Nebulous Fleet Command - Beyond The Basics

[@NekoboyBlue]

Nice to see more of your Nebulous content! Look forward to seeing you in the Battlespace. *WALL OF TEXT INBOUND* 2:53 A common technique called Orbit-Dodging involves setting an orbit command on a point in space at the desired range so your vessel strafes around it in a circle while keeping its bow facing the enemy. Very useful when trying to evade incoming fire as your ship automatically will be moving away from where the enemy gunners expected you to be. 4:25 90 degree turns are your friend! You can preserve your momentum by completing two 90 degree turns instead of fully arresting your ship for a 180 (Some exceptions apply such as Marauder class Bulk Freighters who love to scuttle in and out of cover like crabs) 6:50 A good thing to remember is a Nebulous match is a marathon not a sprint. Preserving your assets till the later quarters of a match can make a big difference on the outcome of a game. 9:38 Sneaky low profile scouts can also be a thing to watch out for. Small vessels such as Shuttles or Corvettes have a minimal radar signature and may not appear the second they enter your range. If unexpectedly tracked execute a burn-thru sweep (provided your radar can) and you may spot the rat radioing your position to the enemy fleet. 12:10 Can confirm no one has ever complained about having too much information about the enemy. 15:15 A word of caution; many point defense turrets (PDT's) require a radar track in order to lock on and fire at incoming missiles. Be careful EMCON'ing your vessel as you may blind your PD gunners to incoming threats. 18:40 Stacking 6 jammers only gets you the combined effectiveness of 3.5 jammers or so. Still a lot but not nearly as much as you paid for. 20:58 "There are players out there who play without point defense. You if you're new to the game should not do this." Experienced players shouldn't do that either XD. As much as we love crossing our fingers and pretending missiles don't exist the PD tax collectors will find you. 21:46 In the Settings-Gameplay menu you can configure your ships default point defense settings so you don't have to manually set it every game; very handy when running fleets with high ship counts. Just remember to turn your decoys back on or you'll end up a greyed-out hull with a dozen chaff still left in the tube. 22:58 In a couple of days after this video's been published flak is getting a bit of a rework in the Carriers/Strike Craft update. Stay tuned for how that turns out. 24:30 Exactly 30 seconds after the Abandon Ship alarm starts playing the vessel will launch lifepods. Do note these can be destroyed (common occurrence with RPF rounds sandblasting a light target) so be attentive. Shooting dead ships/lifepods is a waste of time and ammo, plus under the game's in-universe STABLE rules it's a war crime. 25:36 Any ship with offensive capability is weighed the same inside of a cap point. A common trick is to include an offensive 1 point Ceremonial Arming Missile in your VLS-1 so you can contest against even the mightiest 3000 point battleship; that is until its beams turn you to ash. 26:10 Cap ships win games! A sneaky corvette of shuttle making its way onto a point can flip a game in the 4th quarter and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. That or early on it may spot the fleet poised in ambush to tackle your battlegroup and a

[@ShinMail6164]

This is extremely helpful to me. Thanks

[@cryptoam177]

Ceremonial Arming Missile is hilarious.

[@fishercyza5366]

Gets jammed by three contacts, approaches them, it’s three beamstones 😭

[@hekkura]

Generally if you are jammed....you want to take cover and engage on your terms because if you are closing to them 9 times out of 10 it's on his terms

[@USSLongIslandCVE1]

This is why I always bring a few ARAD/HOJ missiles. Works great if they didnt bring killjoys (Killjoy being a missile with no payload, only a self-screening jammer)

[@peterstedman6140]

As a moderately experienced player (~ 600 hours), keep these coming. Maybe you could do a Collab with one of the advanced players like HopefulMonster, Hunter, Hermann, or Mathblob. The “Commodore Mindset” steam guide from Hopeful is excellent. I’m not a tester, but I do know missiles will no longer reveal ships after the carrier update. The other thing I would mention is that teamwork is very overpowered in nebulous. Use the chat. Better yet, chat with your teammates in the selection screen before a game starts. The easiest way to win battles is to 2v1 another fleet.

[@ShinMail6164]

This is awesome, because I've been dying to join y'all and I feel like I've hit a wall in terms of my skill and even more so, my fleet composition. Can't wait to apply everything I learn here

[@natleslie1103]

32:30 re:blocking external mounts, FCR and I believe jammers and illuminators can work through your hull so long as they have enough depression/elevation to get on target and the mount does not limit traverse. Red partial circle around the mount = limited traverse; yellow circle around the mount = unlimited traverse. You can stick a bullseye in the mount just behind the bridge of an ocello and it will lock targets through the bridge just fine.

[@justicier10-7]

Good stuff! Been holding off on playing Nebulous for the past year or so. Glad to have a refresher, especially since some things have changed in that time.

[@Phrosphor]

@@justicier10-7 carrier update drops Today!!!!!

[@justicier10-7]

@@Phrosphor Definitely been looking forward to it... for a day or two going to wind up like I do in Mechwarrior... spending more time in the 'mechlab' than in missions lol

[@Simon-et4hu]

Thanks for the vid! Really useful. Some of the things in there I didn’t know. I don’t know what you could add though I don’t know enough about the game. I can’t wait for tomorrow! Also I really love that you name your ships based on Highfleet. I really like the game and I have picked it up because I watched you play it ^.^

[@manyheadedmishaps6182]

Edits lie below. Usually I say spoilers too, but this isn't that sort of video 1:04 The most powerful engines are at the back of the ship, and the second most powerful are usually at the front (or at least pointing forward). This means you can brake or reverse faster than you can strafe sideways. 1:22 You have plenty of time for main combat ships to do stuff, but early-game cap assets are to some extent racing, so flanking them onto points right off the bat is good, especially if you're trying to rush something onto the stereotypical central A point 4:00 For most ships, having flank speed off a lot is useful, but cap ships and other light units tend to flank a lot. They won't have the armor, DC, or internal components to survive under fire anyway, and their flank damage bonus means they can flank the whole game without consequences, especially if fitted with a drive that adds more flank damage bonus and/or the Reinforced Thruster Nozzles module - this latter point is a module slot that doesn't really make much of a difference though, so don't worry about taking it if you need that slot for something else 7:20 The other thing with this is that being in cover means you can be taking damage only intermittently, which spreads out the combat time and allows your DC crews significantly more time to fix your ship during and between engagements. 8:30 This is primarily needed for Vauxhall Light Cruisers, Axford Heavy Cruisers, Soloman Battleships, and Ocello Command Cruisers. For all three AN hulls, they have a single main gun mount stern of the conning tower, which will not be able to fire forward. Getting that last gun on target is NOT worth the extra damage input of broadsiding, and is often used for some kind of auxiliary system - often a missile system, or an omnidirectional jammer, or (on Solomans) a particle beam turret 11:00 For some reason, nobody in public matches ever uses the R550 Early Warning Radar (usually abbreviated EWR), and Pinards are rare too. This is a problem, because they are some of the main situational awareness tools in the game (the bloodhound isn't for finding targets but for shooting them, and Spyglasses are the last one). A cheap small ship with R550/Pinard is very easy to add to a fleet, and you can just park it somewhere, point the radar into the map, and forget about it and it'll do its thing without any micro load unless and until someone goes and hunts it down, which may or may not be something you need to care about depending on how much you care about an otherwise-weak, cheap little radar ship late in the game. 14:20 The Scryer only works if the ship carrying the Scryer can see the missile, but it will share that information with all its friends. This means you can put a Scryer on a Spyglass (long-range radar, AN equivalent to the EWR but not an external mount) or EWR ship so it can see a lot of the battlefield and identify missiles while they're en route to the target 17:20 If, however, you have your jammer on some tiny ship that's just vibing next to your actual combat ship, you can attract Home-on-Jam missiles into that ship instead of the one you care about, with apologies to the crew of ANS Rocketsponge #217 18:78 (That is certainly a timestamp, somewhere in the jamming section) One or two jammers active at a time - if you have 4+ jammers you can usually cycle them so that there's always some of them active. I had a fleet with OSPN Flathead Monitors carrying 4 of their omni jammers, and with a little bit of early-game micro timing I could have 3 of the four jammers operating at all times for the rest of the game (barring damage of course) without having to pay attention to it, since omni jammers will cycle on and off automatically and repeatedly if you give them a jam order Tangent unrelated to the video, there's a number of ways to identify enemy ship types other than waiting for your intel center to figure it out. A), the if you watch missiles as they close, they will show you the visual of the target ship, which lets you clearly see what it is. B) if the enemy is rude enough to shoot at you, the number and relative positions of their guns can give you a very good idea of what hull they have. C) if you're shooting at the enemy, especially with RPF rounds, you can watch the shells hit and put together a bit of an outline of the target. D) You can try and make a guess from the number and speed of the enemies, but point costs and speed of a given hull vary a lot by build and engine layout. 25:00 The space oil slick (that grey smoke cloud) is visible even if the dead ship is outside visual range, so you can go look at a distant track and see if it's dead that way. Do note though that dead ships emit the slick pretty much immediately and then proceed to drift if they died while on the move - they will stop quickly, but the slick often ends up somewhere near or behind the ship, not immediately on it. That still means the ship is dead\ 26:30 A bare-minimum cap ship with no real capacity to fight costs around 140 or so points for both factions, it's pretty easy to fit one in. I would also say bringing an EWR, Spyglass, and/or Pinard ship also fills the category of cheap little ship to help your team without requiring as much management as a cap ship does. 28:19 Typically, at least for AN ships and Ocellos, this will be the ship's snoot. You want to shove a bunch of reinforced components in there. That means Reinforced DC lockers (expensive but useful), Auxiliary Steering (very cheap, armored, and you can add 1-2 cheaply for extra resilience), Reinforced Magazines (it won't explode. Probably. Well, it might, but DC can fix it before it does, so it's not usually a problem. Also your first magazine is free, so even if you have no guns it's a good way to add durability to your ship). All three of those modules are available to both factions. I didn't see a good time to mention this and other comments address this, but most ships need a VLS-1 of some size already to carry chaff and point-defense missiles and the like. You can and should make a cheap 1-point size one missile and put a single one into your cap-ship VLS mounts. It needs to be an offensive missile, it does not need a practical seeker or any kind of warhead, but it will allow your ship to cap and contest points. Don't fire it. There's a number of these missiles floating around in fleet lists with silly names like "Hey! I'm Very Dangerous", "Ceremonial Arming Missile", "Very Scary Capping Missile" or what have you. Naming it like that makes it easy to remember it's not a real weapon, and if you see something like that in someone else's fleet that you're using, don't fire it.

[@hekkura]

6:20 LOOSE is TRU but the lead ship will not wait for the formation, not based on REL

[@Nortonius_]

So excited to watch this later! 💪🏾💪🏾

[@cofimaker_3874]

awesome! nice to have updated guides. bought the game recently 👍

[@williamchurch8401]

Thanks for this!

[@jonasg.7329]

Very good video, everything a new player needs to know to get started!

[@MrSmith-zh4ld]

11:26 Pinard has maximum range, it detects radar at their max range + 25%. And ships see if they are detected, its indicated by a purple sensor icon.

[@Phrosphor]

@@MrSmith-zh4ld and then it triangulates with up to two other pinards to give picture of where the radar is + can tell you exactly what radar is being used. Great for finding Bloodhound and EWR tugs/flatheads

[@achillesa5894]

The purple icon is for being pinged by BRN, not ELINT

[@moogoesmeow2435]

This is the first great video of its kind I have seen. Great work.

[@sethlittle6375]

Thank you so much for this!! Been trying to get into this game but felt overwhelmed, this was very helpful!!! It would be nice to have a video focusing on how to best getting out of a bad situation like the ambushes you mentioned in this video

[@woarl]

Really great video, very understandable. The Welsh flags are cool too!

[@quintuple_lained]

5:40 are those names references to the culture series by Ian m banks?

[@arthurrosensmith-gr5ji]

I love the HighFleet ship names as… ship names lol! My problem is that I was trying to play against the bots on the cliff 2v2 for some early learning but I’m not sure that’s the right approach. How do you get actually started playing and feeling confident in your decisions?

[@natleslie1103]

The AIs will be getting better in the next update, but the best way to learn is to (if you are comfortable with it) play with other people in a voice call. Failing that, go play some multiplayer solo and get your shit pushed-in and stick around at the end of the match to ask questions about decisions that you made leading up to dying if you are not entirely clear on what mistakes you made or how to avoid making them in the future. Also if you ever get completely wrecked by a build you can try to replicate it yourself and get a good idea for what that build's strengths and weaknesses are. Nine times out of ten players will be more than happy to answer your questions.

[@tranquilclaws8470]

In the current game, learning vs AIs is now a good idea to prep for multiplayer.

[@garrithsmith799]

I would like to know if this game could cater for disabled people. Could you play this game with just a mouse? Or Shortcuts?

[@Phrosphor]

I have had a good think about this and the only controls I use on the keyboard are the shortcuts to select each ship (1-9), the controls to focus the camera on the selected ship (f key), the sensor manager (space bar) and the controls to move the camera. You don't really need the camera movement commands, I just use them to get pretty shots. I *think* the rest can be rebound, and you can just click on the ships on the left to select them so I think this would be possible, just need some extra mouse buttons.

[@facethefaceandmore44]

@garrithsmith799 Have you tried VoiceAttack? You could set up voice commands for these. I haven’t used it but my brother uses its successfully for many click/press-heavy games due to RSI.

[@Kenionatus]

Does having your radar and comms on really improve the enemie's ability to get an active radar track on you? I thought it only allowed them to get a passive ELINT track on you.

[@MrSmith-zh4ld]

Turning off radar and comms decreases ships radar signature. For practical purposes it is something that helps smaller ships when they are at maximum detection range and bigger ships like BB, CH, LN and CLN don't really benefit from that.