Manor Lords' sole developer, Greg "Slavic Magic" Styczeń, has made a plea to everyone with a review copy of the soon-to-be-released city builder: please stop messing around with the castle planner and breaking the game.
In response to the recent issue, he tweeted, "I just saw one press review try to cheese their way and build town walls with the castle planner tool, please restrain yourself from doing so. I'll add a *proper* town wall tool in one of the updates and the castle planner is meant for manors/castles. Should've locked it for now."
One instance of these irregular town walls, perhaps the first, seems to come from gaming YouTuber One Proud Bavarian, who is currently trying to "build historically accurate and authentic designs in Manor Lords" according to the video's description.
So far you can already build wooden fences which can work like scaled down town walls—it's good for making everything look a bit more uniform. But that's not enough for some, especially if, like One Proud Bavarian, you've got your heart set on building something that's more historically accurate. It seems that there's no stopping people once they've put their mind to something, so it was probably just a matter of time before someone figured out how to jerry-rig them.
You won't do irreparable damage if you do this, but it will mess with your building system. While it may look like a simple stone wall, it isn't, which is what can confuse the game's layered building system. This means if you cover your village with them, it could cause you a bad headache in the future if you want to build around it.
But even so, Styczeń isn't surprised to see people messing around with the game in unexpected ways, he didn't think it would happen so soon. "It's not too hard since it's not finished, but I didn't expect the press to showcase it," he says in a reply.
While I'm not willing to mess up all my villages for the sake of some castle walls, I am very excited to see what could be added in the future. So far, I have a couple of villages, many of which are probably too spread out to be contained by any amount of stone walls, but I've left one spot clear to build my ideal fortification. It's on the edge of a cliff so that's one side covered, and it's nicely wedged between two of my villages, so I'll be able to oversee things quite nicely from there. If town walls do get added down the line, this spot is definitely where I'll choose to build them.
Styczeń's not planning to release a roadmap yet, instead using feedback to guide what he tackles after launch, but at least we now know town walls are on the list.
