Manor Lords has been lauded as one of the best City Builder games on can play, and now the developer is trying to experiment with some new economy system that will allow you to apply real market concepts into the game. To put it simply, via trading, now you will be able to monopolize resources, essentially giving players the ability to commit monopolies as a viable strategy, sounds familiar doesn’t it? Its similar to what’s happening now with RAM prices thanks to the “AI” hardware crisis. Thankfully all of these shenanigans with life defining resources will be contained in a fictional game, for now of course.
Manor Lords has some plans
The developer is merely experimenting so far, and in fact as far as I’m aware you can’t even play with this yet. Yet, the developer behind Manor Lords wants us to imagine an scenario where we monopolize all Iron Slabs by hiring all merchants that try and export them. If you ask me this idea is crazy and can lead to some broken setups that would be super fun to exploit, it makes me remember of old games such as M.U.L.E. where you could monopolize all food which was one of the best tactics you could do.
By doing monopolies on valuables resources, you can control the prices, and you can also force NPCs to trade into disadvantageous positions that will always benefit you since you have the market fully corralled and at your mercy. There’s pretty much no way anyone can do anything aside from complying with your outrageous prices, making your economy grow exponentially. Perhaps there should be a system to counterbalance this, by causing citizens or villagers to notice you are doing this and taking action against it. There’s tons of possibilities in the near future for Manor Lords, and all of them are interesting.
