Nebulous: Fleet Command

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/887570/view/3684560608623876436

Update 0.3.1.18 - Missile Mixing
Missiles are such a huge part of NEBULOUS, and it's been a while since they've gotten much love. I think a lot of our players know that I'm a hardcore missile main, so it's time that was fixed. And don't worry, if you're not that into missiles there are plenty of other things in this update that might interest you. Let's get started!

Mixed Missile Salvos
Up until this point, the art of mixing different types of missiles together for a simultaneous strike was only achievable by the most skilled of single missile players or extremely coordinated teams. The core feature for this update is new UI functionality to allow the easy mixing of multiple missile types into a single salvo.

The size of a salvo is dictated by the number of programming channels on the ship, but you can mix any types of missiles you want within that constraint. You can even group missiles of different sizes together, with different programming times, and they will all launch together (but won't fly at the same speed, so design accordingly). For ships in formation, the missiles you want to group need to be present on all of the ships. The last mixed salvo you launched from any given ship will also be saved for easy re-use later, until you start a new mix.

This feature should breathe new life into the flexibility and utility of S2 missiles by allowing players to combine different seeker heads and support modules without having to pay expensive penetration aid costs across every missile they want to fire.

There is also a new advanced tutorial mission covering the basics of using the new UI.

Torpedo Rework

On the Alliance side, torpedoes have sadly fallen by the wayside. This is mostly due to the fact that during the Modular Missile Update the torpedo body was made as flexible as all of the other missile types, leading to it being outclassed in everything by being exceptional at nothing. This update restores the SGT-3 to its original place as a close range, high durability, and high damage weapon.

We've also added the new TLS-3 launcher, the first turreted missile launcher for the Alliance, to help with low maneuverability weapons at close range.

Interceptor Missile Rework
Interceptor missiles, or AMMs as the community colloquially knows them, have been significantly improved in this update. Their warheads now determine probability of doing damage based on intercept angle instead of intercept velocity, with a head-on or tail-on intercept producing the best probability. This means you can build faster interceptors, to get out and defeat threats early, without having to sacrifice reliability.

The PD Controller logic has also been upgraded to allow ships to coordinate their AMM use and only fire from one ship at any given threat. This will significantly reduce wasted missiles and increase effective magazine depth. If you want to force a ship to fire even if it is not the chosen shooter you can still use the PD Prioritize order (hotkey Z) to queue up the engagement. This logic will also receive further improvements in the near future.

Capital Ship Buffs
Alliance capital ships have received a durability and repairability buff in this update. The Solomon has had its armor upgraded to 58 cm, allowing it to tank 450 shots at steeper angles and especially when bow-on, and the Axford has been given some more resilience in the form of a boosted repair ceiling for damaged components.

The most common complaint I hear from capital players is how quickly they become disarmed due to the size of the hitboxes of their main weapons. To remedy this, the Mk65, Mk66, and Mk68 guns have all had their HP and DT (damage threshold) significantly boosted. These main weapons should now last much longer in battle, comparable to the ships they are mounted on.

Deception Module
And finally, the least-used module in the game (aside from Battle Dressing Station), has been given a rework. The E15 Masquerade is now capable of producing a deceptive signature similar to Protectorate decoy containers on the ship they are mounted on. The type of ship you intend to mimic is selected in the fleet editor, and will appear as that type of ship on the enemy's radar until visually confirmed.


We hope you really enjoy this one! See the full patch notes below:

Changes/Features:
- Added mixed missile salvo planning. Click the green + buttons next to any pooled missile to being a mixed salvo.
- Added TLS-3 Torpedo Turret to Alliance weapons.
- Increased SGT-3 Torpedo speed envelope to 175-300m/s (was 125-200m/s) and increased turn rate slightly.
- Decreased SGT-3 Torpedo flight time per engine increment to 1-4.5 seconds (was 3-17 seconds).
- Added cost to increased SGT-3 maneuverability, minimum 0 points and maximum 3 points.
- Increased SGT-3 Torpedo HP to 160 (was 110).
- Decreased SGT-3 programming time to 3 seconds (was 6).
- Added missing barrel glow to OSP cannons.
- Dedicated servers will now refresh their global ban list every 6 hours instead of only on restart.
- Dedicated servers will now reject joining players during the launch countdown.
- SGM-2 and SGT-3 missile body warhead slots can now also accept support modules.
- Decoy Launcher and Cluster Decoy Laucher missile support modules can now scale the number of decoys with the slot size (when put in a warhead slot). Decoy counts are unchanged for basic support slots.
- Boosted Self-Screening Jammer will now steer to the target's position (within 30 degrees) rather than being fixed in missile's forward direction.
- Increased Boosted Self-Screening Jammer range to 5km (was 4km), FOV to 20 degrees (was 10 degrees), and radiated power to 5 (was 0.5).
- Increased Self-Screening Jammer radiated power to 2.5 (was 0.5) and radius to 1.5km (was 1).
- Jamming support modules for missiles now activate on launch instead of at the start of the terminal guidance phase.
- The probability of Blast Frag warheads doing damage is now related to the angle of intercept rather than relative velocity magnitude, with head-on intercepts having the highest pK and perpendicular intercepts having the lowest.
- PD Controllers will now deconflict AMM use with other friendly ships to reduce wasted missiles.
- Command seeker can now use TRPs natively without requiring another seeker to be present.
- Increased SGM-H-2 sprint stage engine flight time envelope to 1-3 seconds per increment (was 0.75-2.5).
- Decreased top-end speed cost for SGM-H-2 sprint stage engine to 5 points (was 8).
- E15 'Masquerade' module can now produce a deceptive identity for enemy intel. Target identity can be selected in the fleet editor.
- Changed E15 full name to E15 'Masquerade' Deception Module.
- Added "Evacuated" intel report information for ships that have finished launching lifeboats.
- Increased Mk66 Cannon HP to 550 (was 350) and DT to 40 (was 30).
- Increased Mk68 Cannon HP to 650 (was 450) and DT to 40 (was 30).
- Increased Mk65 cannon HP to 450 (was 325) and DT to 40 (was 30).
- Added new stat hull-component-max-repair, default value is the current 10%, capped at 50%.
- Added intrinsic hull modifiers for max repair to Axford (+20%) and Solomon (+5%) hulls.
- DC section of Fleet Editor stats list now shows max repair amount.
- Increased Solomon battleship armor thickness to 58cm (was 52).
- Decreased PD20 Bastion fire rate to 3 rounds per second (was 4).
- Changed icons on missile glance bar to have a new icon for "Searching" and a green crosshair for "Seeking".
- Missile glance bar now indicates seeker jammed status.
- Beam seekers will no longer force the current target to be considered validated if it was selected before a valid target was detected.
- Added mixed salvos tutorial.
- Changed Nyx's Eye to be 10 players (was 8).
- Dedicated servers now have the option to block players with too many conduct reports from connecting.
- Updated starter fleets to account for new point costs.

Bug Fixes:
- Fixed selection circle remaining around a selected enemy ship when it was no longer visible.
- Fixed anti-aliasing not working.
- Fixed formation weapon groups for missiles showing the launcher count in the name when grouped.
- Fixed turreted launchers continuing to play the traverse sound even after firing was completed.
- Fixed NullReferenceException when toggling the pause menu in a tutorial mission with no voice over.
- Fixed LOD levels on VLS-2 culling cell doors too early.
- Fixed direct guidance module not leading targets when fired on a track.
- Fixed HoJ seekers on AMMs flying towards the launching ship instead of the missile with the jammer.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Holy shit there is a strategy layer now? Will need to get back to this ASAP.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Still waiting for it to fully mature before committing.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Played some more MP matches, the MP community is fairly strong (a pleasant surprise given how niche this game is) and it isnt difficult to get 4vs4 matches. The two factions (a regular navy and ragtag frontier dudes who use modified civilian ships) that are in the game right now are pretty distinct and play differently, but are also balanced pretty well, both are viable.

The learning curve is indeed p. steep, and gitting gud is properly rewarding (plus you can design your own ships and even missiles). I am fairly confident about the basics already, though as a noob I still tend to hang back and snipe/launch missiles/do EW stuff while the rest of the teams flies around lol.

Certainly looking forward to some SP content, as so far there are only basic and advanced tutorials outside of the MP skirmishes.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Just a heads up - there is the first SP campaign for Nebulous, albeit an unofficial one. You can find it in Steam workshop for the game.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3129262667

There are four missions for the OSP (the rag tag rebel faction) that show the start of the conflict that the game deals with. I am playing through it and it is fairly good, especially since its fan content. There are briefings and dialogues during the missions, missions are also fairly difficult and so far I haven’t encountered any bugs.

The official campaign is planned, but wont come out anytime soon.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Yo, what up nigguhz. Since I have been playing this a lot lately and I like playing missile ships, lets take a look on how the missile warfare in the game works.

If you played for example Cold Waters, you get the basic idea - the cruise missiles can have their flight path plotted to the point when they activate their homing sensors (of course there are also direct fired missiles for use at short ranges), though this being a 3D space game, the things are obviously more complex.

Here is the map view (similar to the one from Homeworld), where you will be spending most of your time:

Here you can see how plotting the cruise missile strike works:

The red cone shows the area covered by the missile sensors once they activate. You can design your of missiles and in fact designing your own stuff is a huge part of the game. Missiles have tons of subsystems including the homing sensors (there are like ten types in total, ranging from active and semiactive radars to wake homming and optical guidance - all of them have various countermeassures that ships can use against them), configurable engines (you have to balance maneauverability, speed and range), as well as their own countermeasures/penetration aids and such. Both factions have their own approach, with the ANS (regular navy) having access to multistage missiles while the OSPN (rebels) can use improvised containers missiles which can have wide variety of uses.

It tends to be p. hard to break through the point defence of larger formations, so you have to pick your targerts carefully, you are usually better of trying to pick off isolated ships (though if you happen to play against noobs with poorly desingned ships, things get easier). The key is to use mixed salvos - I like to use for example one pure penetration aid missile (with directional radar jammer and tons of decoys) followed by a mix of active radar and home-on-jam missiles.

When you plot a successful strike, you are rewarded with cool show like this...

Salvo of containers about to nuke an enemy scout.

Another enemy scout having a bad time with my containers - in this case I ploted a speculative strike at one of the objectives (C in this case). Since I managed to hit the the capping scout the enemy team failed to cap the point and had to redeploy more ships to try to secure it. This is a very rewarding if risky tactic for MP.

Here you can see the nemy crew evacuating the knocked out scout in life pods - this will be important in the campaigns where you will have named officers and crews gaining XP.

And here we have an enemy missile/EW cruiser getting fucked up hard by the well plotted top-down missile strike. Notice the red tracers - those are the last shells fired by the point defence guns. The yellow lines are the streaks left behind the rockets on the way in. In this case I used rocket containers - those carry large number of submunitions that get released close to the target, very usefull if you need to overwelm a powerfull point defence network.

The game is still in primarly MP phase now, the devs promise to release an update which will introduce careers and strike craft at some point, which will be a very interesting addition - I will see if I switch from the missile ships to careers once they come out.

Sometimes some really ridiculous stuff can happen in the MP matches - recently I was chilling with my missile ship behind and asteroid, sending containers left and right, suddenly a dude from other team tried to rush my possiton with a battleship (the most powerful ANS ship class in the game) followed by a point defenes frigate. In panic I launched a huge salvo at the approaching ships, which was mostly ineffective, however I scored a lucky crit on the frigate, which detonated its reactor. Reactor explosions are the most lethal thing in the game, they kill the sensors in the vicinity for a while and do massive damage. Since the battleship was in close formation with the frigate and was caught up in the explosion, which knocked it out as well. The dude ragequite the match and I spent rest of the match trolling the other team in the chat, since I was out of missiles at that point. Good times.

In any case, shit is p. cash tbh fam. Cant recommend this enough.

 

[std::namespace]

my gut is telling me that this is never gonna be fun:
its a slow rock/paper/sci rts where you fight the 3d ui with your apm

...the core gameplay makes me think of world of tanks... :
you move around invis, looking for position and then fight
except here you cannot disengage
so once fighting starts, the r/p/s just wins...
too much rng, no player skill, except predicting/guessing position

 

[karoliner]