Beautiful, brainy space RTS Nebulous: Fleet Command is getting carriers and fightercraft

Carrier update coming in January

I feel guilty about comparing Nebulous: Fleet Command to Homeworld, inasmuch as it's an appalling bait-and-switch. It's like offering somebody a cake that is actually a cunningly painted hunk of torpedo fuselage. It's like offering to shake hands while wearing one of those comedy hand buzzers - except that the hand buzzer is an intricate simulation of zero-G physics, missile behaviours and comms jamming, featuring spacecraft with proper internal layouts that require you to think hard about attitude control if you don't want, say, your engines to become Swiss cheese about 90 seconds before you need to retreat from combat.

Being a "true" 3D real-time space strategy game, it looks and sounds a lot like Homeworld on the surface, but it's nothing like as straightforward. It is systems within systems. It is a game in which you can, theoretically, plot the path of a single guided munition through an asteroid field, so as to catch an enemy cruiser in the back. I barely understand how to make a ship fire on another ship, using plain old armour-piercing shells, and now they're threatening to add carriers, fighters and bombers. Customisable ones! The humanity. Here's a trailer.

Slated to arrive 10th January 2025, the Carrier update "adds a completely new dimension to the game's approach to hard sci-fi space warfare", according to Rear Admiral John F. Press Release. Yes, they're being metaphorical: the game hasn't gone 4D, though I really wouldn't put it past this developer to start dabbling in non-Euclidean geometry.

"The titular Carriers arrive in the form of both dedicated hulls and self-contained modules for existing hulls for both the game's factions, and with them come launchable craft across a range of archetypes," Rear Admiral John F. Press Release continues, with his trademark gravelly brusqueness. "Each faction gets three unique spaceframes, with a seventh spaceframe representing a shared design.

"Whether you're deploying scouts, missile bombers, utility craft, or Top Gun-style fighters, each spaceframe is customizable via the dedicated in-game editor. Craft can also have multiple customizable loadouts as well, which can be selected and refitted should players need to switch up their tactics mid-battle."

The update will accompany a "barrage" of complementary changes, including rebalanced ship weapons and defences, anti-fighter missile tech, and unguided cluster bombs and rockets.

Nebulous: Fleet Command is currently shy a final release date. I think what I'd most like right now is a proper story mode with a hefty tutorial component - the early access version currently promises "a singleplayer campaign mode involving a persistent fleet, narrative thread, and objectives". Give me a 20 hour yarn dedicated to fleshing out the intricacies, because it feels like there's brilliance at work here, for those brave or mad enough to commit.

In the meantime, there's always - shudder - the multiplayer. You can follow Fleet Command's early access development via the developers' public trello.