Nebulous: Fleet Command

[Huntn]

This game has a lot of potential, and current reports are that AI in battles is hard to beat, yet people will be harder. At least this is my understanding. I’ve worked my way through the first six tutorial and it feels weighty in a good way, as in someone put a lot of thought into these mechanics. Think of this as Home World with more control. In Home World you grouped your ships positioned them, and attacked other groups of ships as hit the attack button.

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There are many Nebulus How TOS on YouTube. Third party guide also available on Steam: https://playgame.tips/nebulousfleetcommandhighscoresbetterguidetonebulousfleetcommand

In Nebulus, there are radar signatures based on fleet spacing, and emissions, Electronic Warefare elements, jamming, and being jammed, offensive guns and missiles, defensive guns and missiles. The ship graphics strike me as basic, but the munitions, when the ship weapons light up, it looks completely awesome.

What I fear in most Real Time Strategy games is the required micromanaging. As compared to on the ground RTS, here you are operating in 3D space. Fortunately your ships have some level of automated point defense responses that can be selected in advance for incoming missiles. You manually set up tracking on targets and launch missiles or shoot guns at them. What I really don’t know is how cumbersome this becomes if you are operating 8 ships in a squadron. Are there group commands? But you are not necessarily going to want all of your ships firing at a single ship and as far as I can tell there is no stop time mechanism to issue orders to each ship. So are you going to have to select each ship and tell it what to do? If you know, I’d like to hear about it. . I’ll know more when I actually get into some skirmishes.

HOLY CRAP!

 

[Huntn]

Omg I jumped into a Nebulous Fleet Command, me vs AI game, talk about a steep learning curve! 😬

The simplest battle as recommended in a 3rd party tutorial is the Cliff Map (named for a reason? ) 2v2, each team is made of 2 groups, on your team it is you controlling 2 ships and and an AI group on your side, but you can’t control, and 2 enemy groups. The battle version I played “Control” is won by controlling points in space. So the battle starts and your AI team heads off on their own to grab a flag. My first attempt I’m like, ok, I’ll go grab a different point and in front of me and my 2 ships, here comes the entire enemy team as basically one group which by my best estimation is suicide, so I turn around and follow my AI group. I allocated 45 min for this battle, but got frustrated because it was very difficult to catch up with the other half of my team, and it was very difficult to navigate 3D space with the tools provided.

For navigation, to move, a circle drawn around your ship with a moveable spoke in the direction to head, and a modifier to increase or decrease elevation in space. It should work well, but what I find is that you can point yourself to a spot in space, but depending on your camera angle which you can change, this perspective of proceeding to a point swings around, so you may think you proceeding to a spot, but actually you are not, you missed. So far the only reliable way is to swing your view until you are looking directly down on your ship, move the destination over the desired point, then swing your view to an angle and add the increase or decrease in elevation to get close, but you’ll still be off

My primary concern which yet to be resolved is micromanaging multiple ships, I’m not sure yet if you can be in charge of up to 8 ships. Fortunately in the solo vs AI games, you can slow down time. Don’t think this is possible in a PVP game. You can batch command your ships , but have been told this is not the best way to fight, And while point defense is automated, I’ll be frank and say if I have to tell each ship which ship to attack and with what, this simulation will likely be a no go for me. 🤔

Yes, I may have not yet really figured out Nebulous so I could be completely wrong, But at this point, my impression is the only way I see to enjoyably participate in a RTS fight is to either run a battle of multiple ships like in Homeworld, you direct groups to attack other groups, but they handle the maneuvering and the weapons deployed, or you just be in charge of your ship and follow the big picture orders from an Admiral or someone.

 

[Huntn]

Ok, this is difficult. It maybe set aside to the future when a battle tutorial is produced for the game.