I got into the city builder mood and bought a few more of the genre that were discounted, and also checked out some older ones I've had in my library for a while now.
And in direct comparison, there are several things that make Manor Lords feel more shallow than its competitors.
There are plenty of things I like about Manor Lords, but right now, one of its biggest issues is that the economy is too simple, and regions are too separate.
There are only three main sources of food: berries, deer, farming. You can supplement that with gardens and chicken coops added to houses, but those are passive income rather than active work for the population.
Honestly, the chicken coops are your best bet at getting sufficient food if your home region doesn't have good farmland.
Pastures, right now, are only for sheep. No cows, no goats, just sheep. And they only give wool, not milk nor meat.
Compared to Farthest Frontier which I've just started playing, that's already a big missing thing: in FF, most animals produce multiple goods. Chickens produce eggs and can be slaughtered for meat. You can set a max population per chicken coop, and if they breed more than that, they'll be auto-slaughtered for meat.
Similarly, goats and cows give milk, and when slaughtered give meat and hide and tallow.
In Manor Lords, deer are so far the only resource that give two products: hide and meat.
When it comes to hunting, Farthest Frontier has deer populations that can migrate away when the player builds too close to their habitat. In Manor Lords, they remain pretty much static.
There are also multiple sources of deer, as well as various wild plants for gathering (berries, nuts, bird nests for eggs, roots and herbs for medicine, mushrooms, etc), all across the map.
The biggest problem Manor Lords has with natural resources is how there's EXACTLY one of EACH resource in EVERY region. You can't rely on hunting or berry gathering unless your deer/berry resource has a higher yield (every region has one or two resources with higher yield, increasing the number of resource units you can harvest from it).
Honestly the way berries and deer work in particular is just completely retarded. There is ONE berry patch and ONE deer population and they both have a maximum number of animals/berries per season. It's incredibly static. Wildlife and vegetation shouldn't be that static.
Manor Lords has a much better combat system than any other city builder I tried (Farthest Frontier, Foundation), and it would be great to have a reason for expanding into other regions to get their resources, but there's no real point to it right now because you have enough at home to set up basic industries, then supplement with trade when you run out.
The second problem is that different regions don't interact. I stopped playing for now after expanding into a region with good soil (my home region had shit soil, making agriculture almost impossible). The plan was to build some farms there and supply my town with bread. But you can't do that effectively, due to how the resource exchange system works. You can barter between regions but it's an exchange of goods from one side to the other, and the amount exchanged is equivalent in value. So you basically have to trade with your own villages instead of just sending resources as needed. This is an interesting system that requires a better balancing of the economy, but in practice it just ends up as tedious micromanagement.
Honestly, ANY other system of expansion is better than having to build a new town from scratch every single time you conquer a province. Hopefully later the game will add other lords that build up their own villages so when you conquer them, you can take over what's already there instead of having to build from scratch again and again and again. This really makes expansion not fun at all.
While the economy is decent, it doesn't quite reach the level of other economy-focused games in the genre. Farthest Frontier is much more complex in amount of resources you can harvest, products you can make from them, and even has a more complex crop rotation system than Manor Lords. Foundation also has more resources and products, and different requirements for harvesting them and producing them, forcing you to diversify your town and add various different economic buildings for all the different production chains.
Right now, Manor Lords feels more complex to me than Banished (which was a pretty simple game overall), but doesn't go far beyond the old Settlers 2 when it comes to production cycles.
There's potential here but it's missing a shitload of content.