Airships: Conquer the Skies
TactiCon Stream (2)
Tacticon! 40% off! More DLC Teasers!
On Friday we'll get Commander Bertelli, a fresh-faced and proud officer.
On Saturday, it's Viviane Garcia's turn - a powerful socialite that can rise to even greater fame.
And on Sunday, we have Vex, who will have your face eaten by gargoyles if you annoy them.
Finally, Sassy Gamers have just posted a detailed interview with me, touching on game development advice, inspirations, future plans, and why I'd bring a magic carpet on a road trip.
So check out Airships if you haven't already, and wishlist Heroes & Villains, and I'll see you tomorrow.
Version 1.1.8
(If you have any particular requests/complaints/questions about modding, let me know!)
- AI is now more likely to enter defensive pacts if it's adjacent to powerful neighbours, but otherwise less likely.
- AI generally bothers you a bit less with diplomacy offers.
- AI does spy actions less often, based on difficulty level.
- It's a bit easier again to demand territory in an ultimatum.
- Added some diplomacy advice loading quotes.
- Added smaller variant of the Suspendium Disruptor.
- AI fleets are now uploaded tagged as "Fleets" rather than "Mods", and volunteers and I will work to re-tag existing fleets, so mods are easier to find.
Example diplomacy advice
Version 1.1.7
- Made AI less likely to break treaties, less likely to ask for unfavourable territory trades, and less likely to do mega-alliances/pact networks. This does mean that if your current game has a mega-alliance, this patch may cause it to break up.
- Autarky now provides +15% spy defence as well as +5% town and city income. Free press research bonus raised from 10% to 15%.
- Diplomatic offer editor now copes better with long line items.
- More/better desync checks and logging.
- To avoid desyncs, the game will now refuse to use mods with missing ship designs in multiplayer.
- Evened out slope HP and height.
- Suspendium Disruptor chimney now recolorable.
Health update: Feeling pretty good, still a bit tired. Doing my exercises, eating my veggies.
Version 1.1.6
- Increased unrest benefits and penalties from reputation.
- Post-game stats now include a graph of reputation.
- Can no longer intercept and fight allied fleets without declaring war.
- AI no longer asks you to help besiege a city using a fleet consisting of a single supply ship.
- AI should no longer ask for your help to besiege a city and then get cold feet and turn its fleet around.
- Editing an AI offer to include a payment now works.
- Stopped ships with lots of sails from constantly emitting sail flap sounds.
- Giant spiders no longer explode when killed.
- The E/I keys now re-hide empire stats/diplomacy as well as showing them.
- Gaining a tech that's in your research queue now removes it from the queue so it doesn't get re-researched.
- If you have enqueued a non-default choice tech (eg Free Press) and then also enqueue a tech that has that as a prerequisite (eg Bureaucracy), the game will no longer incorrectly enqueue the default choice (eg Surveillance State) as well.
Version 1.1.5.1
Version 1.1.5
- AI control is now available in all combat modes, including conquest, multiplayer, and missions.
- Fixed bug where crew would get caught in a loop of alternating between manning sickbay and fetching wounded for the sickbay.
- Visiting bees or wasps with the same ship a second time no longer prevents the nest from launching its flyers.
- After an intercept, your fleet must now return to a port rather than being able to do another intercept immediately, to prevent players from repeatedly re-intercepting and fleeing from the same fleet.
- When fleeing from being intercepted, the game now informs you that you will lose your whole fleet.
- Waves in Per Fess heraldry layout are now displayed correctly.
- The game now knows the plural of "worm eye".
- Limping back now displays accurate travel time.
- Zoom in/out keys are now remappable.
- AI less likely to flood the player with low chance of success spy actions.
- AI less likely to diplomatically interact with non-adjacent empires.
- Cleaned up duplicate English translation keys.
- Fixed some minor/rare crashes and GUI problems.
Health is slowly improving. Work on Heroes and Villains proceeds. All is well.
Health Update and Other News
Of course that does mean that the Heroes & Villains DLC will be delayed. But I was intentionally vague with the promised release date, exactly because with a solo dev, random events can cause delays. So the promised release date hasn't changed - it's still sometime in 2023.
In other news, I am happy to report that the next AMD driver update should contain a fix for the problems in Airships from their end as well. If you continue experiencing graphical problems, do let me know.
Also, there's been a report that the antivirus software MalwareBytes might be causing the game to crash. If the game is crashing to desktop with no error message, do check if your antivirus software might be killing it off. False positives do happen on occasion.
Development on Heroes & Villains was going well before the whole heart attack thing. I was working on diplomatic incidents, and there should be about 40 different ones in the game, all of them involving an interaction - a crisis or opportunity - between two empires.
I also plan to write a few dev blog posts soon, about the details of the AMD bug, and about map generation, which should hopefully be interesting.
For now, I leave you with another three hero / villain portraits:
Version 1.1.4 - AMD Fix
Note that this fix is really a workaround for a bug (or multiple bugs) in the AMD driver. I'm talking to AMD as well and hope they'll eventually resolve it on their end.
DLC Announcement: Heroes & Villains
In Heroes & Villains, you can recruit ship captains and city governors to your cause.
Captains improve your ships' performance, and can use their abilities to turn the tide of battle. You can outflank enemy ships, cripple engines, create smokescreens, and more. Some captains also have unnatural powers that let them control the weather, confuse your enemies, or even raise the dead.
Governors can be assigned to cities to reduce unrest and increase productivity. Some of them can also issue temporary edicts such as declaring martial law, hosting a masked ball, or using the citizens for gruesome experiments. Others can get rid of monsters or pirates for you. All for a price.
Captains and governors react to events and your actions. A peace-loving governor may quit if he sees you commit one too many war crimes, whereas a researcher can gain experience from dissecting the monsters you kill. As time goes on they can change - for better or worse - and a few of them can become famous enough to re-unite the warring city-states, providing a new path to victory.
As for your crew, assuming they don't get killed in battle, they can gain experience, especially if trained by a suitable commander.
Finally, your realm can become entangled in various incidents that require you to determine - or guess at - what your opponents will do. Are they willing to risk war over a trade dispute? Is that charming nobleman an asset or a spy? Is your governor's clever plan going to work? Are you willing to accept the help of heretics?
The character art is created by Samma van Klaarbergen, and the DLC features several new pieces of music by Curtis Schweitzer.
The DLC will release sometime in 2023, and you can wishlist it here now.