In the game, ships are viewed side-on, and their modules are operated by individual crew members. During combat, players give high-level commands to a small fleet, positioning their ships, ramming and boarding others. Ships and terrain are fully destructible: they can catch fire, explode, break apart, and fall. Players can also compete against one another in Internet and LAN matches.
The ships are highly detailed, teeming with sailors moving around at their individual tasks, like an ant farm or a cut-away drawing. The player's choices in ship layout are crucial, and an important part of the game is exploring the design space of different airships and their matching tactics.
So about a week ago I had a heart attack, which is not something I can recommend. I'm now recovering reasonably well, but I'm still pretty tired and have to go through physical rehab.
Of course that does mean that the Heroes & Villains DLC will be delayed. But I was intentionally vague with the promised release date, exactly because with a solo dev, random events can cause delays. So the promised release date hasn't changed - it's still sometime in 2023.
In other news, I am happy to report that the next AMD driver update should contain a fix for the problems in Airships from their end as well. If you continue experiencing graphical problems, do let me know.
Also, there's been a report that the antivirus software MalwareBytes might be causing the game to crash. If the game is crashing to desktop with no error message, do check if your antivirus software might be killing it off. False positives do happen on occasion.
Development on Heroes & Villains was going well before the whole heart attack thing. I was working on diplomatic incidents, and there should be about 40 different ones in the game, all of them involving an interaction - a crisis or opportunity - between two empires.
I also plan to write a few dev blog posts soon, about the details of the AMD bug, and about map generation, which should hopefully be interesting.
For now, I leave you with another three hero / villain portraits:
Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu/Debian/Mint
- Processor: 1.8 Ghz+Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Memory: 256 MB RAM
- Graphics: 1 GB VRAM+
- Storage: 1 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Not currently compatible with Intel HD graphics controllers. May run on other Linux distros. but no guarantees.
Recommended Setup
- OS: Ubuntu/Debian/Mint
- Processor: 2.2Ghz+ Dual-coreMemory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB VRAM+Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 1 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Not currently compatible with Intel HD graphics controllers. May run on other Linux distros. but no guarantees.
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