Airships: Conquer the Skies

A literal blast.
Build intricate airships, defensive structures and giant tanks that are simulated to the extent of pathing the crewmen to carry resources like ammo and water around the structure. Build beds and sickbays, targeting computers that run on coal, enormous single-use rockets, ballistas, mechanical tentacles to rip out enemy crew from other ships, or just giant tank treads that let you run over castles. Even air resistance, weight-to-lift and distance-to-keel are part of ship design. And much more!
Then you fight a realtime, pausable, 2D battle where ships can be riddled with cannon holes, have whole sections broken off, boarded with marines and hijacked. The scale of the conquest game is like a 4X civilization-building game where you take over towns and develop them, conquer enemy cities and engage in diplomacy. You can even risk your fleets against enormous mythological monsters or mad scientists with robot armies.
It's so much fun and well worth the price.

I like this game because you can make cool and normal looking airships, but you can also make the horrors.

Airships: Conquer the Skies is great for a number of reasons:

1. The shipbuilding and design part of the game is very intuitive and well done, with many possible ship designs ranging from little fighters to gigantic flagships spewing rockets and bullets. The ships you use for each play through usually have to be designed for each situation due to rapid changes in resource availability and new research into better ways to kill people, with everything from just dropping rocks to cannons the size of a small apartment to steampunk laser beams , you will always be finding new weapons and other tools to redesign your ships around. This is great because the ship building is arguably the best part of the game and most everything in game revolves around it.

2. The combat is very engaging with fights not being determined by who has the best ship and fleet make-up but also tactics play an important role. you can't just build a giant stack of gigantic city dwarfing destroyers and march them right up to the biggest defensive building on the map, because that's how you get ripped apart by flack cannons. for every fight you have to consider how to best maneuver you ships so all of your weapons can hit them and few of theirs can hit you. beyond staying out of range of enemy fire, you can also command your ships recourse use to an extent, choosing to conserve or quickly rush through ammo depending on the situation. both of these considerations in tactics are amplified by random weather effects and the occasional monster fight, which challenges you to think differently about how you fight, sometimes even requiring a small fleet built just to clear one giant nest in a few of the more end game monster infestations cough cough moon disk cough so the fights never get old because there is no one strategy you can use to triumph over every situation. This is probably further expanded on by the DLC, but I don't have it (yet) so I cant speak on it, but just know you do not need it for the fights to be very varied and fun.

3. The style and art in this game is amazing, and the game does a great job taking advantage of the simplicity of pixel art while also making every bit of the environment, ship, and character design feel detailed and in line with that 1800-1900s brand imperialism, especially with the little details like the sea monsters and blemmyes on the campaign map. The monster design is also great with some of them literally towering over head making all but the biggest of ships look like mere ants in their wake.

the biggest problem I have ever had with the game is during end game fight where some of the AI decide to just spam rifles on their defenses, which can in very very large numbers start to make the game slow down, bu I have never had any problems with crashes and it mostly only slowed down in 3x speed.
Overall, great game, very empire, would recommend.

Re-write of review after playing the game more:
Overall this is a fun little sandbox game, there's plenty of things you can do and quite a few mods you can install to add some extra novelty to the game.
It has pretty simple physics so for the most part it isn't too laggy but large scale battles will sometimes crash when on fastforward mode.
The problem is that there are lots of little annoying flaws that just make certain things really annoying.
The auto-result feature for battles is to provide you with a time-saving way of winning 1 sided battles.
Unfortunately there is a weird bug that causes you to occasionally lose ships. You could send 10 heavily armed ships to take down a single cannon platform, after clicking "Accept automatic result" you have a chance to lose a ship, regardless of its weaponry, size, armour, ceiling or speed.
Ship AI has 0-skill in avoiding flying islands. Treat your ships as if they have to be told how to do everything (cause they do) they will crash into terrain or other friendly ships without a second thought but won't crash into enemies unless you specifically use the "Ram" command.
Weapon balancing is weird, some low level weapons such as grapeshot remain overpowered throughout the whole game whilst the heavy bombard (a late-game weapon) struggles to hit enemy buildings, let alone deal serious damage.
Pirates are extremely irritating, they will sometimes send over a single light ship to "pillage" your town/city,
as you defend from this airship, a bar fills up, indicating how pillaged your town is.
For some reason the pirate airship is allowed to retreat away from defences whilst still pillaging, it can remain completely out of range from serious damage, causing you to lose income in a city for years.
Enemy ships are really cheaty, despite being immobilised, disarmed, having all of the ammo storage destroyed or having no lift, they can somehow retreat from a battle or remain stationary until my ships run out of ammo, causing them to win? If my ships take significant damage it is almost guaranteed they will not leave the battle.
The H&V DLC is fun and worth it but heroes will significantly unbalance the game, it adds a lot of chaos.
There are obviously good aspects too, conquest mode has a neat but simplistic little diplomacy system (oh yeah that is a little broken too though) there are unique monster fights, dynamic weather and time systems during battles that can potentially turn the tides in a 1 sided fight.
There is a multiplayer, it is kinda dead and I have never tried it, but there is one nonetheless.
So yeah, good game, a bit broken but still recommended on sale, pick up the DLC if you want.

At first glance, this might appear highly priced for an otherwise simple indie game. It is anything but. Complex, performance friendly - even addicting. This is easily among my favorite games already, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone on the fence.

In truth i have played for many years..never multiplayer..cant deal with the rudeness of people...not i know in this game but in general ...but this game just keeps giving...I have played since it was in development...lost the plot come back..played again..its the whole package..love it..

I pirated this game but then i bought it cause its so good. only game where i have done that.