This guide covers the basics of the gameplay. However, Lords and Villeins is a rich city-building experience, with many interesting systems and interactions. To understand it properly, we strongly recommend playing through the ingame tutorial scenario and engaging with our rich in-game knowledge book.
Expanding Your Settlement
Your first task is to make sure that your villagers have a place to live. You can use walls to create rooms, place furniture to place tables to eat on and beds to sleep in. Although peasants are used to living in dirt, you can improve their houses by placing floors and roofs. They also need some storage to store food and money (which they do not have a lot of). There are also production structures which are useful when setting up production chains in labor zones.
Placing the structures alone will not build them. You need villagers to carry resources to the building site and villagers are not allowed to use just about anything - they need your permission. To give them one, you must place zones of a given purpose and assign them to each family. This indicates that everything encompassing the area of the zone is given to the care of the assigned family, meaning that all of the family members are allowed to construct buildings, structures and use them to take care of their needs and produce valuable resources.
After your villagers are settled, it is time to get them to work. Understand what professions your villagers are skilled in and assign them working zones relevant to their skills. Place all required structures, make sure they have access to all resources their zone consumes and observe them work as hard as they can to please their ruler.
At launch of the early access version roofs, walls and floors serve a decorative function, but in later updates they will protect villagers from cold weather and criminals trying to steal their goods.
Controls
Access build menu to place structures and zones.
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Move camera |
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Increase camera movement speed |
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Cancel action / close UI / open Main Menu |
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Hold to display Zone Overlay |
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Press to toggle Zone Overlay |
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Control Time (Speed 1x, 2x, 3x, Pause) |
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Selection, placing objects |
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Canceling selection, canceling action |
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Hold to switch in Brush Mode when placing floors or zones |
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Hold shift and scroll to change brush size |
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Hold to switch into removal mode. Useful when removing an object that has been placed by mistake. |
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When placing zones, hold ALT to highlight and select the zone you want to start expanding. The expansion must always touch the original zone. |
HUD
Build Menu
Access build menu to place structures and zones.
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Walls |
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Floors |
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Roofs |
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Furniture |
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Production Structures |
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Storages |
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Zones |
Assigning a Zone
Assigning a zone can be done through zone overlay. Make sure it is active by pressing the zone overlay button or the
key. Then click in the area of the zone to bring the context menu.
In the context menu, you will find all required structures to build and several useful functions, including assigning the zone, zone inventory, zone priority settings and zone accounting report.
Fealty
After opening the zone assignment, select a family that you wish to assign and decide on a type of the feaf you want the zone to be governed by. There are four options:
- Socage is used to tax a % of produced resources. Use it in any labor zone where you have interest in their production.
- Fee-farm is used to charge rent for the area. Use it in areas where you can’t or don’t want to tax any specific resources.
- Stewardry is used to tax 100% of their production. This means they can’t earn a living on the market to buy food, so you will have to pay them a certain wage for their service.
- Frankalmoigne is for areas where you feel particularly generous and you want your villagers the luxury of living there completely free of charge.
Building
Everything that you want to build, is first placed on the map as a blueprint. Villagers responsible for the zone in which the blueprint has been placed will carry any resources required to build the structure to the building site and then proceed with construction.
Storages
All resources have a designated storage structure which villagers use to store their resources. The most important structures are ground storage, barrel, regal, and chest, which almost every zone needs. Villagers then carry resources to the closest available storage.
New Families
New families come in regularly and randomly. The family profession, the size of the family and the skill level of their profession is announced in advance and you get to decide if the opportunity meets your goals. Each new family profession can expand your production chain and help you grow, but they might not always be the best choice. If you are lacking the ability to produce resources they need, they will be nothing but another person to feed. Engaged villagers will also occasionally get pregnant and bring a new life to the world.
In our first public update, we will introduce traveling salesmen - visitors that offer goods your settlement needs. This will allow certain families to be productive even if you can’t produce the used resources on your own. New families will also be introduced via the inn, where they will spend a few nights before ultimately deciding if they want to ask the local ruler for a permanent permission to stay. The ruler's reputation here means everything.
Market
All villagers create supply and demand for resources their whole family needs on a daily basis. Every family looks at their own needs, current inventory, all the zones they have assigned and estimates how much they should buy to be able to stay productive. They will also evaluate which resources in their stock are excessive and offer them on the market for a price. If you build storefronts in private zones and marketplaces, villagers will occupy them and trade with each other using money according to their needs.
Your job as their ruler is to make sure that the economy is balanced enough to keep things going smoothly. Watch out for any bottlenecks, families starving for money to trade with or overproduction of resources that can plummet the prices of goods down enough so that families producing them may have a hard time making a living. Your main ways of keeping things in balance is getting new families, adjusting taxation, analysing inventory stock of each zone and seizing and donating resources between families using the warehouse book (
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The view of the supply and demand can be accessed through the villagers book for each family.
Villagers trading with each other on the market.
Taxes
There are two types of taxes in the game. The taxes you collect from your villagers, and the taxes your king collects from your settlement. While the local taxes happen at the start of each new season, the king tax is collected yearly from your warehouse, by tax collectors who arrive at the beginning of autumn of each year (with the exception of the first year).
The king’s demands are tied to your playstyle and are resembling the production that you are capable of. By keeping up with the demands, you will increase your relationship with the king and earn favor points, which you can spend to request families with specific professions to expand your settlement.
The king’s tax report
Going Beyond Basics
There are many more mechanics to study and discover. Learn the full production chain, understand food and cooking ingredients, changing prices, villagers needs, taming animals or how to properly place zones.
We encourage every passionate player to engage with our in-game knowledge book, to understand the game mechanics and explore the possibilities for fun that
Lords and Villeins can offer.
You can access it by simply pressing the help button in the in game HUD
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1287530/Lords_and_Villeins/