This year's best city-builder is bigger than ever and cheaper than ever, as Manor Lords celebrates 2.5 million sales with an update and a hefty discount

Manor Lords is the biggest city-builder of the year, and with its latest patch, sales milestone, and discount, it's better and cheaper than ever.

In a press release, Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse confirms that the game had passed 2.5 million sales - not bad when its solo dev's girlfriend said it would be lucky to get 7,000 wishlists. Clearly, that's cause for celebration, so the next big Manor Lords patch is leaving beta and heading to the main game.

Patch 0.8.004's headline change is the rollover to Unreal Engine 5, which should help deal with several bugs and crashes. However, there's plenty more directly relevant to players in here. Right up there is the introduction of fishing, which comes with associated ponds, jobs, buildings, and, of course, food. 

Speaking of food, there's a new Butcher artisan conversion, finally allowing you to use excess sheep meat and create sausages. Thankfully, there are also new food spoilage rules, so if you end up with too much food, it shouldn't necessarily bite you too hard. Finally, a new weapon type - crossbows - allows you to train and hire crossbowmen for your army.

The full patch notes go into a lot more detail about all of those changes, but they also contain even more good news - publisher Hooded Horse is running a publisher sale on Steam, which means that Manor Lords is currently available for a 30% discount. That's the city-builder's biggest price drop so far, so if you're not one of those 2.5 million players yet, this could be your chance to get on board. 

Check out our list of the best city-building games.