NEBULOUS: Fleet Command

First review so gonna keep it short, Game is fun though it does have a bit of a learning cliff to get over. The player onboarding, as of this review, is fairly terrible and due to relatively recent drama I'd ill advise engaging the community, specifically the side on discord as they seem to be trying to ferment an echo chamber of the usual politics. Campaign is fairly fun so far do see myself staying with it until the campaign is completed, but community moderation is very poor (♥♥♥♥) and as such don't see myself engaging much in open online play.

Note to self: - ALWAYS check the dev political opinion BEFORE spending money; - J. K. Rowling is right.

I enjoyed playing this game for a long time, but can no longer support it or recommend it to others because both the community and devs have become politically toxic. It's a real shame, it was a legitimately good game, but it's been gatekept in the wrong direction with the community (under the explicit aegis of Mazer/Lys) bending over backward to include all the worst elements and doing everything they can to exclude the normal majority. 90% of the global population is Not Wanted as players or customers. Do not give them your money.

This game has a lot of potential, but I think both the campaign and pvp multiplayer modes have serious issues at the moment. I would rate it as neutral with a slight lean towards a recommend. Since most reviews are positive, let me focus on the issues: Multiplayer: - Because of the lack of players in general, you spend more time waiting for games than actually playing. - The only lobbies that ever fill are the North American ones, so if you don't live in North America you better be used to playing with high ping. Ping isn't as important in this game as in most RTS'es, but it still could be the difference between being hit by missiles or executing countermeasures. - The factions are not equally popular especially amongst new players that have only played ANS due to the campaign, so expect to wait even longer if you want to play ANS or if you want to play against other new players (since the OSP side will take forever to fill even if you are willing to OSP). I think this is difficult to fix, as the lore of the game makes it so one side has the cool military stuff and the other has improvised civilian ships. - The game has a serious lack of new blood. This means that 100 hours in, I am still almost exclusively playing with and vs people that are at a much higher skill level than me. Most lobbies are not properly autobalanced and this means that I get dumpstered quite a lot. - For some reason You do NOT get to see your opponents ship builds after the game, so when you lose because you are new, you won't be able to easily understand and copy the build of the person that just killed you. There is an battle report screen, but the information there is minimal and half the time it bugs out and doesn't even show most enemy ships. There is a nice community on Discord that will probably help you if you ask nicely, but I wish the game itself had better methods for players to learn from their opponents. - The second I join a game as ANS I already know exactly the way I will die: getting cruise missiled to death by unending salvos, usually ones that come all the way from the enemy spawn. They sometimes can reach my spawn. I very rarely get to fight a gun duel. - And this brings me to the greatest issue in multiplayer for a new player: Missiles in general are extremely strong and super obnoxious to deal with for new players. They are one of the few ways to cripple or kill an enemy ship (even a larger one) in seconds while guns would take minutes. Missiles require a high level of game knowledge to build effective ones, which is one barrier of entry for newer players. The bigger problem however is that once built in the designer, they are rather easy to launch in game and then require an asymmetrically high level of game knowledge and micro to counter. 200 points in missiles can destroy a 1500 point ship in the blink of an eye unless the 1500 point ship perfectly executes a 9 step process in the 3 to 5 seconds it has (at most) to do it. The problem with this? The enemy (especially if they are of the OSP faction) has already queued the next salvo by the time the defender defeated the first salvo. Also, the 9 step counter process involves deactivating the defender's radar and thus they are unlikely to be able to shoot at anything while evading missiles. Thus, even if the gunship player somehow finds the missile ship (which in many games is literally in the enemy spawn), the gunship player can still find themself in an infinite cycle of just trying to use countermeasures, reactivating radar to shoot, seeing that another salvo of missiles is coming, scrambling to do the 9 step process again etc. Not only will they be blind and unable to shoot during this process, but If they mis-click once, or just get mildly unlucky and get hit by a blind missile pathing through them, or if they run out of one of the countermeasures, they will die instantly. Even if they dodged 5 salvos and get killed by the 6th one, they still traded inefficiently and the enemy ship likely has enough missiles left to go ruin another ally's day. - I am getting the impression that missiles are balanced around a veteran player base that is much better at using countermeasures than new players will be. I guess if you can reliably execute the full countermeasure set 10 times in a row without getting hit by anything, then you will probably end up trading efficiently against missile spammers. At that point missiles would probably be too weak if they weren't as cheap and deadly as they are now. But this then creates a huge barrier to entry where missiles might be balanced against players with 500+ hours in multiplayer but are horribly OP against any newbie trying to get into the game. - Part of the reason missiles are so difficult as a new player to deal with is because a significant portion of what the game tells you about missiles or anti-missile measures is wrong. That EO dazzler that is supposed to auto-dazzle EO missiles based on its in-game description? That is a lie and it does not do that and there seems to be an entire missile meta revolving around abusing this. That seeker called Wake that is supposed to hit engines? Bugged and bad and you are a moron if you use it in MP. The game suffers from these kind of bugs and outdated descriptions and this impacts missiles and missile countermeasures the most since they are one a rather complex part of the game. I haven't even gone into all the trap options that veterans know to avoid, but which as a new player you will fall into and waste points on and cause your team to lose. Campaign: - Despite masquerading as a space game, the game refuses to give you space to work with. Every single map is some variation of either one huge obstacle in the middle, or a maze of obstacles in the middle. This would be only mildly annoying (and maybe even make some sense) if that was just the objective and there was space around it to manoeuver and approach from. The problem is that there isn't space around it to manoeuvre because the map designer decided to put arbitrary map limits super close to the edge of the central obstacle on nearly every map. You are forced to fly your "spaceships" into the maze only to get cinematically ambushed on basically every map by short range high damage bs, or long range BS that can reach the entire map and you can't get out of its range because of map edge. This gets old quite fast. - Because your fleet persists across missions, the game throws quite a lot at you to try to whittle you down. Because of this, the missions can sometimes feel like zombie apocalypse games. If you lose a small ship (say a frigate) to defeat a bigger enemy ship (say a carrier), you don't feel like you have won, you feel like you have lost because the enemy won't be impacted by that loss next mission, but you will. This goes beyond just loss of ships, and also applies to getting hit since you have limited component repairs as well. Taking any damage feels terrible due to this design. - In coop only the person that hosts can pause. This is an issue because of the point above, since the best way to counter enemy missile salvoes is to pause as soon as they are visible and activate your countermeasures. If you are in CO-OP but you are not the host, you can find yourself in serious trouble simply because you had asked for a pause and the host was busy microing something and didn't press the button in time. - The game has an entire ship design mechanic which is both very cool and very important for Multiplayer, but it is not used at all in the campaign where you get prebuilt ships and don't get to design your own. - Just like you get prebuilt ships, you also get prebuilt missiles. You don't get much info on which one to use in which situation, or how they are tuned. - Some key resupplies (such as planes for the carrier) only seem to be obtainable from highly specific enemy ships, which may or may not decide to blow up before (or while) you board them.

The game looks like it has potential, but it is really more like work than fun. The UI is very inaccurate and their are unrealistic objects just messing with your view. The community is a bunch of politically rabid leftists who will ban you if you disagree with them, and the Devs support this behavior. I give this a huge thumbs down....avoid this company like the plague that they are.

If you're going to ban someone because of politics, then I will leave a bad review because of politics.

Hooded Horse doesn't have anything to do with the recent controversy. Review negative as the community has too many unwritten rules, if the game is being balanced and built around these, then put a community document in the game with a quick rundown of the norms EX Most games of nebulous involve fleets of 3K points a player. I do like that there are no hard limits in this to let people play whatever they want with their friends but the community is too toxic and elitist for newer players oh and once again HOODED HORSE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE CONTROVERSY, they don't own the discord server, and they didn't hire the mods.

Ships have crews but the game requires you to micro-manage every action each ship in your fleet do. There is so much to be do, that the game quickly becomes tedious instead of entertaining. You are the Captain, XO, Quartermaster, DC Teams, Boarding Team, everyone. Good try at doing something different but its poorly executed.

Dev has made statements that are simply not forgivable, and their treatment of paying customers is awful.

Campaign act 1 has arrived, it was worth the wait. Looking forward to act2. Played the campaign on the hardest difficulty. It is very hard if you play it without knowledge of the missions, but it is significantly easier the second time when you know what surprises await in the level. On the highest difficulty you will need to play it a second time as your fleet is persistent, so you cannot afford to take any capital ship casualties and have to conserve your good munitions to have enough to survive the last mission. I was able to solo the campaign on the hardest difficulty, but I almost ran out of munitions on the last mission. My ships had to resupply mid mission to load up the bottom of the barrel missiles to just be able to have something to shoot.