Manor Lords nearly let you fight rebelling villagers, but the city builder's dev decided against it as "something felt off with rallying militia to fight your own villagers"

The creator of Steam's chart-topping city builder Manor Lords has revealed that a scrapped rebellion system that let you fight off your own villagers to quell an uprising had been trialed in-game.

The mechanic was "prototyped and discarded", creator Slavic Magic said on Twitter, responding to a query about settler approval scores from user Scarface9876. "Something felt off with rallying militia to fight your own villagers, like it wasn't satisfying, and I remember testers making fun that they are basically torching their own homes 'cause food variety was too low."

As it stands currently in Early Access, not meeting your villagers' needs and allowing your approval rating to drop below a 50% benchmark results in settlers packing up and leaving. It's an annoying consequence, albeit not an inherently catastrophic one, since it's fairly easy to keep your Manor Lords people happy and earn their approval once you have the right structures in place.

Having heightened consequences for slacking in that regard, as suggested by Scarface9876, would certainly up the ante when it comes to creating pressure on the player to right their wrongs. Still, with your Manor Lords militia comprising actual townspeople, it would be pretty strange to rally your troops to fight against themselves – though I'm sure a paid group of mercenaries or your personal lordly retinue would have no problem with giving those peasants what-for.

Manor Lords is shaping up to be one of the best 4X games already, but here's a list of the very best when it comes to sprawling tactical sims.

Jasmine is a Senior Staff Writer at GamesRadar+. Raised in Hong Kong and having graduated with an English Literature degree from Queen Mary, University of London, she began her journalism career as a freelancer with TheGamer and TechRadar Gaming before joining GR+ full-time in 2023. She now focuses predominantly on features content for GamesRadar+, attending game previews, and key international conferences such as Gamescom and Digital Dragons in between regular interviews, opinion pieces, and the occasional stint with the news or guides teams. In her spare time, you'll likely find Jasmine challenging her friends to a Resident Evil 2 speedrun, purchasing another book she's unlikely to read, or complaining about the weather.