I’m the kind of person who will spend hours on A Wiki of Ice and Fire just looking at families’ coats of arms and reading their heraldic descriptions. This is what I’m considering pleasure. So when Landlords started by letting me design my own weapon, I knew I would have a fun time.
Landlords is a medieval city building strategy game. You are a petty lord who must build up your city, its resources, and its militia to drive out rival lords who have claimed territory that is rightfully yours. Landlords launched in early access on Steam and PC Game Pass and has already sold over a million copies, a stunning feat considering it’s only been available for less than a week. Clearly there is an appetite for this gamey flavor, so I spent some time with it to see how good the food tastes.
First and foremost, Landlords is an early access solo developed game. There are plenty of warnings that there will be bugs and missing or imperfect features. My biggest annoyance with the game concerns the user interface. Unless you place buildings in the middle of an open field, it can be very difficult to see where things are. I’m not the most aesthetically minded country house lady; I place resource-specific buildings close to the intended source. This means that when I place my foraging hut next to a berry deposit in the middle of a forest, it essentially disappears. To find it, I have to zoom in and look for it, or wave my mouse in hopes of highlighting it. I would like to enable an interface that would display all my buildings, or at least have the ability to drag and select a specific area to see buildings in that section.
One more thing left Landlords what you need to be aware of is that this is so very slow, and this is by design. This is not so Age of empires where you pay your resources for a unit, wait a moment, and then, voila, a house or a forge appears. Part of the appeal of Landlords is the commitment to realism, meaning that raw materials for a building, such as stone or logs, must be transported to the construction site before construction can begin. And since this is the medieval period, your only means of transportation are oxen… and that’s what you get An of those losers for starters. If you have more than one building under construction, you’ll have to wait weeks or months of in-game time before everything is finished and ready to start production. Plan accordingly with enough patience (or hit the fast forward button as the game itself suggests).
In addition to these two critical points, Landlords plays like a standard real-time strategy game: collect resources to create specialized buildings that generate wealth and happiness for your villagers. I was afraid this game would be too similar Menu kings… wrong… Crusader Kings 3, and while it’s not exactly a cumbersome mess of inscrutable menus, there’s an extra layer of friction that people used to other types of strategy games might have a hard time with.
When Landlords started by letting me design my own weapon, I knew I would have a fun time
I definitely recommend starting with the game’s ‘Rise to Prosperity’ scenario first, just to get a feel for the systems. The game’s tutorial does a good job of explaining how everything works, and on this lowest difficulty setting you won’t be bothered by bandits or rival armies, allowing you to focus on growing your city. If you are smart enough, you can opt for the harder difficulties. But be careful, bandits will steal from you, and after the first year you will have to deal with a rival army. I couldn’t handle the stress of battle (and I couldn’t figure out the militia system), so I ditched my first save to try to simply grow my city, and I had a blast.
The way resource gathering works in this game is that you order the families in your village to do work — send them to granaries to grind flour, farms to harvest crops, quarries to extract stone, etc. — and all unassigned families will be left to work on construction projects. (Oh, another UI wishlist: I’d like to click a button to see what all my assigned families are doing. As the game is now, I have to click on each building to check if there’s a family there , and as your city grows, this becomes time-consuming.) Families need food, shelter, and fuel of their own, and as their needs are met, your approval grows, enticing more families to move to your country. This system creates all kinds of tensions, requiring you to deftly balance how you deploy your most important resources — people — and that is true Landlords will be fun. I am constantly chasing the approval of my villagers, which itself is a Russian nesting doll with needs that require two or more steps to fulfill.
At the beginning of the game my villagers lived in tents, so I had to build houses for them. Meanwhile, it was the rainy season and my food supplies were getting wet and would spoil if I didn’t build a granary to house them properly. I had to choose between putting a roof over their heads or making sure they had food to eat, realizing that implementing either choice would take a significant amount of time. That’s the good thing — making the kinds of choices that make these types of games fun, because they allow you to create your own story for the lives you control.
I wanted to buy a second ox to speed up the building process, but I was broke because I ran out of money pretty quickly after spending it on chickens. The best way to generate more money is through trading. Since I was sitting on quite a large amount of wooden planks and stones, I decided to build a trading post to replenish my gold supplies. However, too cost money to set up a trade route. Since I was at zero, I had to wait and slowly improve my village market, which allowed me to improve my villagers’ houses to a point where they started paying me modest taxes. After several months of waiting and building, I finally made enough money to set up a trade route, only to find out… that I had used up my surplus of resources and now had nothing left to trade. Womp, womp. Of Landlordsthe food comes out slowly, and you’ll have to try your hardest, but it’s damn good food.