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Airships: Conquer the Skies News

DLC Announcement: Heroes & Villains

I am happy to announce the upcoming DLC for Airships - Heroes & Villains:

In Heroes & Villains, you can recruit ship captains and city governors to your cause.



Captains improve your ships' performance, and can use their abilities to turn the tide of battle. You can outflank enemy ships, cripple engines, create smokescreens, and more. Some captains also have unnatural powers that let them control the weather, confuse your enemies, or even raise the dead.



Governors can be assigned to cities to reduce unrest and increase productivity. Some of them can also issue temporary edicts such as declaring martial law, hosting a masked ball, or using the citizens for gruesome experiments. Others can get rid of monsters or pirates for you. All for a price.

Captains and governors react to events and your actions. A peace-loving governor may quit if he sees you commit one too many war crimes, whereas a researcher can gain experience from dissecting the monsters you kill. As time goes on they can change - for better or worse - and a few of them can become famous enough to re-unite the warring city-states, providing a new path to victory.



As for your crew, assuming they don't get killed in battle, they can gain experience, especially if trained by a suitable commander.

Finally, your realm can become entangled in various incidents that require you to determine - or guess at - what your opponents will do. Are they willing to risk war over a trade dispute? Is that charming nobleman an asset or a spy? Is your governor's clever plan going to work? Are you willing to accept the help of heretics?



The character art is created by Samma van Klaarbergen, and the DLC features several new pieces of music by Curtis Schweitzer.

The DLC will cost $8.99, subject to Steam regional pricing. It will release sometime in 2023, and you can wishlist it here now.

Heraldry Update

Based on requests and ideas from the Discord community, I've added a whole bunch of new heraldic charges to the game. (Heraldic charges are the images of animals and objects and so on that are found in coats of arms.)

I've also added bonuses to eight of them:


+30% armour blast resistance


No maintenance cost for town upgrades


-75% armour HP, double lift


Spies can pursue intrigues, with an increased success rate


Additional unrest from towns and cities, building cost and maintenance is halved


+50% Spy defense


Double research and reputation from universities


Double reputation from sending delegations

Finally, I also added five new heraldry layouts:



DLC Status:
  1. Still not ready to be announced, waiting for key art.
  2. Still not about naval ships. :D
  3. Development is going well.

DLC Announcement Delay

The DLC announcement will be delayed to February because I didn't account for all the things I needed lined up for it, including key artwork. Actual development on the DLC is going well, though, and I will soon be in a position to announce it. Apologies for that.

Version 1.1.2 - Bugfixes!

  • New Chinese translation created by players.
  • You can now view the game setup settings during a conquest game, and use cheats to modify them. You can even do things like turn off the diplomacy system halfway through the game!
  • There's now a setting for reduced visual noise, which gets rid of animations, fragments, background elements, and most particles, to make the game more accessible for people with vision/visual processing issues.
  • If you are editing a ship in multiplayer, you are no longer forced to watch unrelated intercepts.
  • Turning off monsters now also turns off starter monsters.
  • Increased land anemone range.
  • Flipped around some AI buildings that were pointing the wrong way.
  • Landships can now cross oceans to friendly ports.
  • Spy action notices are now shown as normal notices on the left of the screen instead of being a popup.
  • Ammo overlay no longer shown for weapons that don't need ammo.
  • Coronation victory setting explains that it also controls final ritual victory.
  • Torpedo bombers now wait until they have a good shot instead of launching their torpedo as soon as possible.
  • The game now detects when an incompatible driver is being used and automatically turns on graphics compatibility mode and tells the player, instead of crashing out. This isn't a full solution, but it's at least better. If you have an uncle that works at AMD, let me know.
  • Minor graphical/text fixes.

Bugfix release and expansion announcement in January

So I am about to board one of those novel heavier-than-air flying contraptions to travel to the remains of the Old Empire (AKA England), but I wanted to keep you informed of plans for next year.

There'll be a bugfix release in January dealing with some user experience and balance issues, and updating the Chinese translation to an improved one created by players.

And then in late January I'll be announcing an expansion for Airships. The name and topic of which is still under wraps, but I can say that Curtis Schweitzer has once again signed on to create music for it.

Until then!

(Image copyright Roby, CC BY-SA 2.0 be)

Addendum for expectation management: The expansion isn't sea-ships, because I still have some game design problems with sea ships to figure out.