
Take command of your hand-tailored fleet of space warships and use realistic radar, electronic warfare, advanced movement controls in 3D space, and precision targeting to outmaneuver and outwit your opponents in a simulation-heavy tactical space game like no other.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
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About
Engage in intense tactical combat across the vast expanse of space in this heavily simulation-based tactical game featuring everything from kinetic and beam weapons to realistic radar and electronic warfare. Take command of a fleet of space warships tailored to your exact play-style and battle the enemy in single and multiplayer skirmishes, or dive into a narrative campaign – solo or with friends – to lead a strike-force behind enemy lines, managing a limited supply of fuel, munitions, and ships in the face of a growing rebellion.
NEBULOUS: Fleet Command seamlessly blends the thoughtfulness of pre-mission planning, tension of battle decision-making, pressure of real-time action, and pain of inevitable sacrifice into an intense tactical space game that will keep you reflecting on every decision – and mistake – for hours after each battle.
It's in your hands, Commodore.

Take unparalleled control of every unit right down to their individual hardpoints. Keep your entire fleet together, dynamically split off task units, or give each ship its own assignment. Large maps with lots of cover and radar occlusion make methodical positioning and sight lines critical, and massing firepower in one place is not always the best solution, as the enemy could come from any direction in the fully 3-dimensional battlespace. Covering your retreat is always in order.
Group your weapons and task them to different targets or focus fire with everything you have, but bear in mind that weapons have compounding benefits and drawbacks, all of which can be compensated for and planned against. Selecting the appropriate weapon to engage a target is as impactful as deciding which targets to engage at all.

Intelligence is key to victory and your situational awareness is never a given. Asteroids and gas clouds can hide ships behind their radar shadows, preventing sensors from detecting their presence, and ensuring illuminators and fire-control radars are unable to mark targets for missile systems.
When out in the open, electronic countermeasures take the lead as they attempt to jam, scramble, or otherwise mitigate enemy sensors on board their ships and missile systems alike, and ships can opt to run cool, turning a variety of systems inactive in order to more easily hide from detection at the cost of some functionality. Finally, a well-designed formation can provide an extra layer of defense with picket ships screening for capital ships – but multiple ships moving in close proximity produce a larger signature, making them more easily spotted by enemy sensors, especially when exposing a larger face to the enemy.
Occlusion, passive signal detection, balancing radar signature size, and the ability to deceive the enemy makes the fight for intel a critical part of every battle.

Face a growing rebellion in the narrative campaign as you take command of a small strike-force operating behind enemy lines, adapting to its strengths and weaknesses as you face off against increasingly capable enemy forces. Play alone or with friends as you jump from battlespace to battlespace and balance the risk of engaging with secondary objectives that might strengthen your fleet while putting your limited ships in harm's way to accomplish them. Scavenge munitions and fuel from installations and destroyed enemy ships, modifying your arsenal and tactics to overcome evolving circumstances.
Meanwhile, skirmishes against the AI and human opponents allow you to test your mettle in isolated combat scenarios, where fleet design allows you to choose between multiple classes, configuring everything from their munitions storage, power supply unit, and electronic warfare capabilities to their damage control systems, point-defense capabilities, and armaments – right down to the types of missiles each bay carries.
A point cost system keeps fleets balanced as you design battleships, cruisers, frigates, corvettes and more, arriving at the battlespace with little idea as to what your opponent might be fielding. Scouting enemy fleet composition and adapting to their designs will be essential to securing victory, and at times you may spend half the battle (or more) trying to accurately determine your adversary's capabilities so that you can strike with precision and force. Express your tactical identity through the design of your fleet, and each individual ship within.

Each system and subsystem aboard your ships perform specific tasks and are tracked and simulated individually. Their position on your ship can determine optimal facing when unleashing a salvo, or the risk factor when enemy systems open fire. Vital systems should be protected with the help of point-defense systems and defensive maneuvering that presents auxiliary systems towards incoming fire while keeping essential systems hidden behind the armor plating and hull.
Damage is modeled for individual components, determining which ship systems remain active under enemy fire, and damage control teams work rapidly to repair what they can as they move from compartment to compartment. Retreating from active combat to repair damaged components before re-engaging is not only a viable strategy, but at times, an essential maneuver, and in a worst-case scenario, a ship with a breach in its reactor can be quite a potent weapon in its own way.

NEBULOUS has extensive modding support, with hundreds of player-made mods available on Steam Workshop including new maps, ships, weapons, and more. Use the robust Campaign Editor to design your own narrative campaigns, complete with cutscenes, scripted events, custom fleets, and the tools needed to tell and share your own stories in the world of NEBULOUS: Fleet Command.
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English*, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish +1 more
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 71 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 71 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
*Sigh* This one hurts. I've been playing Nebulous on and off for a while and I genuinely do enjoy the game. The sensor tracks and ELINT is just *chefs kiss.* So why the negative review? The devs banning someone for simply posting Arch's stream to their discord. Kitkat, the person who was banned, wasn't just some random either. He was a prolific modder and content creator for the game for YEARS. Not that actually matters, this is still scummy even if it was some rando that joined yesterday. All because he dared to post the "wrong" person's video. I do not care what your sexuality is. I do not care what your political leanings are. But if this is the way you are going to treat your fans, let alone fans who make content for your product FOR FREE? Who just want to help the game succeed? Yeah, no. Stay far away from this studio. Into the bin with Arrowhead you go, I suppose.
I never leave reviews. This is my first. It is rather long, but please consider bearing with me here. It takes a very, very good - or equally bad - game for me to even consider leaving a review. Even so, I have a small handful of particularly notable games that I feel deserve mention. Nebulous: Fleet Command has long been on that small list, and I've been meaning to give it a glowing positive review for some time. It is a solid game that is innovative, fills a unique, criminally underrepresented niche, and is a clear product of passion on the developer's part. So why is this a negative review? There are several issues. For starters, there was recently an incident where an avid fan of the game - one who went so far as to help create a custom faction in the workshop - was targeted and harassed en-mass on the game's Discord. This is detestable, inexcusable behavior for any reason whatsoever, yet this apparently happened over a very mild comment. The attackers claim it was controversial, as did he, but I've been puzzling over the screenshot for three days and still can't see any possible offense. I must stress the phrase "a portion of the community" here; the last thing I want to do is blanket condemn an entire community over what may be a few rotten apples. Further, in my strictly in-game experience, I've been mostly cordial to others and I've received mostly cordiality in return, even making a few Steam friends over the years. However, as the targeted individual was eventually banned despite constant attempts to de-escalate the situation, and despite escalating aggression the group harassing him appears to remain unpunished to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, I have to wonder just how much of this community is composed of such. Regardless, I'll have no more to do with this game. That major issue aside, the game itself does have some issues of it's own. One of the big hooks that got me into this game is the immense attention to detail in the ship-to-ship combat. Some examples: Armor has a thickness rating that determines whether a given size of gun can penetrate the armor with high explosive ammo, if it needs Armor Piercing rounds or if even that will just bounce off. However, armor can be angled, complicating this calculus further. RADAR is also affected by this; depending on which angle of a ship is facing your RADAR panels, you may pick them up earlier, later, or only notice them when the missiles they fired start sending RADAR returns of their own. Speaking of Missiles, there are bog-standard missiles, bog-standard torpedoes, anti-missile missiles, Hybrid missiles that launch and travel slowly until close to their target, then itself launching a lightning-fast secondary warhead that can potentially gut a ship bow-to-stern... the options for customizing each type are limitless. Dizzyingly limitless, and much of the potential combinations are actually stupendously ineffective if the enemy has the proper defenses. If you don't have a solid idea what you're doing, many could be practically harmless to a ship with defenses of any kind. Other times, you'll eat every missile fired at you because you brought the wrong defenses. That same problem also applies to outfitting the ships themselves; do you want a stealth engine? You're not gonna maneuver well, and don't think you're invisible; you're just moderately less visible. Fast engine? Sure, but you're also not going to maneuver well and you're now more visible than you'd otherwise be. Lots of missiles? Bring all you want in singleplayer, but Multiplayer has an unofficial 3000 point limit and missiles get expensive fast. Make them count... oh, and the targeting widget is a bit finicky until you get used to it. Guns? They work, but that sword cuts both ways and it cuts deep; gun duels are very risky for all involved. Beams? They eat everything alive, but you gotta survive long enough to get close, and you need lots of power. Railguns? Eh, they're good enough, but they don't do damage alone, they make other damage more dangerous. Don't expect long range kills. Plasma? Sure thing, they melt armor good. It doesn't hurt anything beyond that though. Don't forget damage control, reactor space, point defense guns, chaff, flares and/or decoys and ammunition for all of it. Radars too. And crew, obviously. Did I mention this game has Electronic Warfare? Take jammers into account. Oh, and don't forget: you must fit all your ships and their constituent parts into 3K worth of fleet points. Got all that? Well, if you didn't or couldn't read that wall of text, the following sums it up. Unless - or even if - you are a naval expert or have served in the navy, you're probably going to need the community's help getting the hang of things, either through the many, many steam guides or interacting with the community itself. Considering my first issue, that may or may not be an issue with you as well. There is one other issue with the game. And the community. Because this title is so niche, the community is small, and extremely skilled. There are several people willing to help onboard new players - I'm Steam friends with one of them - however despite that a new player's first several hours of gameplay will likely consist of doing one thing and immediately dying with little indication how or why they got atomized or what killed them. Those same onboarders will gladly help coach new players dedicated enough to stick to it, but there's likely to be a feeling of beating one's head against the wall for some time before things start making sense. One caveat, if you are a naval expert or have served in the navy, you'll probably have a much easier time. Probably. Also, when I mention the first few hours of gameplay, I don't mean time spent in the game. I mean fighting battles. There seems to be a strong player bias towards the ANS faction while OSP takes longer to fill up, which causes the wait to play a match to take longer than the match itself - sometimes more than twice as long - and the matches can last a while. If you're still reading this you must be very interested in this game, so while I have to say I cannot in good faith recommend it to anyone anymore I do still want to list the positives. The battles are stunning; in the beginning when I first got the game, I very rarely managed to accomplish anything. Yet, losing a match was as fun as winning one simply because of the spectacle of it, which has only gotten more impressive since that time. Next, while making your own fleets is the whole point of the game, the dev and core community members made sure to put in a varied selection of pre-made starter fleets for those that couldn't yet grasp the editors, and it's my understanding they're quite competitive once you know how things work. Thirdly, ANS (The navy of a troubled government) and OSP (An independence movement with obsolete warships and innovatively militarized merchants) are the only official factions, but the workshop has several additional in-progress faction mods ranging from peer opponents for ANS to mercenary groups to total conversion mods. That in addition to a staggering amount of new maps and other interesting things. Finally, in addition to the ongoing development of the single player campaign, the dev appears to have designed the campaign engine in such a way that anyone with an idea what they're doing can make a campaign of their own with relative ease, and - I've heard - anyone lacking the skill set shouldn't have too much trouble learning what to do. If you took the time to read all of that, I thank you for your substantial investment of time. If you instead skimmed or skipped to the end for a brief summary, I don't blame you. To condense all the above as best as I can, this is an incredible game - interesting subject matter, unique mechanics, one of a kind - however it's following appears to have made it something of an exclusive club. A club you may wish to look into before joining.
I really think this game has potential and explores some exciting mechanics. Though quite complex and rough to learn, it has a very in-depth strategy aspect that tickles the brain just right. However, I cannot in good faith recommend a game whose developers are so blatantly political that they will cast out members of their own community for simply having other views. Recently, in their official discord server, a fan posted a video from a streamer who enjoyed the game and gave it praise. This streamer has political opinions that differ from what the devs prefer though did not make this a point during his playthrough instead actually focusing on playing and enjoying the game. The server than attacked this fan for daring to watch someone with different opinions than them, the fan tried to deescalate, and ended up being banned despite doing absolutely nothing wrong. They could have simply acted like human beings and taken the good PR of a streamer enjoying their game, but instead acted like brainless monkeys more willing to execute their own fans rather than understand that everyone has different opinions. Don't support bad people who hatemonger for the sake of feeling good about their politics... That has absolutely no place in gaming. If a dev is reading this, I want to love this game, but until you fix the toxic hatefulness in your community, I just can't bring myself to play or recommend this game
The game can be fun. But the campaign is not what the game "promotes"; no Customization and no Skirmish except against pre-build fleets. BUT, the much worse thing is, these dev's are bad people. Just watch this stream to see what happened and check the steam forums. youtube.com/watch?v=JuGpAfmZ1_0 I do not recommend this game.
Seen this game played by multiple youtubers, but if you happen to post the WRONG youtuber playing it (and praising it) then even if you were a long time fan, you'll get banned from their official discord. They devs are also quite fond of making one faction much better than the other to the point that 70% of the playerbase only wants to play that one faction and thus makes casual games nearly impossible to find as people will just join the server, see there are no slots on ANS, and leave. If you want to increase your chances of ever actually getting to play in the first place, you have to main OSP. OSP is currently much weaker than ANS and requires a lot more planning and coordination with teammates to win games. Devs somehow don't know how to buff OSP into a more competitive space or nerf ANS to bring them in line with the abilities of their opponents. This is to the point that ANS has specific missile designs to only require 1-2 hits to cripple OSP's best capitals. All that being said, I cannot recommend this game to anyone at the moment. When I first started playing I tried getting all of my friends to buy it. That is no longer the case. It's unbalanced and the community is hostile if you so much as look at someone they don't like. Hopefully the ship changes course, but until then, I'll just wish I got a refund before I spent 2 hours waiting for a multiplayer match.
I'm a big fan of the realism with mechanics like radar, ewar, missile tracking. The game strikes a balance between that realism and something more simple/accessible for people who might have a learning curve. Despite this, the controls can take some getting used to as they wrestle to manage 3d movement and camera angles in some very cramped and tight maps full of unrealistic physical obstacles. I do like the game, but it moves very slow if you haven't already spent a long time with it to get familiar with good tactics and navigating the UI/hotkeys. I was initially excited to play the game but that adjustment has made me less keen to open it up since I can waste so much time not having the real fun that can be found in the game. Unfortunately these devs seem to hate anyone with conservative politics, even going as far as banning people just for expressing opinions they disagree with on their discord. Since the long term draw of this game does appear to be multiplayer competition, I don't think I can trust they wouldn't ban me off of their game servers for the same thing eventually. This just adds to the barriers making me even less willing to really get fully familiar with the game to the point I can give detailed orders in real-time. Not to mention if you're conservative and buy this game you'd be funding people that evidently hate you.
This game is a lot of fun, if a very involved strategy game. Yes, you will need some guides to get more into PvP but the in-game tutorials are enough to get you started. For youtubers to watch, I personally recommend Phrosphor. Don't listen to the new negative reviews, they're whining about a guy getting banned from the official discord because he said women's brains can't play strategy games as well as men's brains can. This game was ~81% positive before captain misogyny got the boot. You can also see a lot of transphobic nonsense coming from the people complaining about the ban. Boohoo, women play video games. If you think the devs not tolerating misogyny or hateful speech is "toxic", then to be blunt, you're the problem. Don't be a jerk and no one would have an issue playing with you. Treat other players with respect and stop ragebaiting people in ALL chat instead of playing the game
If I could give it a neutral, I would. This game has excellent premise, the battle ends up looking and feeling pretty good, there are no noticeable technical problems, but... It often feels like the game hates the player. There's a severe lack of qol stuff and some decisions are outright anti-player. Tell me, why in this deep strategic game about long range voidfleet battles we can't have permanent makers for the last known enemy position and movement vector on map? Are we not supposed to have, idk, STAFF IN OUR COMMAND ROOM FOR THIS VERY PURPOUSE, if we're following the realism track. Why am I supposed to keep it in my head all the time when there's so much going on. Yeah, it's skill issue, certainly. It's also a massive qol issue and it's a major reason to never develop any skills for this game whatsoever and just uninstall. The hit report is non existent. Honestly, you barely get any info on the enemy whatsoever. Even with visual, the only way to judge fire effectiveness is to zoom in yourself and look if their thrusters have flames in the proper direction or if there are fires where they aren't supposed to be. In what world is it sane for there NOT TO BE AN autoreport. It's as if this very reallistic game implies that you're the only officer (or even human) on board and have to do all of it yourself. Also, why are controlls so inconsistant? Setting ship, fighter and missile routs all use slightly different controle scheme for no discernable reason. Why, WHY?!&!!?!@#$ It is so infuriatingly confusing.... Coop is underbaked. The formation function doesn't seem to work for the allied fleets, wich turns any group manuvers into micro hell. Also, the accessibility feature for their course plotter implies, that the devs are aware that it's not particularly well made, but instead of coloring the horisontal and vertical planes differently, they made the same white lines fatter with this feature. Thanks a lot, it doesn't help whatsoever. Honestly, while writing this review, I'm very much inclined to give it a negative, but the game is unique and the devs seem to be working actively on it. Maybe it will all improve one day... Who am I kidding, the og community is made up of reddit yes-men that will undoubtedly come tho this review's comment section as well.
The game is fun but the community can be rather...intense, to put it politely. I have a suspicion the devs and their community team would hate my guts if they knew anything about me and I can't recommend the game to my friends if I think the devs would also hate them.
Game is nice but do NOT interact with the official discord. The developers and their moderation team are woke puritans that ban you for a multitude of reasons inlcuding: *gasp*! Shooting lifeboats inside the video game! Because war is bad and you are bad for having fun! If you decide to join the discord I reccomend just lurking for builds and not interacting outside of design discussions.
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Trends
Concurrent players on Steam, sampled daily since tracking started.
Momentum
Pace estimated from the game's recent review growth (our daily snapshots) at its own sales-per-review ratio — a momentum signal, not booked sales.
Engagement
DAU/MAU are modeled from peak concurrent players (≈×8 and ×28) — Steam publishes no active-user counts, so treat these as rough estimates, not reported figures.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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