Manor Lords: Challenging Difficulty Made Easy

Manor Lords: Challenging Difficulty Made Easy

• I am seeing a good amount of people on Reddit and the forums stating that fighting the baron is unfair, I do agree that he gets units a bit to quickly but over all in regular mode I was able to contest half of the map whenever he had a claim started on my first go around.
• This guide is really going to be focused on getting to defend against the first wave of the Baron and the bandits that will assail you. Once you get over that hump it’s really just smooth sailing until the end.
• It’s really a race against the clock to get enough money to keep your economy afloat and there are ways to postpone the baron from taking more lands to quickly but over all you will have to deal with grabbing it all back from him in one way or another.
• Save often, there are plenty of issues and bugs that can cause problems and the more you save the less you have to deal with rolling back.

Finding a Good Starting Point

After loading in with the game mode “Challenging” Selected you will need to get lucky with a couple things.

• Rich Deposit of Iron
• Rich Deposit of Barry’s (preferred) or Wild animals

Below is a prime example of what you would want to start off with and what I used to complete my run.

First Days

The most critical thing for the start of the game is Happiness, Happiness, Happiness.
Without this you will never get new families and its paramount you keep it at 50 or higher to start off without issues.

1. Make sure to not build any houses for a while and just upgrade your camp with a log when you have time to stop happiness from going down because people are homeless.
2. We want to make sure all amenities for families are ready for people as soon as they move into level 1 houses. so we want to have these listed below :

• Water Access
• Church level 1
• Firewood (Market)
• 2 types of food (berries and meat) (Market)
• Clothing (Leather) (Market)

3. Our first buildings are going to be a logging camp, hunting camp, foragers hut and sawpit. You will want to focus your pops on the food and two more to max out firewood and get more logs. We will also want to build a granary and storehouse quickly after to get all of the supplies and bread in doors before any rain comes. Don’t forget to find where to put a well.

4. You may want to get another Ox to speed some things up. Our main goal right now after getting the ladder done is constructing a tannery and church to finish our list of requirements for level 1 housing. I would recommend moving the firewood family moved over to making planks until you have 25 to 30 then moving them back.

5. After everything is built you may need to move around pops from the logging camp to be your constructors of all of the houses to make sure all amenities are taken care of. It should look something like my small village below.

Making Money

Now that we have new people coming into our village we should be going directly into making money to upgrade plots to make either more food or better items to sell for further money.

With our new families we want to build a Mining pit, Bloomery and Trading post. A couple things,

• Again we don’t want to upgrade any houses until we are ready so that we don’t tank our happiness.
• We want to be selling iron bars asap so we can upgrade our double house plots to chickens and carrots and when we are ready to upgrade our single house plots to level 2 we can then start selling weapons to make a good chunk of change. (Make sure in your storage houses to disallow ore or anything else like firewood and planks to clog up your storage)
• Also for our development we want to go right for trade logistics and better deals when we get two houses upgraded. This allows for us to unlock a trade network for cheap and then buy goods at a good exchange rate.
• Before upgrading houses to level 2 make sure to have the church upgraded to level 2, you have 3 types of food two types of cloths (careful with boots of you go down that route, make sure only one storage location can have boots or you will be drowning in boots)
• After getting a good amount of coin (after upgrading a couple plots) around 200 to 400 you should upgrade a couple houses to get the better deals and try and keep it only to two houses at level two to keep happiness high. Change them over to be selling weapons made from the iron and you should start rolling in cash. You will also want to start buying all of the cheap food to keep people happy and so you can keep happiness high and upgrade further buildings to level two without a tavern.
• Also you will want to make your manor some time around now, we are not going to fight ever but we are going to use the units to capture camps while the AI is out fighting the bandits. This will give is a good treasury with out having to lift a finger and can slow down the AI a small amount.

Mid Game Growth

Now that you are making money hand over fist there are some things you will need to look out for and do to explode.

• Make sure to be selling multiple things and not just all one type of weapon or resource. It will tank in value and you would be better off just selling the raw iron then. You can always just pause trade if something is over sold.
• If you are struggling with money and are back down to 0 Just turn off imports for almost everything excluding food and maybe even that since it doesn’t look like families will die without food. This will allow you to re-grow your money supply.
• You can just buy Barely, flax and Grain to start your production of drink, linen and bread. Don’t be afraid to sell your middle products like linen and iron if its growing out of control. You can only sell so much of the high end goods.
• Make sure to be getting a good amount of stock of weapons and shields to give to levies.
• If the baron is finally going for your territories then make sure before selecting to accept the battle to buy up all of the mercenaries or he will buy them for his fight against you.
• As long as you have enough to survive the first wave then you are smooth sailing and can just slowly build up to be a bigger power house and steam roll the baron.
• If you have more then 4k influence after your first fight with the baron to take a county you can disband your weakest mercenary and wait for it to be back to the pool and then declare for a new county right after the AI will not have had it army back yet and will only spawn in the mercenaries to fight which should be an easy win.

End Game

Really by now you can do anything but some fun things you can do is for each region use the same setup and make sure it can live well enough that you can setup a manor and make a new retinue stack. Do that for a couple places and then you will have 5 to 6 stacks of militia and a retinue for each zone.

The last zone the baron will have a bigger army to attack with so if you have a good 4 or higher stacks of retinue’s that are fully armored you should be fine.