Airships: Conquer the Skies

I came across this on GOG maybe a week ago and resisted buying it for just a few days before giving into the urge. Design your own 'steampunk' airships and send them into battle? Sold!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpKfFgzuWLQ

It reminds me of some of the old-school 90s era games. It lacks polish and has some shortcomings- but what it does well is amazing. I love designing an airship and pitting it against other airships/landships/fortifications, seeing how it performs and then doing iterative redesigns to try and perfect it. The campaign mode is fairly simplistic, but it provides some needed variety and forces you to make "practical" designs- that is, affordable ships that can actually function in battle.

If anyone else is into this, I can share some of my ship designs, etc.

This actually looks really good. Like something made in Windows Paint and then brought to life. Will definitely keep tabs on it as it progresses in development.

I too succumbed to my urge as well and bought it last night. Did the tutorial and made a few ships. Im having an issue with getting coal to my engines and such, I keep losing lift.

Link to ship

Yeah, it looks like your suspendium chambers have no direct route to the coal bunkers. Crew probably has to tote coal throughout most of the ship to get it there- it's running out faster than they can get it there, and you lose lift.

Click the "Overlays" button in design mode. The Path overlay and Coal overlay should make the problem obvious. There's a surprising amount of depth to designs. :yes:

Here's one of my favorite designs. I called it the Overlord - Heavy because the original Overlord was a very fragile zeppelin-type affair. The idea was for it to be a heavy cannon platform that stays high and way back from the thick of battle. When the dust clears, it's supposed to be there to finish off any stragglers and to sit there and pound enemy fortifications into dust.

The first one was only marginally successful because it's suspendium dust envelopes were so prone to puncture and explosion- even at a distance. That eventually led to the "Heavy" variant, which is actually cheaper to build and carries 4 heavy cannon instead of three. It's held aloft by internal compressed suspendium dust tanks, so it uses no coal to stay airborne. It's covered with steel wall plating, with steel armor over the cannon, keel and engines. The rear is all engines, coal, dust tanks, and a 'just in case' gatling gun on the tail. The front is all cannon and ammo stores. On top is the crows nest, bridge, bunks,a repair bay and supply hatches. The bottom has a layer of fire door corridors under the dust tanks just to try to provide another layer of protection.

Attachment 19325

Thanks that helped me fix my coal problem! Ok so Im looking at your ship and it seems kinda light on armament. How does it do in battle?

Remember, those are heavy cannon on the front, not normal cannon. They do 150 piercing damage vs the 40 piercing damage regular cannon do- so the 4 of them are the damage equivalent of 15 cannon. Also it has better punch thru armor and significantly better range.

That said, I intend that ship as almost a "standoff" weapon. I typically place it at the uppermost farthest away corner of the battle space and try to keep it protected so it can just sit there and pound away with those huge cannons. That's also why I wanted the compressed tanks instead of suspendium chambers- I didn't want it to ever lose lift from lack of coal. It's able to stay aloft indefinitely.

Here's another fun one- I call it the Buzzsaw. :beam:
Attachment 19327

It's basically a ramming-type ship and doesn't stand well on its own- but it creates total chaos in a crowded battle space. Enemy ships will do almost anything to get away from it.

I'm currently trying my first large conquest game and it's starting to make me question some of my fleet choices, though. My enemy is coming up with some surprisingly effective ships- I need to cook up a better front-line brawler. I had a Phalanx ship that was very durable, but it would run out of ammo/coal in medium to long battles. I tried to update it with more cannon and ammo... but it seems I traded off durability. Meh. :shrug:

Yeah, the "more coal/ammo" issue is one Im kinda dealing with too. I seem to run out of ammo faster than I would like. Im going to try fort building now, going to load it up with those large cannons and see what I can punch through.

Fortifications are tricky. I built designed a giant citadel call "The Spike" with 3 heavy cannon in front, two in the back, regular cannons, and 5 flack guns on top. It cost about $2600 and I thought it should be darn near impregnable. It's not. :no:

i had an epic battle in my large campaign. It was down to 3 nations left, I was the second largest and getting attacked by the smallest and the biggest. To keep from being worn down, I decided to try to blitz my smaller opponent and knock them out quickly giving me much needed income and allowing me to focus on just one enemy. It worked, but I was losing territory to my bigger neighbor in the mean time. Both our navies were beaten up, but with one enemy gone I concentrated my forces and repaired/rebuilt. They split their navy into two fleets- one stayed at home and the other was trying to conquer my undefended cities. I managed to intercept it and beat it back and it limped back to the same city that their other fleet was stationed. I pooled my ships and attacked.

The carnage was legendary. One of my buzzsaws caused a ship to lose lift and it dropped on top of another ship underneath it- causing them both to smash into the ground and catch fire. A second buzzsaw got behind them and destroyed the engines on another one of their ships and it went down. I had two 'Phalanx' ships that were completely destroyed and in the end, my two Overlords and 1 Hellfire (bomber) were all that were still airborne. As designed, the Overlords finished knocking the downed ships out of service and then destroyed the fortifications- capturing the province. More importantly.... every single enemy airship was destroyed. Their nation was completely defenseless save for a pair of distant landships. I quickly snatched 3 of their provinces before needing to stop to repair/rebuild my navy. I don't think they'll ever be able to fight offensively again. I really wish you could save battle replays.

Before I finish them off though, I noticed some unwelcome dragons had nested near one of my cities.... let's see how tough they are. I also learned giant spiders explode when you ram them. Who knew? :laugh4:

Hellfire Mk2 bomber:
Attachment 19328

What kind of frustrates me is that even with the heaviest armor on the fortresses, normal cannons seem to punch through it rather quickly. Like if I have heavy stone and steel armor, my stuff catches fire annoyingly fast.

EDIT: like this fort I made:

https://i.imgur.com/4TCLc9F.jpg

The issue this fort has is that while its very powerful, about half the time it catches fire and just explodes in a massive explosion. Even with the heaviest armor against normal cannons.

Granted, I think its the number of ammo stores. In the next version I cut the number in half. Tried it again, still blew up. Ended up tossing the design completely.

In the upper right corner there is a warning message "Heavily reduced structural integrity due to gigant(ic size?)" Maybe that explains why it is so fragile, could be too large or so.

I think Husar's probably right. Go to the hitpoints overlay and check how many HPs the different modules have. Then find the room to slap a large (or maybe grand?) keel in there somewhere and see how much the hitpoints go up. I had a similar problem designing a rather large landship. Adding a large keel took it from "significantly" reduced integrity to "slightly" reduced. I've never built anything that rated "heavily" reduced. :sweatdrop:

Also note that the number of Air Sailors says "264 (max 120)". I'm pretty sure 120 is the maximum you can have in the current game. That design recommends 164 crew to staff it, so the fortress is probably underperforming with 120 airsailors. Maybe getting rid of those extra ammo stores helped though.

Yeah I ended up scrapping the whole design. Kinda wish that large designs didnt go up like that, would be cool to make one massive superfortress and have a massive number of enemies thrown at it.

The next best thing, I think, would be to design a series of complementary fortifications all designed to work together with each other.

Also, it turns out keels aren't a thing for buildings, apparently. It'd be nice if they put something in to allow for large buildings not to take such a HP hit. I came up with this, it's pretty formidable but even it is taking a "slight" HP penalty. Even still, it seems to crush any cost equivalent combination of airships/landships I've tried. Bookend it with some Silent Watchers and you've really got something.


Attachment 19330