I've been spending a lot of time in Nebulous: Fleet Command these days. Neb is a RTS game for people who experience sexual feelings in the space combat sequences on The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica or wished they could go to Battle School from Ender's Game. The developer is a real-life Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy, and under the hood there's a lot of groggy technical stuff about how radar and missiles actually operate.
In practice, you build a fleet from a set of hulls, from the agile corvette up to the mighty battleship, which you customize with your choice of weapons, systems, and compartments, balancing offense, defense, mobility, and utility. There are two factions: ANS is a traditional space navy with warships and proper weapons that are flexible and robust. OSP have retrofitted civilian ships which tend to be more specialized in a specific area but have corresponding vulnerabilities. Then you go 4v4 in a standard domination set-up where you win by holding control points on a map, and knocking back the enemy helps you get the points.
(Oh, and the most important thing is to pick good names for your ships. Banks' The Culture Minds are pro-tier, along with British and French battleships. I use US military code names, ska songs, and Nic Cage movies.)
I'm pretty good at Neb. I've got a 70% win rate overall, and it's higher more recently. I tend to run an OSP fleet built around two heavy gun broadside liners and a lot of long range radar scouts. The equivalent ANS fleet would be two heavy cruisers. While the heavy cruisers would have turrets so they don't have to sloooowly turn the whole ship to aim, and have actual armor, point defense, and damage control, my fleet can bring about twice the firepower to bear and will likely spot and shoot first. Intelligence is key.
Neb is mostly played in an idealized Combat Information Center (CIC) view, where you fire on radar tracks. To actually see an enemy ship and get a solid read on what weapons they have and what's on fire, you either need to fire missiles at them or close to knife range. And this is interesting, because the CIC is a relatively recent invention, dating back to the Second World War, and I recently read a fantastic book on the subject called Learning War by Trent Hone.
As most military history buffs know, the US Navy did not do well in the opening battles of the Pacific campaign, aside from Midway. In particular, the battles around Guadalcanal were marked by command confusion and heavy losses, a painful price for foiling Japanese plans to destroy Henderson field and reinforce their infantry. What victories were achieved could be credited to an implicit doctrine that in the absence of clear orders, ship captains were to act aggressively, to close and fire with everything they had.
In Hone's analysis, the root cause of the losses was that commanders were becoming cognitively overloaded translating reports from new technologies like radar, sonar, and talk between ships voice radio. They couldn't form a mental picture of the battle and transmit orders to their subordinates fast enough to exercise tactical control.
The solution was a directive from Admiral Nimitz that ships were to form a Combat Operations Center (later renamed a CIC). However, Nimitz provided no further guidance about how the CIC was supposed to work. Each ship ran its own experiments, and lessons about what worked were exchanged in informal conferences just behind the front lines. By 1944, enough of these best practices had been learned to create preliminary manuals about how to organize a CIC and what language to use. This meant that the late-stage US Navy was flexible and modular, able to swap ships between task forces on the fly and reconfigure to operational needs.
Learning War is a great book for war nerds who are part of an organization that wants to be more innovative but isn't, and it also has some valuable lessons for Nebulous players. Fleet composition and teamwork is key to victory, but you're playing with 3 strangers and it's not like you can tell them what to do. At best you can throw up warnings and beg for help. But somehow, the community has figured out what works and what doesn't, what gamers recognize as the meta, and has found a balance between defense and offense.
No big lessons here, just some stuff I've been thinking about. And you should join me on Neb. The void of space is fine, the C beams glittering in the dark so pretty, and there's nothing like the bloom of a fusion reactor going up.
Good luck, have fun!