Nomad Fleet developed by Autarca is a one-man indie strategy game that combines elements from FTL, Homeworld and even Battlestar Galactica into a single package. You command the remnants of the humanity on a quest to find an ancient jump gate to escape a mysterious alien race known as Xenos.
Disclosure: I received a key from the developers for the purposes of making this article and reporting bugs.
Like I mentioned, you need to command your fleet of ships through the galaxy. Like in FTL, this is done by navigating from sector to sector and each sector contains encounters, which mostly involve combat. The campaign is completely done in this non-linear fashion with each sector and its encounter randomized on each playthrough. You are given some information about some of the sectors which you can use to plan your way to the jump gate.
Your objective is to naturally build a strong enough fleet to meet the Xenos in an epic battle at the jump gate. And to do that, you must have enough resources. The economy in Nomad Fleet is based on asteroid mining and salvaging resources from destroyed space ships. This means that especially sectors with asteroid fields are incredibly valuable and often worth fighting for. However, there's a catch: rewards come with a risk. In each encounter you need to weigh these two factors and choose whether to stay and fight or simply run away from the enemies. Of course, you cannot run immediately, that would be too easy. It takes 5 minutes for your jump drives to spool and you have to protect you mothership until the drive is ready to take you to another sector. And all the ships you lose during battles are lost entirely and need to be replaced. Sometimes you can end up losing too many ships to get back the lost resources from a couple of rocks floating in space that you thought you needed.
Combat, which is a big element of Nomad Fleet is inspired by Homeworlds. You fight in fully 3D space and can move ships up and down on the battlefield in addition to the regular XY movement. The strategy is mostly based on the ship types available in your fleet. It's the fairly basic case of a ship type countering another ship type. Of course there is a little more strategy to it, for example you usually want to keep your bombers in the back and draw fire from capital ships before sending them in, but it's nothing too complex. 3D space does allow for some interesting maneuvers though. Downside of it is that the camera controls are a bit clumsy and sometimes getting your units to move where you want them can be a bit difficult due to the quite unusual perspective.
As you might expect the game has various kinds of encounters. Most of them involve combat with various factions, including the Xenos, space pirates and the Gendarih Empire but sometimes you might also stumble upon a sleeping research station or a trading convoy. Trading is very important because it's the only way you can get access to some of the best technologies. You only have very limited researching capabilities and access to only a handful of ship types. But the traders can get you blueprints for heavier capital ships like destroyers and dreadnoughts which you will need in the final battle. This makes the trading hubs extremely important but it also makes acquiring technology quite difficult in addition to being very costly. Another problem is that the game doesn't have a whole lot of different encounters so you will see each of them multiple times during a playthrough.
The difficulty of Nomad Fleet is a bit strange. Even though there are some encounters that are definitely difficult and often the only option is running, I've never really had trouble before arriving at the jump gate. The difficulty spikes there very heavily, with the Xenos sending a huge fleet of capital ships to get you. And worst of all, you actually need to face them in direct combat and running is not an option. I was genuinely surprised when I made my way there since up until then I believed my fleet was practically indestructible. The previous encounters even with the Gendarih had been really easy fights and then the Xenos throw a whole bunch of dreadnoughts at you. So if you pick this game up, make sure you fleet is as overpowered as possible when you arrive at the jump gate. Another weird thing was the lack of Xenos on the way to the jump gate. There are a couple of Xeno encounters but they are about as rare as the other ones. I nearly forgot that humanity was being hunted by these creatures while journeying through the galaxy.
Graphically Nomad Fleet is quite okay. It's not the most beautiful game on the planet but the graphics work well enough in the RTS environment and the game isn't ugly by any means. And considering the game was developed by one person, I'd say it's actually quite well-made. It also performs well for a Unity title and is playable even on my Intel HD Graphics 3000 laptop.
Because the game is still in Early Access it still has some rough edges. I've seen a couple of bugs, none of them game-breaking though. The game can be played from start to finish as it is but the developer is planning on expanding on the content, especially in terms of encounters. For now he has mainly focused on fixing bugs but he mentioned on the game's News page that a big content update is in the works.
Overall I think Nomad Fleet is a quite nice game. I have talked about a game which had heavy influences like this one before, Convoy, and I criticized that game for being too close to the game it was inspired by; FTL. Similar criticism has been hurled at Nomad Fleet. I personally disagree. I think Nomad Fleet does actually “borrow” just enough from both FTL and Homeworld to create a really interesting concept that works very well. The randomized encounters make for an interesting and often very surprising playthroughs and the jump drive mechanic creates an interesting situation where you have the choice of staying in the fight and possibly getting away with more resources or escaping, saving your precious ships but abandoning possible loot by doing so. One playthrough of the game doesn't seem to be too long, only a couple of hours, but the randomized sectors creates gives the game some replay value. To some people it might be a bit of a disappointment to see that there is no skirmish mode or multiplayer in Nomad Fleet and I think those would be nice additions to the game. As it stands, I will still give the game a recommendation. The concept is interesting and generally works well. I would possibly wait for the content update to land before getting the game though, but I think it's already a quite nice game.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Disclosure: I received a key from the developers for the purposes of making this article and reporting bugs.
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Like I mentioned, you need to command your fleet of ships through the galaxy. Like in FTL, this is done by navigating from sector to sector and each sector contains encounters, which mostly involve combat. The campaign is completely done in this non-linear fashion with each sector and its encounter randomized on each playthrough. You are given some information about some of the sectors which you can use to plan your way to the jump gate.
Your objective is to naturally build a strong enough fleet to meet the Xenos in an epic battle at the jump gate. And to do that, you must have enough resources. The economy in Nomad Fleet is based on asteroid mining and salvaging resources from destroyed space ships. This means that especially sectors with asteroid fields are incredibly valuable and often worth fighting for. However, there's a catch: rewards come with a risk. In each encounter you need to weigh these two factors and choose whether to stay and fight or simply run away from the enemies. Of course, you cannot run immediately, that would be too easy. It takes 5 minutes for your jump drives to spool and you have to protect you mothership until the drive is ready to take you to another sector. And all the ships you lose during battles are lost entirely and need to be replaced. Sometimes you can end up losing too many ships to get back the lost resources from a couple of rocks floating in space that you thought you needed.
Combat, which is a big element of Nomad Fleet is inspired by Homeworlds. You fight in fully 3D space and can move ships up and down on the battlefield in addition to the regular XY movement. The strategy is mostly based on the ship types available in your fleet. It's the fairly basic case of a ship type countering another ship type. Of course there is a little more strategy to it, for example you usually want to keep your bombers in the back and draw fire from capital ships before sending them in, but it's nothing too complex. 3D space does allow for some interesting maneuvers though. Downside of it is that the camera controls are a bit clumsy and sometimes getting your units to move where you want them can be a bit difficult due to the quite unusual perspective.
As you might expect the game has various kinds of encounters. Most of them involve combat with various factions, including the Xenos, space pirates and the Gendarih Empire but sometimes you might also stumble upon a sleeping research station or a trading convoy. Trading is very important because it's the only way you can get access to some of the best technologies. You only have very limited researching capabilities and access to only a handful of ship types. But the traders can get you blueprints for heavier capital ships like destroyers and dreadnoughts which you will need in the final battle. This makes the trading hubs extremely important but it also makes acquiring technology quite difficult in addition to being very costly. Another problem is that the game doesn't have a whole lot of different encounters so you will see each of them multiple times during a playthrough.
The difficulty of Nomad Fleet is a bit strange. Even though there are some encounters that are definitely difficult and often the only option is running, I've never really had trouble before arriving at the jump gate. The difficulty spikes there very heavily, with the Xenos sending a huge fleet of capital ships to get you. And worst of all, you actually need to face them in direct combat and running is not an option. I was genuinely surprised when I made my way there since up until then I believed my fleet was practically indestructible. The previous encounters even with the Gendarih had been really easy fights and then the Xenos throw a whole bunch of dreadnoughts at you. So if you pick this game up, make sure you fleet is as overpowered as possible when you arrive at the jump gate. Another weird thing was the lack of Xenos on the way to the jump gate. There are a couple of Xeno encounters but they are about as rare as the other ones. I nearly forgot that humanity was being hunted by these creatures while journeying through the galaxy.
Graphically Nomad Fleet is quite okay. It's not the most beautiful game on the planet but the graphics work well enough in the RTS environment and the game isn't ugly by any means. And considering the game was developed by one person, I'd say it's actually quite well-made. It also performs well for a Unity title and is playable even on my Intel HD Graphics 3000 laptop.
Because the game is still in Early Access it still has some rough edges. I've seen a couple of bugs, none of them game-breaking though. The game can be played from start to finish as it is but the developer is planning on expanding on the content, especially in terms of encounters. For now he has mainly focused on fixing bugs but he mentioned on the game's News page that a big content update is in the works.
Overall I think Nomad Fleet is a quite nice game. I have talked about a game which had heavy influences like this one before, Convoy, and I criticized that game for being too close to the game it was inspired by; FTL. Similar criticism has been hurled at Nomad Fleet. I personally disagree. I think Nomad Fleet does actually “borrow” just enough from both FTL and Homeworld to create a really interesting concept that works very well. The randomized encounters make for an interesting and often very surprising playthroughs and the jump drive mechanic creates an interesting situation where you have the choice of staying in the fight and possibly getting away with more resources or escaping, saving your precious ships but abandoning possible loot by doing so. One playthrough of the game doesn't seem to be too long, only a couple of hours, but the randomized sectors creates gives the game some replay value. To some people it might be a bit of a disappointment to see that there is no skirmish mode or multiplayer in Nomad Fleet and I think those would be nice additions to the game. As it stands, I will still give the game a recommendation. The concept is interesting and generally works well. I would possibly wait for the content update to land before getting the game though, but I think it's already a quite nice game.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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