When you begin a game ofManor Lords, you start out with five homeless families and a few free resources, and you must figure out how to use them to become a thriving town. To help with this, each region in the game comes with several large woods, fertile fields, and resources like clay, iron, and berries.
However, you don’t have to concentrate on a single region when playingManor Lords. In fact, you shouldn’t, at least if you want to complete the “Restoring the Peace” scenario. While you don’t need to build a settlement in every region you claim, the extra resources you can get from them can be very handy when you have to face the baron’s final army.
How to Start a Second Settlement
The first thing you need when you plan on building a second settlement is ownership of a second region on the map.This will cost you 1,000 Influence if the region is unclaimed, or 2,000 Influence if the rival baron owns it. You’ll also need to beat the baron’s army, since he never lets a claim go unchallenged. You can also use a resource called King’s Favor, but as of the 0.7 build, this resource doesn’t yet exist.
The second thing you need is Personal Wealth, which is how you fund the second settlement. The way you gain Personal Wealth is by building a Manor, going to the Manor’s Taxation tab, and setting “Land Taxes” to 10 percent or higher. Land taxes allow you to take a percentage of the standing Regional Wealth.Your approval rating drops fastwhen you demand taxes, so remember to turn them off when your treasury is full.
Once you have at least 250 Personal Wealth, and you own at least two regions, you can choose to build a Settler’s Camp from the Administration tab of the construction menu. This brings up the Settlement Options, which gives you a few choices. First, you can choose to specialize the new settlement (not implemented in 0.7, but this probably gives you a different set of starting resources), and then you can choose to invest more Personal Wealth into the project. For each extra 250 you spend, you get:
However, you’ll always start out with five families and one ox, no matter how much money you spend.
After deciding what to spend, you can set down the settlement tent in any owned but unoccupied region in the game. From this point on, you’ll need to juggle the needs and jobs of each active settlement you own.
Second Settlement Tips
Managing several settlements can be a headache, especially when harvest time rolls around. However, the extra resources, income, militia units, and influence you can get from two or more settlements is well worth the effort it takes to maintain them.
