Building your population in Manor Lords is one thing, but making sure they want to stick around and continue to grow is the real challenge. You could have the ideal design for a village, or the perfect tactical mind for conquering the entire map, but if your approval rating is too low, you won't survive your first winter.
Happy people are the grease that makes your kingdom an efficient machine, but what is it that people value? It can be hard to tell at times why your approval rating isn't going up, or worse going down while playing your first few games. We've zoomed in on all our citizens to learn exactly what you need to do to increase your approval rating.
How to increase approval rating
Your approval rating in Manor Lords is mostly self-explanatory: It is the representation of how much your population likes what you're doing and how you're running your kingdom. Your approval rating is directly tied to your population growth, so you can't afford to ignore it and risk everyone leaving your town. There are several ways to increase your approval rating that you should tackle in a general order as you grow and gather resources.
Step 1: Your first order of business has to be providing enough burgage plots to house your entire population. Being homeless in Manor Lords, just like real life, isn't going to make people very happy. Give everyone a home and you will get an easy boost to approval.
Step 2: Next, build a well for fresh water and make sure you're hunting and gathering enough food and fuel to keep up with demands.
Step 3: From here, things get a little harder to understand, but you can see what will help increase approval rating by looking at any burgage plot and seeing the requirements to upgrade it to level 2. Meeting each of these will also help raise your approval rating. These include:
- Building a Wooden Church and later upgrade it.
- Building a Marketplace and making sure you have resources to stock it with various goods. The more varieties of food available the better.
- Building a Tavern once you have a supply of barley to stock it with.
- Keep taxes low or remove them.
- Build a corpse pit to dispose of dead bodies.