Hardly's Helpful Guide to: What The Heck To Do With Your Spaceships

TLDR

Take TF Oak. Remember that you have 9-11km range, and stay about 5km from your friends at all times. Remember that you can travel 2-3km every two minutes. That’s the magic formula. Congratulations, you are now tactics, and do not need to read the guide. Play a few matches.

Come back and keep reading if it doesn't work. Also, come back and keep reading if it does work. It's one thing to know a magic formula. But if you actually understand it .... that's when you can really start to make magic happen.

A Familiar Experience

You design your beautiful spaceships. Maybe you spent a few hours seeking advice from experienced players. Maybe they're 100% home cooking. Maybe you were loaned a fleet. Maybe you grabbed a starter.

You jump into a multiplayer lobby, perhaps try to make a plan with your teammates, trying to figure out how your ships can work together.

The game starts.

20-40 minutes of chaos and destruction occur.

The battle report appears.

Hmmm. That could have gone better. Surely you could have put your ships in a better position, and engaged the targets around you more effectively?

But …

Where should you have put your ships to help win the battle?

Which target should you have chosen to shoot at?

How could you know whether your ships can get somewhere in time to help out with a fight?

And, perhaps more importantly …

how could you have worked out those things in the midst of a battle?

I’ll be honest: I figure I'm somewhere between terrible and average when it comes to nebulous tactics. But there’s always something more to learn in nebulous … so let’s try this anyway, and see how far we can get towards answering these questions.

Maybe we can figure something out

Far Horizons

The first thing we need to nail down, is what we were trying to do in the first place.

Nebulous skirmish is most commonly played in a 4v4 or 5v5 'control' game mode, with fleets costing exactly 3000 pts per player, on a map with between 3-7 capture points, or 'caps'. Parking on a cap unopposed for 1 minute captures that point for your team, and holding them generates victory points, with the first team to 1000 pts winning the game.

So, the goal of your *team* is to control more caps than the other team (or the same number for longer), and so get to 1000 pts first.

Drat. That still doesn't tell us where to put our ships.

<dramatic music sting with unnecessary camera cut while the narrator swivels their chair around to face the new camera angle>

Or does it?

What does it mean to control a cap point?

Chop Wood, Carry Games

Controlling caps wins games. So, to win games, we must control caps.

So far, so good.

To control a cap, we have to do two things, in order.

Put a ship from our team on the cap, and keep it alive & uncontested for 1 minute.

Prevent the other team from doing the same thing.Huh. Okay. We've figured out where to put our ships. You can close this guide and uninstall nebulous now, it's all solved.

Just park our ships on the capture points, and win.

Let's try that out, and see how it goes:

image credit: Das

Oh, drat. And things were looking so promising.

We forgot that the other team can do the Step 2 part, too.

So, how can we make them not do that?

I Swear If You Ask Another Inane Question I Will Shoot Something

Excellent. That's exactly the energy we need here.

Shoot the other team harder than they can shoot you.

Channel all your frustration at this dumb guide on tactics that still doesn't have any useful tactics in it and just rush down the other team until they're dead.

Oh, huh. That worked. We won. Uhhh, try it again?

Ah, not this time. Hmmm.

So what do we ... no, wait, sorry, I almost goofed there. Let's not do another question.

Let's do something weird and completely unprecedented in the history of guides.

Let's consider what we've learned so far.

Yeah, We Already Learned Something, Maybe

If we shoot the other team a lot, they eventually stop shooting back.

While they're not shooting back, we can cap points.

If they try capping points, we can shoot them some more, until they stop doing that.

But if we let ourselves get shot too much, we lose our ability to shoot.

And if we cap points while they're still shooting at us, we lose the ships we need to cap points.

Okay. Y'know. We've got the basis for something here.

These are our needs:

Shoot the other ship a lot

until it stops doing the things we don't want it to do

like shooting at us

or capping points and starts doing the things we do want it to do

like moving away from cap points

or hiding behind a convenient rock so that we know where it is. so we can do the things we want

like capping points

and shooting more shipsOnce they stop doing capping and shooting, we get to do the capping and shooting, instead.

Yeah, I think we can work with this.

Shootinators

Your ship has shootinators.

Some of them shoot cannon shells. Some of them shoot jamming. Some of them shoot missiles or chaff. Some of them shoot giant glowing green lines. Some of them just cause hours of arguments about game balance.

These shootinators are what we will use to shootinate the shoot out of whatever it is that needs shooting.

There's just two major things we need to care about when it comes to shootinators.

What does the shootinator do to the ship that gets shot?

How far away can it do that?

and, uh

How quickly can we get in range to make the thing happen?

Let's quickly work these through before I make another counting error.

Firstly: Effects.Direct Effects: Cannons, beams, and short-mid range direct missiles damage and break things, and make the ship being hit really really not want to have any more things damaged or broken. If we keep shooting, either a) all their stuff will be broken, or b)they'll leave and go somewhere else so that we stop breaking all their stuff.

Indirect effects/Fires: Long-range missiles, especially cruise missiles, as well as mass drivers and railguns, do the same thing, but often the target *doesn't get to shoot back*. Which honestly sounds pretty great, because being shot at seems like it would be inconvenient.

Even more kinds of indirect effects/Fires: Jammers let the stuff in the first bucket pretend like it’s the stuff in the second bucket - it means we get to shoot them from where they *could* shoot back at us, but means they might not get to do so no matter how much they would like to. Which will probably make them sad I guess, but maybe they should have considered that before they tried to shoot us.

Secondly: Range.All that good stuff up above only reaches so far. Your ships will have a range at which their shootinators are really really effective.

Figure out what it is and DO NOT FORGET IT. There will actually be a quiz on this one later. It is one of the 2⅔ secret numbers to rule the universe.

For ANS 450mm, that number will be between 9-11km, radar depending.

For OSP Plas/100, that number is about 7km

For a torpedo ship, that number will be between 3-5km.

For a gale spammer, that number will be somewhat less than 10km.

For a 250mm ship, that number will be 8km.

Okay, we got this. Let's look at our ship. Decide what the most important shootinator is on it. Figure out its effective range. AND DO NOT FORGET IT.

This is the song that doesn't end.

My shootinators are my friends.

They work at <insert number> kilometers and now I won't forget

Because this stupid song is stuck forever in my head....

Yeah, sorry about that one. But I'm not joking.

AHAH! You Thought I Forgot, Didn't You

Second secondly, perhaps also known as thirdly: How soon can we move into range?

For this, we'll turn away from the end of your ship with all the shootinators on it.

We must consider instead, that enormous plume of burning plasma that your ship zooms around on.

In the fleet editor, your ship has a number which says "FLANK SPEED: " in front of it.

Multiply this by blahblah and then divide by blibbydeboop ... actually, y'know what. Let's cheat.

Move the decimal point one place to the left. Yeah, just like that. Actually, double down on this, and forget the bit after the decimal point, just keep the number on the left. Oh wait. Yeah, we can cheat even more than that. Look at the first numeral in your speed. Forget the rest. Done.

For example:

A Raider/whip Axford does 32.4 m/s at FLANK.

Shuffle the point: 3.24

Drop the decimal: 3

Hey presto! 3 km every 2 minutes.

(Properly calculated, it’s 3.8. Use the 3. Trust)

We'll pretend we multiplied by 120 and divided by 1000, but let's do the incredibly lazy shortcut instead and call it good. I won't tell the council of universal mathematics if you won't.

You now have the second of the 2⅔. universal truths: how many kilometers your ship can travel in two minutes. (Don't forget this one either. I mean it. You don't want me to have to come up with another irritating earworm, do you?)

Two minutes is a nice amount of time, in nebulous. You can get a decent amount of stuff done, but unless someone gets really lucky/unlucky, probably nothing unsalvageably dramatic will happen that quickly.

And now you know exactly what your ship can accomplish in that time: every two minutes, you can move your lovely X km radius shootination bubble over by Y km.

Please Tell Me When You Saw X & Y You Remembered What Your Magic Numbers Were

Aight, let's refresh our memory.

We have 2 of the 2⅔ magic numbers

We know to capture points.

We know to shoot the other ships, so that our team can capture points, and their team can't.

We know to put our ships X km away from the ships we want to shoot.

And we know to choose where we want to be in 2 minutes’ time - we can move Y km towards somewhere that will put us within X km of the next thing we want to shoot.

This plan is actually coming together.

Uhh, wrong gif?

No, that's not

Ah, there we go.

What The Actual, Hardly, This Thing Has Gone On Forever And There's Still No Freaking Tactics In It

No? Yes? Kinda? Remember at the beginning, when I said "I don't actually know that much about tactics" and you decided to keep reading? Checkmate.

Anyway, let's do this. Let's do the tactics.

Tables To Pull The Wool/rug From Over/under Your Eyes/feet

Okay I lied.

You don't have to work out or remember the magical numbers.

I've some nice tables of them, right here.

Table 1: sDirect-fire Weapon2/3rds effective rangeRocketsDirect S3Beam turret3.Spinal beamPlasma, 100mm, 120mm7.250mm5.600mm6.5kmFCR 450mmLR 450mm11.7.

(Well, these are really mostly just “max range”. Real effective range will depend a lot on your ship, and how you’ve designed it. Try max range to start with, then dial it back till you find the range at which things really start happening well.)

Table 2: sSpeedFlankTypically …13-19 m/s20-28.5 m/sBB, CH

MN20-26 m/s30-39 m/sCL, DD, FF

CLN, LN, CC, Tug

Sundrive MN26.5-3340-49.5 m/sWhiplash CL, FF

Longhaul LN, Sundrive Tug33.5-39.550-59 m/sFFL

Shuttle

This is good, because I lied twice.

You don't have to think about the magic numbers for your ships ... you need to think about them for everyone else's ships, too.

That's okay, because I lied three times.

You don't need to think about them as numbers.

You can think of them as bubbles instead.

Bubble Bubble, Range And Trouble

Your ship's magic number 1 is the radius of a giant bubble around your ship, in which you can effectively shoot at other ships to make them stop doing the things you don't want them to do.

Your ship's magic number 2, is how far you can push that bubble around, every two minutes.

And your ship's magic number ⅔, which I'm going to pretend we talked about in detail but will actually leave as a spooky mystery for now, is your *mutual support range*.

The edges of the bubble are pretty tough, at least when it comes to pushing on ships. If you push the bubble towards a ship you're shooting at, it won't immediately burst - if your shooting is getting a lot of effects onto your target, your bubble might push them (and their bubble) back a bit.

If your bubble is much larger than your target's, and you're *still* getting good effects with your shootinating while you have them at the edge of your bubble, your bubble might push them back a lot.

In nebulous, smaller bubbles can be even tougher, though. If you're working with an 11km bubble, and someone punches their ships deep into your bubble carrying a 4km torpedo bubble with them, you probably really really do not want that 4km bubble to start pushing your ship around.

Oh look, that seems useful.

BUBBLE IDEA 1:

Shuttle 0001 will get wrecked by the strong outer portion of the CL’s 250mm RPF bubble … but the CL may have difficulty swiveling its guns around to engage Shuttle 0002 after it pops out from cover already deep inside the CL’s bubble

The inner boundary of the strong layer of your bubble is your mutual support range. If you want to help out a ship with your guns, you probably want to hang out so that you keep them on that boundary. This is magic number ⅔, btw. No, I didn't forget about it, I just buried the lede about 3/4 of the way through a 3000-word essay about exploding fictional spaceships.

The support range lets your weapons cover the weakest part of your friends bubble, and positions you to quickly move forward and focus your shootinators on the same target as theirs. If your bubble is larger than theirs, hang a little back from them so the strongest portions of your bubbles overlap on your target. If your bubble is smaller, then lucky you, you get to open the door.

BUBBLE IDEA 2:

Our CL friend is in trouble, but because we kept the BB in support range, we can overlap our bubbles on the attacker, and help them out

It can get a little trickier when ships with different ranges are supporting each other. Aship with longer range, can support a ship with shorter range by using its own 2/3rds line. A ship with shorter range can receive support from a longer ranged ship, by sticking to the other ship's support line.

If you're the one in the shorter ranged ships, that's your cue to communicate with the other ship, and ask for their help, or to realise that you'll be taking a risk by going out of support - but risk isn't inherently bad.

In the example below, the CC, LN, and MN can support all their friends easily, out to the extent of their bubbles. Since the BB is the shared target, the shorter ranged ships are between the BB and the longest ranged CC .... but if a threat popped up on the other side, it wouldn't take long for them to shuffle their bubbles over to get in range.

The torpedo tug can support most of the fleet, but has let the CC fall outside the tug's support range, so it might struggle to get back over to the CC fast enough to help .... but that's okay other friends are covering it, the tug doesn't need to carry all the weight alone.

Only the rocket shuttle here is unable to directly support its friends ...... but all ships in the fleet are able to support the shuttle, and with that many different kinds of bubbles overlapped, that BB is likely to be toast in short order.

Oh darn, you know which number we did forget though? Magic number 2 - our two-minute movement range at FLANK.

It's not always going to be possible to keep your teammates nicely within your 2/3rds support range. But that's okay, because you have magic number 2, and magic number 2 tells you that your bubble is actually bigger on the outside than it is on the inside, provided you're a time traveler.

Your 2-minute-move range is, in part, your leeway, it gives you a margin of error to move around to seek cover, or dodge stuff, or get distracted, or make mistakes, or whatever.

It is the wispy extra-bubble area of influence, easily swept away on the stellar winds, but there none the less.

Use it. Choose it.

If your bubble isn't pushing/shootinating on any enemy ships *right now*, pick a place two minutes away where it can, and go there. If there's no enemy ships you can shoot at with your bubble, find a friend that can/is shooting, and go get your bubble overlapped. You can even easily figure out how long it will take you to get there, because we have magic number #2

And remember how we cheated on the maths? That means that you can pull a Scott Montgomery, and arrive a little earlier, or dither over your decision for a few extra seconds, because our mathematical laziness built a safety margin into our tactical movement plan.

BUBBLE IDEA 3:

Ooooh, we could charge into beam range along path A within two minutes ….. or we could sidle back into support range of our CH anchor along path B where it can support us better, and still be in beam range in 2 minutes, let’s do that one.

If you have no clue, find a friend who does, and go practice the SECOND IDEA OF BUBBLES with them. If you had a galaxy brain moment and are doing everything we’ve figured out so far, you are already within two minutes of supporting your friend, which should make this part really easy.

If there’s nothing at all to shoot, talk with your friends, and get your bubbles ready to cover a capture attempt, or a suspicious rock from which the other team might spring out. (Sensor ships are bubbles too! I wonder what you’d use those for ……….)

We're winning at this now, right?

Ahhh Nooo, We Almost Forgot The Other Thing Again

BUBBLE IDEA 4:

Yeah, the other team? They’re going to be bubbling you back. This whole time we were gloating about our mastery of the 2⅔ universal numbers of tactical brilliance, they were shootinating us more than we were shootinating them, and we lost.

Don't let that happen.

Shootinate them. Shootinate them with friends. Keep shootinating them until they stop shootinating back.

How?

Oh wait, we already know this one!

Step 1: The Plan

1) Put your target in the strong outer 1/3rd of your bubble-of-shooting.

2) Shoot the target.

3) Keep your friends within your 2/3rds support line, so you can quickly get your bubbles to overlap on the target.

3) Keeping shoot the target: better with friends edition.

3) Choose where you want your bubble to be in 2 minutes, so you can do more shooting. Go there, and communicate with your friends about this.

4) Fix the numbering, spelling, and, grammar of this list

5) KEEP SHOOTING THE TARGET UNTIL THE TARGET STOPS DOING THE THINGS YOU DON'T LIKE

...

7) Win.

No way. We actually came up with a plan!

Which Is Very Fortunate, Because I'm Tired Now, Go Home

Ah. You're disappointed because there's still no fancy tactics here.

Yeah, sorry about that. I did label this guide "Tactics 001" for a reason.

Look, let's be real. I dunno how to magic a flank up out of thin air, improvise a cohesive fire base out of random pub fleets, or carry a game of nebulous on the tactical genius that I don't possess.

But, remember how we started with nothing?

Well, now we have:

some shared language for talking about tactical problems (bubbles, effects, fires, direct, indirect, range, support range, movement).

a simple plan (see the section right before this one!) which helps you to know

Where to put your ships to support your friends and win the battle

Which targets to shoot at

How quickly how can respond to new situations in the battlespaceaaaand 2 and ⅔ magic numbers to help you figure it out on the fly

Take your magic numbers. The ones you can't forget because the song that doesn't end is still making you annoyed at me.

Remember your BUBBLE, the effective range of your most relevant weapon system.

Remember your SUPPORT RANGE, so that you can work together with your team to overlap your bubbles on a target to shoot them together.

And remember your TWO MINUTE MOVE, so that you can decisively move around the map to put your bubble where your shootinators can shoot the next thing that is doing something you don't like, and quickly move into range to help your friends before their ships take catastrophic damage.

Follow the plan. Use your bubble deliberately. Remember your magic numbers. Change things up when you need to. Keep typing or talking with your team.

I have a terrible sneaking suspicion, that if you start to do that, you might find that you are *accidentally* doing fancy tactics. And every time that happens, it becomes more likely that you'll be able to do it again ... and this time, do it on purpose.

Try to make one good tactical choice in a game, and recognise when it works out well. Think about why it worked. Then do it again.

Bubble. Overlap. Shoot. Move. Remember. Win/Lose. Learn. Repeat.

Step 2: Everything Else

So yeah, there's a lot more to nebulous and its tactics than this.

use cover

cap points

do scouting

do counter-scouting

do indirect stuff (rails/md, cruise missiles, EW)

build effective fleets

assemble effective team compositions

etc.....

But this is one place you could start.

Don't stress it if nebulous doesn't make sense straight away - it's complex, and there's always something more to learn.

Try things, keep thinking and learning, and you'll do great.

Enjoy blowing up starships, even if sometimes those starships will be yours. At least the explosions are pretty :-)

= = = = = =

Worked Example: WHERE THE HECK DO I PUT MY SHIPS!?

"Okay Hardly," you might be thinking. "All this is very nice. Bubbles are great and all. And that's a snappy sounding plan. But I still don't know where the heck to put my ships, and you promised you were going to tell me."

Y'know what - that's fair.

But - and hear me out here - I think you now know how to figure out that question. What's more, I think we can use our new method to figure out the answer, even if you've never used the ship you're bringing before.

Let's work it all the way through, top to bottom.

The theory

The first thing we talked about, was what our team needs to do to win - control cap points. And we talked about what we need to do to achieve that - shoot at (or be ready to shoot at) the other teams ships, so that they can't cap, and they can't stop our cappers.

Next, we talked about shootinators - the stuff on our ships, that can make bad stuff happen on their ships. Cannons, missiles, jammers, beams, the works. Chances are, if it's on your ship, you can use it to cause problems for the other team. (And if you can't, it might be worth considering whether you needed to bring that module along, after all).

Our ships most relevant shootinator gives us the first magic number: the effective range.

Ship location step #1: Figure out your ship's effective range. If you're not sure, start by using the maximum range of its most important weapon. Put the ship at <effective range> km from something or somewhere we want to shoot.

Next we talked about how to cheat at maths, taking the flank speed of our ship, keeping the first number (the 10s digit), and throwing the rest away, to give us our second magic number: the 2-minute move.

Ship location step #1: Figure out your ship's effective range. If you're not sure, start by using the maximum range of its most important weapon. Put the ship at <effective range> km from something or somewhere you want to shoot, so that it's nicely in the strong outer part of your bubble.

Ship location step #2: Figure out your ship's two-minute move. Cheat at the maths, just pull the first numeral off the front of the flank speed, and that's how far you can go in two minutes. If there's somewhere else you want to quickly move your bubble, put your ship at <two-minute move> km away from it.

Then .... well then we got a bit distracted by figuring out the properties of bubbles. We talked how shooting at hostile ships at our effective range, is like pushing them around with the strong outer parts of the bubble. The more bubbles that can push on a ship at once, the more pressure our team can exert to get the target to do what we want. Most importantly, we talked about how we could stay close-but-not-too-close to our friends, so that it was easy to overlap our bubbles on the same target to focus fire & overwhelm them.

That gave us our 2/3rds magic number: the support range.

Ship location step #1: Figure out your ship's effective range. If you're not sure, start by using the maximum range of its most important weapon. Put the ship at <effective range> km from something or somewhere you want to shoot, so that it's nicely in the strong outer part of your bubble.

Ship location step #2: Figure out your ship's two-minute move. Cheat at the maths, just pull the first numeral off the front of the flank speed, and that's how far you can go in two minutes. If there's somewhere else you want to quickly move your bubble, put your ship at <two-minute move> km away from it.

Ship location step #3: Take 2/3rds of <effective range> to get your ship's support range. If you have a longer <effective range> than another ship, you can support it by keeping them within <support range> km. If you have a shorter <effective range> than another ship, you can receive support from them by staying within their <effective range>. By working around and within each others' support ranges, it is easy to quickly overlap your bubbles on a target - the more bubbles, the more better.

That's all the basic info we need to follow through our plan.

The Plan Put your target in the strong outer 1/3rd of your bubble-of-shooting.

Shoot the target.

Keep your friends within your 2/3rds support line, so you can quickly get your bubbles to overlap on the target.

Overlap lots of bubbles, and wreck the target

Choose where you want your bubble to be in 2 minutes, so you can do more shooting. Go there, and communicate with your friends about this.

RepeatThe Practice

Let's take, say, a plasma/100 sundrive monitor for our example.

Magic numbers speedrun, any%:

7.2km effective range

3km 2-minute move

5km support range

Alright, we have our numbers. We have our plan. Let's gooo.

(Each image is 2 minutes apart, using 2-minute-moves for each ship)

Phase 1

We arrive to the map. Teammate in the 450mm CC (450 -> 11km -> 8km support) starts capping C. Our other teammate in the shuttle .... yup, looks like they're dreaming of an A cap.

Hmm, what will we need to be able to shoot to support them?

It seems likely ANS will move to cap B.... and whether or not we see a capper incoming, they'll probably want to have something covering A as well. Let's guess at some ship positions, and start pushing forward to get in range ... and we'll communicate with the CC, and ask them to range on the rocks as well once the cap finishes up.

Phase 2Oh carp ... there was a beamstone there. Good thing everyone is in supporting range - with two bubbles overlapping, we have our best shot.

Well, hmmm. We got the beamstone ... and they got our shuttle, stalling the A cap. That's alright, we can cover the cap for now and try again later.

In the meantime, the core of the ANS fleet has appeared - a 450mm Axford begins pummeling our MN from outside our range. Thankfully, our CC is in support range, and can quickly push up to start returning fire, covering us as we sidestep the axford's line of fire to setup our advance.

Phase 3Well, good news, bad news.

Since we were in supporting range, it didn't take long for us to push the MN into range, and duck back out to overlap our bubble with the CC. Between plas/100 & 450mm, the CH will be feeling the pressure.

Unfortunately, a dangerous threat has just popped up, deep in our bubble. We sidled too close to that rock without cover on that side, and now we might just pay for it .... we're still in support range of our friend though, so let's see what we can manage.

Let's step back into cover so that we're in only one hostile bubble, and get the CC to join us in bubbling the FFL. Between us, we can kill it ... but we'll likely pay for our positional risk by eating a couple of torpedoes. Ah well, that's the game.

Phase 4Okay. We're .... hurt, but still fighting. We're excited about how well this is going. And we're going to make a stupid, reckless, mistake.

aaaaand ... that's it. I've hit word count for this chapter. Why was that a mistake? Will it be worth the risk? What do you think our team should do next?

Appendix I: Hardly's Terrible Tactical Toolkit

One last thing.

I made this to help think about all this in a less chaotic environment than an actual neb game.

It’s a lightweight tactical sketchpad for Nebulous.

You can get the sketchpad, and its source code here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jGxau5sqWZ-6e9QB7tE-uAsux3xrgoID?usp=sharing

You can use this toolkit like a whiteboard. Lay out some rocks, drag out some ships and targets and their weaponry, and you’ll be able to rapidly see how the bubbles start to interact.

And game it out, one two minute move at a time (the measurement tool shows the 2-min-move range for the ship you have selected, if you’ve set the speed for it). You'll have to supply your own pewpewpew noises, decide which ships live and die, and generally scribble in any other stuff that happens ….

But with this tool, you can start to visualise your bubbles, and the effects that positional and movement choices have as the bubbles move around and shoot at things. You can draw out a simplified version of an engagement you had, and figure out maybe how different choices could have affected things.

You’re clever, I’m sure you’ll figure out more interesting uses for it, too.

Appendix II: Further Reading & Other Approaches

By no means should you consider this the definitive guide to nebulous tactics, heh.

Many others have written guides describing other approaches, other frameworks, and other aspects of figuring out the chaos and complexity of nebulous skirmish matches.

Here’s some other guides that I’ve found helpful in my own journey of learning …

Hopeful Monster’s “The Commodore Mindset”, probably the most useful introduction to nebulous tactics.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2903743078

Vren55’s excellent guide to the design & effective use of the starter fleets:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2939725175

Hermann’s “Armchair Admiral's Acronym Almanac”,perfect for making sense of the soup of nebulous acronyms and concepts that get discussed:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3159655737

Puppy’s (Perfect) Pillars Playback, a detailed tactical breakdown of one of the most commonly played maps

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2864759112

Appendix III: Acknowledgements

Many people helped with review, testing, and feedback for both this guide, and the tactical sketchpad, including (in alphabetical order): Arofire, Admiralyolo, Dargaribdus, Das, Farmers_Intel, Hermann, HopefulMonster, K8ll8ngDingo, Lagia8, PuppyFromHell, QoREKT, TallyTwoTime, TheCoolGuy, and the entire #mod-development crew.

Thank you! I really appreciated your help and support :-)

Appendix IV: This Guide Is Wrong

The principles in the guide are very basic, and I haven't developed the ideas very far. I hope that it's enough to get people started on a journey of thinking about their tactics more deliberately ... but I feel it's beyond my current skills to write a guide to write a guide showing how to translate these building blocks into more complex tactics.

While writing this guide, I received a lot of feedback and requests for more detailed specific tactics, or tactical assessments of common fleet archetypes or ship builds. These might be ideal for a Tactics 101, or even 201 .... but this is Tactics 001, alas. Perhaps you will be the one to write those guides!

I guess you could say this guide is somewhat of a half-tested experiment. I’ve tried to listen and learn from people who are good at playing nebulous, but it’s kinda hard for me to judge how well I’ve actually learned their lessons, heh.

But I remember how chaotic and overwhelming nebulous was when I started ……. and how my own journey to even a vague notion of effective tactical decisions in nebulous took hundreds of hours.

I’ve written this guide in the hopes that your journey might get off to a stronger start.

But nebulous is vast and complex. I’ve tested this guide’s gameplan, and asked a few others to try it out too, in an attempt to check that it works. But you’ll no doubt quickly learn areas and situations where the ideas in this guide might fall down, or need adjustment to work better.

Great! That’s how learning works. Test what you figure out, learn, or notice. Try to refine it, then share it with the community. We all improve, games get more dynamic, allies get more capable, opponents get more interesting, and everyone wins.

If you’re not already there, the developer’s official discord (it’s linked on the main menu of the game!) is welcoming, friendly, and an excellent place to learn about & discuss Nebulous: Fleet Command.

See you in the battlespace!

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3266906092					

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• Better Battle Report (BBR) User Guide
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