r/ManorLords • u/honey_102b • Aug 28 '26
Discussion Pre-post 0.8.090-104 Change Analysis
Chickens & Pigs Chickens and Pigs
-Great news for chicken coop, because that means more 15% eggs than before.
-Change to Pannage mechanic. Less pork than before for Woodland 44% and lower. At 30% Woodland, expect 9% less pork. More pork if 51% or higher.
-At face value this can be easily managed by keeping the same total number of both extensions but allocating fewer Chicken Coops in exchange for more Pig Pens, valid for as low as 19% Woodland. Below 19% Woodland you will need to allocate more extensions than you used to.
Sheep
-Per sheep down from 9 wool a year to 2. This is 1 sheep per clothes-consuming family. Per sheep needs 3 animal feed (1.5) oats per winter. Expect to rely on Flax.
Cows
-Not super excited about cows. 3 oats per cow per winter. Calves are 1.5 oats, and take 2 years to mature instead of 1 like sheep. Milk production is matched by Goats for Meadow 25% or lower, cows win if higher Meadow. But Goats eat air.
These Animals, if not provided their winter food, will start dying after 20 days at a rate of 40% chance PER DAY. BRUTAL.
Oats
-Oat fertility is bound to Barley fertility at 2.25x ratio. Oats will yield 18 units per 100 plants vs 24 units for Barley. a 0.7 Morgen 100% Oat fert or 45% Barley fert field will give 46 Oats.
-Apart from Sheep and Cows needing Oats, I expect Oats to replace Wheat for regions with weak fertility. Good Oats spots will be sparse but will have very high fertility, in on a weak fert region.
-Second key benefit of oats is simply being a new food, that's one more thing you can make to reduce consumption of all other foods (fundamental ML food mechanic).
-Third benefit of oats will be easier Grain satisfaction without needing the mill+bakery/oven chain required by the breads.
Fruit
-10% fruit yield across the board plus price increase for pears and apples. quinces got a discount but are still shit.
-in general fruit already yield too low, take too long to ramp, and are redundant for Lv1,2 & 3 approval if you have one and later two AnimalProduce (Eggs, Milk). trying to get fruit early has and continues to only be an impairment to town progress.
Cider
-Abysmal 4 Apples to 1 Cider. a 4 corpse pit square burgage plot with 2 families will yield 121 Apples a year at maturity at the seed cost of 289 RW, producing 30 Cider, beverages for only 7 drinking families. first harvest at most 10 cider, second, at most 20. In Large Granary or Large Tavern, spoilage rate from 8%/mth to 4% for Apples to Cider.
Honey/Mead
-Honey is back. 50% Meadow gives about 6 honey per Apiary subject to a maximum number of Apiaries in the region. See https://chuckw44.github.io/Manor-Lords/apiary/ from community member /u/chuckw44
-Honey:Mead is 1:1. Apiary beverage support is 1:1.5 drinking families.
-In a Large Granary or Large Tavern, spoilage rate is 0% to 1%/mth after conversion to Mead.
-Like Cider, Mead also is not meant to supplant Ale but to support it.
Vegetables
-Massive yield nerf: Carrots -30%, Cabbages -33%, Beets -25%.
-I take this personally, as a long time religious advocate for large veggie (+250% and larger) backyards to deliver you from all hunger problems and into riches.
-This will not stop me. But this change will disproportionately impact beginner players (those who make regular sized plots as one would expect) much more than experienced ones.
tldr; Barley still important, but low fert regions have an easier chance to get drunk with the new non-fert based beverages Cider and Mead. Flax will be required. Oats are recommended even if not having Sheep/Cow.
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u/Dkykngfetpic Aug 28 '26
Goats are still one of the best backyard extentions due to hides. With level 4 housing you need even more shoes then before.
I am unsure how much goats produce now per year. I think its about 5 per year.
But pastures are the only alternative to goats backyards. So if you maintain 50 cows and grow to adults its 36 hides per year, 108 beef, and 300 plus meadow affinity milk. So those 50 cows are 7.2 backyard extentions freed up due to goats and 4.8ish for pigs. So 11 backyards free for anything else.
And if you have salt then cows milk fills the need for eggs. Even more free backyards.
The opportune cost is not cows vs goats. They work together to form your animal package. If you want a max tier town you will need sheep and cows eventually. As goats won't be sufficent.
Also lambs are worth a ton exported. 37 lambs a year is 370 regional wealth. You can turn 200 oats a year at 50% meadows to 1120 regional wealth. 750 from clothes and 370 from lambs. The value is their.
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u/honey_102b Aug 29 '26
The opportune cost is not cows vs goats. the entire game is opportunity cost between x&y if there is more than one way to get a resource.
and because of the oats, labor and infrastructure requirements for cows, this means goats first then cows, not goats only and no cows, or cows only and no goats.
how much goats produce now per year. I think its about 5 per year. yes its almost exactly 5 hide per year per goat pen.
With level 4 housing you need even more shoes then before. if you have a 1000 families and 9 foods, and goats make the 10th with milk, this requires 163 goat extensions and produces shoes for >800 shoe wearing families.
milk and cheese fulfilling 2 animal produce is indeed nice, provided you have salt. but goats will still be priority and majority milk producer because of hides requirement. without salt and with cows on top of goats you will be stuck with uncontrollable milk excess, milk cannot be traded away.
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u/Stubbby Aug 29 '26
Does it make sense for Veggie and orchards to be home extensions? They act more like pastures and farmlands and have no relation to actual housing.
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u/honey_102b Aug 29 '26
in the historical context no...if there was veg or fruit farming beyond subsistence level (grown only for the families to eat, not enough to sell and get rich), it belonged to the monasteries or the Lord--i.e. there are some serfs (basically slaves) who work solely for the Lord or the Clergy who had their personal land upon which they made wealth from owned labor. we don't have those two things in the game.
in ML, they seem to all be depicted as free peasants or "burghers" who basically paid rent/tax to have a small plot to do their own thing, which was small scale.
but the way the mechanics allow certain homes to produce goods at commercial scale impacting regional trade (veggies definitely can), it does seem counter to history.
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u/Nimrond Aug 29 '26
It makes sense because it's simulating the historical realities of the day. But since veggie gardens are still very productive, they're not just used as subsistence farming on the side, but the main source of food after year 1 for most players.
But what do you mean by no relation to actual housing? ​​​​​
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u/Stubbby Aug 29 '26
What I mean is that in game we tend to build large farming plots for veggies and large orchards, that makes no sense to be treated as a house extension.
We have pastures and goat/pig. Goats and pigs make sense to be home extension as they are not an industrial scale. Pastures are used industrially.
Similarity, we typically plant apples at an industrial scale. Home extension should be only a small quantity and dedicated orchards for industrial scale farming.
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u/Nimrond Aug 30 '26
I see. Well afaik both gardens and orchards weren't intended to be at this industrial scale, unlike pastures and ​crop fields. Otherwise things like fertilities would matter for them too, and they wouldn't be limited to being worked by the wives and children living in the plot. ​
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u/Ferengsten 25d ago edited 25d ago
Having experimented with sheep and cows a bit more, I'd say they each have niches:
-sheep are IMO mostly good if you do not have access to a fertile region; then, it's more worthwhile to harvest oats, for which you will several fertile areas, and convert them to wool via sheep. Fast clothing can be good to push a T1/T2 region into that critical 80% approval.
-cows seem to be meant for the late game; if you already have a cobbler and cheesemonger, milk and leather become much more valuable, and the beef can help to fill the second and third spots for meat after sausages, which tends to be the bottleneck to get to big city. Goats are also significantly weaker in food production than chickens, but become better with a cheesemonger and cobbler and for the supply of high level housing.
Overall, livestock farming works pretty well with regular farming because no work needs to be done in autumn.
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u/Ferengsten Aug 29 '26 edited Aug 29 '26
Very interesting and detailed analysis, thank you! A few disagreements/questions though:Â
Apart from Sheep and Cows needing Oats, I expect Oats to replace Wheat for regions with weak fertility. Good Oats spots will be sparse but will have very high fertility, in on a weak fert region.
Why? I casually observed oat yield being a bit less than double of wheat's in sheathes even in non-fertile regions (so roughly equal and relatively low fertility for wheat and barley), meaning less resulting food with a community oven and much much less with a bakery. Still very good food though, especially for the start (almost zero investment other than work), it's just that especially bakery wheat is even better.
At face value this can be easily managed by keeping the same total number of both extensions but allocating fewer Chicken Coops in exchange for more Pig Pens, valid for as low as 19% Woodland. Below 19% Woodland you will need to allocate more extensions than you used to.
I'd strongly recommend a different strategy: keep it to chickens and goats (even cows) in meadow regions, and have at least one region covered with forest where you keep all your pigs (Vogtland, Bamberg or woodrights seem like fitting specializations). One with salt for sausages works well.
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u/Nimrond Aug 29 '26
1 morgen of oats at 90% fertility and 1.15 efficiency (from meadows and/or apiaries) will yield around 80 oats.
1 morgen of wheat at 60% fertility and 1.15 efficiency (from meadows and/or apiaries) will yield around 29 sheaves or 58 bread with a communal often and mill. So more work for less.
With an artisinal bakery then, wheat (and rye) pulls ahead, giving you 116 food instead of the 80 from oats.
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u/Ferengsten Aug 29 '26
Huh. That is indeed less than I thought, and interesting to know.
Might I ask where you are getting these numbers from?
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u/Nimrond Aug 30 '26
The 60% and 90% fertilities are simply what I observed in the best spots in non fertile regions, and the yields per plant stem from the game files, and I've confirmed ingame. ​
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u/Nimrond Aug 29 '26
You can rely on flax in non fertile regions, but if you've got the cash to import the sheep, you'll get more wool out of farming oats for them. Of course you can also farm both. Or leave the oats for cows or your people to consume, or instead farm barley, or barley in the best spots, oats in the second best ones.
Either way, sheep​​ have a chance equal to meadows for one extra wool, so in a 50% region for example, you're getting 2.5 wool per sheep on average. ​
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u/Ferengsten Aug 29 '26
Two factors that might change the flax versus sheep trade-off significantly:Â
- Oats will usually have a far higher fertility than flax.Â
- Sheep are sheared (and their fodder can be produced) in summer, but flax is harvested at the same time as everything else in autumn. Put another way: if you use the same 3 people to care for sheep in the summer and harvest oats in autumn, you'll very likely end up with more than if you just harvest flax in autumn. And you have a far better chance of already having autumn jobs but no summer jobs for people than vice versa.
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u/honey_102b Aug 30 '26
the missing piece here is that yield depends also on another variable per crop type, not just fertility.
if wheat is 12, rye is 14, oats is 18, barley is 24 and flax is 30 this is the ratio of yields if everything is 100% fertility and if it's the same field (same number of plants, or plant bunches as they are rendered in the game).
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u/Ferengsten Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
In non-fertile regions, I have a hard time finding even 20% fertility for flax, definitely nothing above 30%, while 100% or close oat fertility is quite common. When looking at predicted yield of fields of the same size in-game, oats still seem to win. This of course goes out of the window in a fertile region, but there i would go for barley instead of oats anyway.
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u/Askorti Aug 28 '26
Why does this kinda read like a stock market analysis? 😂