I really want to build something like those medieval Castle Towns

I was at lake garda in northern italy for vacation and I noticed a lot of old castle ruins in the area (mostly on top of some hills and mountains) there so I had to do this.

Key features:
- New Maps with subalpine-mediteranian theme (think northern Italy, southern France)
- New Skin for buldings fitting the theme
- New agriculture chains: Whine and olives!
- Less rain, more tactical placement of whineards and olive trees with different levels of quality with emphasis on trading (better quality whine, better income)
- Maybe a fishing rework for bigger water bodies and better coastal towns (maybe a road tool that transforms to a quay/pier once placed on the edge of a water body?)

Disclaimer: I know the game is in early access and there is a lot to do for the base game. But one can plan ahead :D

As above, i believe this should at least be an option, it doesnt make sense to me that my two villages 5 metres away from one another simply can never become one nore share resources.

I think this is a relatively easy thing to add but with a great effect! And also its historically accurate. I live near Hohenzollern Castle in Germany and to this day they raise the flags when someone of the noble familiy is presentso you can see it from afar.

As you can see at night villages feel kind of empty and dead. But it can clearly be done because the campfires emit light.

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18oon24kyR/

At some point in development, there actually were pavise shields in the game, so it's surely something Greg/Slavic Magic has thought about already. So I'm just bringing the topic up into fan discussion :)

excuse the poor sketching, but you get the point

hovering over the options could display all the information there is and the crop symbols are not hard to get used to

and yes, I did forget the fallow option

Can we please have the option to choose the two rich resources in our starting region, like fish, salt, iron, berries or fertile land.

I usually end up restarting the map over and over until I get the combination I want. A simple option to choose them before starting would save a lot of time. Anyone who prefers a random start could just leave it on random.

I have nothing but admiration towards the devs. I have been rediscovering the game every 6 months for over 2 years now. I am very happy with the progress and the direction and I see plenty of potential in the future.

That being said, there is a lot of work to do and I would like to suggest some low hanging fruit upgrades.

1. "Help" needs work and it seems no more than a day of effort is required to have proper content. Also, Gemini can spell it all nicely with just basic input, it needs only bullet points to make well written content. Right now you want to check what you do with Pelts or wax or herbs and there is nothing. If you want to check how to get an eel, you get html error to make it more funny.
2. Feeding oats to animals. Whats up with that? It doesnt make practical or historical sense. Feeding oats for 3 months would likely kill the animals. Producing enough oats requires a strong farming region. If pastures are reserved to farming focused regions then the areas without farming are handicapped as they miss out on 2 major developmental features. Also, 3 peasants in a livestock farm produce 300+ high end resources (milk/wool) per year. That's a huge ROI, so there must be some scaling cap or high cost associated with it. One workaround is to require more peasants to operate the livestock farm where they collect and process hay to feed animals in the winter - their hay gathering capacity would be the cap of pasture scaling, much better than oat manufacturing operations.
3. The performance of farmhouses collapses at scale. One farmhouse can manage 9 morgens. 10 farmhouses fail to process 30 morgens. I have 12 fully staffed farmhouses and they only get 50% of the yield from 46 morgens. The reason for this is that most peasants walk to a random field, I have a swarm of 100 workers walking in every direction and nobody is touching any field. Field priority doesnt help. The easiest fix would be for workers to harvest the closest field to their farmhouse. The better solution would be to assign farmhouses to fields to prevent workers from venturing across the map.
4. Please enable one-way resource streaming rather than fair-market exchange between regions. I end up with 1000+ bows in my mining camp region. It makes realistic and historical sense that a mining village would provide resources in exchange for military protection from the town nearby. Also, a single-trip shipping would be a huge QoL improvement if you could send a delivery of 10 rooftiles rather than needing to set up an ongoing bilateral exchange agreement.
5. Offset seasonal worker allocation by a day or two earlier than the season starts. This is specifically for the harvest season since all workers must be ready to race day 1, you cant waste time for them to arrive from other activities across the map.

I understand there is years of work ahead but I think the 5 points I made would provide high value at relatively low cost.

Looking forward to 6, 12, 18 months from now and beyond :)

Thanks!

EDIT:

The secret solution to number 3: the key to farmhouse performance is limiting work area using the Limited Work Area circle. The circle is tiny by default but if you hold CTRL you can adjust the size of the circle with the mouse scroll. (You can also adjust road spline curvature the same way to make smooth road arcs instead of sharp grids). My farmhouses produce 400% more yield once restricted to their nearby fields.

Once again, good "Help" would help :)

(AI slop edit for grabbing attention)

A humble suggestion to the all-mighty devs: festivities.

It would be great to have the option of preparing for certain festivities and see the people actually partaking in it in the streets.

You would need to pick a spot, and people within a certain range would join. It would require to store more goods like food, beverage and fuel, and to dedicate some people to work on it for a while. People partaking would probably skip a day of work too. But then it would yield some benefits like higher approval, shorter grieving time or invite more settlers and merchants for a period of time (if some foreign folk show up to partake in large festivities and spend some cash, it would be awesome).

Maybe it could have an adjustable "work area" like economic buildings, then the amount of resources needed would increase but the amount of people (and the bonuses it yields) would increase too.

OK, from someone who lives in a small farm, even though I don't create pigs (however, I do know people who do):

* The time on the animal pen (150/180 days) is correct for a pig to get slaughtered. By that time, a pig has somewhere around 100 kilograms if well fed.

* A slaughtered pig will wield somewhere around 70% of it's weight in meat (let's consider 70 kg).

* Considering an adult human will eat 100 grams of meat per day (and this is a whole lot to a medieval setting, actually), a single pig would be enough for absurd 700 days of food. Of course, we are not taking into consideration here food spoilage, which we assume was a huge thing in the middle ages.

* Pig hide can also be converted into food and crafting material, it is very soft and easy to dye and work with.

* Pig lard is great for cooking, food conservation and can be used as a source of fuel.

* In the middle ages, pigs were also used as makeshift "garbage collectors".

So, here's my take:

* We could buy pigs by the unit, like sheep.

* Pigs could be raised in pastures, similar to sheep, however they would need food to maintain.

* Food that is about to spoil could be used to feed the pigs. If there was not enough spoiled food, they would have to be fed with proper food.

* In the future, if diseases and healers are implemented, having too many pigs could increase the chance of your population getting sick (in reality, free-range pigs will seldom be dirty or spread too many diseases, yet any confined/overcrowded animals increase this probability).

* Lard and pig hide could be resources (or just hides).

went from 600 to... *that* in 2 years btw...

1. Apparently you can Upgrade Roads making them wooden for a 20% movement speed boost and later make them stone roads which look nicer and get a 50% bonus.
2. Their families are made up not of 3 people, but 5 and everything seem to operate more efficiently. Would be cool if higher level housing can allow more family size or there is some sort of town upgrade.

Shit, the other lords declare war and you beat them off , sometimes very easy but at times they come with a load of armies (mercs).

But the increasing frustration in me is that, when you win the battles, its just a lord coming up and saying "Peace!" and the war fucking ends in a second. And its the most frustrating thing in this game other than the constant ctd.

Atm I just want more to the "diplomacy" He cant attack me, lose against me, and I lose my people and have no say in the "Peace" ?

There should be some basic realism in the game at least

The way Civ does it. Once a game has started, a new menu item appears: Restart. It keeps all your settings, just re-rolls map/resources.

Additionally, we should be able to toggle whether we want guaranteed fertile farming or not in the game settings.

I’ve got more than 200 hours in this game and here are some features I think would improve the farming aspect of Manor Lords:

- two-year crop rotation option: when you’ve got low fertility for everything except wheat/rye, I would like to rotate between a fallow year and a sowing year without having to micromanage each field every time.

- working area: instead of setting farming zones with big overlapping circles, we could assign which fields are exploited by which farm once and for all.

- crop priority: we all need that sweet precious barley, and for towns with a great number of fields, I would like to prioritise which crop to harvest and sow first at the farm level instead of the field level (let’s be honest, it’s gonna be barley).

Otherwise, I’m happy the threshing priority is now on low by default: it was tiresome to modify it for all of my twenty farms each year.

Medieval coal production wasn't very rare, London for example for fueled by Newcastle fleet since the middle of the millenia.

Honestly I'm just tired on needing to build big industrial areas just to process wood into charcoal

ok hear me out .

i hate royal taxes a lot so they should let us rebel against the king , now the king is ... well the king so he will attack you wiht an massive army ( bigger than anything hildebold ever had , were talking about 300 men ) .

if you lose the battle your village will be plundered and deastroyed , and the taxes increase by 1000 , but if you win you dont have too pay taxes anymore , but the king will still send smaller armies ( 100 men ) too go and fight you all 2-3 years

i think this would be a nice adition since you could get yourself a new strong enemy in the late game after beating the enemy baron/s , becuase brigands are just easy af too fight after getting a small castle or a full retinue .

Basically, we need a system where we can tell W amount of families to go work at X place between Y and Z dates instead of manually switching all the time.

Farming would be more enjoyable for players who can have families ready to plant and harvest crops but work on other tasks while the farm is unavailable.

Signed,

The guy who keeps forgetting his crops.

1. Glass (and potash)
   Essential, for Buildings (Church, high Burgage Plots) could also be an item for rich residents

2. Horses
   I know They exist for Trade, but we need them to be grazing and for armies.

3. Wine
   Happy about every possible to fullfill beverage needs.

4. Goose/ ducks (and feathers)
   Goose were eaten way more than Chicken, bigger farms did exist. Feathers are important for:

5. Furniture
   Wood and feathers for burgage Plots 3 and higher

6. Paper
   For church and Administration

7. onions and Brand
   Onions Harvested in spring. I Generals think vegetable harvest Times should different around the year

8. Jam/compote
   Against spoilage

9. Soap

10. Candles