Flying city-builder Airborne Empire hits early access today with a new military element

rockpapershotgun.com:

In 2020's Airborne Kingdom, you cobbled together a flying city from sailcloth, smokestacks, wings and flippers, striving to meet a growing population's need for food and shelter while dealing with the more exotic problem of levelling your streets out and generating enough lift. In the process, you explored a beautiful, Orientalist world map of faded mosaic tiles and dusty gold fittings.

In Airborne Empire, out in early access today, you do much the same again, but this time the world is trying to murder you. A bit. You are no longer alone in the skies: there are merchant dirigibles you can barter with, and pirate airships who'll strafe your suburbs and set your bazaars on fire. As such, the sequel's new city technologies include a choice of offensive and defensive weapons. Here's a launch trailer.

And here's some blurb from the creators.

I liked the original Airborne Kingdom, but had reservations about the game never quite addressing the fact that it is pretty bloody sinister. The writing frames you as a benign presence, helping out ground-bound cities and offering a new way of life to wistful souls in remote villages, but the campaign progression and overall visual spectacle tell a different story. I mean, this is a game about about an empire with a mobile centre, a remorselessly expanding heavenly citadel that prowls and siphons resources from a pliant, balmy world of towns who, somehow, do not react in pure religious terror to having the sun periodically eclipsed by a dense, smoking mass of minarets and propellers.

Airborne Empire's addition of war mechanics consolidates this reading, on paper, though the writing seems as dreamy and upbeat as ever, with a newly zoomorphic cast of chirping, cawing, squawking avian NPCs.

I explored all this in a review for Eurogamer, back when I was a cloud-hopping freelancer. Around the same time, Nate Crowley (RPS in peace) wrote a more hopeful analysis of the game as exploring and celebrating "the role of Islamic cultures in