Airships: Conquer the Skies News

There will be an official player-organised Airships tournament on September 14 and 15. There will be Fun and Prizes. To participate and get all the details, head over to the Discord server.

(Note that the tournament is endorsed by me but administered by a committee of players, who are responsible for tournament rules, referee decisions, etc.)

• 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.