Airships: Conquer the Skies

There’s a specific kind of game that could only come from one person refusing to let go of an idea. Airships: Conquer the Skies is that game. David Stark — who publishes as Zarkonnen — started this thing in Early Access and didn’t call it finished until 16 August 2018, shipping on Steam for Windows, macOS, and Linux at $12.49. The result is a steampunk construction-and-tactics title that occupies a strange, mostly empty corner of the market: it’s not a builder, not quite a wargame, and it refuses to abstract away the parts most games would happily hide behind a stat sheet.

The pitch is simple. You build flying warships in a side-on cutaway view, bolting modules together like a mad engineer with a budget and a grudge — guns, armor plating, engines, propellers, crew quarters, and equipment strange enough to require its own vocabulary. Then you send them up and watch what happens. What separates this from a thousand other “design your ship” games is that the cutaway isn’t a UI convenience. It’s the entire point. Every deck you draw is a space real crew members will walk through, and every gap in your armor is a hole something can fly into.

Market positioning is where it gets interesting. Airships sits in the lineage of Space Engineers, FTL, and the old Sid Meier’s Pirates! school of tactical spectacle, but it doesn’t feel derivative of any of them. It’s a niche product that found its audience and kept them — a game built to be finished and then replayed, not sampled and shelved.

Stark’s continued presence is part of the appeal. His responsiveness across years of updates has earned goodwill rather than purchased it. Solo development usually means compromise somewhere. Here, the compromises are visible — but they’re not where you’d expect.

• Modular Ship Construction: Over 100 modules assembled in a cutaway cross-section, with near-endless configurations. Armor thickness, weapon placement, engine loadout, and internal layout are all yours to get wrong.
• Crew Simulation: Individual sailors run between stations to load cannons, fight fires, and patch breaches. Killing a gun crew is as tactically valuable as punching through the hull — sometimes more.
• Destructible Everything: Ships and terrain burn, explode, snap apart, and fall out of the sky. Structural failure is simulated, not scripted.
• Three Modes: Standalone custom missions, a city-by-city conquest campaign, and cross-platform online/LAN multiplayer.
• A Bestiary With Teeth: Giant aerial kraken, fleshcracker mechs, venomous spiders, clockwork wasps. The enemies are monsters and machines with their own attack patterns, not rival fleets with different paint jobs.
• Workshop, Achievements, Localization: Steam Workshop support, 32 achievements, and seven languages.

The Design Loop

The core loop is build, fight, learn, rebuild — and it works because the feedback is legible. Most strategy games punish you with a number. Airships punishes you with a visible cause. Your ship goes down because the ammunition magazine was one tile from the outer hull and a lucky shot found it. You watch it happen. You know exactly which decision killed you, and you know exactly which wall to move.

That legibility is the game’s central design achievement. The cutaway view turns a systems simulation into something you read like a diagram, and it means the learning curve is steep but never opaque. The design is easy to learn and difficult to master, and for the right reasons: the rules are simple, but the interactions between them are not.

Crew simulation is where the design justifies its ambition. Sailors aren’t decoration. They’re a resource with pathing, and pathing has consequences. A ship with beautiful gun coverage and a badly designed interior will lose to an uglier vessel where the crew can actually get from the quarters to the guns before the fire spreads. Suddenly you’re thinking about corridors. About redundancy. About whether that second staircase is worth the weight. This is the good stuff — the emergent depth that comes from simulating a thing honestly rather than approximating it.

Combat

Combat operates at a deliberate remove. You issue high-level fleet orders — position here, close to ram, hold range, board — and then you watch your design succeed or fail on its own merits. This is the correct call. Direct control would let a good pilot rescue a bad ship, and that would gut the entire point. By keeping your hands off the wheel, Stark forces the design to be the argument.

It also makes the spectacle land. Two ships grinding into each other while boarding parties spill across the gap, fires race through a hull, and a propeller shears off and takes a gondola with it is a spectacle most tactics games can’t manage. Destruction here isn’t a particle effect. It’s the simulation reaching its conclusion.

Hit registration is the wart. Shots that visually connect but deal no damage are a real problem in a game whose entire credibility rests on the connection between what you see and what happens. It’s not frequent enough to break the experience, but it undermines the one thing Airships absolutely must get right.

The Conquest Problem

Here’s where we have to be blunt. The conquest campaign is the weakest part of the package, and it’s weak in an instructive way. You expand a nation city by city, building infrastructure and fielding fleets. The trouble is that the economy doesn’t reward the building: buildings are underpowered relative to simply capturing enemy capitals, which collapses a strategic layer that should have branches into a single dominant line.

That’s a shame, because the campaign is the frame that gives your ships stakes. When the optimal play is “build one good murder-fleet and take capitals until the map is yours,” the empire-building becomes ceremony. The strategic layer has the skeleton of something better — it just never got the balance pass that the tactical layer clearly received.

Custom missions and multiplayer pick up the slack. Cross-platform online and LAN play means your designs get tested against human ingenuity rather than AI competence, and that’s where the design system reveals its real ceiling. The Workshop keeps the well full.

The pixel art divides people, and both camps have a point. It’s chunky, functional, and unapologetically utilitarian — closer to a technical drawing than to art direction. It’s also the only reasonable choice. A cutaway view showing dozens of individual crew members, module-level damage states, and propagating fire needs to be readable above all else, and readability is exactly what this style delivers. Detractors calling it crude aren’t wrong about the surface. They’re wrong about the priorities.

Where it comes alive is in motion. Fire spreading deck to deck, a hull buckling under sustained fire, a doomed vessel tipping and falling — the animation work carries far more weight than the static screenshots suggest. Anyone judging this from the store page is judging the wrong artifact.

The UI is less defensible. Windows popping out of place and scaling issues in windowed mode are the sort of interface friction a larger team would have sanded off before launch. It’s a solo-dev tell, and it’s the kind of thing players learn to work around rather than something that ruins the game. Annoying, not disqualifying.

Performance is a non-issue by design. A 2D simulation of this scope is light on hardware, which matters more than usual here given how much is being simulated per frame.

This is a mouse-and-keyboard game, and it should never be anything else. The construction interface is a precision tool — you’re placing individual modules on a grid, adjusting armor tile by tile, and the pointer is the only input that makes sense. Any controller adaptation would be a downgrade.

Steam’s contribution is meaningful rather than incidental. Workshop support is the difference between a design game with a fixed shelf life and one with a community-fed pipeline of ships to fight, steal, and improve. The 32 achievements are standard fare. Cross-platform multiplayer across Windows, macOS, and Linux is the underrated feature — a solo dev shipping working cross-platform netcode is not a given, and it means the player base doesn’t fragment into three smaller ones.

Windows is the most polished path, if only by weight of testing hours. Mac and Linux users get the same game with the same UI quirks.

Airships: Conquer the Skies is a game with an unusually clear sense of what it’s about, and it’s willing to be mediocre at the things it doesn’t care about in order to be very good at the thing it does. The ship designer is the product. Everything else — the campaign, the missions, the multiplayer — exists to give your ships somewhere to die.

Judged on that basis, it largely succeeds. There is no other game that makes the internal layout of a fictional flying warship feel like a consequential decision. The flaws are real, though, and they matter: the conquest campaign needed another balance pass it never received, hit registration occasionally lies to you, and the UI has rough edges a QA team would have caught. They don’t touch the core, but they keep the whole from rising above solid.

What Stark built here is a machine for generating specific, memorable failures — and then letting you fix them. That’s worth more than polish, and it’s enough to recommend to anyone whose tastes lean engineering-first.