The big hit medieval strategy game Manor Lords works well on Linux

Manor Lords is currently another 2024 release smashing through the charts on Steam! Coming from developer Slavic Magic and publisher Hooded Horse, it's certainly impressive. Note: personal purchase, but publisher did send a key that I missed - woops.

A game that blends together a medieval city-builder with a full RTS game where you try to take over neighbouring lands, it's a really interesting mix that will suck away a lot of your time.

Thankfully, this Early Access release already works rather well on Desktop Linux thanks to Proton. I've been testing it with Proton 9, and apart from the pop-over tutorial videos being blank, it's been smooth-sailing. That is the only Linux-specific issue I've encountered with it so far as all other issues seem to be present on Windows too from reports I've seen on Steam.

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Testing on my main desktop system with Proton 9 (Beta): Kubuntu Linux 23.10, AMD Ryzen 5800X, Radeon RX 6800 XT with Mesa 24.0.6 at a 2560x1440 resolution with the settings cranked up to the maximum (with FSR on Quality) it has been performing really well above 100FPS.

I'm going to be spending a lot more time with this one as so far I am thoroughly captured by the setting, the mechanics, the visuals and pretty much everything about it. There's certain rough edges though of course, with it being Early Access (where the dev estimates another year to finish it) but fantastic so far. It can be quite a challenge too, especially with how construction depends on having Oxen, if you're dumb (like me) and allow them to all run away early on, you're pretty much screwed. There's no doubt going to be plenty of tweaks to the balancing on that, but I gather it's not supposed to exactly be easy and you will learn from your mistakes as I did.

What blows my mind is that Manor Lords is mostly the work of solo developer Greg Styczeń. It goes to show what small teams can accomplish. Publisher Hooded Horse mentioned on X (formerly Twitter) that Manor Lords has already sold over 1 million copies in only about a day. They said:

Since yesterday's launch Manor Lords has already sold over 1 million copies & hit a peak Steam concurrent player count of 170k - highest ever for a city builder (or for other different genres like GSG/4x/colony sim).

Manor Lords is available to buy from:

Fanatical

GOG

Humble Store

Steam