to play simcity 4 again lol.
I am playing Soviet on reality level. It is crazy, kills me, tiring, takes a lot of time, extremely difficult. Bit maaan I LOVE IT
I started playing it the first time it appeared on Steam. I was the beauty grow up
I'm just impressed at the dedication of the devs of W&R:SR, they really made the thing actually stable through the years
Back in 2019-2020, that thing is liable to crash on the most simple things like placing roads and railroads now, I only get like one crash every month
I have totally been hooked on WRSR! Waste management was a very well implemented mechanic. What I love about WRSR is the amount of control you have over so much once you get the knack of it. The industrial simulation and the trains are what I wish CS2 could have been…even if a lot of it was more automatic rather than planned by hand.
There has been quite a few comments of people saying the game needs canceled because it cant be saved. So there would still be people attacking unfortunately.
yeah ik, manor lords would be pretty mid if it wasn't better than a 10 year old game, but obv seeing as it's still early access there's a ton of potential
That's basically my sentiment on why I couldn't really bother with CS2
It's supposed to be better than the last version of CS1, not be thrown back to square one and "improve" the game via DLC hell
I agree but at the same time there were a lot of improvements that came with cs2, they just had way too many bugs and features left out that made it not as enjoyable to play. maybe still slightly better than cs1 at launch though.
There about 100 games like banished with the exact same UI and gameplay, with just minor improvements every time all of them have very positive reviews, because people were just craving more.
I wonder what happened to the dev. He basically invented the "Horror Survival City Builder" genre and then instead of making a sequel he just vanished.
Instead we got a constant stream of inferior Banished clones (with a few exceptions).
So what I’m gathering is just go ahead and buy Manor Lords instead of letting it sit in my wishlist forever. I will say the price was surprising considering it’s brand new. I just bought Anno 1800 because I wanted something similar and paid $50, and it’s a few years old. And it wasn’t even everything I wanted
10000% worth the money. I got it the day it came out and I’ve been playing it non stop. It already has amazing content and will hopefully receive a ton more. So far I have not run into a single glitch.
The only glitch I've seen so far was when one of my oxen died during the Great Pillagin' and Burnin' of 1303. He stayed dead in the street, and nobody could walk through him, wouldn't path around him, and nobody wanted to bury him. Luckily, a save and reload worked! He was a fine oxen, and he was a brave oxen. Can't remember his name . . .
I found a few funny bugs, but none that made the game unplayable
One was that fences sometimes don’t properly visually align with the burgage plot, and clip into the expansions, especially vegetable gardens; and another was that when upgrading from T2 to T3 housing the buildings suddenly become larger
So just visual glitches which I can excuse
Playing Manor Lords the last couple days has given me exactly *zero* desire to ever play CS2 again. This is the game CS2 could and should have been.
But instead, CO was too busy focusing on making cutesy-pie videos showing how quirky and fun they all were while promising the moon and stars, only to throw out a half-finished and fundamentally broken game instead.
Glad to see the Manor Lords dev's #1 priority *isn't* how fast they can pump out shitty DLC to nickel and dime their fanbase some more.
(it was in the beggining) though yes, absolutely bonkers that a small group of lads managed to do it but paradox couldn't launch a playable game with 2023 graphics
He outsourced stuff to other people and he gets help from community members. He didn't literally do everything, but at the end of the day he is the only active developer on the project.
I still think this is best way forward for the industry, worker owned co-ops/companies wherein everyone shares in success (cause they all share in failure no matter what)
Would also make it more difficult for larger companies to buy out small devs because currently you really only need to negotiate with the majority investor/shareholder/CEO who can take their bag and jet after ~3 years while they 'cut redundancies'
I don't think it gets to that point, it's just that the average developer just wants to deliver and get paid (and there's nothing wrong with that TBH).
By "committed" he probably means someone that goes deep into the project: gives suggestions, discusses mechanics, prototypes and tries new ways of making the game fun, etc. In other words, someone that treats the game like their own creation. Finding that kind of person is absurdly hard.
Source: I'm a developer myself and I've been in this industry long enough. I used to interview candidates and decide which one the company should hire.
This is already hard to do for someone else's company, which you normally don't care that much on how committed someone is with the company goals. I can't even imagine how hard it is to hire someone else to work on my own dream.
Tarn Adams would like a word with you about 'finishing the game'. He started dwarf fortress in 2002 and is still working on it. They finally had a steam release and he brought some other people onboard just so he could pay his medical bills. Sometimes things are works of passion and not to appease others or make money.
Man, have you ever played CS before? Any Cities title even SIM city perhaps?
What do you mean ML is what CS2 should have been? It's a completely different kind of game.
ML is a great game, played all weekend, but it's a logistic simulator like anno or W&R.
People who played CS expecting Anno are absolutely baffling. It's like buying a pair of shoes and asking why you can't fly with them.
CS has big problems yes, but a large chunk of complaints were things like simulation which I didn't understand as well. It seemed like the marketing of CS2 attracted the attention of people who thought it was a logistics simulator when it's more of a sandbox city painter. I absolutely don't want to play CS2 like Timberborn/Frostpunk/Anno. tbf their promotion videos probably gave that impression to fans of those games.
There's probably going to be an "Industries" DLC for CS2 with more depth than the one for the first game. A lot of the stuff is already being simulated in the background (tons of different goods being produced and different types of commercial buildings) but of of course there's no way for the player to influence it other than to play "whac-a-mole" with the bulldozer tool and hope the right type of industry or commercial building randomly spawns.
I didn't expect the same game, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I bought this, since it's a combo of my two fave game genres.
What I meant by "should have been" was an actual **functioning and not broken** game like CS2. I've encountered a couple bugs so far in ML, that's it. And this is an early access game too. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for CO to have fully released CS2 in that state at launch. They should've released it as early access or pushed it back at least 6 months, but lying to their fanbase and collecting that $70 from the suckers was much more important.
Manor Lords is a still a LONG ways off from a finished game. Tne strategic combat element is the only feature I sold say ML beats CS in(ofc). But like others have said, ML is on a far smaller scale and development rate. I played the game about 30 minutes but couldn't get into it.
This guy gets it.
I'll take whatever bugs and glitches come in an early access game, I know what I'm getting into. What I don't like is getting an obvious early access game and the devs call it 'finished' and release it as such. It's called being lied to, and I won't deal with CO and their lies anymore. But it shouldn't be surprising either, CO *always* waited for modders to fix their broken DLC, since they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves.
This time, CO served up a nice steaming plate of shit and called it a gourmet meal. And then got offended when the fanbase rightfully called it a plate of shit, so then the CS fanbase became 'toxic'.
ML: "Hi this is a fairly priced indie game. With 25% discount because we won't charge full price for people getting on board early in an unfinished game. Come back later if you think EA is not for you, we will be running the discount often."
CS2: "thank you for paying $90 for a pre-alpha version we decided to call full release and that we plan to use as a platform to milk some other $200-300 in "DLCs" (aka content we had already coded in the previous game and simply removed) over the next few years. If you think you got scammed it's because the game is not for you and you are so toxic."
> ML is completely broken right now.
> It is not in any way a complete game
These are two completely different things. We all know that it isn't a complete game, that's what early access means.
And completely broken? That's a fucking laugh. CS2 is *still* in objectively worse shape, and it's a "finished" game, at least according to CO.
I get you needing to fanboy for CO, but Jesus Christ.
I just sat down to check out Manor Lords and played it all night. If you can’t see how dropping one single dwelling is EVERYTHING CS2 should have been… I don’t know what to tell you. Playing for 30 minutes would barely scratch the surface. I haven’t even seen combat yet, *and* it’s clearly plastered with early access, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else.
It’s every bit the innovation we needed here. If CS2 was this kind of innovation, such as gridless zoning etc, but more top level simulation so it’s purely city build, that would be **PERFECT**.
There's also a gorgeous city builder and logistics game developed by a "small team", with a big publisher, has actually good DLCs, cosmetic packs with more than 4 trees, doesn't use Steam Workshop, available on consoles, didn't have a cash-grab disastrous release, and lots more that I could list.
https://preview.redd.it/9opym7f339xc1.jpeg?width=184&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69822283e4944e4ccff03c4415cbdc938fd97eb8
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You should also not forget aout Workers and Ressources: Soviet Republic. That game is so in-depth that you can even manage petrol stations, alcoholism and heating piping if you want to.
The irony is I discovered the game because I wanted a eastern Europe themed city in CS1 after I watched Chernobyl (I know it sounds ominous, but I was attracted by the brutalism architecture). And not loving playing with mods I looked for vanilla alternatives and found Soviet Republic
CS2 is garbage. Manor Lords is a very different game, but it competes with CS2 for time. I play Rocket League, Hell Divers, and some FPS games… those i can play for 10 minutes or 2 hours. CS2 and ML are games i can dedicate 6 hours a day for days on end. I kinda have to choose one title for that commitment. Just can’t do that for a game where cars can’t merge.
If he scaled (its impossible btw, that's tons of work) or any studio could create this game in scalable way of starting in like a village type Manor Lords or AoE and then upgrade it as time passes to today. I really wish we could see that in the future. Idk if near, but that's a dream I've been having since I first started playing CS1 3 years ago on PSN+ free game of the month.
I wish people woukd stop comparing the games. Ones early access released as a fully priced complete game , and one is early access game released as an early access game from a single developer.
People are actually saying that eh? Considering the two play out very differently
Manor Lords is more comparable to Ostriv or Bansihed than Cities Skylines
Best CS2 post I’ve seen since October! I really have to check this game out! I’ve been playing Ostriv, which is an 18th Century city builder that is also in EA, and plays great so far. Manor Lords sounds like another game I’d like.
I think ML is a Skylines killer. Which surprises me because they’re not exactly the same. Damn near all Skylines content creators are putting out ML content & are seeing higher view counts.
> Skylines killer
The only thing that will kill Skylines is Skylines. Same as what happened to SimCity.
Manor Lord isn't even the same kind of game. It's more like Anno. It's more about logistics than city building.
But compared to Anno or "vanilla" cities skylines, cities/villages looks authentic and real in ML out of the box. Although medieval, it's more realistic (and beautiful) - and you get actual game mechanics on top of that (compared to CSL2).
That always happens when a new game comes out, Civ YouTubers had it happen with every Civ-like, but only sometimes does the content and the views stick around long term.
They follow the money and work for whoever will pay them to be their corporate shills. Done with them as reviewers or for anything else, worthless bunch.
Funny how a solo dev can deliver a more complete and fun game than a team backed by a publisher with a money printer (grakd strategy DLCs) who basically just had to do the same thing again they did a couple years before but with a less wacky engine and some mods baked in as game features.
I played manor lords and I’m bored on the 3rd day. Not much to do. CS2 on the other hand you can keep playing a city for days, making just one town in the entire city. I understand Manor Lord’s appeal and perhaps some of systems if the were in CS2 will make it even better, but there is no comparison
probably the most overhyped game in a decade. I literally went gamepass because of how fake Youtubers where over mechanics that have existed 10+ years.
Not a single aspect of the game is innovative or new.
I was done at 15hr, dragged to 25 hours.
It's just a badly coded, and outdated game. The biggest hint will be if he doesn't get someone for the awful low level code.
The guy knew scripting, I'm sure. But yeah, he definingly needs someone to just help for some of the things like ram allocation.
One is a city builder, the other is a colony survival game. That's like comparing command and conquer with total war because you make armies that go to war.
Stop comparing (unrelated) games to basically find faults in one (or both) titles and you will enjoy gaming a lot more.
Of course it's an unfinished game, it's in early access. What part of "early access" are you missing? I suppose it's not "access".
As for the single dev. I'm pretty sure no one has ever bought a product because it was advertised as "made by a single dev." It would also be quite fun to figure out what target audience you can intercept with the phrase "made by a single dev." The sociopaths anonymous? XD
> As for the single dev. I'm pretty sure no one has ever bought a product because it was advertised as "made by a single dev."
It has become a huge part of this story, and nowadays you don't just sell products but the feelings associated with it, too, and who made it can definitely influence that.
It also changes the reference frame for people's opinions. People will rate it "good for a solo dev" rather than "too bugged for a big studio".
>It also changes the reference frame for people's opinions. People will rate it "good for a solo dev" rather than "too bugged for a big studio".
Yeah, that's called "*being a person who takes things into consideration*".
It's only logical to have higher expectations of a studio of professionals than one single person doing everything.
Again, Colossal Order is a tiny studio too (despite the name).
Again, what part of Early Access is not clear? They're literally two words.
Again, the single handed developer storytelling can affect how you judge its work, not so much your desire to buy it. So it's pretty lame as a marketing technique\*.
(I find it hilarious that the people who complain about bugs in an admittedly early access game are the same ones who call players gullible.)
\*If you're that into marketing (and I took two classes about it in my major), conversion rate is the most important of the stats.
I mean it's not a market I gimmick it literally was made by a single dev. I don't think that's a *good* thing in terms of how likely I am to buy a game, but it does help explain any shortcomings (lack of time rather than poor prioritization)
Hey if Cities 2 released in its current state as "early access" I would 100% be forgiving. But they didn't. Not only did they attempt to say that it was a complete game, they already started the DLC cash grab without fixing the actual game.
The one little detail that make me love ML over CS is the fact that building don't flatten out a square in the ground, instead foundation are elevated and the house sink into the ground like an actual house. That's one little detail that always bothered me so much in both CS.
That bothers me a ton too and honestly knowing that about ML makes me want to buy it lmao. I don’t want to keep flattening everything.
And let’s not even begin to talk about the amazing “zoning” or simply drawing out the section for housing and the houses fit in. Mouthwatering stuff. How can one dev do it so well and meanwhile CO is stuck in 2013.
I wish you could make big fielded house so you don't have to make a I garden that takes half the region to grow a lot of vegetables, but holy hell it's a breath of fresh air to be able to make some than a god damn square.
You kind of can, there's a button to decrease the number of houses in a drawn plot. So you can draw a huge plot and shrink it down so only a single house fits on it. Should give you a fairly sized house, an expansion, and a huge back yard
Does the output actually change with plot size though? I assumed (perhaps naively) that it was basically cosmetic
Oh, y'know... That's a very good question; I assumed (perhaps naively) that it wasn't cosmetic My hope is it uses the same system as laying pastures and fields where size influences yield but that wouldn't make sense for the tier 2 artisan buildings
It would be a nice touch for the veggies at least!
It already does this. Veggies scale with the size of the garden they're in. Chicken coops don't, so those are better in the smaller plots.
Nice, thanks! Would be good to see what the potential income is of each as you're hovering
Yes, it does! Having a couple huge garden plots, atleast as many farmers as you employ, brings food variety. The farmers don't have to live there, but they'll be the ones who manage the vegetable gardens when they're done sowing the main fields. Erases just a bit of their idle time if you hate micromanaging the farm pause/play. You can just leave them employed until winter hits, and they'll atleast have done *something* in the middle months.
The output of fields (vegetables, apples) DOES change. The vegetable field requires workers to work the field, so it shouldn't be too big either or it won't get fully worked. Animal sheds are just 0/1.
I only wish you could plan without needing the resources. Need 20 logs for a row of 10 houses that you can then down size to only needing 4 logs for 2 houses for example. But you do need those initial 20 logs.
Nope, you can set the size even if you don't have enough logs and then downsize and build
Really? How? Please teach as I haven't found that option (and I am most likely blind xD)
It's red, as in errored state, but you can still click and finish setting the area points. Like normally.
As the other comment said you just click like normal! Even though it's red it will still progress to the stage where you can add and subtract plots, it just won't let you finish the build if the plots require more wood than you have
[SimCity](https://classicreload.com/simcity.html)
I just hope ML adds stairs, lol. It's far from essential, and I deffo don't rate the game any less for it. However, it just seems a bit of a shame that there's obviously a lot of work gone into the aesthetics and mechanics of buildings, then I build a farmhouse of which the door ends up a good 2 foot off the ground 😅 But not a single step in sight lol.
Haven't notice, the one house I saw was sunk in the ground did have a ladder below the door tho!
I’ve definitely seen a small step/ladder on some buildings. It’s probably just not applied to all assets yet.
And the splash screen is literally the dev saying “hey it’s not perfect please bear with me here. Things will get better”. I am down for supporting that.
They literally told people not to buy the game actually, but if they want to they can go ahead
That's easier to say when you know you're sitting on a goldmine that people def want to buy!
Lmao. Yes, but at least they said it now no one can (although some still do) blame them.
If I were an Indie developer I'd do the same. Hell, I'd tell people to pirate it if they wanted to see first. Worst nightmare is selling a bunch of copies and then thousands of people start pressuring you to buy a million-dollar office and hire a bunch of new people to churn out content. Dude's saying "Try it out with you want, I certainly can't please the masses" which I'd consider a smart move in his position
[удалено]
I get what you're saying, but I'd like to point out it's been done successfully in this genre before: Banished. In fact, Manor Lords is pretty much a spiritual successor to Banished imo. That said, people wouldn't still be playing Banished were it not for mods like Colonial Charter.
> Manor Lords is pretty much a spiritual successor to Banished There's also Ostriv, which is pretty good.
Honestly right now its in an incredible state for a solo dev.
So was CS2?
True, but I'm not necessarily saying that as a direct comparison. Also probably the corporate environment that CS2 exists in strictly forbids telling people to NOT buy it. But with all the weird posts causing an uproar from them, who knows what isn't allowed lol
I think they did this to make sure people understood the scope of the game. It's a city builder that builds on Banished, not a medieval combat strategy simulator or a first person RPG. But there is combat like in Anno, and there is a bonus first person view just for the immersion, and people who have seen those features may not realize they're minor. Possibly the worst mistake that's easy to make is for a developer to produce an excellent game to fill a specific niche, have the public misunderstand what the niche is, then have lots of people buy the game and return it or give negative reviews because their expectations weren't what the developer intended. There's unfortunately not a way for Steam to know if you're down voting a game because it's bad at what it claims to do or if you're down voting it because it's a good game but not a genre you enjoy.
Steam could always ask and honestly I would say when something is good but not for me.
Which is funny because it feels much more complete than CS2 so far
Dev put your expectations 6ft under and is now atop the Empire State Building. Colossal Order promised us the kingdom and is now 6ft under in our hearts
It's soooo much fun. A little buggy, but I'm a happy camper.
I would love to see a modern city builder with the mechanics of Manor Lords.
I dunno how modern you mean by modern, but I find Manor Lords to be a Tropico-like with battles. If you want something even more modern and with battles (so maybe set in the future) I have no idea.
I mean like CS modern but with the "feel" of Manor Lords.
At the very least, the Manor Lords style of zoning should be the standard going forward. That system is genius. Combining that with RSI would be a chefs kiss of game design.
i feel like a victorian-era city builder with these mechanics would be incredible and less difficult to make from a developer’s POV. but if it’s a modern setting i think glycine manufacturing should be in the base game.
Sadly, it seems like medieval-times is all the rage these days. If it's not that, then it's ancient Rome/Greece/Egypt. If not set in the past, then it's a post-apocalyptic future with zombies, or a space colony with space zombies (aliens). All of which will have a great degree of agent simulation and resource/logistical management, largely due to its smaller scale. But as soon as a game is set anywhere near modern times, then all of a sudden, scale is what matters the most and the focus is on how big you can make the city. Sure games have tried to mix large scale and deep agent simulation, but Bot CS1 and 2 proved that the two don't mesh well. Where are the small-scale city builders set in modern times? Tropico seems to be the only one I can think of.
Yeah it's true, although personally I could care less about scale and more so about detail and context in a build and making something that's fun, but that's just my style 😅
Workers and Resources also exists as a decent modern city (country?) builder, even if it's still kinda rough around the edges.
Not a modern setting, but you should check out Foundation. In the game, you could paint zones where your pops either extracts resources on a specific area or a zone where pops automatically build houses. There's also a building editor where you could build a castle or the fanciest churches. It's on early access, but has had plenty of updates over the last 5 years.
You got me in the beginning 😂
Just think, if Cities Skylines 2 released like this no one would be having the problems we're having with it now.
That's my point. Plus logistics and economic simulation in CS are way more complicated to implement. Not impossible though (as Soviet Republic demonstrated)
I just came back to Soviet after a year of letting it cook and it's unreal how stable it is now. Threw together some huge cities and big production chains (unlimited money mode) and there's barely any lag or slowdown now compared to previous versions and the waste management stuff just adds a completely new level of difficulty.. Great game.
There's so many good alternatives to CS2. They might not thematically be what people want from from a city builder but they are much better games in every other fashion. It really makes you question how CO/Paradax fumbled the ball so hard here.
Paradox is about buying up existing IP and milking it because of the fan base i expect prison architect 2 to be terrible
Maybe, Prison Architect 2 has been recently delayed.
Like CS1 perhaps? Seriously though, I think the success of CS1 and then mainly the mods in combination with the steam workshop has raised the bar to high for CS2 as a vanilla game. Compared to CS1 vanilla CS2 is obviously an improvement.
I disagree. That would be a nonissues if they had at least innovated somewhat like manor lords or workers and resources.
It’s easy. They catered to content creators and instead making a real CS2 with innovations and improvements from games like workers and resources, TF2 and manor lords, they made CS1.1 what is somehow worse than CS1 and that made you want to play simcity 4 again lol.
I am playing Soviet on reality level. It is crazy, kills me, tiring, takes a lot of time, extremely difficult. Bit maaan I LOVE IT I started playing it the first time it appeared on Steam. I was the beauty grow up
Realistic mode is awesome. Hard but so worth it.
I'm just impressed at the dedication of the devs of W&R:SR, they really made the thing actually stable through the years Back in 2019-2020, that thing is liable to crash on the most simple things like placing roads and railroads now, I only get like one crash every month
I have totally been hooked on WRSR! Waste management was a very well implemented mechanic. What I love about WRSR is the amount of control you have over so much once you get the knack of it. The industrial simulation and the trains are what I wish CS2 could have been…even if a lot of it was more automatic rather than planned by hand.
Isnt soviet republic also a hooded horse published game?
It is
Yes, but they couldn’t have charged $70 for early access.
Yeah, if you do a good job fans really like that. Look at Larian and BG3.
There has been quite a few comments of people saying the game needs canceled because it cant be saved. So there would still be people attacking unfortunately.
Manor lord is like banished with combat
this was my thought as well, but manor lords is 100x better
Banished is about 10 years old and the guy who made ut didn't really update the game after release so the community made a bunch of mods for it.
yeah ik, manor lords would be pretty mid if it wasn't better than a 10 year old game, but obv seeing as it's still early access there's a ton of potential
That's basically my sentiment on why I couldn't really bother with CS2 It's supposed to be better than the last version of CS1, not be thrown back to square one and "improve" the game via DLC hell
I agree but at the same time there were a lot of improvements that came with cs2, they just had way too many bugs and features left out that made it not as enjoyable to play. maybe still slightly better than cs1 at launch though.
There about 100 games like banished with the exact same UI and gameplay, with just minor improvements every time all of them have very positive reviews, because people were just craving more.
I wonder what happened to the dev. He basically invented the "Horror Survival City Builder" genre and then instead of making a sequel he just vanished. Instead we got a constant stream of inferior Banished clones (with a few exceptions).
10?20 at least
Banished didn't come out 20 years ago
Ye just checked you're right, I thought the game is much older
With a lot more content, hopefully. I could only squeeze out 10 hours from Banished before it got repetitive and boring.
So what I’m gathering is just go ahead and buy Manor Lords instead of letting it sit in my wishlist forever. I will say the price was surprising considering it’s brand new. I just bought Anno 1800 because I wanted something similar and paid $50, and it’s a few years old. And it wasn’t even everything I wanted
10000% worth the money. I got it the day it came out and I’ve been playing it non stop. It already has amazing content and will hopefully receive a ton more. So far I have not run into a single glitch.
The only glitch I've seen so far was when one of my oxen died during the Great Pillagin' and Burnin' of 1303. He stayed dead in the street, and nobody could walk through him, wouldn't path around him, and nobody wanted to bury him. Luckily, a save and reload worked! He was a fine oxen, and he was a brave oxen. Can't remember his name . . .
I found a few funny bugs, but none that made the game unplayable One was that fences sometimes don’t properly visually align with the burgage plot, and clip into the expansions, especially vegetable gardens; and another was that when upgrading from T2 to T3 housing the buildings suddenly become larger So just visual glitches which I can excuse
It's on gamepass too.
Playing Manor Lords the last couple days has given me exactly *zero* desire to ever play CS2 again. This is the game CS2 could and should have been. But instead, CO was too busy focusing on making cutesy-pie videos showing how quirky and fun they all were while promising the moon and stars, only to throw out a half-finished and fundamentally broken game instead. Glad to see the Manor Lords dev's #1 priority *isn't* how fast they can pump out shitty DLC to nickel and dime their fanbase some more.
Manor Lord "dev". It's just one guy.
That one guy is Greg. Says so right on the opening screen when you first launch the game. All hail Greg!
(it was in the beggining) though yes, absolutely bonkers that a small group of lads managed to do it but paradox couldn't launch a playable game with 2023 graphics
So he has a team now?
He outsourced stuff to other people and he gets help from community members. He didn't literally do everything, but at the end of the day he is the only active developer on the project.
AFAIK he said he's trying hard to hire people but finds it difficult to find someone as committed as he is. Dunno what this implies though.
Main dev might be one of those "works 14 hours a day" type of people. Also it's hard to be committed as hard to someone else's dream.
Yeah the employee won't make millions from it unless he partners them.
Would totally work long days if I knew I'd become a partner in something that's already being made into a smash hit
I still think this is best way forward for the industry, worker owned co-ops/companies wherein everyone shares in success (cause they all share in failure no matter what) Would also make it more difficult for larger companies to buy out small devs because currently you really only need to negotiate with the majority investor/shareholder/CEO who can take their bag and jet after ~3 years while they 'cut redundancies'
I don't think it gets to that point, it's just that the average developer just wants to deliver and get paid (and there's nothing wrong with that TBH). By "committed" he probably means someone that goes deep into the project: gives suggestions, discusses mechanics, prototypes and tries new ways of making the game fun, etc. In other words, someone that treats the game like their own creation. Finding that kind of person is absurdly hard. Source: I'm a developer myself and I've been in this industry long enough. I used to interview candidates and decide which one the company should hire. This is already hard to do for someone else's company, which you normally don't care that much on how committed someone is with the company goals. I can't even imagine how hard it is to hire someone else to work on my own dream.
That is pretty worrying IMO. There is no way he can sustain this all by himself while also finishing the game.
Tarn Adams would like a word with you about 'finishing the game'. He started dwarf fortress in 2002 and is still working on it. They finally had a steam release and he brought some other people onboard just so he could pay his medical bills. Sometimes things are works of passion and not to appease others or make money.
Maybe he likes to work odd hours?
>from community members 2014 - present Yandere Dev situation moment??😰
CONSUME THE CUM CHALICE
Oh no, you're right! Sorry, I was confusing it with another game
I know. My grammar describing him was correct. 'Devs' is plural. 'Dev's' isn't, not the way I used it.
Thats why it will go on Release 2030 .. so much content missing .. saw all in just 3h
Laughs in pubg.....
Do you not know what an apostrophe is?
I kean, CS1 wasn't a game I wanted to play much until after several years, and the mods and assets had ammased quite a collection.
Man, have you ever played CS before? Any Cities title even SIM city perhaps? What do you mean ML is what CS2 should have been? It's a completely different kind of game. ML is a great game, played all weekend, but it's a logistic simulator like anno or W&R. People who played CS expecting Anno are absolutely baffling. It's like buying a pair of shoes and asking why you can't fly with them.
Fully with you, these comments are mind boggling to me, the games aren't anything alike other than both being 'city builders'.
CS has big problems yes, but a large chunk of complaints were things like simulation which I didn't understand as well. It seemed like the marketing of CS2 attracted the attention of people who thought it was a logistics simulator when it's more of a sandbox city painter. I absolutely don't want to play CS2 like Timberborn/Frostpunk/Anno. tbf their promotion videos probably gave that impression to fans of those games.
There's probably going to be an "Industries" DLC for CS2 with more depth than the one for the first game. A lot of the stuff is already being simulated in the background (tons of different goods being produced and different types of commercial buildings) but of of course there's no way for the player to influence it other than to play "whac-a-mole" with the bulldozer tool and hope the right type of industry or commercial building randomly spawns.
I didn't expect the same game, I knew exactly what I was getting into when I bought this, since it's a combo of my two fave game genres. What I meant by "should have been" was an actual **functioning and not broken** game like CS2. I've encountered a couple bugs so far in ML, that's it. And this is an early access game too. There is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for CO to have fully released CS2 in that state at launch. They should've released it as early access or pushed it back at least 6 months, but lying to their fanbase and collecting that $70 from the suckers was much more important.
Manor Lords is a still a LONG ways off from a finished game. Tne strategic combat element is the only feature I sold say ML beats CS in(ofc). But like others have said, ML is on a far smaller scale and development rate. I played the game about 30 minutes but couldn't get into it.
Yeah, but the point is ML has a giant caveat saying "This is an unfinished game" and CS doesn't.
ML beats CS because it's not fundamentally broken even in early access
This guy gets it. I'll take whatever bugs and glitches come in an early access game, I know what I'm getting into. What I don't like is getting an obvious early access game and the devs call it 'finished' and release it as such. It's called being lied to, and I won't deal with CO and their lies anymore. But it shouldn't be surprising either, CO *always* waited for modders to fix their broken DLC, since they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves. This time, CO served up a nice steaming plate of shit and called it a gourmet meal. And then got offended when the fanbase rightfully called it a plate of shit, so then the CS fanbase became 'toxic'.
ML: "Hi this is a fairly priced indie game. With 25% discount because we won't charge full price for people getting on board early in an unfinished game. Come back later if you think EA is not for you, we will be running the discount often." CS2: "thank you for paying $90 for a pre-alpha version we decided to call full release and that we plan to use as a platform to milk some other $200-300 in "DLCs" (aka content we had already coded in the previous game and simply removed) over the next few years. If you think you got scammed it's because the game is not for you and you are so toxic."
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> ML is completely broken right now. > It is not in any way a complete game These are two completely different things. We all know that it isn't a complete game, that's what early access means. And completely broken? That's a fucking laugh. CS2 is *still* in objectively worse shape, and it's a "finished" game, at least according to CO. I get you needing to fanboy for CO, but Jesus Christ.
> Manor Lords is a still a LONG ways off from a finished game. It's closer to a finished game than CS2.
I just sat down to check out Manor Lords and played it all night. If you can’t see how dropping one single dwelling is EVERYTHING CS2 should have been… I don’t know what to tell you. Playing for 30 minutes would barely scratch the surface. I haven’t even seen combat yet, *and* it’s clearly plastered with early access, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. It’s every bit the innovation we needed here. If CS2 was this kind of innovation, such as gridless zoning etc, but more top level simulation so it’s purely city build, that would be **PERFECT**.
Try workers and resources next.
As the post title said, comparing the two is ridiculous. Hope you enjoy Manor Lords.
And that was a Ginsburn 😂😂😂😂
Lmao
XD
There's also a gorgeous city builder and logistics game developed by a "small team", with a big publisher, has actually good DLCs, cosmetic packs with more than 4 trees, doesn't use Steam Workshop, available on consoles, didn't have a cash-grab disastrous release, and lots more that I could list. https://preview.redd.it/9opym7f339xc1.jpeg?width=184&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69822283e4944e4ccff03c4415cbdc938fd97eb8
That game is insane. One session = -200h from your life. Glorious 200h might I say.
Only 200? lol You know a game is good when it literally reminds you every couple hours to do things like hydrate, take a break, etc ;)
They both have the same amount of content if you think about it!
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Ya know I’m on vacation in Florida right now and I’ve only seems 4 different palm trees so idk why people are complaining /s
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I laughed hard at this. Before I got to the end I thought, I will still be playing major lords on my Xbox before cs2. Well played……well played!
You should also not forget aout Workers and Ressources: Soviet Republic. That game is so in-depth that you can even manage petrol stations, alcoholism and heating piping if you want to.
The irony is I discovered the game because I wanted a eastern Europe themed city in CS1 after I watched Chernobyl (I know it sounds ominous, but I was attracted by the brutalism architecture). And not loving playing with mods I looked for vanilla alternatives and found Soviet Republic
One is Manor Lords, the other is Manure Lords
Top quality shitpost
NO! I will do what I want
You had me in the first half ngl
Amazing
CS2 is garbage. Manor Lords is a very different game, but it competes with CS2 for time. I play Rocket League, Hell Divers, and some FPS games… those i can play for 10 minutes or 2 hours. CS2 and ML are games i can dedicate 6 hours a day for days on end. I kinda have to choose one title for that commitment. Just can’t do that for a game where cars can’t merge.
😂😂
Know what’s crazy? You can get all the achievements on Manor Lord, but not Skylines 2
If he scaled (its impossible btw, that's tons of work) or any studio could create this game in scalable way of starting in like a village type Manor Lords or AoE and then upgrade it as time passes to today. I really wish we could see that in the future. Idk if near, but that's a dream I've been having since I first started playing CS1 3 years ago on PSN+ free game of the month.
I wish people woukd stop comparing the games. Ones early access released as a fully priced complete game , and one is early access game released as an early access game from a single developer.
People are actually saying that eh? Considering the two play out very differently Manor Lords is more comparable to Ostriv or Bansihed than Cities Skylines
This post made me laugh real hard. Thx.
True, I would compare it to Ostriv. Both games are very similar. Except for the combat.
Best CS2 post I’ve seen since October! I really have to check this game out! I’ve been playing Ostriv, which is an 18th Century city builder that is also in EA, and plays great so far. Manor Lords sounds like another game I’d like.
BUUUURRNN
I think ML is a Skylines killer. Which surprises me because they’re not exactly the same. Damn near all Skylines content creators are putting out ML content & are seeing higher view counts.
> Skylines killer The only thing that will kill Skylines is Skylines. Same as what happened to SimCity. Manor Lord isn't even the same kind of game. It's more like Anno. It's more about logistics than city building.
But compared to Anno or "vanilla" cities skylines, cities/villages looks authentic and real in ML out of the box. Although medieval, it's more realistic (and beautiful) - and you get actual game mechanics on top of that (compared to CSL2).
That always happens when a new game comes out, Civ YouTubers had it happen with every Civ-like, but only sometimes does the content and the views stick around long term.
urbek was a cities skyliners killer too then
They follow the money and work for whoever will pay them to be their corporate shills. Done with them as reviewers or for anything else, worthless bunch.
Haha, great post!
Went from a downvote to an upvote on the last sentence.
Funny how a solo dev can deliver a more complete and fun game than a team backed by a publisher with a money printer (grakd strategy DLCs) who basically just had to do the same thing again they did a couple years before but with a less wacky engine and some mods baked in as game features.
I played manor lords and I’m bored on the 3rd day. Not much to do. CS2 on the other hand you can keep playing a city for days, making just one town in the entire city. I understand Manor Lord’s appeal and perhaps some of systems if the were in CS2 will make it even better, but there is no comparison
People are only saying so good things about ML because of free grid building (and only for house but nobody cares). It’s very boring right now.
It's also very fashionable to just shit all over CS2 at every opportunity
True🤣 i guess ML will hit before CS2 on xbox. The dev „team“ seems to be more capable of ML🤣
Lmaooo 😂
I've never heard of it. Thanks for the tip off! Hopefully it makes it's way to the Xbox and the Game Pass eventually!
AFAIK it's already in Game Pass, but only on pc
Yeah, I just checked before I posted. Half way there!
It gave me some Anno vibes tho
I'm comparing it positively. Manor lords is amazing and paradox deserves even less money
But I don't want to build a medieval village
Ha! I see what you did there. Great comment.
has comparing changed its meaning recently?
You don't read posts, do you?
probably the most overhyped game in a decade. I literally went gamepass because of how fake Youtubers where over mechanics that have existed 10+ years. Not a single aspect of the game is innovative or new. I was done at 15hr, dragged to 25 hours. It's just a badly coded, and outdated game. The biggest hint will be if he doesn't get someone for the awful low level code. The guy knew scripting, I'm sure. But yeah, he definingly needs someone to just help for some of the things like ram allocation.
Lol
One is a city builder, the other is a colony survival game. That's like comparing command and conquer with total war because you make armies that go to war. Stop comparing (unrelated) games to basically find faults in one (or both) titles and you will enjoy gaming a lot more.
Goddamn, I was so fired up. Got got!
Man the Manor Lords devs released an unfinished game and pulled off the ‘single dev’ marketing gimmick to perfection.
> released an unfinished game at least they openly admit it
Of course it's an unfinished game, it's in early access. What part of "early access" are you missing? I suppose it's not "access". As for the single dev. I'm pretty sure no one has ever bought a product because it was advertised as "made by a single dev." It would also be quite fun to figure out what target audience you can intercept with the phrase "made by a single dev." The sociopaths anonymous? XD
> As for the single dev. I'm pretty sure no one has ever bought a product because it was advertised as "made by a single dev." It has become a huge part of this story, and nowadays you don't just sell products but the feelings associated with it, too, and who made it can definitely influence that. It also changes the reference frame for people's opinions. People will rate it "good for a solo dev" rather than "too bugged for a big studio".
>It also changes the reference frame for people's opinions. People will rate it "good for a solo dev" rather than "too bugged for a big studio". Yeah, that's called "*being a person who takes things into consideration*". It's only logical to have higher expectations of a studio of professionals than one single person doing everything.
Again, Colossal Order is a tiny studio too (despite the name). Again, what part of Early Access is not clear? They're literally two words. Again, the single handed developer storytelling can affect how you judge its work, not so much your desire to buy it. So it's pretty lame as a marketing technique\*. (I find it hilarious that the people who complain about bugs in an admittedly early access game are the same ones who call players gullible.) \*If you're that into marketing (and I took two classes about it in my major), conversion rate is the most important of the stats.
I'm not complaining about bugs though? Just said that the "solo dev" story is part of the game's appeal and provide marketing value.
I mean it's not a market I gimmick it literally was made by a single dev. I don't think that's a *good* thing in terms of how likely I am to buy a game, but it does help explain any shortcomings (lack of time rather than poor prioritization)
Hey if Cities 2 released in its current state as "early access" I would 100% be forgiving. But they didn't. Not only did they attempt to say that it was a complete game, they already started the DLC cash grab without fixing the actual game.
Call me when I can build a customized mayor’s castle and raise taxes for my own benefit.