Manor Lords combat guide: How to make weapons and stop raiders

The Manor Lords combat system is unlike anything we have seen in a city builder thus far. The game utilizes RTS-style elements, where players must hire mercenaries or use their own citizens to form a militia to defend their homeland or expand to new territories. To get the best results out of each battle, and keep your settlement alive, here's our guide to combat in Manor Lords.

Manor Lords allows players to control and direct units in real-time, giving it a lot of the same feel as an RTS game. Players will need to use combat to defend themselves from attacking raiders and expand to new settlements.

To fight these battles, you'll need to hire mercenaries with the town's treasury and/or build your militia from the citizens of your settlement. To get a working militia, you'll need to make weapons or buy them from the trading post. For mercenaries, you will need to build up a treasury from taxes.

Once you have the necessary troops in place, you will be able to command them to move around, take or give position, and send them after enemy troops. This is the only way to claim new territory in the game, and also the only way to stop your settlement from being burned to the ground by raiders.

The building blocks of any effective militia are its weapons. Players can build weapons of their own to supply the militia once they have upgraded a burgage to level 2. Once at this level, there will be options to convert those families into artisans who can create bows, shields, and spears for your militia. These are essential to getting started with combat in Manor Lords.

Creating weapons is vital to any hopes of expansion in the late-game, and will also help players get through those pesky raider attacks that happen every so often. By this time, you should also have one or many militia groups formed, thanks to the game's tutorial reminders.

To stop raider attacks in Manor Lords, players will need to build weapons and form a militia to defend their settlement. Or if there is room in the treasury from taxes, you can also opt to hire a mercenary group. But they are pricey.

As a final measure, there are defensive reinforcements that can come via upgrading and adding to the Manor, an administrative building that is built in the early game.

This has a very small reserve of troops that can be upgraded and used in combat like any other militia member or mercenary. With all of this at your disposal, don't get caught off-guard at 12x speed with raiders approaching. Trust me, it can happen.

For more Manor Lords guides, like this one on how to get regional wealth from trading, make sure to stay tuned for more from esports.gg.