• Fixed a major cause of desyncs!
  
• Game setup now remembers hero and incident settings.
  
• Guardian sprites summoned by heroes now go home again after a while.
  
• You no longer get incidents that can spawn heroes when heroes are turned off.
  
• Saved games that use Cataclystic Expansion are now loadable. (I made the game ignore the bit of bad data in the expansion that was causing the problem.)
  
• Surplus guards now distribute themselves across all modules that need guarding, rather than sitting in their barracks.
  
• Increased mechanical tentacle length by 40%.
  
• Modding: ground troops set to shoot airships now do so consistently.

Axe heraldic charge now works.

Crash hotfix patch.

Boarding
Ongoing boarding combats are now auto-resolved when one side leaves/surrenders a combat. You are warned when you are likely to lose ships this way.



Also, Waspkiller Marines have -45% fire rate and the Martial Caste tech now increases Guard HP by 60%.

Heroes
I fixed a bug where some heroes wouldn't be triggered to appear. So now a bunch of rare heroes should be more frequent, and two will finally turn up at all! So you (accidentally) get two new heroes with this update. Also, Dame Laura now retains her Reconstruction ability after upgrading.

New Heraldic Charges
Added 11 new heraldic charges:


Axe: -30% Airship maintenance, no local defence budget


Bridge: +80% Resupply speed


Castle: -20% Building cost, double local defence budget


Effigy: Quadruple chance for enemy ships to catch fire


Grappling Hook: +60% Grenadier HP, grenadier tech


Hammer: +75% Steel armour HP


Heart: -15 Unrest in all towns and cities


Lighthouse: +40% Accuracy


Pillar: Double unrest reduction from high reputation


Scythe: No unrest from brutal takeovers


Winged Wheel: -30% Landship cost, double landship map speed

Steam Rich Presence
Finally, the game now also shows your current activity to your friends on Steam. You can also turn that off in the settings if you need to for some reason.

I am very pleased to announce that the two premier side-view killing machine construction games on Steam have teamed up for a bundle!

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/59685/Forts_x_Airships_Conquer_the_Skies/

The Forts and Airships communities have been sufficiently entwined for years such that there's an entire long-running Forts mod called Fortships: Conquer the Skies. We got to talking via the medium of digital video communications (probably a kind of sorcery created by worm eye cultists) and have agreed to combine forces.

Fixed a desync bug.

Fixed a crash when looking at the settings tab on a loaded game.

Transferring money in diplomacy now has a stronger effect on the AI, but the AI is much less willing to give you money.

When making a diplomatic offer, the AI will check if it's willing to give you some money along with it, and automatically add the money. So you no longer have to edit each diplomatic offer to make sure you get that extra bit of money.



If your reputation is very low, the AI is less interested in getting tribute from you, as it doesn't believe you'll honour the deal. The same applies to a lesser degree to trade and research treaties.

You can now save medal designs in a persistent medal library:



You can now set the map generation seed in single and multiplayer conquest games. Newly created games now also show in the settings tab what seed was used. This means that if you find a nice-looking map, you can reuse it. Make sure to use the same settings for map size, land coverage, monsters, etc.



Finally: Bees, aerial dragoons, and other flying boarders will now pick a new target to board when their original target is no longer available. And the moon disk now takes less damage from ramming but has fewer HP overall.

• Fixed a crash caused by looking at a map overlay from the perspective of an empire that disappears.
  
• Added more logging for diagnosing desyncs.

I just released a major content update for Airships: Lost Flotilla, the sister game to Conquer the Skies. It's basically all the stuff I wanted to add after releasing the game. Do check it out - it's also 30% off at the moment.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2858150/view/669466707009470661