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.
Very Positive
32 Steam reviews
| LANGUAGE | AUDIO | SUBTITLES | INTERFACE |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Y | Y | Y |
Can't recommend at all.
The game has decent foundation, but it is plagued by some absolute nonsense mechanics, combined with toxicity from the higher rank clique.
Here's a list of problems that have made me uninstall with disgust:
1. Ships and missiles in the game follow Newton physics for the most part, however, craft (carrier launched shuttles) do not.
As a result, lower caliber weapons (100mm,120mm) have trouble doing meaningful damage to them with their respective explosive rounds, because they try to anticipate their paths.
When craft zig-zag in evasive maneuvers, you clearly see them not following any physics at all, and it's just vector movement - shells travel post codes away from where the craft is at.
One faction has 100mm flak, which is absolutely worthless at doing any meaningful damage to craft, and the other has 120mm fragmentation, which does some damage to craft, but needs a lot of guns to properly destroy them.
2. Anti-missile warfare. This is BY FAR my biggest gripe with this game.
60-70% of this game is just missile combat. There are two ways of dealing with missiles - juke them with countermeasures / jamming (softkill), or destroy them with point-defense turrets (hardkill).
Softkill is absolutely broken.
Missiles have slots for 1 main seeker and 1 secondary seeker.
The secondary seeker can function as a validator, incase the primary seeker gets confused by decoys, IE, telling an Exhaust-seeker, for instance, that the target is the one emitting radar waves.
Here's the problem:
There are like 7-8 different seekers, and triple the combinations you can have with them to bypass softkill.
You try to equip your ship with softkill for everything - Chaff, Active decoys, Comms jammer, Radar jammer and it literally doesn't matter.
You can do everything right, like dump chaff, move behind it, emcon (turn off radar), stop moving to eliminate engine exhaust, and enable jammers against the missiles, and it wouldn't matter - 90% of them will hit you anyway.
"Oh, you have XYZ on your ship, you did V, P, L, and K, but the reason you got killed is because you should have done O, P, and L, and my finest missile creations were engineered to not give a f**k about any of your softkill"
Why not go hardkill then? Because if you go full hardkill, the enemy can just overwhelm you by concentrating multiple volleys, sending them on delay paths converging on you. One of the factions is almost entirely focused on hurling missiles all over the map.
You do a mix of both - you don't have enough PD to defend yourself, and your softkill does f**k all to begin with.
3. Carriers are a plague, that ruins this game. Craft strikes are impossible to juke with softkill and jamming.
The game used to have room for ambush tactics, which rewarded good positioning, but since the carrier update, there is almost no fog of war.
The game has turned to a missile slog - camping rocks, hurling missiles from behind them, having a field day obliterating capital ship after capital ship with impunity, and making life miserable for cap fleets.
Light ships, whose purpose it is to grab control points on the map for your team, are absolutely defenseless against craft, primarily because low caliber weapons barely scratch their paint.
As a result, barely anyone volunteers to play cap fleets or frontline.
It's a damage farmland for clickers, and you're the crop.
4. The game's experience system gives you higher ranks the more you play. The ranks are divided in color - blue, white, and gold.
The gold clique of experienced players are some of the most toxic a**hats you will see in this game.
They do not shy away from seal clubbing and stacking purposely in unbalanced lobbies.
If you raise concern about any issue with the game, they'll be first to tell you it's a skill issue, or to wait fixes in the next update.
Wanna know how often updates come out? Every half a year.
Carriers were nerfed 3 times over the course of 2 years, because they would just roflstomp everything in their path, and the gold clique would be prime candidate to abuse them and make new players miserable.
5. People in this game have absolutely no respect for anybody's time.
Outside of peak hours, it takes anywhere from half an hour to 2 hours to get an 8-man lobby filled up.
Exasperating this issue is people who think it's ok to build fleets in lobby, and completely ignore everything else while they are at it.
Wasting time is the name of the game. A third of the player base goes AFK at random times, and when you try to vote-kick the timewasters, people are either too AFK to get the votes, or vote against kicking just because the time-waster said "Just 1 sec", taking another 4 minutes to tweak his precious chaff numbers.
Since this game has 0 single player content, other than AI skirmishes, this is all you have to look forward to, if you buy this game.
Macht viel Spaß, mit nen paar Freunden zu spielen. Sehr schwierig am Anfang, aber mit der Zeit wird das immer leichter. Auf jeden Fall ist es versuchswert.
I would recommend getting this game with friends and play either against bots or only each other, that way you can all learn together without getting demolished.
The game explains things fairly poorly. There's essentially 0 singleplayer value. It's extremely overstimulating in the sense that theres way too much that goes on and that, mixed with its complexity as a whole, makes figuring out what is even going on half the time hard. If you like sea power you might like this. But it feels like they had an engineer create this game with no one to stream line it at any point.
BUG with players ! unity malware ? :Locked_ACS::Locked_ACS::Locked_ACS::redwiz::colt:
ALL GAMES BLOCKED - about game "shift tab" with who was played all games shows only NEBULOUS: Fleet Command !!! what to do ? :steamthumbsdown::steamthumbsdown::steamthumbsdown:
Too bad, what happened to it. It was an interesting game with a lot of detail and potential for growth. Unfortunately, it never made it out of EA. The community turned rancid and the developer appears to have bailed on the project. These things happen to EA titles all the time. There hasn't been an update since October of 2025, and no dev blogs since December of 2025. The general consensus is that this is now abandonware. Consequently, while it remains an interesting proof of concept, I really can't recommend it.
MP focused strategy game will inevitably die as the try-hard player base will be the only thing that remains. The community is also totally overrun by discord weirdos. Would not recommend.
Hoi4 naval mechanics turned into separate game
Last proper game update was almost 1 year ago now, no more devlogs, nothing. Game feels abandoned at this point.
cant recommend the game anymore, many dumb decisions like removing antiship missiles from bombers.
The whole game is catered to only the small group of no lifers in there discord. No point in playing this game anymore.
I've played this game quite a lot as it'll show, but I was just thinking yesterday "does this game really have any appeal outside of a very small niche?" and for reasons outside of the core gameplay, I think it doesn't, and decided to check the reviews today.
And yeah I agree with many recent negative ones.
Some reasons I don't think it appeals outside of a narrow niche.
You have to REALLY REALLY love this game and its very specific niche, which I do, to put up with these multiple issues:
-Terrible netcode. The "Time Dilation" to keep things synced like an RTS from the 1990s also introduces many bugs that makes balance worse.
-No reconnnects, which is part of the terrible netcode.
-The developer has basically said "I already chose a bad network framework, and can't(won't) change it now" even though it's needed.
-The servers have been really bad lately which makes these problems worse, but if netcode was better than bad servers wouldn't be as problematic.
And I'm not saying the game needs wide appeal... but it doesn't even have less-than-super-narrow appeal.
-The starting fleets are questionable, though I think the beta test branch is addressing this better.
-I honestly can't imagine the coop campaign being nearly as fun as Homeworld, or Starcraft, but maybe... and maybe with mods, there is that.
That said, funny enough this game isn't so... hyper-simulation blah blah like DCS or whatever.
The core gameplay loop and controls are actually very accessible. It's a shame the netcode is so so SO bad and people blindly defend it because they like the gameplay itself.
That said, I'll keep playing it and I'm looking forward to the updates. I just can't swindle others into buying it when it's probably not for them
Having to BUILD EVERYTHING even down to the MISSILES is an absolute non-starter for those who want to play fleet commander but not warship engineer. For example, I like Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age insofar as managing tracks, emissions, sorties, targeting, etc. and so forth. This game has that...but with the additional layer of asking whether or you not you kitted out your ship correctly. Maybe you could have done everything regarding hardcore space naval warfare and simulating its systems better, IF ONLY your loadouts were better optimized.
Whose idea was this? Does a squadron admiral IRL have to build their ships individually, down to configuring missile warheads? Are they Lockheed or US Navy? Presets and templates won't solve the problem, especially when you can just develop metas to counter those presets and templates.
If you lose a session in Nebulous, you don't just ask "Did I command well?"...you ask "Did I arrive with the right ontology of ship?".
Pass unless you're okay with "two games in one". We'll still be waiting for a game that does what Nebulous does but minus this core pillar.
日本語化して
Was a great game, had a lot of fun. Sadly too little from Devs for a long time.
I larped as a femboy sissy commander. I my vessel got shredded but it was hot
I don't know how long I am banned from casual lobies ?
Was fun for a while, but the missile cheese got worse and worse. Its never just hulks fighting it out anymore. Got so much worse after the carrier update that Its just not fun anymore. All my ship builds are now geared against soft targets. Boring.
Rly good game if u have time. Not alot of ppl are playing it but I love it.
probably the best space combat game out there, criminally underrated
Not much content for us single player enjoyers, wait for something else.
This game has a learning curve, but once you understand it, you feel like you are really a commander in a future space war.
only moving 1 cm an hour in a match now a days
I really like this game. IF THE CO-OP CAMPAIGN IS CANCELLED I CHANGE MY REVIEW TO NEGATIVE. but until i see definitive proof that they have abandoned it, this game will be great. I honestly do not care about balance. OSP, ANS, either side has so many tools and its such a skill based game, it doenst matter. Great lore and space sim. like chess in space. carrier battles and missile editor are my faves... I REALLY WANT TO SEE A CAMPAIGN
To start this off, this is a fun game. It's very cool, I like the design elements and it does feel like a really good space naval warfare game, fun for those who like Sea Power and similar games - this is even a bit more "exciting" than most milsim naval warfare games. The maps are OK, they're geared towards 20-45 minute matches assuming no cheese is involved, which is fine for the most part. Cheese *is* an issue you will face playing any multiplayer match, a coordinated team can simply spam the cheapest corvette in the game and bumrush points and players with rocket pods and just delay the enemy until they get a victory-by-points, but all games have issues like that so it's OK.
The issue - and the reason I can't recommend this game - is the community. There's a lot of "unwritten rules" that get you yelled at or kicked from matches that I genuinely can't find listed anywhere (3k point limit, don't use non-meta tactics, etc). Usually that's "okay", I can understand if someone is bringing the worst ship imaginable with it costing 3 trillion points, but there's no actual limit to the points in the editor or multiplayer menu as far as I can tell. This could easily be fixed with matches having a hard cap on points based on what server you're queueing for (some could have 3k limits, others upwards of 6k) allowing for large fleets or small fleets.
However, the points and hate for non-meta tactics isn't really the issue. The issue is that the community is toxic in such a way that i've seen entire matches/servers "held hostage" because someone doesn't want to play on a certain team, or doesn't want someone using a certain class of ships, etc. Constantly leaving (and creating a team imbalance), which causes the rest of their team to leave, thus restarting the match. They do this until they get what they want.
This doesn't happen very often, but it happens enough for me to include it in this review as a reason to be hesitant when buying this game. There's a myriad of other issues with the community as stated above, and as far as I can tell from talking to players or checking the other reviews here, the developer(s?) seem to be aware of it and don't care about the issues in the community or have any plans to fix the very easily fixable meta and points issues.
I am aware that a campaign is supposedly set for "Q1 2026", and if it does release that would be cool - and maybe it would shift my view of the game, but right now the game is essentially a complex multiplayer-PVP game where you are very much forced to play at the whims veteran community players. Having the game be purely PVP is totally fine, many games do that, but that creates the issue of playstyles being required to be "Meta". You can't experiment with missiles, you can't experiment with ship designs, you have to use the meta - this community especially takes *extreme* offense when your fleet isn't meta.
Overall, it's a good game gameplay wise - but I just can't recommend it. The community is not good to say the least, and most of the game is already spent waiting for people to join, dealing with people unhappy with team placement - when you do get into a game, theres a solid 50% chance you'll be bumrushed by a wave of disposable ships. But it is still fun.
If you like naval warfare games or space combat games, then try it out (pretty sure this game has a demo, or just play for sub 2 hours and refund if you don't like it). I think the mechanics are fun if a bit meta-driven, it's just the community and lack of balancing features that have me turned away.
Empty Shell, 4 year later pve campaign canceled. If i could refund now, i would.
Edit, that was not the campaign that got canceled, but conquest. At the moment still no campaign but who knows.
At the moment,:Fan boy can say what they want. That too long for too little.
It's a really interesting and fun yet very complex ship game. The focus is on PVP battles, mostly 4v4.
The fact that capping is needed for victory makes a capper fleet needed for most matches, but most people don't want to or don't know how to play that type of fleet. Therefore, there are weird situations where people ask their teammates to play cappers, but don't want to (or don't know how to) play cappers themselves. Such thing is just an example of how the game, being cooperative PVP, suffers from some team organization problems in public lobbies.
Overall, the community is friendly and has a good amount of flexible players though.
You totally can (and even should) ask questions during matches about what the expressions used mean.
The game offers a variety of ship classes, weapons, electronic warfare equipment, missiles, aircraft, countermeasures and so on. So each player has a lot of freedom to customize their fleets, this means you can play in a lot of different ways according to your desires. Players can fully customize even missiles!
This game is also asymmetrical, both factions use different warfare tactics. Playing the tutorial is not an option to make you more comfortable with the controls, it's needed so you're not completely confused during your first matches. But there is no need to hop into fleet customization early on, since there are a lot of starter fleets you can pick, but these are pretty bad (no one wants to play META on their first matches anyway). You can also ask other players on discord for their fleets, and put the files they send in your game fleets' files.
The variety of options makes so you're going to experience situations where you simply don't have the ideal tool for what you're dealing with. You're going to need to adapt your playstyle according to your fleet as well as the scenario you're in. Which requires a lot of skill, and is the main reason why the skill ceiling in this game is very high. Understanding the situation and possibilities of enemy positioning, as well the fleets they might have, is the main challenge during most of the gameplay.
The game is really complex, but has great tutorials and a discord community full of veterans willing to help. It's stressful at first, ngl. But Nebulous is also really exciting once you can understand the situation, the enemies and fight for your team's victory with a fleet you built.
its a game that currently exists as far as im aware
I really like this game. I've heard a lot of complaints about the "competitive multiplayer" scene being fairly small and unwelcoming to new players, but I don't know anything about that because I don't play competitive multiplayer. I only play this game with my friends and I have a great time doing so. I can't recommend this game to everyone, but if you have friends who like this type of game, I'd say give it a shot. Once you've learned the basic mechanics, start pushing the limits. Play with ridiculous 10,000+ point fleets. Play with mods (there is one on the workshop that adds 6 new factions). Experiment with off-meta builds and strategies that wouldn't work at all in "competitive multiplayer." You can do so much more when you aren't limited by small point limits and locked into a meta, and it is a load of fun.
Game is great, community is pretty toxic in my experience unfortunately. It's fun even with the learning curve being vertical, just don't play the multiplayer unless you want to be super serious competitive I guess?
It is mainly a very complex game PvP. You really need to love this game to invest the time to get beat by the experience players. There is no sing of a strategic campaign for a single player like me.
I will start by saying what has been said by a lot of people who have posted reviews here. THIS GAME HAS A LEARNING CLIFF. While that may seem extremely concerning, I have 2 major pieces of advice that can help any person to get into this game. For one, you do not know everything; this community has some extremely dedicated and committed individuals to the game, they have almost specialized into certain aspects. There will always be knowledge gaps even with the most seasoned individuals in this community. This leads into the second point. Have an open mind; if you have a certain ship design in mind and belive that it will defeat everything, it will most likely not.
This game is basically chess on steroids via 1980's ships in space. The community can be rather confusing at times, take everything they say with maybe 2 grains of salt; but they do want to help people succeed in the game. Take peoples advice, ask question, get to understand the slang that everyone uses, they will be more than happy to reply.
If you are still on the fence or want to get an idea of what the game is like, check out ScapeGT on Youtube for regular video gameplay, and on Sundays they stream the game and also review community submitted fleets, so you can get your feet wet with how to do construction.
The community and the level of detail this game has inspired me to begin working on a "Beginners Guide to NEB", since there can be a lot for a new player to first discover exists and then learn how to do it.
I hope to see you on the battlefield!
小船带混合导弹可以杀遍天下，强度离谱，感觉可以去隔壁群星打25倍天灾了
Lots of neat concepts and very cool ideas, but the game is lacking in substance, has some annying quality of life issues, and there are plenty of weapons that sound cool on paper but do not live up to the concept in practice. The lack of diversity in the maps also hobbles the replay potential.
There is no single player experience here unless you count the tutorial, because skirmish mode gets really boring quite fast.
I spent an entire weekend really trying to like this game, but alas, to no avail. I weep for what it might have been.
