• Crew chatter messages for planes.
  
• Tactical AI improvements, especially against buildings. More details in a write-up to come.
  
• Weapons can no longer lead shots beyond their firing arcs.
  
• Balanced keels vs bows.
  
• Bomb damage reduced by 20% and accuracy reduced.
  
• Spy messages now point to the city where the event happened.
  
• Can no longer view cities that haven't been fully infiltrated by a spy.
  
• Warning message when your computer can't keep up with multiplayer.
  
• Can no longer edit floating islands on the far side of the combat map to set traps.
  
• Cultists no longer accumulate infinite undead squid.
  
• Key configuration for edit modes now works.
  
• Maintenance cost for buildings is now at least $1.
  
• Buildings with zero maintenance cost now have $1 maintenance cost, but modded buildings with negative maintenance (ie income) still have that negative maintenance.

Note that I have released v1.0.2.2 to fix the negative maintenance cost issue.

The focus of the next update will be balancing and AI in conquest mode.

Version 1.0.2 is out and finally adds keyboard configuration to the game. Let me know if there's any improvements I can make to how it works, or other accessibility improvements you'd like to see.

Next up, I'll be working on the additional issues described here.

And this is the bugfix release for the bugfix release! The game should now no longer constantly crash in the editor. My apologies about this.

The first bugfix release is out!

• Double clicking to load and save in file screens works correctly now.
  
• Pirates that have captured a landship they can't use no longer get stuck in an endless cycle of re-attacking.
  
• Strategic AI values have been tweaked.
  
• When reinforcements are moving towards a fleet, it will now wait for them to arrive before attacking.
  
• The strategic AI should be much less likely to constantly re-attack the same location.
  
• The strategic AI will no longer build pure boarding ships and then immediately scrap them again because they have no guns.
  
• Strategic conquest now starts out stopped both when starting a new game and when loading one. This only applies to single-player.
  
• Imperial cannon is more accurate and reloads more quickly.
  
• Rockets and bombs are less accurate.
  
• Hitting space in spectator mode no longer crashes the game.
  
• Fixed some rare crashes in map generation in archipelago mode.
  
• Small Suspendium chambers now get lift bonus from lozenge heraldic charge, like the other chambers.
  
• Damage that's too weak to penetrate armour now has a chance to do 1 damage based on relative strength, instead of always doing one damage.
  
• Spiderlings have longer "grappling hooks".

This was the first tranche of bug fixes. More issues that I am aware of, that will get fixed:

• Some AIs need bigger building designs to build.
  
• Robot spiders fail to board buildings sometimes.
  
• Repairing damaged buildings causes their position to shift into the ground.
  
• Melee combat AI vs buildings and low-flying ships is bad.
  
• Module info should show troop stats.
  
• Ability to flip and rotate decals and modules where appropriate.
  
• In rare cases, a crewman can be still part of a ship when his module is gone, causing him to appear to float in midair next to the ship.
  
• Muskets look identical to rifles.
  
• The game doesn't work if your Windows home folder has the letter ö in it.
  
• Some rare multiplayer desyncs.
  
• More balancing and AI improvements.

I have returned from gamescom, an event of truly biblical proportions. Launch week has ended, and I'm now pretty much caught up on email and tech support, so it's time to see what's next for the game.

Here are the things I plan to do, in order of priority:

1. Bug fixes. The launch was mercifully low on bugs, actually. I feared much worse, because each new player is a new opportunity to find bugs no one's noticed before, so usually a large influx of new players means lots more bugs discovered. But there are a few issues, which I want to fix first.

2. Balance issues and user interface improvements. For example, I had to cut key configuration from the game to make the launch date, so I'm going to put that in ASAP.

3. Popularly requested features. Probably the things people want the most are multiplayer coop and some sort of diplomacy system. I can't guarantee that I can put those in, because there can be game design or technical difficulties, but I know you want them. :)

4. Content I really wanted to put in and had to cut. Some more techs. Monsters. Some other fun little surprises.

5. Finally, I will get started on developing an expansion pack for the game that will introduce sea ships. So the game's called "Airships", but I ended up putting in landships. This added most of a year to its development time, so I wanted to avoid repeating this with sea ships. Instead, I will take my time to do a proper job of adding water, sea ships, submarines, buoyancy, drowning, sea monsters and all that, and put it into a $5 expansion pack.

And in parallel, I'm starting pre-production on the next game project, which is going to be about flying saucers...

Printing gold on T-shirts is kind of hard, but the Airships logo is gold-on-black, not yellow-on-black. Because of heraldry. So I've partnered up with Teespring to give you a one time only run of cost-price official Airships T-Shirts.



The way this works is that you pre-order the shirts with Teespring and they do one print run and send them to you. So if you want a T-shirt, order one now. Get them here:

Printed and shipped from the US.

Printed and shipped from Europe.

So by cost-price I mean that I am making zero money from this, to make them as cheap as possible, to let the most people who want one, get one.

So I think the launch went quite well! Nothing caught fire, we had a good time streaming on the Steam page, and reviews are looking good.

I'm now mopping up, making notes of things to fix, and answering questions.

The one thing that didn't go well was YouTube. It's the main way people find this game, and I know a lot of you have found it through Stuff+ or more recently EnterElysium, Frazzz, or GamingFTL.

Before the launch, I did my best to contact more YouTubers who do construction-type games, but it's just really hard to get through to them. I know that YouTubers receive literally hundreds of emails a day from devs and marketing people, so my attempts just got lost in the noise.

I also know that they may listen to their viewers. So if you're a regular viewer of a channel, here is something very helpful you can do for me: post a comment, or send a tweet, asking them to play Airships: Conquer the Skies. If they can see there's an audience for the game, they may have a look.

In the meantime, I'll be over here making the game better. :)

After five years of development, Airships: Conquer the Skies is out!

It started as a quick prototype inspired by FTL and Cortex Command, and was rapidly met with a lot of interest. So I... kind of kept working at it, and along the way it acquired a community, mod support, a soundtrack, landships, tentacles, and more.

And speaking of this community, I am immensely grateful for it. You've helped me with finding bugs, making suggestions, creating mods, but seeing people enjoy the game has also just been a huge morale booster.

So, what's next? Well, because no software is ever bug-free, I'm sure there will be a whole bunch of patches. I also ask you to be patient with me - if a lot of people buy the game, a lot of people will have questions at the same time.

There's still some bits of content I'd like to add, too. Beyond that, I have plans and prototypes for the next game...

It's the day before the release!

I've pushed some final fixes and improvements over the last few days: editor performance, better support for saving and loading files with Chinese letters in, and updated missions. The 1.0 version will not really be any different gameplay-wise, but it *will* feature five new tracks by Curtis Schweitzer.

So now I'm running around getting the house in order for the launch. The launch trailer's cut and ready, I have sent out emails and press keys, and I'm about to revamp the store page description.

The Call for GIFs has concluded, and you can see the winners here. (Steam doesn't much like large GIFs, which is why I didn't embed them here.)

See you on the other side!