Airships: Conquer the Skies

A steampunk autoshooter where you fight your way through waves of enemies on your way to a safe harbour. Destroy your foes, harvest wreckage, and upgrade your ship.

Press Info & Discord

The heroes introduced in the Heroes & Villains DLC can be modded, changing them or adding new ones.

You can download a simple example mod here, for you to study and modify. You can also look at the already existing heroes in data/crossplay/heroes/HeroType. You can probably figure things out just from that.

The rest of this post attempts to document everything exhaustively

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.

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.

Today's DLC preview is about Vex, 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.

So the other day we looked at Commander Bertelli, an airship captain. Today it's the turn of Viviane Garcia, a city governor and ardent socialite.

Heroes & Villains, the upcoming DLC for Airships: Conquer the Skies, will introduce captains and governors with special abilities. Today we're having an in-depth look at Commander Bertelli.

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

Special eras are one of the features that I introduced in the co-op and conquest update in August. These work by temporarily changing the rules of the game, and may also have a victory condition, where an empire can be rewarded for ending the era early.

Like pretty much everything in the game, these are data-driven, so you can add new ones by modding. Here's how.

Here's a quick tutorial on how to mod a new city upgrade into Airships - a Workhouse, which increases city industry but also raises unrest.

Nearly all of the data in Airships: Conquer the Skies can be modded, and modders have created some excellent additions to the game. I want to encourage you to try modding too, so here is a detailed guide.

If you have any questions about modding, it's worth joining the Discord, where you can find helpful, seasoned modders. You can also contact me directly with any questions. If you get stuck, you can even send me the mod you're working on and ask me to help you.

To learn how to mod, you can read this guide, watch this video, or if you just need a starting point and are happy to explore on your own, here's the very very short version:

An in-depth guide to how modding works in Airships, and how to create a mod that adds a new module.

Plus a surprise feature.

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

As previously mentioned, I really enjoy the history blog ACOUP. One of the things it's brought up recently is the difference between strategy, operations, and tactics in war. I want to talk about these in terms of how they map onto computer games, including mine.

This is an in-depth tutorial for newcomers to modding. We are going to make a simple mod that adds a new kind of enemy to spawn in strategic mode, a peasant uprising. You need no graphical skills for this one.

I'm now working on the AI for the upcoming diplomacy features. I've already implemented the diplomacy systems themselves: what war and peace mean, the ability to negotiate agreements and send ultimatums, and so on. But of course AI empires need to be able to interact with these systems: responding to players' diplomatic offers and making their own, and also conducting diplomacy between themselves.

Well, looks like you all really enjoyed this years April fools for Airships, which introduced a set of in-game ads for a variety of strange and frightening products and services. While April 1 has passed, by popular request, the ads will resurface occasionally in loading screens.

If you missed them, here's all the ads, plus some commentary:

Airships: Conquer the Skies is now ad-supported, placing tasteful and unobtrusive ads in a variety of carefully chosen locations.

I'm working on an entirely new system for saving and syncing conquest games. It's currently in beta, and it's not certain that it will make it into the game yet, but I thought you might enjoy a dive into the why and how of it.

An Airships Lore Dump

Seven years ago, I started working on a simple game about building airships and blowing them up again. Over time, it became definitely not simple, and I'm very proud to announce that it's now sold 100'000 copies!