Nebulous: Fleet Command captures the immensity of The Expanse’s space battles

polygon.com:

Like many fans of The Expanse, I’m feeling a little lost right now. Both the nine-book series and six-season TV show came to a close in December and January, respectively. What can possibly fill the Roci shaped hole in my heart? For now, the answer is Nebulous: Fleet Command.

Recently released into Steam Early Access,Nebulous: Fleet Command is an exceptionally deep, fully 3D, real-time strategy game. You command a small fleet of spaceships, giving attack orders and movement commands in all six directions. 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.

It also feels like an Expanse RTS in everything but name.

This feeling starts from the very first moments of battle, when your ships enter the battlefield with their engines seemingly pointing the wrong direction. 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.

To that end, you have to start thinking in terms of 3D space. 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. If one flank gets chewed up during a fight, you can also rotate your ship to protect its wounds.

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. Luckily, just like the Rocinante has Amos Burton, you’ve got engineers who can repair and rebuild injured components mid-battle. And just like in The Expanse, If you’re not