Manor Lordsisn’t a traffic simulator likeCities: Skylines, and busy streets aren’t a problem outside of the occasional oxen logjam. However, distances are important when everyone has to walk to their job and back.
That’s what makes village layouts important. When workers don’t have to walk as far, they can spend more time doing their jobs and collecting the items they need for their homes. A good layout also includes plenty of room for backyard upgrades, because certain upgrades produce more resources when the backyard is bigger. So, with the right layout, yourManor Lordstown will produce more than enough food for every citizen.
Supply Hubs
The biggest thing you can do to improve the layout of a town inManor Lordsis create hubs aroundall the buildings that store resources. These buildings are:
You can then surround these buildings with all the structures that use the resources, generate resources that go into these buildings, or both. There are a few things to understand about how these resource buildings work:
Burgage Plot Sizes
The flexible Burgage Plot toollets you build houses of various sizes. Depending on the width and length of the plot, you can give a single plot enough space for a building expansion, a backyard extension, or both.
For most backyard expansions, the size of the backyard doesn’t matter. None of the artisan upgrades work more efficiently with a larger backyard, and you don’t get more chickens or goats when you add more space. However,the backyard size is very important when it comes to Vegetablesand Apples. For both extensions, larger yards will give you more produce.
This makes it a good idea to build Burgage Plots with a mix of sizes.A few large yards can support orchardsand vegetable gardens, while smaller yards allow you to build a second ring of Burgage Plots close to the central Marketplace. You can also build plots only big enough for a single house, but this is a waste of potential resources and artisans. Make sure every plot has the backyard extension symbol before you build a set.
Homes and Workplaces
Another important consideration is where people live compared to where they work. Your workers spend part of their time at home, at the pub,hawking wares in the Marketplace, and otherwise waiting for a chance to do their jobs somewhere near their homes. This means you can save a lot of time by building workplaces and Burgage Plots close together.
However, you have no real control over which family works at which workplace. Each time you turn off a seasonal job,each time you juggle workers, and each time you fire a family to make them focus on construction,Manor Lordschooses which family ends up where at random. The game doesn’t have a workplace experience tracker (at least not in version 0.7), and so any family can do any job equally well.
What this means is that you can’t guarantee that a family living close to a workplace will be the family that works there. Instead, the game may choose a family that works at the far end of the region instead, and the family that lives close by may have another job at the other end of town. Because of this, you should attempt to build a single residential hub and surround it with workplaces. This is the best way to limit how far a worker has to walk to get to and from their home.
The one exception to this problem is the artisan. Families that live in homes with artisan extensions always work at home, and they never join the general labor pool. However, they still need to gather goods from Storehouses and Granaries, and they still need to keep their home stocked with food, fuel, and clothing goods, so the same rules and restrictions apply.
In short, here’s what to do to create the best village layouts:
