Airships: Conquer the Skies News

• A few more decorative items: ornate name plates, concave curved blocks, more domes, ornate decking, and crenellations.
  
• Introduced minimal upgrade time for monster nests, so you won't be surprised by pirate kings or elder dragons early in the game on lower difficulties.
  
• Hitting escape in a confirm dialog in the file screen no longer exits the file screen.
  
• Demonstertruckification: New spring values for track suspensions (based on work by Yellowminer, thank you), plus larger undercarriage graphics, so landships no longer have quite as ridiculously tall suspensions.
  
• New setting to reduce flashing caused by shots, explosions, lightning, etc.
  
• Fixed a bug where a fleet would be incorrectly unable to intercept another.
  

• There is no longer a giant carrot peeking out of hussar bays.
  
• AI vs AI combat resolution is no longer biased towards fleets of small ships.
  
• The AI is more likely to build large ships if it can.
  
• Front/back light cost and price are now the same as top/bottom.
  
• Added stencilled numbers as decals.
  

Known issues:

• Unable to input Chinese and Japanese characters.
  
• Bomber-building AI is still weirdly dominant sometimes.
  

Fixes a number of rare crash bugs during map generation, conquest, and ship editing.

More interesting things to come - in July, I've been busy, overheated, and sick twice, but diplomacy is progressing, if more slowly than planned. (Ugh, I really dislike having to make a "and here's why nothing visible has been happening" post.)

In the meantime, I'd like to tell you about two games by friends of mine that I've been enjoying:

Nowhere Prophet is a game about taking your tribe on a pilgrimage across an alien planet, fighting your way through various enemies in a card-based combat system. I've been playing this a lot, on the lowest difficulty level, while too stupid to code, and it's very satisfying with a lot of options to unlock.

I found out about Merchant of the Skies by seeing cute pixel art of airships on Twitter. I talked the developers into letting me see it a week or so early. It's a game of trading and building up industry in a cute world of floating islands. Also, some turtledoves appear to have flown through a spatial rift and ended up there.

Version 1.0.9 is now out.

• Bottom-left messages that tell you when a weapon is ineffective against an armour or monster.
  
• You can now search by file name in open file screens.
  
• AI bomber fleets are now restricted to higher difficulty levels.
  
• The AI will no longer spam dragonriders except on high difficulty levels.
  
• Fixed more physics issues.
  
• Fixed data loading bug that ignored non-default boolean values.
  

1.0.8.5: Fixes some bugs and adds a whole lot of new player-suggested city names.

1.0.8.6, 1.0.8.7, 1.0.8.8: Fix various combat crashes.