Airships: Conquer the Skies is about coming up with designs and strategies to counter your opponents. Then realising the flaws in your designs and finding ways to improve them. Even after 80 hours of gameplay I'm still finding ways to optimise my ships and there are practically an infinite amount of variations that could work. The battles are fun to watch, even though a lot of the time you already know your going to win you can still end up losing a ship due to an easy mistake or just bad luck.

The AI is a bit stupid but this doesn't necessarily prevent them from winning, sometimes they just happen to have the perfect counter to your ships, or they have overwhelming numbers (depending on difficulty).
There are some balancing issues as well, a lot of weapons are pretty useless in terms of cost effectiveness, it is still fun when the AI uses them.
A lot of these issues will be fixed, and the game is highly moddable. In it's current state it's still very fun and definitely worth the price.