In Nebulous, different missiles allow for different tactics: One might be more resilient to jamming but requires one of your ships to paint the enemy with a targeting laser (a tactic employed by the Rocinante in the first book). It’s simply impossible for me not to hear her yelling “fast movers!” anytime you see a barrage of missiles appear on the HUD. You’ll soon feel like Naomi Nagata, setting up jamming on enemy fleets and trying to find the real enemies amongst the radar noise. Locking onto enemy ships is critical for weapon accuracy while radar jammers will fill your screen with false enemy icons. That brings me to another Expanse/Nebulous similarity: Radar is an essential part of your tactical suite, as is the electric warfare designed to counteract it. Any ships caught in these stunning explosions (I still gasp every time) will be heavily damaged and nearby ships’ radar will be temporarily scrambled. And just like in The Expanse, If you’re not careful (or just unlucky) your fusion reactor can go critical and your spaceship will temporarily be replaced by a small star. Luckily, just like the Rocinante has Amos Burton, you’ve got engineers who can repair and rebuild injured components mid-battle. Speaking of wounds - their locations matter! Instead of a single health bar, all of your ship’s systems have actual physical locations on your ship (complete with their own hitboxes) and can be individually damaged by enemy fire. A fusion reactor meltdown is truly a sight to behold.
If one flank gets chewed up during a fight, you can also rotate your ship to protect its wounds. Not only do you need to move your ships in six directions, but your ship might need to roll itself in order to properly line up its railguns. To that end, you have to start thinking in terms of 3D space. Of course, The Expanse isn’t the first sci-fi series to use a “braking burn”, but it effectively sets the same tone: This is hard sci-fi, with an emphasis on realism. This feeling starts from the very first moments of battle, when your ships enter the battlefield with their engines seemingly pointing the wrong direction.
It also feels like an Expanse RTS in everything but name. The controls can be finicky in their immense complexity, but that’s only in service of giving you the widest possible set of tactics to choose from. You command a small fleet of spaceships, giving attack orders and movement commands in all six directions. Recently released into Steam Early Access, Nebulous: Fleet Command is an exceptionally deep, fully 3D, real-time strategy game. What can possibly fill the Roci shaped hole in my heart? For now, the answer is Nebulous: Fleet Command. Both the nine-book series and six-season TV show came to a close in December and January, respectively. Like many fans of The Expanse, I’m feeling a little lost right now.
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