This game got into my brain in the vey best way. I have spent the past three evenings in a feverish blur of designing and deploying and redesigning my ships: from my first sloppy, budget attempt to make a handful of cannons remain aloft long enough to actually win an engagement, I've plumbed the depths and heights of what this game has to offer.

And it offers a lot! I built turret-laden battlecruisers, barely aloft from the weight of their huge onboard difference engines, grinding out firing solutions for their artillery. I built high-flying troop carriers with a hold full of jetpack-equipped marines. I built an assault ship with nothing but a face full of flamethrowers and rockets. By combining the technologies of landships and fixed-wing flight, I even built a walking aircraft carrier - just an airstrip with legs. Was it an effective design? Of course not. But I built it!

I admit I am very much the target audience for games like this. Back in the day, I wasted many hours sending fleets back and forth with my brother in Gratuitous Space Battles. And I always loved the ship designers in 4X games, and I was always disappointed when all that effort never actually mattered very much.

For a game like this to work, you need a design puzzle that's complicated enough that the decisions matter, so that players can express themselves and come up with interesting solutions. But you also need the design tool itself to be accessible and easy to use, so that they can actually engage with that puzzle.

I really, really enjoyed the mechanical balancing act here - everything matters, and everything has a clear, evocative, understandable function. Your weapons need ammo and your suspendium engines need coal, but they're dangerously flammable so you'll need a water supply close to hand. And when things do go wrong, you'll need a repair bay nearby, too. And then of course you'll need crew quarters for all those sailors. It reminds me of city-building games, where ideally you want everything to be nearby, but you have to compromise because it all takes up space.

There's a couple of pretty interesting mini-mechanics in there, too. Your ship's lift score determines its service ceiling: its maximum height. That literally gives you more room to maneouver, and being able to get above your opponent is really important for bombing and boarding strategies.

Meanwhile, if your ship has a high officer-to-crew ratio from building extra bridges, you'll be able to issue special orders more often - which is essential for more complicated tactics. Also, if all the command centres aboard a ship get destroyed, you won't be able to issue orders or even see what's going on inside.

(In practice, I did find myself mostly relying on simple artillery ships that didn't need much micro-management, but I challenged myself to try some more challenging designs.)

The persistent conquest mode is pretty bare-bones, but functional: it lets you focus on designing and deploying your airships, rather than resource management or, say, agricultural policy. And that's fine!

Having played even more of this game than I intended to, I could certainly name some improvements I'd like to see. It would be nice if there were clearer, more detailed information during battles. Say, hovertext reminding you what each visible module aboard the enemy ships (or indeed, your ships!) actually is.

I got pretty good at reading the spritework - which is all pretty decent - but squinting at the enemy fleet trying to count how many cannons they have, and what type they are, gets a bit tiring.

There's a pretty useful ingame tutorial, but it would be nice if there were one or two more steps explaining grappling and ramming - they were conspicuous by their absence.

And then we get down to some really petty things - like how one of the most common commands you deliver in battle is "M"+"F" ("move here and rotate facing"), but if you accidentally press just "F" it tells your ship to "focus on extinguishing fires" and then triggers your command cooldown so you can't correct your mistake. 

Or how it'd be nice if the design tool had a "paint" button for armour, so that you don't have to manually smear it over each square of the ship. 

Or how the highlighting for which technologies you have and haven't researched could be much clearer.

You know what, I might just go ahead and leave this stuff as actual feedback because I'd love to see this game get even better.

Overall, it's very impressive and a for what seems to be a one-person show.