I am very pleased to announce that Heroes & Villains, a DLC for Airships: Conquer the Skies, is now available!



In Heroes & Villains, you can recruit commanders for your airships and governors for your cities, and use their special abilities to conquer the world.



Commanders can outflank enemy ships, supercharge their engines, or repurpose random objects as ammunition. And some commanders are sorcerers who can blind enemies, control the weather, or summon creatures to aid them.



Meanwhile, governors increase the productivity of cities, quiet unrest, and can pronounce edicts and events such as martial law, forced labour, or a fun masked ball.

Based on your actions, these characters can gain experience, gain or lose their loyalty, or become more angry, stressed, insane, powerful, famous. Over time, some will change into different versions of themselves - experienced or embittered or empowered. Disloyal governors can be great liabilities, while some heroes can become famous or magically powerful enough to help you win the game.



Diplomatic incidents can now arise between empires, where you have to decide whether to trust or betray your neighbours. Risk war to burnish your own reputation? Encourage cultists? Fight pirates together? The right answer depends very much on where you are, what you need, and what you know about the other empire.



Ship crew now gain experience with each battle - assuming they survive it, that is. So here's an incentive to keep those little air sailors alive, maybe give them a sickbay, maybe some better armour. Or don't bother - there's always more where they came from.

Also, here's a an extra surprise feature: You can design and award medals to ships based on their experience level. Each medal tier only has a small number of medals, and the medals are permanently lost along with their ships, so make sure you keep your medal-bearing ships alive.



Also note that if you join a multiplayer game, you can use the DLC during the game even if you haven't bought it. I wanted to avoid splitting the player base along DLC lines.

And as always with any big release, there are probably bugs, so if you encounter any problems, please report them on the Steam forums or on Discord, and I'll get to fixing them right away.

And now go enjoy the DLC!



I am also happy to announce that Airships is part of Simfest, the Steam festival celebrating all things related to simulation games. From today through July 24, Airships is 50% off! Do check out Simfest to see a wide variety of the latest and greatest simulation titles, both newly released and coming soon.

Alongside the DLC release, the baseline version of Airships is also getting an update with some new things and rebalancing.

Landships are now available at tier 0, using wheels instead of tracks. Of course, these landships need to be propelled somehow, which is why there's now teams of lizards you can attach to your vehicles. They're not very fast, but they're cheap and work perfectly fine.



The game now supports weapons with arcing ballistic trajectories. Most weapons still have flat trajectories, but grenades, ballistas, and heavy bombards have arced ones. In addition, there's now trebuchets as a tier 0 siege weapon, and mortars, which you get along with cannons.



Some modules got a major redesign, such as imperial cannons, which now do splash damage, acid spitters, which are now rapid fire, and targeting computers that now assist guided missiles.



The weather will now sometimes change during a fight - rain starting or ending, dusk turning into night, dawn into day, and so on. And there's a bunch of performance improvements and bug fixes, including a fix to a desync bug that's been plaguing the game for about a year now.

Here's the complete list of balance changes:

• Imperial Cannon: 400 -> 120 Piercing damage, Added 5m piercing splash radius, 7s -> 9s Reload time
  
• Suspendium Ray: 12 -> 15 Piercing damage
  
• Junk Sails: +50% HP
  
• Acid Spitter: +133% Shot speed, 3s -> 0.35s Reload, added 3.5s clip reload, 3 -> 20 Clip size, 10 -> 8 Blast damage, 8.5m -> 5.7m Blast splash radius, 30 -> 16 Direct damage
  
• Aerial Charges: +45% Shot speed, 3s -> 2s Reload, 1 -> 2 Number of shots
  
• Big Tracks: Added 600 ship HP bonus
  
• Small Tracks: Added 250 ship HP bonus
  
• Bomb Bay: -20% Shot speed, 6s -> 0.6s Reload, 1 -> 3 Clip size, Added 7s clip reload time, -33% Accuracy, 40 -> 30 Blast damage
  
• All cannons: -10% Reload time
  
• Command Centre: 400 -> 250 Cost
  
• Kinetic Bomb AKA Droppy Rock: +40% Shot speed, 2 -> 4 Clip size
  
• Flamethrower: 5 -> 6 Blast damage
  
• Giant Flamethrower: 15 -> 16 Blast damage
  
• Aircraft Command Deck: 500 -> 260 Cost
  
• Gaff Sail: 25 -> 20 Cost
  
• Grapeshot Cannon and Sponson: 8 -> 14 Piercing damage per shot, 28m -> 43m Shoot troops range
  
• Guided Missile: 25s -> 35s (25s with Targeting Computer) Reload, 3x (2x with Targeting Computer) Inaccuracy, 105 -> 90 Blast damage, 13m -> 14m Blast splash radius, 214m -> 285m (186m with Targeting Computer) Minimum range
  
• Hussar Rifle: +10% Accuracy
  
• Large Suspendium Chamber: 240 -> 220 Fire HP, 200 -> 180 Explode HP
  
• Suspendium Cannon: 90 -> 100 Piercing damage, Now obeys fire mode
  
• Targeting Computer: 400 -> 300 Weight, 20s -> 60s Coal reload, 3 -> 2 Crew, improves Guided Missile (see above)
  
• Heavy Bombard: 44 -> 50 Blast damage, +30% Accuracy, Made trajectory ballistic, Added 450m max range, Added 28m max up range, Added 0.7x accuracy multiplier against airships
  
• Ballista: Made trajectory ballistic
  
• Grenades: Made trajectory ballistic
  
• Aerial Hussars: +40% Acceleration
  
• Steel Wall: 36 -> 40 HP, 5 -> 10 Blast damage absorb
  
• Steel Armour: 50 -> 60 HP, 16 -> 22 Blast damage absorb, 6 -> 8 Piercing damage absorb
  
• Heavy Steel Armour: 90 -> 80 HP, 24 -> 30 Blast damage absorb
  
• Brick Wall: 2 -> 4 Blast damage absorb
  
• Stone Wall: 80 -> 85 HP, 4 -> 6 Blast damage absorb
  
• Massive Stone Wall: 130 -> 150 HP, 6 -> 10 Blast damage absorb
  
• Wooden Wall: 24 -> 30 HP, 2 -> Piercing damage absorb
  
• Heavy Wooden Armour: 75 -> 90 HP, 6 -> 8 Blast damage absorb, 12 -> 24 Piercing damage absorb, 12 -> 16 Weight

With Heroes & Villains releasing in one week, here's a post about some of the design decisions I made.

Last year, I taught a class at the Zurich University of the Arts about using game mechanics to tell stories. It was a very small class, and so we spent our time sitting together, playing games, and discussing them. We played Crusader Kings 3, Rimworld, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, and more. I'm not sure if we figured out what was intended to be the core theme of the class, but we did learn a bunch of things about characters in games and procedural narratives.

Conveniently, I then immediately got to apply these things to the design of the Heroes & Villains expansion.

One of the surprising strengths of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, a game about surviving your teenage years on an alien planet, is that its characters are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. It's a game that's meant to be played through repeatedly as you figure out how to achieve your goals, and so you meet the same people again and again. My assumption would have been that you get bored of the characters, but in fact your emotional connection to them deepens with repeated playthroughs.

In comparison, Rimworld has a pretty sophisticated system for generating characters with all kinds of different traits - but because these traits get jumbled up each time you play, repeated playthroughs actually alienate me from the game characters. As I see more and more recombinations - and as people keep on dying from random rabid squirrel attacks - I stop seeing them as people and just see them as collections of traits that are more or less useful.

So for Heroes & Villains, I intentionally chose to go with handcrafted characters - quite a lot of them, more than sixty, but you'll still see them again and again. So that when you see a familiar face pop up, you'll go "oh, it's that guy!"



The second decision I made was to express stories through mechanics as much as possible. Both characters' stories and diplomatic incidents focus on mechanics and tradeoffs rather than having large amounts of flavour text.

This is a response to another game we looked at, Crusader Kings 3, which has elaborately written events with text that I read maybe once, if at all. It's just too much text, and the text is so specific and detailed that reading it actually breaks my suspension of disbelief. Oh, your dog gets lost the same way as the dogs of ten previous rulers?

They're doing their best, pumping the game full of hundreds and thousands of events - but it's a losing battle. To make people notice that there's new events in an update, you need to have a significant proportion of new ones, and so each time you have to add even more for it to be noticeable. I'm one dev. I can't possibly write hundreds of events.

Instead, I concentrated on creating interesting decisions and very little text. Heroes have different stats - Loyalty, Pride, Fear, Rage, Sanity, Stress - depending on what kind of person they are, and your game actions affect those stats. So you have Commander Bertelli, whose pride can overtake his experience and turn him into a jerk, or the Aukhan Band of Brothers, whose oath of brotherhood weakens as your empire enters modernity, or Captain Bui, who is consumed with desire for revenge on one specific empire.



The expansion also adds diplomatic incidents, which are events that happen between two empires. They're prisoner's dilemma type decisions, so you have to take into account the situation both empires are in, and their personality, be they human or AI. Perhaps you can afford to antagonise the other empire. Maybe you desperately want to reduce their reputation. Maybe they have grievances towards you, and this is your chance to get rid of them and avert war.



All together, I made those design decisions to provide interesting gameplay experiences and choices, rather than things you numbly click through. You'll be able to see them in one week, when the expansion comes out!

Fixed the AI incorrectly claiming an ultimatum was a "de facto declaration of war". Fixed some text issues.

I am happy to announce that Airships: Heroes and Villains will release on July 20, 2023. It's the first DLC for the steampunk ship-building strategy game Airships: Conquer the Skies.

In Heroes & Villains, you can recruit commanders for your airships and governors for your cities, and use their special abilities to conquer the world.




Commanders can outflank enemy ships, supercharge their engines, or repurpose random objects as ammunition. And some commanders are sorcerers who can blind enemies, control the weather, or summon creatures to aid them.

Meanwhile, governors increase the productivity of cities, quiet unrest, and can pronounce edicts and events such as martial law, forced labour, or a fun masked ball.

Based on your actions, these characters can gain experience, gain or lose their loyalty, or become more angry, stressed, insane, powerful, famous. Over time, some will change into different versions of themselves - experienced or embittered or empowered. Disloyal governors can be great liabilities, while some heroes can become famous or magically powerful enough to help you win the game.

So you should totally wishlist it.

• AI should now respect minimum interval between spy actions set by difficulty level, ending spy notice spam. (And remember that you can right-click on the notices to dismiss them.)
  
• Having 0 money now halves your research, halves your resupply speed, and imposes a 30% spy defence penalty.
  
• Made tech screen GUI clearer, I hope.
  
• Tech research finished popup now actually tells you the effects of the tech you researched.
  
• Towns and cities disconnected from your capital now have a map icon so it's more visible.
  
• Unrest spy action is harder, but more effective.
  
• Aircraft no longer land on ships that have been taken over by the enemy.
  
• You can no longer trick the diplomacy AI by threatening war so that that it cancels all treaties, and then declaring war anyway, saving yourself the rep loss.
  
• Age of Madness should no longer also spawn all kinds of other monster nests.
  
• Age of Quiet unrest reduction reduced from 20 to 10, and it now also halves resupply speed.
  
• Coronation tooltip indicates how many cities you currently have.
  
• AI control should no longer give orders to direct control ship.

• Updated the Java Runtime Environment to 64-bit for Windows. A 32-bit version is also still available. The switch to 64 bits means that the game can use more memory, which is useful.
  
• Improved performance, especially in combats where ships break into lots of fragments.
  
• Can no longer pointlessly build a second spy academy if one is already being built.
  
• Can no longer use armour replacement to add armour to external modules such as rams.

Edit: The new Windows version has DPI scaling issues on some machines. I'm working on fixing this.

• Massively improved ship editor performance on ships with many modules.
  
• Slightly improved combat performance.
  
• Updated player-created Chinese translation.
  
• Removed the "Launch with System Java" launch option, as it's no longer useful or used by anyone.
  
• Mods are no longer automatically enabled when they're installed. Instead, newly installed mods are listed in the main menu, and you're prompted to enable them in the mod manager. This is to prevent the game from choking on attempting to load dozens of mods. Especially if you installed the game on a new machine, it would try to load every single mod you ever subscribed to.

So yesterday I promised I would show you an actual villain from the upcoming DLC. Here's Gwalo. He makes good money selling human beings, and he's happy to help you.



He slightly raises unrest in the city he's assigned to, but he also increases production by 50%, allowing it to churn out ships much faster.

And if that's too slow, he has a Forced Labour edict, which really speeds up production. It doesn't make your empire look very good, but if it delivers a defensive building in time before an invasion fleet arrives, maybe it's worth it.



And if you don't care about your reputation at all, he's happy to help you make some quick cash by enslaving the local population. There's some long-term consequences, but who cares about those - you have a world to conquer.



He'll become more loyal the more cities you pillage, giving him opportunities for his business, but he rather despises kindness, gentleness, and any kind of scientific or educational endeavour, which he does not understand.

So what does "the empire showing kindness to another" mean? Well, sometimes there are diplomatic incidents - another new feature in the DLC - and sometimes there are opportunity to be kind to another empire, such as rescuing their people from pirates, or giving them food when they're starving. Gwalo really hates it when you do that.



Anyway, that's all from me for TactiCon. I hope you enjoyed the DLC preview, and I'll just ask you one last time - to appease the Gods of Marketing - to wishlist Heroes & Villains.

Today's DLC preview post is about Vex:



Vex is a druid who often appears at the same time as some spiders or gargoyles settling into your territory. They can be hired as an airship captain, providing a number of magical spells:

Sinkhole, which spontaneously produces a massive hole in the ground, causing whatever was standing there to crash down. Great for taking out small buildings or making landships lose their footing.



Crosswinds, which for a time entirely prevents a ship from moving, letting you move your ships into an optimal position.



Air Support, here in the form of a flock of eight gargoyles, which will tear apart the enemy ships with their acid spit.



So what does Vex want from you? It's pretty simple, really: wipe out pirates, mad scientists, cultists, machine cubes, and other such blights upon nature, and leave the animals alone. Even if they're giant animals that like to eat people.

And it won't be as simple as keeping your captains' and governors' loyalty just above zero. Even before they quit, low-loyalty characters can be amenable to persuasion from other empires...

As a design note, there's no magical abilities that do direct damage, because I felt that in a game that already incorporates cannons, the ability to cast fireball wouldn't be all that exciting.

Instead, many magical abilities are about battlefield control, and they're generally "plausibly deniable". Maybe the ground did just give way? Maybe there were some unfortunate winds stopping this ship from moving? Maybe some angry gargoyles just happened to fly past and decided to exclusively attack one side's ships because they smelled wrong?

We're pretty sure that was all Vex, but we can't be certain.

Finally, I realised that I have now shown you three heroes, or at least ambiguous characters. Given that the title of the DLC is Heroes & Villains, I will do one more post tomorrow, showing you a very bad man you might nevertheless want to hire.