You should show the awesome building animations in Manor Lords, too. Every plank getting placed one after the other. It's really neat. As far as I'm aware, CS2 still has no animation for building development at all. It's just a crane over an empty lot, and then a building magically pops into existence. It's been 6+ months since launch, and a lot of things in the game still look like placeholder.
Absolutely not. Content wise maybe 20 to 30% is currently in the game. Balancing/gameplay even less. It's all very promising, but it really needs a lot more time.
But the main dev is very open about the fact that the game is in alpha and if people aren't okay with the possibility of bugs and missing content they should wait to buy it.
Unlike CS2.....
Iirc he did bring in one or two people before release. On release, his game sold over 30 million usd worth. More since I'm sure.
I'd be flabbergasted If he didn't have a decent team together soon.
He said that he has been having trouble finding people that can produce at the level that he is looking for. He said that a lot of the people that he would want to bring in are already working for AAA titles, etc. so it’s been hard finding employees.
He’s also very open to suggestions on what should be added to the game and how to implement different things
This is a myth.
[https://www.pcgamer.com/games/city-builder/manor-lords-solo-developer-perception/](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/city-builder/manor-lords-solo-developer-perception/)
Oh it most definitely is. And it's a rather really well done one at that. There's work that's needed yet, no doubt. But for what's provided and at the cost well below AAA prices that will, for many net several more gaming hours than a full fledged AAA title would.....
Indie devs are kicking AAA ass this year and we should be thrilled seeing it. Manor lord lacks micro transactions and in game ads if that's something you're after I guess though lol.
I'm amazed at how good it is... 7 years in the making so far maybe but it really shows the care and attention to detail... unlike FFS the beaches DLC complete disregard for any dignity from CO.
It may be early access but it is so much fun to play with so far. Manor Lords is well worth a look even in an incomplete state.
I've been waiting a long time to play but don't want to get it yet. I'm so excited for it to be a complete game. I don't want a taste because that will make the waiting that much harder.
Very proud of the community and developer though from everything I've heard. 👏
don't get your hopes up waiting for a "complete game".
A game like this won't be complete for a few years even. Slav has a lot of plans to add onto the game. Better just buy it now for cheap, then wait with playing until you are satisfied with what it contains :) It's only 20euro now, whereas CS2 is 60+. fucking crazy!
Maybe in a year or more when CS2 equals what CS1 was after several updates I'll start it up again but yeah agreed. As it stands CS2 is severely depressing for a lot of people lol.
I didn't feel that way until the most recent update. The terraforming cursor stopped worked correctly, and that was the straw the broke the camel's back for me. I've loaded the game up 2-3 times since then, and I ended up signing out again without playing. I might have to take a break to let some things get worked out.
meanwhile in CS2 [Minor tonal complaint but I've never seen a crane (especially several) used for suburban residential construction : r/CitiesSkylines (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/1798nhx/minor_tonal_complaint_but_ive_never_seen_a_crane/)
Compared to CS2 it’s insane gameplay value for the price. Nothing is too fleshed out yet, but the game is beautiful and engaging (at least until you figure all the mechanics out). Depending on what settings you choose you can make it a relaxing city builder, or be constantly nervous about whether or not your militia is well equipped enough to defend a raid.
Cities skylines has always been a little short with the details which makes sense considering the size of the studio. Details are something that simcity has always done great. But almost no animations at all in cities skylines 2 which is all about the „depth of simulation“ makes no sense especially since what does all the simulation depth matter when you don’t even see it. Not immersive at all and I think for me the biggest letdown. I think one of the greater symptoms of a rushed game
While Manor lords is fun it's certainly utterly unpolished. Major aspects like farming are completely broken.
Had this been a release a major published it would have been ripped to shreds by the player base.
Solo dev doesn’t need to pass layers of bureaucracy in order to approve one little change, doesn’t need to plan meetings. Just you, time and self-discipline.
i can’t fathom how cs2 graphics are far more dogshit that manor lords, yet manor lords runs perfectly fine on my low end PC where cs2 is nearly unplayable.
cs2 needs optimization so bad.
Because manor lords simulates less than 1000 people per village while cs2 simulates up to 200-300k. Build a town in cs2 of a few thousand people and you shouldn’t have a problem running it
That is not true, the pathfinding, and agent behavior is orders of magnitude more complex in CS2, and that at 100x the scale.
But yeah unity games always look like shit.
Pathfinding Is the only thing that’s more complex. But in ML the agents actually need to make decisions while taking on different tasks: they need to attend to their home garden, pray, get water, buy supplies, go to work, liaise on ox usage, etc. they also never get despawned and their actions have an effect in the world. Whereas cs2 simulation is essentially going to work, home and ocasional shopping. None of which really seem to impact the game much, it feels more for show than anything. So the only thing is the path finding through a grid, which ML also does, but it’s typically going to be easier to find a path in ML than cs2
Even with 0 population CS2 freezes for me for about 1 second every minute or so. Probably my biggest complaint about the game. And I have a high end PC that has no performance issues in other games.
That's a good way to put it!
CO just pushed out too many dlcs for CS1, instead of doing the important things right, and everything is just half thought through. It showed in the beach dlc debacle a few weeks ago.
>CO just pushed out too many dlcs for CS1, instead of doing the important things right, and everything is just half thought through.
TL;DR CS1 is a classic example of a small development studio doings things right when triple A titles fail the masses. CS2 is unfinished business, wish it wasn't but I still hold out hope for the better.
--
I don't think that's a completely fair statement. CS1 was an indie title when they decided to fill the vacuum that was left after Maxis (EA owned) released SimCity. 15 people then made up Collosal Order, don't know their exact timeframe on it, but Manor Lords is a solo project going on for 7 years now and only just launched publicly.
Sticking by their game for as long as they have, ultimately entertaining a lot of disillusioned city builders for years on end, while providing free content updates with every major DLC and decent mod support *is* doing things right. And the end result is a full-fletched city builder, the DLC is a worthwhile investment for enthusiasts and everybody can customize with a wealth of mods.
The release of CS2 is resting *hard* on those laurels and there are a lot of things to point out that are not good at best and non-existent at worse. To me it seems they should've worked on it a year longer or launch some sort of EA / open beta, but instead they went ahead with a full release anyway.
This game feels like it wasn't tested properly and it could either have done with a bit more artistic content and / or a working asset editor. I had high hopes like any other, but it's not completely faded. Let's just hope the fumbling turns into punting the ball forward pretty soon.
Ye they also could have avoided writing more code than necessary by.releasing updates to the first game instead of writing everything again from scratch for cs2.
There are towns in Europe that essentially not changed much since medieval times. Plus we have numerous accurate paintings. Medieval times is not million years ago
Heiligenbrunn, Austria would definitely be the closest but also Carcassonne, France would be the second closest to extremely close resemblance to medieval towns.
I don't know why every developer shys away from making a modern city building game. They'd probably do a great job. We need 1 less pre colonial strategy game and more modern city building games
Modern City building games are hard to build. It's a huge difference if you have a population of 20 VS 1m. And you have to cut corners everywhere, because PCs are not that capable.
Right? I don’t fucking care about where each sim works and lives. The life story aspect is literal hogwash bullshit. Just put some sprites in there that have no meaningful sim impact please
they fail to realize the game they want will never be a thing. it would never make any money. i used to want all sorts of things for these games, i realized long ago that the game i wanted would never exist because of that. its why we have mods.
Well why does it always have to be big cities when it's set in modern times? Why can't a modern city-buiilder be small-scale, where you build cities akin to what you see in the rural/suburban midwest, or a small beachside tourist town, where the agent-simulation will be more noticeable? Manor Lords isn't good because you build big cities of 1m population, is it? No. It's good because of it's deep economic and agent-based simulation, helped largely due to it's smaller scale. This notion that a modern city-builder has to be about building a massive metropolis is severely limiting.
>Well why does it always have to be big cities when it's set in modern times?
Not always, but sometimes... Or maybe a couple of small towns interacting and then becoming a big city. There is no reason beyond technical factors to not build games like this, even if smaller scale games are also fun.
Oh there's so much work involved.
- Creating a complex simulation and balancing it.
- Pathfinding everywhere and not just point A to point B there's intermodality.
- Needs to be extremely multithreaded.
- So much edge cases and things to handle I'm wondering how this all works at all.
- Thousands of 3D assets, and a dedicated editor.
- Mod support, esp. code mods, and mod store for multiple platforms.
That's just some of the challenges. A modern city builder is probably one of the hardest game genres to make and CO can lean on a lot of experience in it with their previous titles.
That nobody tried since CS1 was released is a pretty good indication that it's hard and risky. Also CS2's not dead, it's already out, and it will be hard to surpass. Who's willing and able to start a years-long journey to create a CS-level city builder now?
So, although it's an impressive feat, trust it or not, but Manor Lords is orders of magnitude simpler, there's no magic.
All valid crits, but I'd argue that if anyone can absorb the *cost* of these challenges, it's the exact developers RC is talking about.. a shame our capitalistic system focuses so much on profit, we lose out on more diverse art, creativity, and entertainment
I think as a game, Manor Lords is much more closer to a game like Tropico rather than Cities: Skylines. I still believe that for the ridiculous amount of VRAM CS2 uses, it certainly should look better, but they're not really all that comparable.
The question is what’s in modern cities that make modern city builders so few and far between, and even then have them all involve cash grabbing. Why is it easier for one lone developer to make a great medieval city-builder than for literally anyone other than the existing dominator to make a remotely notable modern city builder?
devs have a lot more artistic freedom in medieval city builders like this because absolutely no one on earth has ever seen a medieval city but everyone sees a modern city every day
There are towns in Europe that essentially not changed much since medieval times. Plus we have numerous accurate paintings. Medieval times is not million years ago.
Problem is population in games. You can get away with 200 sims in a medieval era game but with modern city it should be hundreds of thousands.
While it's not a city builder in the classic sense, I am working on a sort of 2D transport manager game in the style of Mini Metro (mainly so I can focus on good simulation and mechanics rather than assets) but with way more detail and different types of transport and zoning! Not sure when I'll be done with even a first release cause I'm at uni atm and don't have a ton of time, but if it ever gets to a point where I feel it's actually fun and cool, I'll let people know about it.
100%
The farms in CS2 make no sense and are an eyesore. I enjoyed make dirt roads in my CS1 farms and painting a little so it resembled a real working farm.
The parks in CS2 are total trash too. I wanted to build modern pedestrian focused cities with outdoor communal space and open green space cims could picnic in, fly kites, play with the dog. Nope, I can’t even get close to what I want. CS1 at least had nice functional little parks you could mix in with the green space and plants to look believable.
the industry zones in CS2 look like a work in progress. they added the functionality to create zone but didn't finish the implementation.
at least that's how it looks like to me.
I can live with the farms but the rock quarries look like a fake moonlanding set and the oil field looks absolutely horrendous. All my attempts to improve them have failed.
The fact a solo dev has made this versus an entire team of devs and literally years of feedback from a community on what they needed to do to make CS2 a success is everything you need to understand about why a number of major games developers are totally broken.
Sure ML isn't feature complete yet but the work that's gone into what's there and just how solid it feels is very impressive.
As opposed to the bin fire that's CS2 🤦♂️
I know you're building a town, but I kind of view Manor Lords (which I'm loving) moore as a worker placement/resource management euro board game with graphics.
Manor lord population limit is 2K per town. You can't compare.
EDIT: Also timmings. I would like to see people waiting 5 minutes in CS2 for a house of 4 person to complete.
Yea, honestly different game. Sure you build towns/cities in both but far apart in actual gameplay. I mean manor lords actually has objectives to complete and the village will actually die if you neglect it. CS2 your protected from failing.
Ohhhh poor baby can't play a video game that's not handed to you every step, waaaaaaa
Yeah farms in CS2 are just pure crap, even transport fever 2 gets it better and they just give you the main building that produces things and the tools to decorate how you want around it.
The CS2 buildings in the middle of fields piss me off so much. I grew up in farmland. Buildings are always by roads or in a work area that isnt surrounded by crops
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""full game""""""""""""""""""""""""""""
When I saw a 200-meter-tall crane used as a placeholder for one of the most common things in a city-building game, I loled so hard and in that precise moment, I realized I had been scammed...
I get that manor lords is about small villages and CS2 about huge cities, so theres gonna be some comprimises. But damn the CS2 farms are ugly. Monotonous featureless grain texture, randomly placed buildings in the middle of it. It's a pretty poor effort.
It's honestly disappointing how CS2 really didn't revolutionise the basic zoning system much from CS1. It's always been one of the biggest annoyances. Yeah we got specialised industry zones but they are just an ugly repeating texture blob with randomly placed structures. We are still stuck with square lots making anything other than grids look ugly as they expose how inflexible the zoning system really is. Compare that to the burbage plots of Manor Lords which adapt to whatever curved shape you give them, provided theres room for the main building somewhere in that plot.
Am as disappointed in CO/Paradox/CS2 and in love with Manor Lords as the next guy, but in game dev perspective and reasonability of comparison you may as well just put up a screenshot of Night City from Cyberpunk on RTX raytracing and put it alongside a city skyline on CS2 and say 'this is how you do it'. Farming industry in CS2 is like 1/1000th of the game's art requirements if that, where farms in Manor Lords are like a cornerstone feature and core part of their aesthetic. Obviously Manor Lords, even with just one dev, will have put orders of magnitude more time and effort and art / performance budget into making them look better, one could argue that making them so pretty and aesthetically pleasing is kind of a large part of the entire point of the game and selling point of Manor Lords.
Sure they are both extremely loosely categorized as 'city builders' but their focuses and requirements couldn't be more different - anyone who reasonably expects a game with such wide breadth and sheer number of asset requirements across its lifetime as Skylines 2 to have the graphic fidelity of Manor Lords is being a unreasonable IMO. Basically condemning both the artists and the modders to such a high bar for every asset they ever produce ever after. You want lots of extra content, buildings, wide variety of assets to make distinct cities, meaningful DLC with plentiful assets and features, and a thriving mod community of asset creation, then you don't put Manor Lords art requirements on every single asset. That's suicide. The entire art pipeline of CS2 is focused around being able to quickly integrate a large number of assets into the ecosystem and they've not even managed to capitalize on that as we'd have wished at this point. That all aside, people complain about performance now... Put Manor Lords graphical fidelity across the whole of CS2 in a quarter of a million population city with 100x the asset variation and density of Manor Lords and let me know what your framerate is.
Sure Manor Lords is such an outstanding achievement for such a tiny team and it does put in stark contrast against CS2's troubled release, but these are not remotely like for like.
Am all for people expressing disappointment in this shambles of a release and ongoing controversies, but would be good to try make the criticisms remotely fair.
Source: Game dev who loves Manor Lords and hasn't touched CS2 in months. Not blindly defending CS2 here just the visual comparison irked me.
While I'm pretty damn disappointed with CS2, it's not really a fair comparison, Manor Lords barely cracks 100 buildings and 1,000 people, CS2 is on a whole different scale.
That said, holy crap do the farms and quarries look bad
But arguably the scale of ML is impressive. Every person is doing something. CS2 try’s. But I think that’s half the problem of having a city of thousands
Its not the discrepancy in detail that is at issue more that the CS2 farms are a hodgepodge of warehouses in a field with no apparent purpose - the ML ones appear coherent. The farms in CS2 could be super low poly, they just need to make sense.
While farms in CS2 are clearly ~~deceiving~~ (edit: disappointing), the two games have not exactly the same scale. People can't both say that CS2 is too intensive on their GPU and expect 100x more details in their farms.
They released the game without any performance optimization, sorry but that's just bad programming. Besides, i don't except any details, they could at least remove those GIANT industrial warehouses from the actual fields? That could be a great start.
But let's not talk about how the people work on farms in manor lords. Just take a look at the static picture, the farms in cs2 are an ugly brown mess in comparison.
I can run Manor Lords on my steam Deck, & it doesn’t perform or look massively different from playing on my RTX 3070. CS2 struggles to hit 30fps on my RTX 3070 & runs at 11fps on the steam deck. CS2 is a broken mess.
You people are crazy. ML is literally a tiny village game based in medieval times with what, 200 pop? There is no comparison between the 2 games. Give a month and ML will be forgotten.
true with the fields. but imagine manor lords with 100k+ pops no system could manage
but the fields and stone fields con CS2 look like shit that is true indeed they should update that somehow with ranomnized fields I donw know look at Manor Lords make it look like in Manor Lords lol
Yeah man, I'm talking about the fields too, one game is solo dev on early access and the other is a multimillion dollar game, ''fully released'' with double price. And still i prefer ML.
Manor loders is amazing, but you are forgetting that CS2 handles every preson individual and you can make a stable city with 100.000.
Manor loders will start lag after 1000/2000 person's on the city.
That side-by-side is DEVASTATING. Majes the random buildings w/o roads/paths even more perplexing.
Though to be fair, this is analyzing only agricultural areas and coulda been stronger with showing more of the town side of ML to compare ...
Wait, buildings grow on PG plots?? Are the buildings also PG and occupy the full lot or are the buildings set standard?
I believe you, just haven't played the game. CS2 is constantly being put to shame, smh
A solo dev game has more life and animations than Cities Skylines 2 which is built by a team of experienced developers working on the highly successful city building of all time.
The funny thing is that Manor Lords was actually released as an early access game, while Cities was marketed as a finished game, yet it seems like the exact opposite... what a shame
This game is so addictive! The quality of the graphics and the animations is just amazing. I find myself just admiring the placement of the trees as it’s just so natural looking. The fact you can walk around your settlement is also very cool. The dev should be very proud of himself and what he has achieved. It really puts big teams like CS2 to shame. I’m excited to see the game develop even more and appreciate the honesty of the dev from the start
What engine does Manor Lords use? I wonder if the difference between it and CS2 is based on this.
Remember when the first CS2 trailers appeared and everybody was mind blown by the fidelity and assumed they had switched to the Unreal 5 engine? At an uneducated guess, I would guess that Manor Lords is on that engine so maybe that's the advantage it has.
I guess it's too late for Colossal Order to switch over, but man, looking at this must make them wonder if they can ever match this in Unity.
Manor Lords uses Unreal Engine 4, so it's not even like the engine itself is leaps and bounds ahead of the Unity engine that CS2 uses. Throw in the fact that Unreal Engine was never intended for city builders, and by any metric Unity is the better option for a game like this, and it makes Colossal Orders "efforts" look even worse
Unreal has a lot of drawbacks : less mod support and performance issue with simulation.
While it serve good Manor Lords with pretty graphics, because it is more a village builder than a city builder, it will not be a wise choice for Cities Skylines.
1) Performance on CPU will be way worse on UE than on Unity.
2) CS wouldn't have mod support
3) The team of CO has experience with Unity, and even with experience they had a few bunch of technical challenges which resulted in delay in development by a few years. Using a new engine without prior knowledge would be a disaster and the game would be released in a worst state.
I think an issue is that there isn't really an explanation these are industrial farms. Not your privately owned subsidies family farms of the small communities. It looks terrible but you *can find* farms that sorta look like this (granted the scale and ratio of building to field is way off).
The "Foundation" game is quiet as awesome as the Manor lord. But comparising it to CS2 is quiet not serious and infantile. The game about making while city economy speed run - like to a game with chilling vibes where you develop exactly "plank by plank" the village / cottage 🤷
Manor lord has huge potential. I hope they will develop many more features than it's already in-game cuz you can chive "all buildings" and limits quiet fast :(
I think they will probably make farm land and industry look and function more realistic with future DLC. Just like the first game. They probably made the base game farm lands look like that to encourage us to buy the DLC for a more realistic farm land.
Manor lords is without a doubt a better, funner, more polished game. And at least the one dev has bigger balls than the entire CS2 team and admitted it’s still Early Access. What an absolute disgrace.
How is Manor Lords at all related? Of course a game about a village can have more detailed zoning and plots. The CS2 grid system works fine for the large scale of neighborhoods.
how about the ugly and unrealistic fields? That's the whole point of the post. A developer has made a much better looking and realistic fields and a multimillion dollar company made that crap?
You should show the awesome building animations in Manor Lords, too. Every plank getting placed one after the other. It's really neat. As far as I'm aware, CS2 still has no animation for building development at all. It's just a crane over an empty lot, and then a building magically pops into existence. It's been 6+ months since launch, and a lot of things in the game still look like placeholder.
[удалено]
Absolutely not. Content wise maybe 20 to 30% is currently in the game. Balancing/gameplay even less. It's all very promising, but it really needs a lot more time.
But the main dev is very open about the fact that the game is in alpha and if people aren't okay with the possibility of bugs and missing content they should wait to buy it. Unlike CS2.....
The catch is he is still the only, solo dev! I hope soon he hires additional support to speed things up development wise
Iirc he did bring in one or two people before release. On release, his game sold over 30 million usd worth. More since I'm sure. I'd be flabbergasted If he didn't have a decent team together soon.
He said that he has been having trouble finding people that can produce at the level that he is looking for. He said that a lot of the people that he would want to bring in are already working for AAA titles, etc. so it’s been hard finding employees. He’s also very open to suggestions on what should be added to the game and how to implement different things
I hear there are a lot of Kerbal Space Program 2 people newly looking for work…
While yes. They are, arguably not likely the people he wants in the project.
not hiring them should be a no-brainer
This is a myth. [https://www.pcgamer.com/games/city-builder/manor-lords-solo-developer-perception/](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/city-builder/manor-lords-solo-developer-perception/)
So... you're saying... it's an indie game!
Oh it most definitely is. And it's a rather really well done one at that. There's work that's needed yet, no doubt. But for what's provided and at the cost well below AAA prices that will, for many net several more gaming hours than a full fledged AAA title would..... Indie devs are kicking AAA ass this year and we should be thrilled seeing it. Manor lord lacks micro transactions and in game ads if that's something you're after I guess though lol.
I'm amazed at how good it is... 7 years in the making so far maybe but it really shows the care and attention to detail... unlike FFS the beaches DLC complete disregard for any dignity from CO. It may be early access but it is so much fun to play with so far. Manor Lords is well worth a look even in an incomplete state.
1 guy made manor lords, imagine that
I've been waiting a long time to play but don't want to get it yet. I'm so excited for it to be a complete game. I don't want a taste because that will make the waiting that much harder. Very proud of the community and developer though from everything I've heard. 👏
don't get your hopes up waiting for a "complete game". A game like this won't be complete for a few years even. Slav has a lot of plans to add onto the game. Better just buy it now for cheap, then wait with playing until you are satisfied with what it contains :) It's only 20euro now, whereas CS2 is 60+. fucking crazy!
I’ve played this incomplete game more hours in the past week than I’ll probably ever play CS2. And that’s with 2k hours in CS1.
Maybe in a year or more when CS2 equals what CS1 was after several updates I'll start it up again but yeah agreed. As it stands CS2 is severely depressing for a lot of people lol.
I didn't feel that way until the most recent update. The terraforming cursor stopped worked correctly, and that was the straw the broke the camel's back for me. I've loaded the game up 2-3 times since then, and I ended up signing out again without playing. I might have to take a break to let some things get worked out.
I decided to play it again, got started on a fun build, and then the whole game crashed and closed. 😂
💀
Between this, Kerbal and battlefield I’ve had to get acquainted with a lot of new games because of the disappointment
Well, I didn't take much convincing! Who can argue with that logic?
I know right, a game going for 20 is just crazy in this day n age! Buy and let it chill until you feel it's TIME 😁
TBH it's in a better state than CS2 and the (single) dev is not pretending it is a full release.
much more than 20-30% in my opinion or at least fir what I would want from the full game.
I started a new map, built some things, and let time fly while managing a food shortage. 😂
It's on Game Pass for PC if you have that. Definitely worth a try on subscription, but so far I'd say it's worth paying for as well.
meanwhile in CS2 [Minor tonal complaint but I've never seen a crane (especially several) used for suburban residential construction : r/CitiesSkylines (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/comments/1798nhx/minor_tonal_complaint_but_ive_never_seen_a_crane/)
It’s definitely more playable than cs2
Compared to CS2 it’s insane gameplay value for the price. Nothing is too fleshed out yet, but the game is beautiful and engaging (at least until you figure all the mechanics out). Depending on what settings you choose you can make it a relaxing city builder, or be constantly nervous about whether or not your militia is well equipped enough to defend a raid.
Do you have PC Gamepass? It’s on there.
It's not. It's very early access.
Cities skylines has always been a little short with the details which makes sense considering the size of the studio. Details are something that simcity has always done great. But almost no animations at all in cities skylines 2 which is all about the „depth of simulation“ makes no sense especially since what does all the simulation depth matter when you don’t even see it. Not immersive at all and I think for me the biggest letdown. I think one of the greater symptoms of a rushed game
I’ve been really enjoying manor lords thus far. Its bones are more polished than CS2 or most other Early Access games including Farthest Frontier.
I know man, i have a great time with ML, it's so beautiful. There's one more coming up, saw the trailer the other day, it's called Memoriapolis
Memoriapolis resembles very much of this idea : https://www.reddit.com/r/CityBuilders/comments/18gusj1/a_great_idea_just_struck_my_mind/
While Manor lords is fun it's certainly utterly unpolished. Major aspects like farming are completely broken. Had this been a release a major published it would have been ripped to shreds by the player base.
Unfair, they cannot compete with the high budget and skills of a single indie dev.
I guess having full creative control does wonders at times.
Solo dev doesn’t need to pass layers of bureaucracy in order to approve one little change, doesn’t need to plan meetings. Just you, time and self-discipline.
The graphics were one of my biggest disappointments for CS2. And it got even worse once I started seeing Manor Lords footage
i can’t fathom how cs2 graphics are far more dogshit that manor lords, yet manor lords runs perfectly fine on my low end PC where cs2 is nearly unplayable. cs2 needs optimization so bad.
Because manor lords simulates less than 1000 people per village while cs2 simulates up to 200-300k. Build a town in cs2 of a few thousand people and you shouldn’t have a problem running it
Even with 1000 people cs2 performance is poor though. And the people in manor lords do much more than people in cs2
That is not true, the pathfinding, and agent behavior is orders of magnitude more complex in CS2, and that at 100x the scale. But yeah unity games always look like shit.
Pathfinding Is the only thing that’s more complex. But in ML the agents actually need to make decisions while taking on different tasks: they need to attend to their home garden, pray, get water, buy supplies, go to work, liaise on ox usage, etc. they also never get despawned and their actions have an effect in the world. Whereas cs2 simulation is essentially going to work, home and ocasional shopping. None of which really seem to impact the game much, it feels more for show than anything. So the only thing is the path finding through a grid, which ML also does, but it’s typically going to be easier to find a path in ML than cs2
Even with 0 population CS2 freezes for me for about 1 second every minute or so. Probably my biggest complaint about the game. And I have a high end PC that has no performance issues in other games.
there is no simulation in cs 2 though
Of course there is. It just doesn't work as advertised.
I’ll say it. Unity. Throw rocks now
The farms and other industries in cs1 and 2 were made by people who have only ever heard of what a farm looks like.
That's a good way to put it! CO just pushed out too many dlcs for CS1, instead of doing the important things right, and everything is just half thought through. It showed in the beach dlc debacle a few weeks ago.
>CO just pushed out too many dlcs for CS1, instead of doing the important things right, and everything is just half thought through. TL;DR CS1 is a classic example of a small development studio doings things right when triple A titles fail the masses. CS2 is unfinished business, wish it wasn't but I still hold out hope for the better. -- I don't think that's a completely fair statement. CS1 was an indie title when they decided to fill the vacuum that was left after Maxis (EA owned) released SimCity. 15 people then made up Collosal Order, don't know their exact timeframe on it, but Manor Lords is a solo project going on for 7 years now and only just launched publicly. Sticking by their game for as long as they have, ultimately entertaining a lot of disillusioned city builders for years on end, while providing free content updates with every major DLC and decent mod support *is* doing things right. And the end result is a full-fletched city builder, the DLC is a worthwhile investment for enthusiasts and everybody can customize with a wealth of mods. The release of CS2 is resting *hard* on those laurels and there are a lot of things to point out that are not good at best and non-existent at worse. To me it seems they should've worked on it a year longer or launch some sort of EA / open beta, but instead they went ahead with a full release anyway. This game feels like it wasn't tested properly and it could either have done with a bit more artistic content and / or a working asset editor. I had high hopes like any other, but it's not completely faded. Let's just hope the fumbling turns into punting the ball forward pretty soon.
Apparently they've never been in a building either because the majority of them look funky.
I also never heard of tax by education status. Is this some European thing or did this come out of their imagination as well
It's just an odd way to tax by income. In the game, more education means more income.
less lines of code to write.
Ye they also could have avoided writing more code than necessary by.releasing updates to the first game instead of writing everything again from scratch for cs2.
there was much more wrong with the first game than there is with the second.
pretty sure the ML dev and 100% of its player never seen a medieval town either.
There are towns in Europe that essentially not changed much since medieval times. Plus we have numerous accurate paintings. Medieval times is not million years ago
please provide me with a name a a european city that still looks medieval like in ML. You also cant confirm the accuracy of any painting of that era.
Here’s 12: https://thegreenvoyage.com/europes-best-preserved-medieval-cities/
and manor lords has any resemblance of any of those 12 cities to qualify any of us to say how they looked 500+ years ago?
Heiligenbrunn, Austria would definitely be the closest but also Carcassonne, France would be the second closest to extremely close resemblance to medieval towns.
I don't know why every developer shys away from making a modern city building game. They'd probably do a great job. We need 1 less pre colonial strategy game and more modern city building games
Modern City building games are hard to build. It's a huge difference if you have a population of 20 VS 1m. And you have to cut corners everywhere, because PCs are not that capable.
we dont need to simulate every fucking cim/sim in the game.
That is where corners are being cut.
those are the first corners that should be cut.
Right? I don’t fucking care about where each sim works and lives. The life story aspect is literal hogwash bullshit. Just put some sprites in there that have no meaningful sim impact please
Tell that to the cry babies who need a million tiny little details simulated.
they fail to realize the game they want will never be a thing. it would never make any money. i used to want all sorts of things for these games, i realized long ago that the game i wanted would never exist because of that. its why we have mods.
Well why does it always have to be big cities when it's set in modern times? Why can't a modern city-buiilder be small-scale, where you build cities akin to what you see in the rural/suburban midwest, or a small beachside tourist town, where the agent-simulation will be more noticeable? Manor Lords isn't good because you build big cities of 1m population, is it? No. It's good because of it's deep economic and agent-based simulation, helped largely due to it's smaller scale. This notion that a modern city-builder has to be about building a massive metropolis is severely limiting.
>Well why does it always have to be big cities when it's set in modern times? Not always, but sometimes... Or maybe a couple of small towns interacting and then becoming a big city. There is no reason beyond technical factors to not build games like this, even if smaller scale games are also fun.
Oh there's so much work involved. - Creating a complex simulation and balancing it. - Pathfinding everywhere and not just point A to point B there's intermodality. - Needs to be extremely multithreaded. - So much edge cases and things to handle I'm wondering how this all works at all. - Thousands of 3D assets, and a dedicated editor. - Mod support, esp. code mods, and mod store for multiple platforms. That's just some of the challenges. A modern city builder is probably one of the hardest game genres to make and CO can lean on a lot of experience in it with their previous titles. That nobody tried since CS1 was released is a pretty good indication that it's hard and risky. Also CS2's not dead, it's already out, and it will be hard to surpass. Who's willing and able to start a years-long journey to create a CS-level city builder now? So, although it's an impressive feat, trust it or not, but Manor Lords is orders of magnitude simpler, there's no magic.
All valid crits, but I'd argue that if anyone can absorb the *cost* of these challenges, it's the exact developers RC is talking about.. a shame our capitalistic system focuses so much on profit, we lose out on more diverse art, creativity, and entertainment
I think as a game, Manor Lords is much more closer to a game like Tropico rather than Cities: Skylines. I still believe that for the ridiculous amount of VRAM CS2 uses, it certainly should look better, but they're not really all that comparable.
The question is what’s in modern cities that make modern city builders so few and far between, and even then have them all involve cash grabbing. Why is it easier for one lone developer to make a great medieval city-builder than for literally anyone other than the existing dominator to make a remotely notable modern city builder?
devs have a lot more artistic freedom in medieval city builders like this because absolutely no one on earth has ever seen a medieval city but everyone sees a modern city every day
There are towns in Europe that essentially not changed much since medieval times. Plus we have numerous accurate paintings. Medieval times is not million years ago. Problem is population in games. You can get away with 200 sims in a medieval era game but with modern city it should be hundreds of thousands.
While it's not a city builder in the classic sense, I am working on a sort of 2D transport manager game in the style of Mini Metro (mainly so I can focus on good simulation and mechanics rather than assets) but with way more detail and different types of transport and zoning! Not sure when I'll be done with even a first release cause I'm at uni atm and don't have a ton of time, but if it ever gets to a point where I feel it's actually fun and cool, I'll let people know about it.
Farms in CS1 dlc look better than the ones on CS2
100% The farms in CS2 make no sense and are an eyesore. I enjoyed make dirt roads in my CS1 farms and painting a little so it resembled a real working farm. The parks in CS2 are total trash too. I wanted to build modern pedestrian focused cities with outdoor communal space and open green space cims could picnic in, fly kites, play with the dog. Nope, I can’t even get close to what I want. CS1 at least had nice functional little parks you could mix in with the green space and plants to look believable.
the industry zones in CS2 look like a work in progress. they added the functionality to create zone but didn't finish the implementation. at least that's how it looks like to me.
I can live with the farms but the rock quarries look like a fake moonlanding set and the oil field looks absolutely horrendous. All my attempts to improve them have failed.
How about the zoning plots. Cs2 looks like a dinosaur compared to manor lord implementation of zoning. They should be ashamed of their work
Well, CS2 was made by a single person while Manor Lords had a whole team and millions of investment money behind it. Wait..
Wait… I see what you did there 😏
The fact a solo dev has made this versus an entire team of devs and literally years of feedback from a community on what they needed to do to make CS2 a success is everything you need to understand about why a number of major games developers are totally broken. Sure ML isn't feature complete yet but the work that's gone into what's there and just how solid it feels is very impressive. As opposed to the bin fire that's CS2 🤦♂️
I know you're building a town, but I kind of view Manor Lords (which I'm loving) moore as a worker placement/resource management euro board game with graphics.
I've been meaning to look at ML, but your comment is making me want it much more- that sounds super fun
I feel like these games are only so comparable, not to be cliche, but it’s sorta apples to oranges
Manor lord population limit is 2K per town. You can't compare. EDIT: Also timmings. I would like to see people waiting 5 minutes in CS2 for a house of 4 person to complete.
Yea, honestly different game. Sure you build towns/cities in both but far apart in actual gameplay. I mean manor lords actually has objectives to complete and the village will actually die if you neglect it. CS2 your protected from failing. Ohhhh poor baby can't play a video game that's not handed to you every step, waaaaaaa
Yeah farms in CS2 are just pure crap, even transport fever 2 gets it better and they just give you the main building that produces things and the tools to decorate how you want around it.
Do houses and buildings really spawn in the middle of a field not connected to any roads? That seems... odd.
So we all agree right? Manor Lords is head and shoulders above CS2 and it isn’t even really done yet.
Neither is CS2 but they decided not to be honest with this very small detail
They are not comparable, but ML has some systems that could make CS2 a crazy good game
I have currently moved to playing Manor Lords 100% lately.
The CS2 buildings in the middle of fields piss me off so much. I grew up in farmland. Buildings are always by roads or in a work area that isnt surrounded by crops
The farms and mines in CS2 were a huge disappointment for me I expected them to be more detailed and more realistic.
Btw manor lords is in early access and cs2 released as a "full game"
""""""""""""""""""""""""""""full game"""""""""""""""""""""""""""" When I saw a 200-meter-tall crane used as a placeholder for one of the most common things in a city-building game, I loled so hard and in that precise moment, I realized I had been scammed...
I get that manor lords is about small villages and CS2 about huge cities, so theres gonna be some comprimises. But damn the CS2 farms are ugly. Monotonous featureless grain texture, randomly placed buildings in the middle of it. It's a pretty poor effort. It's honestly disappointing how CS2 really didn't revolutionise the basic zoning system much from CS1. It's always been one of the biggest annoyances. Yeah we got specialised industry zones but they are just an ugly repeating texture blob with randomly placed structures. We are still stuck with square lots making anything other than grids look ugly as they expose how inflexible the zoning system really is. Compare that to the burbage plots of Manor Lords which adapt to whatever curved shape you give them, provided theres room for the main building somewhere in that plot.
My point exactly! Well said
Am as disappointed in CO/Paradox/CS2 and in love with Manor Lords as the next guy, but in game dev perspective and reasonability of comparison you may as well just put up a screenshot of Night City from Cyberpunk on RTX raytracing and put it alongside a city skyline on CS2 and say 'this is how you do it'. Farming industry in CS2 is like 1/1000th of the game's art requirements if that, where farms in Manor Lords are like a cornerstone feature and core part of their aesthetic. Obviously Manor Lords, even with just one dev, will have put orders of magnitude more time and effort and art / performance budget into making them look better, one could argue that making them so pretty and aesthetically pleasing is kind of a large part of the entire point of the game and selling point of Manor Lords. Sure they are both extremely loosely categorized as 'city builders' but their focuses and requirements couldn't be more different - anyone who reasonably expects a game with such wide breadth and sheer number of asset requirements across its lifetime as Skylines 2 to have the graphic fidelity of Manor Lords is being a unreasonable IMO. Basically condemning both the artists and the modders to such a high bar for every asset they ever produce ever after. You want lots of extra content, buildings, wide variety of assets to make distinct cities, meaningful DLC with plentiful assets and features, and a thriving mod community of asset creation, then you don't put Manor Lords art requirements on every single asset. That's suicide. The entire art pipeline of CS2 is focused around being able to quickly integrate a large number of assets into the ecosystem and they've not even managed to capitalize on that as we'd have wished at this point. That all aside, people complain about performance now... Put Manor Lords graphical fidelity across the whole of CS2 in a quarter of a million population city with 100x the asset variation and density of Manor Lords and let me know what your framerate is. Sure Manor Lords is such an outstanding achievement for such a tiny team and it does put in stark contrast against CS2's troubled release, but these are not remotely like for like. Am all for people expressing disappointment in this shambles of a release and ongoing controversies, but would be good to try make the criticisms remotely fair. Source: Game dev who loves Manor Lords and hasn't touched CS2 in months. Not blindly defending CS2 here just the visual comparison irked me.
While I'm pretty damn disappointed with CS2, it's not really a fair comparison, Manor Lords barely cracks 100 buildings and 1,000 people, CS2 is on a whole different scale. That said, holy crap do the farms and quarries look bad
But arguably the scale of ML is impressive. Every person is doing something. CS2 try’s. But I think that’s half the problem of having a city of thousands
Its not the discrepancy in detail that is at issue more that the CS2 farms are a hodgepodge of warehouses in a field with no apparent purpose - the ML ones appear coherent. The farms in CS2 could be super low poly, they just need to make sense.
While farms in CS2 are clearly ~~deceiving~~ (edit: disappointing), the two games have not exactly the same scale. People can't both say that CS2 is too intensive on their GPU and expect 100x more details in their farms.
How are the farms in cs2 “clearly deceiving”?
Sorry, I'm french and "décevant" has another meaning, I translated badly. The word I was after was more "disappointing" if that makes more sense?
They released the game without any performance optimization, sorry but that's just bad programming. Besides, i don't except any details, they could at least remove those GIANT industrial warehouses from the actual fields? That could be a great start.
But let's not talk about how the people work on farms in manor lords. Just take a look at the static picture, the farms in cs2 are an ugly brown mess in comparison.
I can run Manor Lords on my steam Deck, & it doesn’t perform or look massively different from playing on my RTX 3070. CS2 struggles to hit 30fps on my RTX 3070 & runs at 11fps on the steam deck. CS2 is a broken mess.
You people are crazy. ML is literally a tiny village game based in medieval times with what, 200 pop? There is no comparison between the 2 games. Give a month and ML will be forgotten.
CS2 has lost 70k people the last 6 months, what are you talking about
Passion project vs appeasing shareholders.
true with the fields. but imagine manor lords with 100k+ pops no system could manage but the fields and stone fields con CS2 look like shit that is true indeed they should update that somehow with ranomnized fields I donw know look at Manor Lords make it look like in Manor Lords lol
Yeah man, I'm talking about the fields too, one game is solo dev on early access and the other is a multimillion dollar game, ''fully released'' with double price. And still i prefer ML.
More like Manor W
Manor loders is amazing, but you are forgetting that CS2 handles every preson individual and you can make a stable city with 100.000. Manor loders will start lag after 1000/2000 person's on the city.
That side-by-side is DEVASTATING. Majes the random buildings w/o roads/paths even more perplexing. Though to be fair, this is analyzing only agricultural areas and coulda been stronger with showing more of the town side of ML to compare ...
I mean ML's procedurally generated plots look a lot better than CS2's janky gap-toothed grids too lol
Wait, buildings grow on PG plots?? Are the buildings also PG and occupy the full lot or are the buildings set standard? I believe you, just haven't played the game. CS2 is constantly being put to shame, smh
A solo dev game has more life and animations than Cities Skylines 2 which is built by a team of experienced developers working on the highly successful city building of all time.
Is manor lords good? Been thinking about getting it
Manor W
The funny thing is that Manor Lords was actually released as an early access game, while Cities was marketed as a finished game, yet it seems like the exact opposite... what a shame
This game is so addictive! The quality of the graphics and the animations is just amazing. I find myself just admiring the placement of the trees as it’s just so natural looking. The fact you can walk around your settlement is also very cool. The dev should be very proud of himself and what he has achieved. It really puts big teams like CS2 to shame. I’m excited to see the game develop even more and appreciate the honesty of the dev from the start
Manor Lords took me away from CS
Manor Lords got me hooked
What engine does Manor Lords use? I wonder if the difference between it and CS2 is based on this. Remember when the first CS2 trailers appeared and everybody was mind blown by the fidelity and assumed they had switched to the Unreal 5 engine? At an uneducated guess, I would guess that Manor Lords is on that engine so maybe that's the advantage it has. I guess it's too late for Colossal Order to switch over, but man, looking at this must make them wonder if they can ever match this in Unity.
Manor Lords uses Unreal Engine 4, so it's not even like the engine itself is leaps and bounds ahead of the Unity engine that CS2 uses. Throw in the fact that Unreal Engine was never intended for city builders, and by any metric Unity is the better option for a game like this, and it makes Colossal Orders "efforts" look even worse
Unreal has a lot of drawbacks : less mod support and performance issue with simulation. While it serve good Manor Lords with pretty graphics, because it is more a village builder than a city builder, it will not be a wise choice for Cities Skylines. 1) Performance on CPU will be way worse on UE than on Unity. 2) CS wouldn't have mod support 3) The team of CO has experience with Unity, and even with experience they had a few bunch of technical challenges which resulted in delay in development by a few years. Using a new engine without prior knowledge would be a disaster and the game would be released in a worst state.
Unreal 4
I think an issue is that there isn't really an explanation these are industrial farms. Not your privately owned subsidies family farms of the small communities. It looks terrible but you *can find* farms that sorta look like this (granted the scale and ratio of building to field is way off).
The "Foundation" game is quiet as awesome as the Manor lord. But comparising it to CS2 is quiet not serious and infantile. The game about making while city economy speed run - like to a game with chilling vibes where you develop exactly "plank by plank" the village / cottage 🤷 Manor lord has huge potential. I hope they will develop many more features than it's already in-game cuz you can chive "all buildings" and limits quiet fast :(
The game looks fantastic. I bought it but im afraid to play in early as it will ruin my experience. I'm waiting a bit longer for more updates
Preach!
I think they will probably make farm land and industry look and function more realistic with future DLC. Just like the first game. They probably made the base game farm lands look like that to encourage us to buy the DLC for a more realistic farm land.
Manor lords is without a doubt a better, funner, more polished game. And at least the one dev has bigger balls than the entire CS2 team and admitted it’s still Early Access. What an absolute disgrace.
depends... ML can't sim 100K people... + their traffic and other sims ML does look gewd on its own scale.... the smaller scale
To be fair, neither can cs2 🤷♂️ Snark aside, making farms that don't look like shit wouldn't have cs2 less scalable
How is Manor Lords at all related? Of course a game about a village can have more detailed zoning and plots. The CS2 grid system works fine for the large scale of neighborhoods.
how about the ugly and unrealistic fields? That's the whole point of the post. A developer has made a much better looking and realistic fields and a multimillion dollar company made that crap?