Airships Conquer the Skies

Airships: Conquer the Skies is a steampunk vehicle-builder and tactical battle game in roughly equal measure. The construction half is the heart of the game — you assemble airships and land vehicles from a long catalogue of modules, choosing weapons, armour types, structural pieces, equipment and resources in combinations that, in practice, never quite stop yielding new viable layouts. Crews scurry through your designs during play, each sailor running their own job, and a well-built ship looks visibly busy even before the first shot.

Combat is fought as a small fleet commander rather than a single-ship pilot. You issue high-level orders — manoeuvre, ram, board, retreat — and the chaos that follows is fully destructible: ships catch fire, structural members snap, modules explode, terrain crumbles, crewmen jump or fall. Enemies range from rival captains to giant aerial kraken, fleshcracker mechs, huge venomous spiders and clockwork wasps, each of which forces a different kind of ship design.

Three modes split the game across distinct play patterns. The mission set is a curated string of fixed scenarios — or your own, built in the same editor; Conquest is a longer-form empire-building campaign with persistent fleets and territorial expansion; and multiplayer (online or LAN) puts your designs directly against another player's. Most of the long-term play happens in the back-and-forth between testing a build in the workshop, getting it shot apart by something unexpected, and rebuilding it with the right counter.