Since the nerf to manors I’ve decided to look into how many vills is necessary to make them viable.
To achieve the same income as pre-patch at a manor you need 11 villagers under the aura, however this post isn’t about receiving the same income as it was patched for a reason. This is about how many villagers is necessary for the manors to pay back their cost or be worth building.
Firstly I’m ignoring 50 resources from the manors cost as they provide 10 population and so save you building a house. So the true cost is 275 resources. You now get +6 res per minute per villager in the aura.
A manor with no villagers produces 40 res per minute so 275/40= 6.9 minutes which is longer than a 2nd town center. With 1 villager it becomes 5.97 so slightly faster than a 2nd TC, 2 vills= 5.28, 3 vils= 4.74 and so on.
So as long as we have 22 villagers under aura at any one time then manors have a very respectable pay off time and are worth building anyway even if the new manor won’t have vills under it’s own aura, it’s perfectly fine to use manors like chinese granaries for your farms and some overlap in the aura does not matter, in fact in that sense it’s as if your farms have a 15% increased gather rate if we consider the average vill gets 40 res per minute, +6 from the manor is 15% more.
So if you want to play greedily like the old manor boom you can still do so and manors still have a respectable pay off time compared to other things like a 2nd tc, malian cow boom etc. If you add in excess manors that aren’t currently buffing vills just treat them as chinese granaries and add farms around them slowly over time. Also you’ll likely have far more vills under the aura than 22 so the manors are still a very good investment into eco, also always get scutage as soon as you hit imperial as that tech basically makes the manors pay off twice as fast.