• Stopped the AI from building landships it doesn't have the tech for.
  
• Flipped AI defensive building the right way around.
  
• Stealing research through espionage now works properly.
  
• New cheat to guarantee 100% spy success.
  
• Grapeshot cannons and bottom turrets now properly affected heavy gunnery bonus.
  
• Fixed display problem with calculation for amount of research points generated.
  
• Fixed display problem with city income calculation.
  
• Correctly named map sizes in German.
  
• Tribute paid is now listed in empire budget.
  
• Negative maintenance from modules and ships is now treated more like proper income. (This is only relevant for mods that add income-generating modules, which stopped working with the big update and should now work again.)
  
• Allow building multiple universities.
  
• Reduced income loss from rare powerful nests. Starting out next to a black dragon nest was a bit too painful.
  
• Ministry of security now decreases unrest by 15 points in all towns and cities instead of 10, is $200 more expensive, and no longer decreases local unrest as well, as that was really confusing.
  
• Spy agency now increases spy network growth speed by 50% instead of 25%.
  
• More error logging to hopefully track down network desyncs.

• Better, more fine-grained volume controls.
  
• Spy infiltration is now half as fast and the AI doesn't constantly do spy actions anymore.
  
• Fixed the Invictus achievement. Note that you'll have to start a new game to get the achievement. Sorry about that.
  
• Show correct travel time for fleets based on which ships are selected.
  
• Desert columns no longer randomly lift entire landships into the sky.
  
• List of bonuses now shown correctly.
  
• City upgrade construction time now displayed correctly.
  
• AI allies no longer take your ships out of the reserve and start giving them commands.
  
• Turtledove armour reward now works.
  
• AI no longer builds multiple monasteries in one place.
  
• Doubled trade treaty income and increased research treaty effect by 50%.
  
• Fixed trade treaty incomes on low difficulties.
  
• Can no longer induce revolt in cities that are still being taken over.
  
• AI now obeys supply limits when travelling to friendly cities.
  
• Unrest from empire size increased by about 25%. Unrest from recent takeover decreased.
  
• Made ages around 40% longer.
  
• Added some missing defense buildings.
  
• Fixed a rare landship map pathing bug.
  
• More work on fixing up desyncs.
  
• Fixed some rare crashes.

• The AI is less likely to accept ultimatums, and very unlikely to accept another ultimatum if it's recently accepted one. This should make it less straightforward to bully yourself to victory.
  
• Losing a city that doesn't have a ritual site no longer cancels the final ritual.
  
• When you get an ultimatum or offer, there is now a button to go to the other empire's capital.
  
• Increased cooldown time of some espionage actions.
  
• Settings now accessible from more places, and settings button is a gear icon instead of the word "Settings".
  
• You can now adjust the tooltip delay in the settings.
  
• Fixed airship command panel positioning when dyslexic fonts are active.
  
• Fixed graphical glitch in dyslexic fonts.
  
• Fixed some multiplayer desyncs.
  
• Fixed some crashes.
  
• Fixed some missing text.
  
• The soundtrack now includes the eight new tracks from the update.

Addendum: Version 1.1.0.4 fixes a performance problem that this update introduced.

• The new achievements now work.
  
• The landscape backdrop now changes properly when you change landscape type in combat setup.
  
• Fixed a number of crashes.
  
• Various small user interface and text fixes.
  
• Mech spiders now have grappling hooks.

There is a known but not yet fixed issue with some people's graphics cards causing crashes. If the game crashes when you go into the editor or game setup, try turning on simple graphics mode. The game will look less pretty, but it should run.

Hey look, the co-op and conquest update is out! This huge update for Airships has been four years in the making, and it's the completion of an eight-year development project.

Headline features are:

Any number of players and AIs can fight on both sides of airship battles. You can set up custom multiplayer battles as well as fight alongside your allies in conquest mode.



Previously, empires were in a state of permanent war. Now there is a detailed system of diplomacy, allowing for non-aggression pacts, defensive pacts, alliances, trade and research treaties, tribute, ceding territory, and more.



You can also send ultimatums to other empires, demanding that they accede to your terms and threatening retaliation otherwise.

The AI personalities can evaluate and send any kind of diplomatic interaction, and there are tooltips that clearly explain their reasoning.

There are no artificial limits on who you can go to war with, but you do have a reputation to consider. A bad reputation can make you the target of glory-seeking empires and weaken your espionage and counter-espionage efforts. And a high enough reputation - and a sizeable territory - can make it possible for you to win by crowning yourself emperor.

You can now upgrade your cities with shipyards to rapidly build fleets, police stations to control unrest, scientific labs, factories, skyscrapers, and more.



And some towns provide unique bonuses from resources such as silk, great forests, and floathoney and special institutions such as the Spire of Learning and the old Imperial Post Office. Depending on your strategy of choice, these towns may be extremely valuable to you.

As the game progresses, your capacity for ruling your empire increases, granting you faster research, more spies, and less unrest - and then a special era comes along that significantly changes the way the game plays. A long, deep winter freezes the land and makes it hard to procure supplies. An age of decadence offers opportunities for raising your reputation and destroying others'. Or a plague breaks out.



Some of these eras can be "won" by an empire, gaining it a massive boost in reputation or other advantages. For example, an age of piety is won by whoever controls all holy sites in the land.

So those are the major features. This update concludes feature development on the game, so after this, I'll be doing bug fixes and balancing, but there won't be any new free content or mechanics in the game.

I will likely do a DLC for the game, but I want to fix the bugs and take some time to rest before I announce anything. :)

Speaking of bugs, if you encounter problems with the game, send me an email or head over to the Discord to report them. We've been beta testing this thing heavily for the past months, but no game is ever bug-free.

At this point I also want to especially thank the game's beta testers, who have found a whole bunch of bugs and some enjoyable exploits, such as "you can just pay everyone to be friends with you and win".

With the feature list for the update known for months and years now, I worried that the release would be a bit anticlimactic, so I snuck in one more big feature: direct control mode.



You can now select a ship, click on the direct control button, and gain fine-grained control of your craft. You can tell your weapons exactly where to fire, your engines whether to go forward, stop, or reverse, and your lift chambers which altitude to maintain. As soon as you leave direct control, your commands are forgotten, and the ship resumes normal operation. This is of course available in both singleplayer and multiplayer. :)

Finally, here's a more or less complete list of other features that I added, though I probably forgot some things:

• Eight new music tracks by renowned musician Curtis Schweitzer
  
• Unrest and supply mechanics
  
• Revamped espionage system
  
• Optional combat autoresolve
  
• Prettier map
  
• New fleet designs contributed by the community
  
• Reactive hint system for conquest
  
• Many more achievements
  
• Updated user interface appearance
  
• Ability to request siege assistance from your allies
  
• New weather and landscape including deserts
  
• New technologies and modules
  
• All translations should be up to date, for once
  
• In-game manual (English only)
  
• Local defense budgets
  
• New heraldic charges and abiilities
  
• Tooltip values now describe what influences them

FYI the co-op and conquest update will release at 7 PM CET today, which is in nine hours.

The reason for the timing is the mysterious internal workings of Steam.

We're now one week away from the co-op and conquest update release!

In a feat of excellent timing, I've spent most of the last three weeks sick with Covid, from which I'm still recovering. Still, the release can go ahead. It's been getting beta tested for the last several months, and I'm confident it's pretty solid by now.

Of course there will be bugs - there always are. If you find one, don't despair, come over to the Discord and report it in the bugs channel, or drop me an email.

I am really excited that you soon all get to play the version I've been working towards for the last four years.

I am happy to announce August 16, 2022 as the definitive release date for the huge free Co-op and Conquest update to Airships: Conquer the Skies.

The update adds co-op airship combat with any number of human and AI players to each side of the fight.



It also massively expands the features of the conquest mode:

A full-featured diplomacy system. The AI takes a "realpolitik" approach, and the system explains in detail why the AI likes or dislikes a diplomatic action. So no AI opponents that hate or love you for no clear reason. Your diplomatic actions also affect your reputation in the world as a whole.

I'm especially pleased with the ultimatum system, where you can send an interaction saying "do this or else I'll do this other thing". This can be "pay me tribute or I declare war" but also more out there things like "upgrade our non-aggression pact pact to a defensive pact or I'll cancel our trade treaty".



You can now upgrade your towns and cities with shipyards, factories, police stations, pleasure palaces, labs, and more. Balance your expenditures between building up your empire and conquering more of it.



There are new systems for logistics and city unrest, as well as a fully rewritten espionage system, a revamped technology tree, and a much prettier new map.

Finally, there are now special eras in conquest that change things up by having special rules. Like an Age of Piety that reduces unrest and gives the players a bunch of holy sites to fight over. Or an Age of Exploration that lets the players send out expeditions to find knowledge and valuables.



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Airships: Conquer the Skies is a real-time strategy game where you build steampunk vehicles and fight with them against other players and weird monsters. It's been around for a number of years and is developed solo by David Stark.

Press Kit

Sorry about that.

The combat AI no longer massively overvalues gatling guns and tries to point them at the enemy to the exclusion of all else.