First of all, this isn't a highly strategic or intensely tactical game. There is a fleshed-out presence of real-time strategy combat, and a rudimentary overarching campaign, sure, but they are not exactly nail-biting (or at least, they aren't against the AI). The most interesting part of this game is the ship builder, and this is also not particularly engaging from the critical-thinking point of view. The power of a ship being designed is directly proportional to its cost, and while there is a sort of technological hierarchy, designing them isn't much of an engineering challenge since there is only one resource with no hard limits and only minor penalties for inefficiencies. Similarly, there are very few design tradeoffs of significant consequence- some considerations to be made for HP, mass, DPS, and etcetera, but nothing major that makes different ships feel wildly unique.
That all being said, I don't think that the core appeal of Airships: Conquer the Skies comes from its higher level strategic layer, its tactical combat layer, nor its engineering puzzle layer. Instead, I think it comes from the sort of sandbox-experience it provides. The room for creativity is massive, with a robust system for customizing the visual appearance of the designed ships and a variety of flavor bells and widgets. When playing this game and designing ships, the thematic integrity of what I am building is of a much higher concern to me than it's hypothetical resource efficiency. It was a lot of fun connecting pretty-looking tiles together, painting exterior hulls and balloons, and recreating some of my favorite steampunk tropes and vehicles. I had a blast refitting damaged ships and buildings to look like something brand new after they took damage in combat, just because it felt cool to have the patchwork repair aesthetic.
Overall, the ship editor is enough fun to justify purchasing this game and toying with it, if nothing else. The overarching strategic and tactical layer serve to add some semblance of practical significance to the designs, but they aren't extraordinarily appealing by themselves.
That all being said, I don't think that the core appeal of Airships: Conquer the Skies comes from its higher level strategic layer, its tactical combat layer, nor its engineering puzzle layer. Instead, I think it comes from the sort of sandbox-experience it provides. The room for creativity is massive, with a robust system for customizing the visual appearance of the designed ships and a variety of flavor bells and widgets. When playing this game and designing ships, the thematic integrity of what I am building is of a much higher concern to me than it's hypothetical resource efficiency. It was a lot of fun connecting pretty-looking tiles together, painting exterior hulls and balloons, and recreating some of my favorite steampunk tropes and vehicles. I had a blast refitting damaged ships and buildings to look like something brand new after they took damage in combat, just because it felt cool to have the patchwork repair aesthetic.
Overall, the ship editor is enough fun to justify purchasing this game and toying with it, if nothing else. The overarching strategic and tactical layer serve to add some semblance of practical significance to the designs, but they aren't extraordinarily appealing by themselves.