I'm somewhat surprised that Airships has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam. I must admit it's very well made for a small indie game, but it's far from perfectly executed.
Airships is primarily a sandbox for designing steampunk airships and pitting them against other airships. There's also landships and bases which use the same parts but different methods of movement. I spent most of my time in a conquer-the-world style scenario mode, which adds a tech tree for unlocking parts and adds bases to fight over that generate income, thus limiting your ship designs. But you really just care about the ships and the combat, and there's quite a few flaws with that part. Allow me to list off some that come to me, in no particular order:
The research is far too slow, taking tens if not hundreds of hours to finish in its entirety. Getting even a single upgrade takes a while, and sometimes gives only one new block. The research tree does not specifically tell you what each node unlocks.
Combat is neither manual nor automatic enough. You can only give rudimentary commands to your ships, being 80% movement, and 15% who to target. The movement is terrible at understanding whether something is in the way, sometimes ramming into stuff, and sometimes stopping even if it wouldn't ram into anything. There's no navigating around obstacles, chained movement commands, no option to follow a target and keep it at range, no way to target specific systems (weapons, crew, repairs, ammo, etc.) on the enemy...
The battle maps are far too small for the epic scale this game promises, and even almost enables. There is no room to manouver or position your ships most of the time, leading to piles of wreckage blocking the way. If larger maps could be combined with autonomous AI (that works better than current enemy AI, which rams into its own units and gets stuck) and larger budgets for designing ships, we could actually get a lot of entertainment value from watching massive fights - not the case right now.
The battles are about twice too fast at normal speed, and about twice too slow at the next slowest, 1/4 speed.
Aside from research not being transparent, a lot of other systems aren't either. How does armor work? How is accuracy calculated over range? How much damage am I actually doing to the enemy? Or how much are they doing to me, for that matter? If I don't know if my weapons scale better or worse over range than the enemy's, I don't get to make a decision of whether to fight up close or far. This isn't just a strategic problem, it's also unfun to not understand what is going on.
And honestly, there's more problems, most related to not enough polish, not necessarily bad ideas.
Overall, I did play Airships for nearly ten hours, definitely proving it has some appeal. But once you build a few cool ships with the parts you have, there isn't too much incentive to build even more, so that part of the game falls off. The overworld RTS game is very slow and bare-bones, so that was never exciting to start with. And finally, the combat despite offering some awe at larger-than-usual scale fights, and watching the dynamic destruction of both fleets, eers more on the frustrating than the fun side for the reasons listed above.
I'm left wondering what could have caused people to like this game so much. Perhaps there is a shortage of games that let you build your own armaments and then offer a meaningful battleground. I can't help but feel that maybe even Gratuitous Space Battles did it better. In any case, I can't recommend a game I didn't ultimately enjoy, so I can't recommend Airships.
