Airships: Conquer the Skies News

This is a heads-up that the price of the game will shortly increase to $24.99. Gives you time to get it at the old price.

The game's price has risen over time, starting at just $5 for the very first release. As time goes on and I add more features, I think it's fair to adjust the price upwards too. And more features are yet to come. :D

Something I probably should have explained, sorry: I'm also raising the price in advance of the diplomacy update. When the diplomacy update drops, I want to do a sale, and I can't both raise the price and do a sale at the same time. I don't intend to raise the price for the game any further.

• Added two new bonuses for coats of arms: The crossed swords are close combat specialists, increasing sawblade and flamethrower damage by 40%. The vol are aerial aces, increasing the fire rate of airplanes by 40%.
  
• Reduced marine fire rate by 25% for balancing purposes.
  
• Fixed a bug where ships with sails would constantly emit sail sounds.
  
• The AI again no longer builds ships it cannot afford to maintain.
  
• Added modding utilities for converting between the game's internal GUG format used for saves and a (more) human-readable JSON format. You can activate them by enabling "modding tools" in the settings.
  
• Added a setting for enabling in-game cheats.
  

The cheats allow you to get free money, get all techs, instantly complete ship construction, prevent the AI from attacking you, destroy ships in combat, restock your resources in combat, and switch which empire you control.



They're of course only available in single-player and disable achievements. If you have suggestions for additional ones, let me know.

Why did I add cheats? Well, uh, people are cheating anyway using cheat engine and causing weird bug reports that I then have to spend time investigating. So I'd much rather give you a clean way to cheat. Plus I firmly believe that you should be able to do whatever you like with software that's on your computer. It's your computer, and I'm not a cop.

But please don't use Cheat Engine in multiplayer. It desyncs the game and then I have to spend time and energy going over the desync report. Time I could spend making cool stuff for Airships, or napping.

Since some players are having difficulties with conquest mode, here's a simple way to win it. This is not an especially exciting way to win, but it's simple: no research, ship design, building defenses, espionage, etc.

Start with a small map on very easy mode. Save up money to build two HMS Unmatched, which are a default ship design.

Using the two HMS Unmatched and whatever ship you started with, start attacking towns, which are the ones with the small icons.

Your fleet should be big enough to induce them to just surrender. If not, retreat and build another HMS Unmatched.



Pillage each town you conquer and use the money to build more HMS Unmatcheds to grow your fleet. Conquer all the towns like that.

By the end of this process, you should have about a dozen Unmatcheds. You can now start conquering the cities. They won't surrender, but you should now have massively superior firepower. In combat, tell your ships to move close to the enemy ships and buildings and then just wait for them to be destroyed.



Whenever you conquer a city, pillage it, but wait until the pillaging is complete before moving your fleet to the next city, so it can restock its ammunition.

Keep doing that until you've conquered all cities and won.

Now you can go for a higher difficulty level and start looking into using your ships more effectively and creating better ship designs.

• Robot tentacles now longer drop grabbed crew when losing power.
  
• Setting a name prefix for your ship no longer desyncs the game.
  

More to come.