Airships: Conquer the Skies

Update 1.0.18.3 (27 October 2020)

I've completely reworked the conquest mode victory and defeat screens. There are now pretty new artworks courtesy of Karina, and a set of graphs and replays.

There is now a calendar. Research, construction, and city takeovers now show how long they will take. The calendar is moddable, and different for cultist empires.

There are also seasons now, affecting the kind of weather you get.

Fixes

• Injured crew now have visible wounds.
• Injured crew no longer get up to flinch when they are hit.
• Injured crew no longer change into an air sailor outfit when they are picked up.
• Game logs older than 30 days are now automatically deleted to save your disk from filling up.
• Particles now obey the combat speed rather than always moving at the same speed.
• Harpoons no longer produce a disappointed message that they didn't penetrate heavy armour.
• Recordings of combats run at fractional speeds may still diverge, but no longer complain about it.
• Fixed a physics exploit that allowed landships to fly. Thanks kouwei32 for the detailed report, including a mission demonstrating the exploit.
• The industrial production bonus from the bee heraldic charge now actually works. This would be less embarassing if I didn't make the exact same mistake for the scales heraldic charge, which also was non-operational for a long time. Oh well.

Community-sourced Balance Changes

• Stone wall blast damage absorb 2 -> 4
• Brick wall blast damage absorb 0 -> 2
• Brick wall piercing damage absorb 0 -> 1
• Dragon rider cost 3000 -> 2000
• Grenade damage 30 -> 20 but +5 with advanced explosives
• Guided missile explode damage 500 -> 250
• Biplane, triplane and bomber costs 300 -> 200 (but not torpedo bomber)
• Monocoque construction now reduces plane maintenance cost by half

Clarifications

• Guided missile explode damage refers to the damage caused by the module exploding, not the damage the weapon does.
• Game logs are technical files used for bug fixing. They're not your saves. Your saves are safe.

1.0.18.3.1 Hotfix AKA Let's Do The Time Warp Again

• Fixed crash in conquest main map when sending fleets.
• +5 damage bonus to grenades from advanced explosives now actually works.
• Days are twice as long now.

Update 1.0.18 (05 July 2020)

New Modules:

• Command Centre: Massive bridge with an additional +30% command points generated for all ships in the fleet.
• Observation Dome: Upgrade to the crow's nest, +15% accuracy instead of +10%, and more HP.
• Aircraft Command Deck: Triples the speed at which planes can be launched. Allows for more detailed commands to be issued to the planes launched by this ship.
• Aircraft Maintenance Bay: Doubles aircraft repair speed and makes rearming 25% faster. (All planes now need to return home every once in a while to stock up on ammo.)
• Guided Missile: Massive high-tech guided missile that actively seeks out targets. Does a lot of splash damage, uses a lot of ammo, takes a long time to reload.
• Kinetic Bomb, AKA a rock you can drop on your enemies. Eventually evolves to a metal teardrop with fins you can drop on your enemies.
• Biplane hook for attaching biplanes to the underside of ships.
• One-use versions of rockets, massive rockets, and torpedoes.

Improvements:

• You can now see aerial torpedoes and guided missiles being assembled bit-by-bit as ammo for them arrives.
• Option for dyslexic-friendly font in the settings.
• Cultist crew now have some special shouts more appropriate to their cultist nature.
• Modules that provide a ship-wide bonus, like telescopes, now specify which modules their bonus stacks with.
• Modules and armours now tell you which mod they're from.
• AI no longer tries to outmanoeuvre faster ships.
• Explosion damage overlay now uses same code as explosions to be accurate, and supports hovering over specific modules to see just the damage they do.
• Four new sets of AI ships by superieurerobot, Orang, h, and me.

Bug fixes:

• Desync at start of MP game should no longer happen.
• At least one case of boarders just kind of jumping to their deaths is fixed.
• Entirely new logic for deciding whether a ship/building will survive a fight. This should hopefully get rid of "ghost fleets" of grounded airships and other issues like that.
• When you bury grass with stuff (like ruins, logs, etc) on it, it now converts into normal soil.
• More helpful message when mods are missing when loading a replay.
• Feedback input field is now multi-line, so you can hit enter without submitting feedback early.
• Custom charges now render correctly in counterchanged and dimidiated coats of arms.
• Particles no longer adhere to dragonriders and some other monsters.

Balance:

• Heavy wooden armour: Blast absorb 4 -> 6, Piercing absorb 9 -> 12
• Steel wall: HP 27 -> 36
• Turtle shell armour: HP 45 -> 60
• Aerial charges: HP 80 -> 100
• Suspendium Ray: +50% damage
• Pressurised Suspendium Tank: Lift 900 -> 1200

Modding:

• Crew shouts are now moddable. Shouts are now loadables like everything else.
• You can add guidance systems to your weapons. See GUIDED_MISSILE.json for an example.
• Support for non-1024px sprite sheets is even better now, might actually work, you never know.
• You can now specify that the barrel of a weapon should not be displayed (see ROCKETS.json) or even a whole set of stages for how the barrel changes as it's loaded. (See GUIDED_MISSILE.json.)
• Use "canResupplyInCombat": false to make a module unable to be resupplied with ammo or coal.

Known issues:

• Tech tree rendering does bad stuff with confusingly overlapping dependency lines.
• Landship ramming AI is broken.

Update 1.0.17.2 (05 July 2020)

There is now a fancier system for choosing the screen resolution and window size for the game.

You can now place and remove windows.

Update 1.0.5 (02 November 2018)

I bring you a seasonally appropriate monstrous update!
Gargoyles have started to nest in abandoned churches and factories throughout the land. These aerial predators nest in large swarms and defend their nests with acid spit.
What's more, strange giant red disks have been spotted hovering above the landscape, exuding a noxious yellow gas that is causing sickness and suffocation.
Defeating monsters can offer a new type of reward, a sudden leap ahead in your research. And with the new and improved Monster Hunter heraldic charge, you get one and a half times the research and money from defeating any biological monster.
Finally, there's also some nice new decorative windows you can use, and for modders, the ability to use frame-based animations instead of skeletal animations for crew.

Patch 10.0.3 (7th August 2018)

• Explosions
• Free-form ship design where you're not limited to some fixed layout
• Historically authentic heraldry
• Dragon taming
• Giant sky squid that eat your crew
• Grappling hooks
• Giant land-walkers
• An in-game editor for challenge missions
• A combat replay system that lets you re-enter the fight on either side
• Multiplayer map conquest
• Extensive modding support with more than a hundred mods, adding a huge number of extra modules and other things
• Explosions
• From now until release, I'll be concentrating on improving conquest mode and the game tutorial. After, I will of course continue supporting the game with bug fixes, balance patches, and user interface improvements.

Patch 9.8.2.2 (29 June 2018)

• Fixed a lighting error on turrets.
• You can now use the arrow keys and cursor to change the insertion point in text fields.
• Clearer indicator for which modules are disconnected.

Patch 9.8.1.5 (07 June 2018)

• There's a problem on some graphics cards with the new flags code. I'm still working on fixing it, but I've made it so that the rest of the graphics draw properly if you're affected.
• Added a 1x1 inert filler block.
• Fixed some crashes.
• Armour masks now work with mods.
• Combat replays are now more visible.
• Some more on combat replays and GIF creation soon..

Patch 9.7.2 (20 April 2018)

• Redid a bunch of ship editor graphics and displays to make things (hopefully) clearer.
• 64-bit Linux users (most of them, I'd guess) can now use the bundled Java in the game. So if you've been selecting "Launch with System Java" all this time, try the default launch option.
• Greatly reduced the frequency of dragon attacks in conquest mode. Do note that the correct way to deal with elder dragons is to shoot them before they grow that big.
• Increased rocket reload time and decreased giant rocket splash radius.
• Fixed a bunch of crashes mostly related to loading conquest games.
• Some tutorial message fixes.

Patch 9.7.1 (01 March 2018)

• Version 9.7.1 fixes a few crashes and introduces three massive new weapons

Patch 9.6.2 (12th January 2018)

• There can now only be one Pirate King and Elder Dragon in a game at any given time, and they take longer to spawn.
• The AI can choose to stand aside and let pirates and dragons plunder its city rather than lose its fleet in a hopeless defense.
• The MP overlay now shows the most recent chat message next to the number of people online.
• The grand ram now renders correctly on enemy ships when zoomed out.
• The game now tells you when a save failed due to disk space issues.
• Fixed a playback divergence issue caused by ramming tree trunks.
• Made clicks and beeps obey the volume settings.
• Fixed various rare crash bugs.

Patch 9.6.1 (07 December 2017)

• Move troops commands work again
• Fixed rare crash when AI uses reserves in combat
• Hitting space now toggles between stop and the most recent combat speed, instead of stop and 1x speed

Patch 9.5.2 (27th November 2017)

• Fixes a problem with massive lag in multiplayer games.

Patch 9.5.1 (16th November 2017)

• Increased rifle damage from 4 to 5 but decreased clip size to 20.
• Upgrading monster nests now keep their fleet and coat of arms.
• Having lots of monster nests no longer causes performance problems.
• Fixed pirate king income and missing upgrade warning message.
• Fixed weird stone guardian shot display.
• Fixed inability to design ships from defences.
• Fixed incorrect width of city menu when building things.
• Raid progress bar no longer overflows.
• Raid panel no longer hides weather info icons.
• Fixed incorrect reference to grenades in German crew shouts.
• Stopped particles stuck on ships from vibrating weirdly.
• Fixed scroll wheel hot areas for editor and ships list.

Patch 9.5 (06 November 2017)

New Monsters

Turtledoves - You have probably seen these float past in the background. It's frankly unkind to call these creatures monsters. They're peaceful and mostly harmless. You can simply let them be, or you can hunt them for their meat and shells.
Aerial Jellies - The giant, flying version of a Portuguese Man o'War. This one has a lot of tentacles and will rapidly devour your crew.
Cultists - These questionable clerics set up temples in remote regions and acquire followers with promises of a new morality, unshackled from common mores. Plus, they practice magic, which while rare, turns out to be real and very dangerous.
Stone Guardians - Gigantic animated stone statues that stand watch over certain sites. Are they protecting treasure or ritual sites? They come in a huge array of shapes and project glowing orbs of magical energy to pulverize your fleet.

New construction options

• Shell Armour - Made from the remains of those poor turtledoves you hunted. It makes your ships float better.
• Acid Spitter - Created by harvesting the acid produced by giant spiders or other... certain rare creatures. A short-range armour-penetrating weapon.

To round it off, as usual, there's a bunch of bug fixes and performance improvements. And with that, we leave the dev 9 development cycle behind and get started on dev 10, focusing on strategic conquest.

Patch 9.4.1 (18th October 2017)

• Fixed missing explosion overlay tooltip and repair ship text.
• Explosion overlay uses new explosion damage calculations.
• Zoom to fit shortcut key has been removed to no longer conflict with undo.
• Errors and warnings now move out of the way of the overlay chooser.

• Can now delete files in subfolders.

Patch 9.4 (16 October 2017)

• Folder support for ship designs and save games.
• Build queues for ships and buildings.
• You no longer get the cost of your ship refunded when it's finished building!
• Fixed crash when loading modded strategic game.

Patch 9.2.4 (15 September 2017)

• Rewrote network code to be faster and more reliable. The new network system connects to a separate server, and the old one will be shut down in a while.
• Reintroduced the multiplayer overlay. You can now seamlessly chat with other players in the multiplayer lobby while playing single-player games, designing ships, and so on.
• Timestamps for messages.
• Recent chat history when logging into the multiplayer lobby.
• Combat playback speed adjusts dynamically to keep the game running smoothly and lag at acceptable levels.
• The game now runs in the background, so you should be able to alt-tab away and have multiplayer chat, etc continue working.
• Prevented undo handling from eating up all the RAM and crashing the game.
• Fixed issue where ships would be non-loadable when they were made with a mod that uses custom bonuses.
• Prettier Suspendium chambers.
• Game stutters way less after big explosions

Patch 9.2.3 (03 August 2017)

• Fixed incorrect memory warnings.
• Can discard ships in-flight if needed to eg get rid of landships that block the fleet from moving.
• F2 now properly hides multiplayer chat.
• Prevented "AI uses player ship designs" feature from using lots of memory.
• Explanation that your registered coat of arms has no bonus.

Patch 9.2.2 (19th July 2017)

• Massively reduced memory use for multiplayer battles.
• Removed 50000 and 100000 points options from multiplayer. Added 20000 option.
• Removed multiplayer chat overlay. It was badly written and caused crashes. A replacement will arrive in a future update.
• Reduced Aerial Hussar hit points.

Patch 9.2 (07th July 2017)

After a record number of beta iterations, Airships v9.2 is out! It introduces small flying units and troops:

• Air Hussars, small one-person airships launched from a Hussar Bay. They're strong against light- to mid armoured ships that lack anti-unit weapons (see above) but are very vulnerable to anti-unit weapons and planes.
• Triplanes, fast-moving heavier than air flying machines. Strong against light-armoured ships, and a bit better at dodging anti-unit weapons.
• Biplanes, light planes that move very fast and are excellent at shooting down other small units like Air Hussars, Triplanes or boarders. Quite hard to hit, but their guns are pretty harmless against decent armour.
• Bombers, heavy planes suitable for attacking ships and buildings. Vulnerable to flak fire and smaller fliers.
• Air Dragoons, boarding troops equipped with a Suspendium-based float harness. Unlike Marines and Grenadiers, no careful positioning is needed to board enemy ships, as they can just fly over, but they're fairly expensive for their boarding strength.
• To compensate for these new threats, small ship-based weapons like rifles and gatling guns are now able to directly shoot down small flying units and troops. This also allows ships to better defend themselves against existing boarding troops like marines.

9.2 also introduces two new monster types using the same code as the dragoons: clockwork wasps and giant bees. You can read about them in the new bestiary pages:

http://zarkonnen.com/airships/bestiary_clockwork_wasps

http://zarkonnen.com/airships/bestiary_giant_bees

• In an ongoing effort to make it easier for people to find others to fight against in multiplayer, 9.2 introduces regular multiplayer hours, one-hour global time segments where people are encouraged to go into the MP lobby and find someone to fight against. I will be present in those times as much as possible, so if nothing else, you can fight against me.
• Other improvements include various bugfixes and balance changes, massive performance and pathing improvements for boarding troops, and a rewritten audio system.
• What's next? I'm planning on two more 9.x releases. The first one will tackle some of long-running user experience issues and finally make explosions behave more realistically. The second one will round out the bestiary of monsters, finally making use of the Sky Kraken and introducing some other menaces like cultists.

• Then it's on to version 10, the final major development cycle before the release! Version 10 will focus on improvements to strategic conquest mode. And then - to victory!

Patch 9.1.1 (28th March 2017)

• New audio system: sounds loop better, move around better, and can shift in volume and pitch. (Note to modders: this means you have to update how sounds for engines and Suspendium chambers are specified, sorry.)
• Reworked the way modules catch fire. Small arms are no longer much better at causing fires than big ones.
• Reworked the way fire spreads. Fire is now much more likely to spread between modules that are connected by a door.
• More messages pop up in the bottom left to inform you of various things like incoming torpedoes and fog.
• Added option for fullscreen window mode in the resolution settings.
• Button for disabling all mods at once.
• Dragon fire arc increased from 60 to 90 degrees.
• Heavy cannon reload time decreased from 8 to 6 seconds.
• Collisions between big ships do more damage.
• Night is a bit less dark yet.
• Saved combats now store the mods the combat used. Opening a combat will load in the correct mods.
• Brigands and mad scientists no longer spawn in road-less nest locations.
• Fixed some crashes and improved some minor GUI stuff.
• There are now instructions in the install directory for running your own multiplayer server.

Patch 9.1 (13th March 2017)

GUI Features

• GUI scaling: The game's user interface will now pick from three different sizes based on the size of the screen or window. You can also override the automatic scaling in the settings.
• Scroll bars now have scroll thumbs that indicate the visible area.
• More clever module search in the editor. Search using multiple words or by initialism, e.g "hea ca" or "hc" for Heavy Cannon.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed crew job assignment bug that causes crew to repeatedly pick up and then abandon ammo and coal jobs.
• Fixed lighting system bug if screen was resized mid-game.
• You can now set a custom multiplayer server address in launch_settings.json.

Modding

• Difficulty levels and map sizes are now moddable. Note that super-huge maps may require very powerful computers!
• Removing modules with mods once again works, even if they're referenced by ConstructionAffinities.

Balancing

• Grapeshot cannons are slightly more accurate.

Performance

• Approximately 20% CPU performance improvement for combats.
• Up to quadruple CPU performance improvement in very large battles versus AI opponents.