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Manor Lords wants your help: should its "OP" trade system be changed?

High on your own supply.

A man carries a slab of meat away from a hunting camp in Manor Lords
Image credit: Eurogamer/Hooded Horse

Manor Lords developer Greg Styczeń wants your help deciding what he should do about the game's global market supply mechanic.

Addressing the game's considerable fanbase on the official Discord, Styczeń asked for feedback on whether the mechanic – introduced after critics and content creators noted the trade system was "too OP" – should stay or go.

Manor Lords - trailer.Watch on YouTube

"When press and content creators got the build two weeks ago, they often said that the trade is OP and that it's too cheesy/exploity to just sell one type of good and make your town rich that way," Styczeń said.

"I tried to add a quick fix and added a market oversupply mechanic, basically of you start selling one type of item a lot, it's price will keep falling until the exports stop completely. Same for the opposite, if you keep massively importing some type of good, its price will rise and it will become very expensive.

"I was never quite sure about it since I thought specialising regions in producing certain goods is how the game should be played," Styczeń added. "There are other possible ways to make sure players have what to spend their fortunes on in future builds. But of course there is a risk players just won’t have to build production chains at all if they can basically import everything without any consequence, possibly not having to interact with certain gameplay mechanics at all."

It's at this point Styczeń asks players to give their views on whether they think the global market supply mechanic should be kept as it is, kept but "tuned down cause it's too harsh", or removed entirely (thanks, PCGN) and so far, it seems most players would like it to remain as is.

Slavic Magic's Manor Lords is off to a flying start; the medieval city builder/strategy hybrid is currently Steam's best-selling title and its seventh most played game of the weekend, with a peak of over 170K concurrent players at the time of writing.

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