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Finally got around to getting through the tutorials, putting together a fleet, and trying it out against AI default fleets. Boy does this one have a learning curve. It's good though. My initial designs skewed hard towards PD, after reading about the amount of missiles people will bring online, but that meant anything skewed in non-missile directions wrecked me hard. The PD corvettes that I designed do an incredible job of knocking down incoming missiles, but their offensive contribution is laughable. Need to find a way to shuffle hulls and designs to get a second EWAR ship instead of overkilling on PD; jamming can really mess with people, but I need more/better angles to keep my one good gun platform alive.
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Mar 28, 2022 02:18
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:07 |
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Nebulous goes pretty far into the technical weeds and is even slower paced, but this game reminds me heavily of Myth. Specifically, it's about organization. You have to preposition rather than react = god help you if you get caught out. Also surprisingly easy to run out of gun ammo. Turns out ten minutes of ammo is only enough if you're an early casualty. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Mar 28, 2022 |
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Mar 28, 2022 06:11
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PD is tough to pick, and tough to design into a game, because it's an entirely defensive investment that works against only one axis of attack. It'd be much better, design-wise, if PD could also function as a knife-fighting weapon, but there are severe technical issues with doing so according to the developers (each projectile has a simulated cost and PD only gets away with huge amounts of projectiles because it ignores ship impacts). So I can absolutely see why someone would try to avoid dumping points into PD and instead attempt to use jamming and stealth as defenses, both of which work against multiple types of threat.
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Apr 4, 2022 00:35
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I really want to like this game, but every time I try playing I can't get over how badly it needs a VR mod. Just imagine being able to reach out and physically place missile waypoints.
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Aug 22, 2022 16:37
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The asymmetrical warfare that the new faction adds is a ton of fun. Got me to finally jump into multiplayer last night and had a blast, and people were largely chill and friendly.
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Mar 11, 2023 18:36
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Have kept playing since the OSP update, which is new for me. In the past I'd check out the latest update, go "huh that's neat but [mechanic] needs more time in the oven," and be gone within a week. Not this time. This time it's stuck. At the end of the day, there aren't any mechanics that I feel are negative play experiences. There was always something in the past that I'd get fed up with, whether it was old-style railgun dominance or gigastacking ECM or absurdly stealthy hybrid missiles, but the game's dealt with pretty much all of the egregious stuff now. Everything has a counter, whether through build or tactics or both, and executing those counters is interesting rather than agonizing. Though I'm not skilled enough to say this with total confidence, right now the game feels like it favors bringing a toolbox rather than a hard skew; counters are "hard" enough to encourage threatening and probing along multiple axes rather than going all-in on one and just hoping for the best. Been considering writing some ship-specific strategy pieces. The game is deep enough to warrant it and I'm now getting experienced enough to identify most of the common ship builds. The gun battleship, for example, is a simple ship at first glance - yet all too easy to misuse in practice. Contrasting the Axford and the Ocello would also be a fascinating exercise. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 17:23
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habituallyred posted:double gun battleships That's pretty wild; when last I looked at the possibility it seemed like two battleships would actually be less capable than one, given the lack of points for buff modules. What can you afford on those?
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Jun 4, 2023 21:03
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Yeah, some of those design compromises - PD in particular - are big oofs. I've been sufficiently traumatized by S2 rolloff spam that I will never leave home without maximum flak. Not a big fan of double Axford either though, tbh. Spoilers for if/when I write up a piece dedicated to them, but I really think Axfords are designed to take advantage of multiple weapon systems - which tends to either preclude taking two or makes the second kind of redundant compared to diversifying on hulls. I've seen single Axfords wreck house by putting points into either big hybrid capability or a beam plus escorts/cappers for map control, but double gun Axford feels like it gives up a lot of durability compared to a gun BB without actually gaining that much in map mobility. Workable but lackluster ime. The double-gunship build that I do like is double Ocellos... which means I have some harsh words for ANS procurement. Ocellos just kick all kinds of rear end, even if they die the instant that they get flanked. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 23:20
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Okay, let's take a minute to discuss the Gun Battleship. The battleship chassis has two unique defensive features: thick armor and sheer size. If you're going to bring a BB, you want to leverage these defensive strengths. The simplest way to do this is, of course, by bowtanking. Like all ANS warships of cruiser size or larger, the BB is designed to face the enemy: it is long rather than wide and presents highly angled armor across most of it's relatively narrow front profile. These angles multiply the effective armor thickness across most of it's frontal target profile. For a BB, sporting thick armor to begin with, that makes it possible to deflect even 450mm shells from some angles. This effective armor thickness is then further multiplied by the ship's sheer size and internal density, since any shell that penetrates armor will be further slowed by crashing through the ship's structure. The result is that impacts from the front are basically never going to damage components in the back, or even middle - which are always the critical ones for the ship's operation. Size also has the advantage of permitting a huge complement of damage control teams. Given how slowly damage will leak through to critical components, it's not difficult for a BB's damage control complement to repeatedly return damaged compartments to operation. As long as the incoming damage is too infrequent to punch out reinforced components with consecutive hits, a BB can keep trucking almost indefinitely. Even if the occasional significant compartment goes grey, the sheer amount of restores that a BB can bring makes it easy to fix.  Good luck, I'm behind 7 reinforced modules! Step one of battleship doctrine is, therefore, to always be pointed toward the enemy and avoid being flanked. Attacks from the side, after all, will bypass most of the BB's unique defensive advantages. It's components are still tough, but if you're not bowtanking then your damage control teams won't have a prayer of keeping up. The gun BB's primary armament is the 450mm gun - a long range weapon that inflicts heavy attrition over time. It's a good weapon, one that the BB can buff to the max thanks to it's many module slots, but that "over time" part of the description is a very important limitation given our vulnerability to being flanked. If you play aggressively early, which is an overwhelming temptation with this giant imposing ship, then you will almost certainly get flanked by overwhelming force and die before you can inflict compensating damage of your own. Even the powerful 450mm gun takes time to kill a prepared target; I once saw a bowtank duel between a gun BB and a pair of Ocellos that lasted for the entire match because no third party intervened. If you position aggressively and get mired in such an attritional gunfight, even one that you would eventually win, then you're very likely to get flanked and die for nothing. A BB is not maneuverable enough to quickly escape a bad situation, especially after taking inevitable thruster damage from bowtanking. (Side note: the one exception to this is that you can disrespect the poo poo out of monitors. Monitors are the epitome of tough exterior shell with soft gooey insides... and the only thing that exterior shell does against 450mm is prevent over-penetration. Their weapons are just as deadly as any if left alone, but monitors die shockingly fast to a gun BB.)  Just a few big compartments with no meaningful depth. Tapdancing on monitors aside, the gun BB is not a hammer; it's an anvil. If you play carefully, staying at range and using cover and teammates' sensors to limit flanking angles, it's effectively impossible to remove you with gunfire. Even in the near-draw Ocello example, the Ocellos will eventually lose (even if it takes so long that it's mostly academic) and are even more vulnerable to being flanked. That means you can squat on a long fire line and dare the other side to fight you in positions where they are vulnerable to your team. If you can fix the enemy in place with gunfire, or restrict their movement with the threat of gunfire, that gives your team opportunities to outmaneuver them. That requires you to find safe positions that can still exert meaningful area control, which is not a trivial evaluation. Worse still, it requires your team to then recognize these opportunities and take advantage of them. The fact is, a gun BB is extremely reliant on the team. You won't have many small craft to scout, contest points, or make risky plays if you bring a gun BB. Only in the late game, after the enemy team has been scouted and attritioned to the point where flanking ceases to be a major threat, can you really play aggressively. You can create opportunities by limiting enemy options, but you can't take full advantage of those opportunities. If you team is too passive or too reckless, or simply too uncoordinated, then there's very little you can do with a gun BB to change the outcome. If your team can't or won't play the control point game, you certainly won't have the hulls to do it yourself! Playing a gun BB means accepting a significant loss of agency. I don't think the gun BB is bad or unfun - it's one of my personal favorites, in fact - but the conservative positioning that a gun BB requires tends to prohibit punishing opposing mistakes in the way that a CL wolfpack, cruise missile fleet, or beam BB could. (Side note: the reason a beam BB can play proactively while a gun BB struggles to do is because beams have a better chance of murdering flankers before they can disable the BB. Beams do absurd amounts of damage within their limited range bubble, which pretty drastically alters the tactical priorities of a beam BB compared to a gun BB. I don't personally play beam BBs though, so I won't attempt to elaborate on specifics.) Finally, before we go, a quick word on missiles.  Pay your taxes. As resilient as BBs are against frontal gunfire, missiles can still smash them. I am of the firm opinion that a BB should always fill every single point defense mount, without compromise, and really wants to bring some softkill to boot. An undamaged BB can mount a seemingly absurd amounts of PD, but gunfights have a way of degrading PD networks. Heck, even an undamaged but isolated BB's hardkill can be swamped by a really dedicated missile spam fleet - and given the size of the prize, there's no reason for the enemy to make anything less than their maximum effort. Give yourself a fighting chance by bringing an excellent point defense network. Bring a lot of both stonewalls (for S2 spam) and defenders (for container spam). Doing anything less will undermine your role as an nigh-impossible-to-dislodge area control piece.
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Jun 5, 2023 04:42
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habituallyred posted:Knew it was going to be good when I saw the back slot turretless. Do you go with all AMMs or mix in some short range stuff for if you get flanked? On that point I noticed you have substantial PD in the side pits. I can never get those to shoot enough threats to justify Stonewalls or above. At the moment I use the VLS-1 for softkill, but AMMs are a completely viable option that can do a lot to blunt the first few huge missile waves. Right now I use the points from not bringing AMMs to afford a second bullseye + gun corvette (which is also part of my answer against enemy small ships - outsource the secondary battery). Never regretted bringing all six stonewalls though; I'm really not kidding about needing every single mount against dedicated S2 fleets. If I could fit even more stonewalls without sacrificing 450 turrets or active decoy capability, I would. e: Part of why I wrote in generalities most of the time is that I keep tweaking my fleets to reflect new experiences and meta shifts. Most recently, for example, I doubled the PD ammo on my BB after running out and dying against the rare double-containership OSP team. e2: Thinking about it, sustainability is precisely the reason I shy away from AMMs. They work wonders against missile waves from small ships that can't afford huge missile magazines, but against a container ship or missile bulker that can and will chuck wave after wave after wave... well, flak shells and 20mm ammo are a lot cheaper than AMMs. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 03:58
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Phrosphor posted:How do you feel about using the MK62 in the side slots with RPF rounds as part of your PD network? Not something I'd do post-RPF nerf.
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Jun 6, 2023 04:38
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On the contrary, huge frigblobs with ewar and guns are popularly considered the strongest build in the game. They were the main reason RPF got nerfed, and they are still extremely good after the nerf. I just don't see them often because most people don't particularly want to manage a ton of ships and I don't play anything more competitive than random lobbies. They're real nasty when someone does dig them out to prove a point though.
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Jun 6, 2023 05:54
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wins32767 posted:How does one get into this game? The 3d part of the interface seemed pretty fiddly when I gave it a go back a year or so ago and I ended up bouncing off. It seems wonderfully deep but the tutorials didn't really help much beyond the basic mechanics. I often found myself frustrated with the interface until the OSP update. I think what happened is the game finally got compelling enough to make me stick with it long enough for the interface to click. It really is quite good once you understand how it wants you to do things. In particular, using the sensors manager view for maneuvering will give you lots of UI cues to help with depth perception, particularly stuff like showing where terrain intersects with the cursor's current elevation while giving movement commands (allowing you to use terrain as a constant reference point) or projecting contacts onto a uniform sphere around the selected ship when giving heading commands (to easily face what you want to face rather than having to eyeball the angle at a distance without true depth perception). The relatively slow and deliberate pace of the game helps a great deal as well. The official discord is also very helpful in answering new player questions. I usually avoid public discord servers, as a rule, but I found this one very informative - especially regarding ship design and component function. Folks are also typically quite chill in games with new players. I think the community knows that being jerks to prospective new blood would be a one-way ticket to having no one to play with, and it's not like Nebulous is some flavor-of-the-month FPS game where it'd be trivial to find another game in the same genre if the current one dies. There's really nothing else like Nebulous out there, and there hasn't been for decades. Phrosphor posted:When the faction warfare system comes in I fully intend to deeply commit. I don't know whether I am eager for or terrified of conquest mode. The prospect pushes all the same buttons, for good and for ill, as Dominions.
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Jun 6, 2023 17:29
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SIGSEGV posted:In dominions you can blue on green a misidentified legitimate freighter and enter a death spiral of everyone hating you for good reason, which I hope will be possible here. That's literally in the design document the developer posted. No more recon-by-cruise-missile, unless you want to lose the war and get prosecuted for war crimes. e: For the curious, here's a link to the document. It's also linked from a stickied post by the dev on the game's steam forum. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 17:36
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Nice post! I do think there's a bit more to talk about regarding stealth though, specifically when playing ANS. You're never ever going to hide a battleship from radar, but corvettes and frigates are small enough and OSP radar is primitive enough that stealth is a legit factor. Missiles in particular pair well with stealth-based tactics: double-prowler cruise-missile-carrying "submarine" frigates are a venerable classic, but more recently and more shockingly I've seen people playing stealthy insta-stage S3H corvettes. It's an extremely rude thing to run into, since you detect them about the time they're hot-launching an ~800 m/s decoy-accompanied HEKP warhead at you. Even simple whiplash gun corvettes, my personal favorite maneuver element, rely heavily on stealth via emissions control to avoid fights with OSP heavies. OSP ships are much less capable of radar stealth. Shuttles are small and sneaky, but everything else is relatively big and blocky with a hefty RCS to match. The OSP does have solid radar jamming, even on their home-grown civilian hulls, but ANS ships have good burnthrough radar and robust communications nets with which to share tracks. There's a lot of counterplay. Worse yet, jamming can't hide your general position - allowing the enemy to maneuver accordingly. The good old-fashioned Hide Behind a Big Rock strategy remains OSP's best option for denying information.
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Jun 10, 2023 05:57
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Worth noting that people are figuring out plasma bulker builds now. They gently caress up most anything, but ANS heavies suffer particularly badly because they're too fat and expensive to hide effectively under jamming. Can't really recommend gun BBs right now.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:26
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 20:07 |
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Patch Notes are up. Capital buffs, torp rework, penaid warheads, mixed missile salvos, and cooperative multi-ship AMM allocation. It's a big feature list with substantial knock-on effects to the meta.
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Aug 21, 2023 23:01
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