Phase 3 of Conquest development is almost complete, and this devlog covers team traits, officer mechanics, fuel consumption, scoring, and some conquest-specific changes to the skirmish battles.
Conquest Concept Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pv0jSMwneQzJ_7o2vx0QB_NSVup5N-t_N6TvlLCcICs/edit
Officer portrait art by ShieldMade: https://shieldmade.artstation.com/
Play on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/887570/NEBULOUS_Fleet_Command/
Public Roadmap: https://trello.com/b/ZNxJIGSQ/nebulous-public-roadmap
Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/XSYYRPS
Support development on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/EriInd
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Mind. Blown. So. Cool. 🤯
Will stations carry limited amounts of fuel or will you be able to refuel your vessels at any station at any time assuming an open berth. (sorry if this was covered I've been watching this in a loud area)
14:44 This is one of the main reasons why I'm excited about playing this game. Each ship forming its own identity with crew that grow with it over time and the very real threat of losing it all. It sounds like the perfect game to me honestly.
I have an idea to maybe spice things up with how the maps could work when a battle is started. Add dozens of small asteroid clusters throughout the campaign overview screen. If your fleet is going to be intercepted by a superior force they could head towards one of these asteroid clusters to give them a fighting chance at outsmarting a larger force that would easily defeat them on the direct confrontations youd have on abysal. Just a thought that could spice up the gameplay
Can’t wait to try this, shame I don’t have friends who are interested in this kind of games
Oh hey another Devlog! I was just thinking about Nebulous and what's been going on. I'm so glad things are chugging along!
I feelsome cargo resupply/fuel tankers would be neccesary in this mode. So you csn refuel your ships on the flu and rearm them mid flight
I watched this and instantly bought the game
I can't wait to have the lowest possible warcrime score. -999
I love the human element that's been baked into Nebulous since I started playing. Even the tutorial missions do a great job at just humanizing the ships and crew.
THAT SAID
You do realize that now that there is a scoreboard for it that some players- Not me! (he lied as easily as he breathed) but some players are going to try and get the high score for warcrimes, yes?
Not saying thats a good/bad thing, but it is a thing you should expect.
EDIT: Actually with the addition of the Withdrawal and retreat timers, what happens to life-pods of the losing team? How do they get out? Can they be intercepted by the victorious faction? Can prisoners of war be a thing? Could we embark upon daring raids to rescue our admiral from an enemy prison? Please say yes.
My opinions matter not, but I have never wanted or cared to "get gud" at a game before. But here I am. Thanks Mazer and all the rest of y'all for doing this wonderful niche thing. Happy New Year's.
Oh my god the warcrime system, that’s fucking great. I wonder if you could include picking up lifepods as well in order to capture enemy officers without causing warcrimes (maybe that would require carriers though!).
I think it could also be interesting if the officers also had even more in depth character. Eg. one of your best officers has been through so many very close battles where their ship is hit (and crew dies), and at some point they get PTSD… this means debuffs, or maybe even the character disappearing completely (being too messed up to continue working, or something else). So in essence lowering the stress of your officers by giving them off time, and making sure your losses aren’t so great. I suppose that could just cause a snowball effect, which I am not a huge fan of personally…
Good plans. Great work by the artist, too. Good luck!
Do you plan on adding AI to the large scale conquest? Or will it be multiplayer only?
This is amazing work! Super excited for conquest!
The officer portraits fit the game design perfectly! Thank you for giving us an update.
Awesome dev diary, cannot wait to see all my poor shipmates die, hopefully they will be listed in the AAR of a battle and maybe let us hand out (even if just cosmetic / posthumously) medals based on what these officers did! And a quick record of service, what ships they served on, what systems/planets they traveled to and what battles they fought in? Would be super cool imo
Love the officer system, really ingenious and a great way to simulate skills and personnel. One idea could be command skills relating to the strategic layer and then only being able to be applied when filling an admiral's billet, and tie them in with the officer's experiences before becoming an admiral. So a lvl 15 navigator admiral gets the perk "Master Navigator" which gives his task force better fuel efficiency, a lvl 15 Ops admiral gets a "Logistician Ties" perk that increases berth operations, etc.
babe wake up, new nebulous devlog
I want to overhaul your text menus.
I'd highly suggest adding spaces between rank names which have multiple words to enhance readability. E.g:
VADM –> V. ADM
CHENG –> Ch. ENG
LCDR –> L. CDR
This would help those who are not as familiar with navy ranks IRL.
Will Conquest mode be available vs AI? lol
tugg of war should be the default game mode, look at other games that use similar game modes (Company of heroes). Tugg of war makes for much more interesting games and less of a "rush A" game. In ToW people can win the game after the initial engagements and holding territory is more critical – it deincentivizes use of "half surrender" ships that just sits in the back throwing missiles.
Are logistic ships/auxiliaries going to be new hulls?
As for how the evacuation system works… why would you bring the logistics ship into the battle. You could just have it decelerate early and arrive late (or, if you lose, turn around). It seems like a problem you shouldn't have to worry about.
So, if that's going to be a thing you want to do, maybe have it actually do something? Mid-battle replenishment is probably a bit unrealistic, but… could be an option. Or if they could be given some armament, they could be used to hold capture points against One Sneaky Corvette, which would encourage sticking them on your 'natural' VP and only running if you're retreating the whole force.
… as to the option to abandon retreat, that gives me a further idea: Recovering abandoned ships, both yours and the enemy's. Obviously you can't recover a ship that evaporated due to reactor explosion, but if you could occasionally get the ability to recover and repair a damaged hull… Normally this would be not particularly worthwhile, but could be especially interesting as OSP.
Thank you for your amazing work. I've never guessed that the Strategic part would get that deep. Amazing.
Take your time to complete. And also I would like to support the development, so how about a cosmetic's "support-the-development"-dlc ?
Being a prior service guy I really appreciate the officer system. When I play games like Combat Mission I have a lot of head cannon for my troops and seeing things like this really get me into the roleplay of it all. Especially with the really good art style you picked for the portraits. This game really gives me vibes of the Frontline books by Marko Kloos. Sci-fi with an injection of realism. Keep up the amazing work!
Just my experiance working prevenative maintaince on a production line: people do absolutely make a huge difference between a line running well and not so well (private sector experience only). I would like to see a couple of things implemented just from what I see here:
1) Building of new ships with different templates ( overtime when a fight occurs you are going to adapt your fleet to what works and what does not).
2) Rotation of officers to send to the acdemy to train new officers ( in WW2 the USA recovered their down pilots and after so long on deployment. Those experienced pilots were sent them home to train the new pilots)
The officer system sounds super cool! I 100% agree that having your ship crew be as much of an important part of your army as the ships themselves makes for more engaging gameplay, and adds a whole new layer of strategies and considerations when deciding how to engage in battles. Super excited to get my hands on this game mode, as someone who loves the idea of this game but is not too much into random death matches as it's currently playable. Keep up the good work! And also, happy new year to everyone.
I hope they include a capture/POW system as well, ransoming and interrogation of crew and officers for intel and resources. Population (War Support) and Crew should be a resource. Could even separate the crews into boatswains(general), maintenance(technicians), and specialists(support).
And I will still say no future war is realistic without nukes, but I guess that will have to be modded in.
Really loving the looks of this. It's clear that you're taking a lot of concepts into account, and making an effort to make cheesing less attractive. Obviously the cheesing is not a big deal for singleplayer, but multi will always be an uphill battle against mechanic exploitation. Looking forward to future updates!
I am incredibly excited for this!
I think this is a cool detail, traits using values and on top of that the use of officers on ships, so that a ship can specialize in something.
it is kinda weird to have two navies not be ready for war in one system
unless its a civil war scenario
hey! for how long and how many of you are working on this game? thx for your answer