Airships: Conquer the Skies News

This update has one major change: Ships no longer get all their crew and resources back after a fight. If you conquer a city, you have to wait until its takeover period is complete to get your crew and resources refilled. Edit: Or go back to a city or town you already control.

This has some important consequences: hit and run tactics where you repeatedly attack a city and retreat to get back resources no longer work. Not do blitzkrieg tactics where you conquer city after city without stopping.

Also, if your ship loses all its crew quarters, it now still retains its crew and is no longer lost, but if it actually loses all its crew in a hostile environment, it is lost.

Other changes:

• Improved ramming AI.
• Redid city notifications. Showing fewer unimportant notifications, like enemy cities recovering economically.
• Indicator for fleets needing repair.
• Fixed crash when trying to bribe a ship that has departed a city.
• Small pirate boarder now has all-pirate crew.
• Slightly more manoeuvrable hussars.

Next up, I'm looking at boarding problems and the reserve mechanic.

To celebrate Airships selling 100k copies, I'm doing an AMA (a Q&A session) on Reddit. If you have questions about the game, its development, future plans, game development in general, or just want to be told weird animal facts, come and join us right now!

Seven years ago, I started working on a simple game about building airships and blowing them up again. Over time, it became definitely not simple, and I’m very proud to announce that it’s now sold 100′000 copies!

You can build airships and landships from more than a hundred modules in a free-form way. You can ram enemy ships, board them, watch them break apart, fight against sky-krakens that eat your crew. You can conquer the world in multiplayer. You can replay fights and take over at any point to change the outcome.

I designed and developed the game, made most of the graphics and sounds, did the marketing and community management. Curtis Schweitzer has created an amazing soundtrack for it, Karina S drew beautiful art, Javier Zúmer improved the sound design, and many many community members have contributed graphics, ship designs, and vast amounts of feedback.

The game is a hidden gem : 95% positive reviews on Steam, thousands of user-created ships and hundreds of mods in the workshop, but not much media coverage.

So I admit I’m also here to say: Hey! Look! We made this thing, and it’s actually really cool and pretty big now!

Come and talk to me: I’m doing an AMA on Reddit on Saturday, August 22, 20:00 CEST.

This version adds a lot of new modules and content!



New Modules:

• Command Centre: Massive bridge with an additional +30% command points generated for all ships in the fleet.
  
• Observation Dome: Upgrade to the crow's nest, +15% accuracy instead of +10%, and more HP.
  
• Aircraft Command Deck: Triples the speed at which planes can be launched. Allows for more detailed commands to be issued to the planes launched by this ship.
  
• Aircraft Maintenance Bay: Doubles aircraft repair speed and makes rearming 25% faster. (All planes now need to return home every once in a while to stock up on ammo.)
  
• Guided Missile: Massive high-tech guided missile that actively seeks out targets. Does a lot of splash damage, uses a lot of ammo, takes a long time to reload.
  
• Kinetic Bomb, AKA a rock you can drop on your enemies. Eventually evolves to a metal teardrop with fins you can drop on your enemies.
  
• Biplane hook for attaching biplanes to the underside of ships.
  
• One-use versions of rockets, massive rockets, and torpedoes.
  

Improvements:

• You can now see aerial torpedoes and guided missiles being assembled bit-by-bit as ammo for them arrives.
  
• Option for dyslexic-friendly font in the settings.
  
• Cultist crew now have some special shouts more appropriate to their cultist nature.
  
• Modules that provide a ship-wide bonus, like telescopes, now specify which modules their bonus stacks with.
  
• Modules and armours now tell you which mod they're from.
  
• AI no longer tries to outmanoeuvre faster ships.
  
• Explosion damage overlay now uses same code as explosions to be accurate, and supports hovering over specific modules to see just the damage they do.
  
• Four new sets of AI ships by superieurerobot, Orang, h, and me.
  

Bug fixes:

• Desync at start of MP game should no longer happen.
  
• At least one case of boarders just kind of jumping to their deaths is fixed.
  
• Entirely new logic for deciding whether a ship/building will survive a fight. This should hopefully get rid of "ghost fleets" of grounded airships and other issues like that.
  
• When you bury grass with stuff (like ruins, logs, etc) on it, it now converts into normal soil.
  
• More helpful message when mods are missing when loading a replay.
  
• Feedback input field is now multi-line, so you can hit enter without submitting feedback early.
  
• Custom charges now render correctly in counterchanged and dimidiated coats of arms.
  
• Particles no longer adhere to dragonriders and some other monsters.
  

Balance:

• Heavy wooden armour: Blast absorb 4 -> 6, Piercing absorb 9 -> 12
  
• Steel wall: HP 27 -> 36
  
• Turtle shell armour: HP 45 -> 60
  
• Aerial charges: HP 80 -> 100
  
• Suspendium Ray: +50% damage
  
• Pressurised Suspendium Tank: Lift 900 -> 1200
  

Modding:

• Crew shouts are now moddable. Shouts are now loadables like everything else.
  
• You can add guidance systems to your weapons. See GUIDED_MISSILE.json for an example.
  
• Support for non-1024px sprite sheets is even better now, might actually work, you never know.
  
• You can now specify that the barrel of a weapon should not be displayed (see ROCKETS.json) or even a whole set of stages for how the barrel changes as it's loaded. (See GUIDED_MISSILE.json.)
  
• Use "canResupplyInCombat": false to make a module unable to be resupplied with ammo or coal.
  

Known issues:

• Tech tree rendering does bad stuff with confusingly overlapping dependency lines.
  
• Landship ramming AI is broken.
  

Switzerland! Mountains! Cheese! Also: Games! Here we present a delicious selection of homegrown Swiss games, from the artistic to the deeply nerdy.

Do you like machinery? We've got you covered with Farming Simulator, offering an in-depth farming experience with realistically simulated tractors. Or Transport Fever 2, covering trains, planes, trucks (no Superman, though, they didn't get the licence).

Something more fantastical? Build space drones in Nimbatus or steampunk machines in Airships: Conquer the Skies. Fight interstellar nuclear war in Stellar Commanders. Keep changing shape as you fight in Morphies' Law! Fight the darkness in Towaga: Among Shadows. Execute amazing feats of gun-play using Retimed's incredibly clever local bullet-time system.

Too violent? Take a haunting journey across a dry sea-bed in Far: Lone Sails. Observe the behaviour of crowds in KIDS. Raise a tribe of adorable creatures in Niche, and learn about genetics while you do. Defy gravity in Octahedron! Adventure through varied terrain to build a railway track together with your friends in Unrailed!