So I gave this game a “thumbs up” in whatever Steam’s black and white in a world of gray ranking system calls that. I bought it at a discount, and would suggest that if the high concepts of the game sound interesting that you do the same.

This is a game developed by one guy as his first attempt. Is it a game for the ages? No. Is it a game with an interesting concept? For me, it is. I like the mashup of the concept of Homeworld with FTL style random missions. That's an interesting amalgamation of concepts from my point of view. I'd love it if Mission 8 in HW isn't always going to be the Cathedral of Kadesh. Maybe, like in FTL, it's just some traders, maybe it's an overwhelming fleet of implacable foes that you have to make a fight or flight decision about. Who knows? Not knowing is the cool bit. The Nomad Fleet dev felt the same way and made a game based around that. And I applaud him for it.

Is it as awesome as either Homeworld and FTL in its final presentation? Not for me. In both the technical and aesthetic departments I find it falls short. But should it be? Could it be, given the hoops that one person would have to jump through to make it happen? Well that's up to you. I have to say I can't see how one person could have done it all though. I will say I’m not going to hold one person to the standards of the combined works of the teams he drew from just to mark it… uh, Facebook “thumbs down” or whatever. I’m not buying into that Cluster B binary thing.

Again, this is one guy who wanted to mash together two games, one of which was done by a full-fledged game dev apparatus, with a programming department, an art dev department, with sub departments consisting of 3d, music, Voice, Texturing, Backgrounds and the like, (not to mention Admin, PR, legal and, of course, Management.) FTL was done, albeit by an "Indy" team, but it was just that, a TEAM. And it was a 2D game.

Given that this was made by one guy I thought it was amazing that he had the balls to do a concept of a HW/FTL mash-up and take on ALL the work (or buy the assets on a budget) to make it happen like it did. That's the type of crazy I applaud, and that’s why I give it a thumbs up.

There are *gasp* bugs and such. None of them were "show stoppers" for me. Still, I would watch to see if the developer Is going to patch the game now that it has been fully released.

Good game so far with potential for more. As many have pointed out its a cross between Homeworld and FTL.

Things that will really make this game shine is fleshing out the ships better. While you have many to build most feel .. lacking and without a uniqueness. In the end it becomes just a build quick and toss em at the enemy styled game. Much similiar to the tank rush tactics of the Command and Conquer Series.

The individual systems end up being repetitive. Within a few battles as you jump around the map you can tell upon landing what scenario it chose for you. The Randomness is also missing in these scenarios. You wind up ahead of time knowing where the enemy will jump into and having pilots and caps positioned at each point and waiting.

I have yet to see third unlockable fleet, But the second fleet "The Lost fleet" was deffinately better looking then your starting nomad fleet. The only downsides I was never able to get the siege canon to fire... no matter what, I was always out of range.

The Technologies to unlock and research in the unlocked fleet are the Technologies you used to find it. I found that extremely dissapointing. I felt if you are piloting this cutting edge battle group that researching older technologies is counter productive.

The Controls need some TLC. bringing in existing models from homeworld, Sins, Anno and other RTS games would be a vast improvement. The 3D grid combat is great, but fine tuning and restyling the way its done would be an amazing improvement alone for the game.

The game overall so far is fun to play, Its nothing story wise that will have you grinding hours to unlock each part. But the missions are quick enough that you can sit down and run a few before work. With more time put into fleshing out the games scenarios, randomizing the spawn points of reinforcement waves better and expanding/improving technology trees this game can bloom easily into a good Space RTS competitor against the AAA's.

As the Developer is working alone on this, it is amazing in itself. If the comunity does get involved and assist its collective knowledge or even skills, this will be an amazing product. I would open the game up for modding and tweaking by the community. Opening up the vast tools and skills of its playerbase can push the game to new bounderies as experienced moders and coders start adding its collective weight in mods. Perfect Example is Kotor being redone in Unreal 4 engine or the Open X-Com series (all 3 being done) project. Developing a game alone is daunting but if you get your current fanbase involved it might lighten the load with the simple payment of knowing they were involved helping expand what they got hooked into.

I think that the game should have remained in early access. It lacks the polish you would expect from a finished game.

Camera controls are god awful.
- Panning is extremely slow. Going from one side of the map to another is an exercise in frustration. And it doesn't help that the enemies can pop up miles away. Your best best is to just wait for them to come to you. After reading the forums, it looks like holding [shift] will accelerate the camera's movements. I think it could be a bit faster, but its useable. Now if only the functionality was flipped since it's a bit awkward on the fingers.
- Your camera is fixed at a specified height above the plane. Which makes things frustrating when you're trying to zoom in and out for a better look. Either to get a closer look at a unit or to zoom out so that you can see what's going on around the operational area. Found out on the forums that you can use the C and V keys to adjust the camera height.
- In order to zoom in on a ship, you need to have it focused. Otherwise your zoom is limited to "really far" and "far" in strategic view or "isn't space pretty" in normal view.

== You're forced to use certain views to perform certain tasks ==
- The normal view tells you absolutely nothing about the positions of ships and their heights. Which sucks because this is how you're able to actually zoom in closer. So without this information, you can't finely manuever the resource corvette to the nearest asteroid so that your resource harvesters would only need to travel mere meters to deposit their inventory.
- The strategic view doesn't let you click on the enemy. So you generally don't know how much health it has, or what it even is until you flip to the normal view. Then you're able to select it, and then mouse over the icon to view the tooltip.

== What the hell? ==
- Why isn't there a position indicator for the salvageable stuff? Whenever I try to send resource corvettes closer to the harvesters, they tend to dive down and run far away from the nearest asteroids and derelicts because I can't get a good view angle. (A recent patch has added this feature. This point is now moot)

- When you have units selected, they blink in and out. When you have a ton of units, it's hard to tell what's selected since everything else is blinking to notify you of events like attacking targets and all that. Couldn't unit selection have a different color?

- It's like there isn't a select all of one unit type command. I try double-clicking a specific unit. Nope, it selects that one unit. To get this to work, you have to select everything. Then scroll through the list until you find the one type of unit that you want. Waste of time and forces you to keep your groups up to date.

- The icons are too small and they rely on tooltips to tell you what ship is what. At one point I just stopped scrolling through the list of selected ships and just looked for the unit with the 8 sided enclosement box. That was usually the dreadnought and that was all that I needed. As a sidenote, there is a setting in the options box to scale up the UI, so you can get larger icons. Useful for a higher resolution I guess.

- I can't select enemy fighters. It would help if I can tell how much hp they have left so that I can figure out which ships are effective against them.

- The AI is...stupid. It generally just rushes. No real strategy whatsoever. Once I researched the upgrade to perform a localized jump, I just sent a dreadnought behind the enemy capital ships. One or two just-launched fighters would usually flip back around to intercept, but everything else continued forward. Easy way to blow up the spawning ship and save myself the hassle of fighting hundreds of snubfighters.

- Why is nearly every jump point a battle? Some allow me to bribe or trade, but aside from that everything else has me fighting waves of incoming hostiles. In one game, I had to fight through 10 warp points in a row before deciding that I had had enough and beelined for a known trade point.

- Why doesn't the jump point ever seem to change? I landed on an asteroid square. Mined everything. Jumped out, then jumped back in. More stuff to mine. It was a really easy way to rack up the credits. By jumping in and out and dealing with the interfering ships, I soon had enough money for all of the upgrades after repeating this like 10 times.

- Limited tech tree? I kind of wish the larger ships had more upgrades besides strategic jump. Better weapons and the like. Only the fighters get this upgrade.

- Poor unit info. It's limited to a question mark and a general description. For these types of games, you would have a far more detailed entry with speeds / weapon damage / strengths and weaknesses plus a description for immersive purposes. At one point I had experimental dreadnoughts. Was there something special about them? I don't know, there wasn't even a question mark and a general description for it. Nevermind obtaining detailed info.

That said, the game has potential...maybe...depends on how much support the developer is going to lend to it now that it's been released in an unfinished state.

Nomad Fleet is a Homeworld-influenced riff on the first episode ("33") of Battlestar Galactica. As leader of the remnants of humanity, you make an FTL jump across space to a new sector, then hold off attacks as you recharge your engine for 5 (real-time) minutes. Repeat many times.

The controls are numerous but intuitive, although moving around the battlefield and switching camera modes can leave you stranded awkwardly at times, unsure what's happening. Deploying ships is straightforward, using Homeworld-style control where you click once to move ships horizontally, then optionally hold shift to change height.

Gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50x2fOvNXlY

There are a few different kinds of combat scenarios to encounter - simple ambushes where you need to defend your main ship from attackers, guarded resources where to do any serious resource collection you'll have to take on a fleet defending them, one where you convince a neutral fleet to join yours by helping them defeat their enemy, etc. Each require slightly different tactics. There are occasional trade encounters too.

The randomness of the type of encounter you'll get after every jump is essential to the game, so you can do FTL-style runs and never quite know what's going to happen. But the game definitely needs more (galaxy) maps, at the moment there's only one with limited choice of route. And there's no huge reason to veer off the shortest path as yet.

As it stands (July 2015) this is a solid, enjoyable proof of concept that begs for more content - more maps, more types of encounter and more fightin' ship types to add tactical depth.

It's FTL meets Homeworld, or a Battlestar Galactica Sim where you play as Adama.

Either way it's awesome, with tough choices, cool ships (I LOVE how my bombers weave inbetween shots!), scenarios, and an absolutley INTENSE final mission!


Fair warning though, in it's current state fleet controls are rather clunky, my only advice to alleviate it is to set the camera rotate function to middle mouse button (or a side button or something along those lines) and use WASD to pan.

EDIT: Also, Use your drag click functions (ctrl/alt/shift + click) instead of trying to directly click on the ships, that tremendously helps, especially when attacking waves of fighters

Pros:
- A cross between Homeworld and FTL
- Fun for short romp

Cons:
-Short: I've beaten it twice in 3 hours and unlocked all of the different fleets.
-AI: The AI is simplistic to say the least. It will just rush right towards you.

Its not a bad game at all, but I can't reccomend it at the current price point per hour played.

Easily the best ten bucks I have ever spent.

It's a simple enough concept - get your mother ship from over here on the galactic map... to over there... through hostile space.

The galactic map is made up of randomly generated tiles at the beginning of each new game. Most of the time you don't know what you're getting yourself into when you enter a sector. Sometimes you find a nice little debris field. After you wipe out a few enemies, you can sit back and relax with a nice cup of tea as your harvesters gather up the resources.

Other times you're sitting on the edge of your seat counting down every second 'til the hyperdrive charges up, so you can haul your butt out of there. Meanwhile, you fend off the hordes of encroaching foes as best as you can, cringing with each lost ship.

Early on in the game, you enter each sector with a bit of trepidation. You're low on resources, low on tech, low on ships... and sometimes you find yourself facing insurmountable odds, and you'll have to cut and run. But as you build up your fleet, you have the potential to become a force to be reckoned with. It's a pretty good feeling when you return to beat the snot out of a sector that sent you packing earlier on. You can build your fleet into an unstoppable war machine and crush foes with overwhelming might, or emphasize a strategic conservation of force and defeat your foes with sound tactics like approaching from blindspots and utilizing each vessel's inherent strengths.

Make sure you're prepared for the final battle. Even with the most massive fleet and sound tactics, it can push you to your limits.

The game isn't linear. You can return to any sector as often as you want. Resources and enemies respawn, but the type of encounter and class of enemy vessels varies when you reenter most tiles. The game autosaves every time you jump out of a system, and you have the option of saving between sectors as well. You can easily pick up where you left off - making this a great game to play on busy days when you only have 10-15 minutes here and there. There are three play speeds - normal, 2x speed, and 4x speed.

Gameplay
Straight forward tactics in real time - you consider the best combination of ship types and number to intercept hostile contigents. At a distance, they're designated with geometric symbols - triangles for fighter class ships, squares for corvettes... pentagons for frigates, octagons for dreadnoughts... There are destroyers, battleships, carriers, heavy carriers, and a variety of corvettes and frigates - all sorts of ships in this game - each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Controls
There's always a bit of a learning curve when it comes to mastering the controls of tactical games like this. If you're familiar with the genre, you'll pick it up fairly quickly. WASD, C&V to move the camera about; mouse buttons to change the viewing angle or direction and to select and direct ships. At times you have to make adjustments for the third dimension when directing ships. This may seem tricky at first, but it's actually quite simple. There's a real time tactical map which is very useful. You can enter and exit it easily. You can zoom in on groups and individuals to see what they're up to, and to take a front row seat as the action unfolds.

Miscellany
- The enemy isn't particularly clever - usually just bears down on you, but some of the vessels it sends at you are no less of a threat despite their lack of tactics. I've lost valuable ships, even my mothership on more than one occasion.

- It can be easy to get confused with the number of different kinds of specialized ships in each class when they're bunched up since they have the same geometric designation. You don't want to send a laser frigate after a bunch of fighters for instance, or a missile corvette after a dreadnought. But you can assign groups, or types to numbers 1-0, which is invaluable for keeping your fleet organized.

- It's nice that the noncombat ships such as carriers and harvesters won't follow your orders if you accidentally order them into the fray. They're like... ...um...NO. On the other hand, combat ready ships will pounce on an enemy as soon as they're in range.

- There are unlockable fleets that have special traits. The Lost Fleet feels like a real upgrade to the Nomad Fleet. The Hybrid Fleet has a ton of character, and plays significantly different than the other two.

- Even after full release, the dev is still checking in and responding to feedback and questions, as well as providing patches.

Overall - Nomad Fleet is a veritable gem of a game, and an absolute steal at this price. I'm so glad I found it.

While the game kind of worked, it felt very much like a game that the creators forgot to finish before putting it on the shelves. bad controls, clunky audio, terrible unit balance, hotkeys not working, Its clearly heavily inspired by Homeworld, where they took all of the great parts of the Homeworld series and did none of those things.

I was excited about playing this. I played the original Homeworld and HW:Cataclysm in particular to death. Boy, was I disappointed.

From the very start I could tell that this game tried to be like Homeworld, yet clearly lacked the ability to come even close to reaching that level. If anything, I would say that this entire game feels... flat. The story rings hollow due to its lacking execution, the shipdesigns are dull, the weapon's fire sounds flat and the few missions I played are little more than “Objective here. Enemies appear from nowhere. Destroy them. More enemies appear from nowhere. Destroy them. Repeat until objective complete.”
Now this wouldn't even be so terrible if anything interesting was seen in story, visuals or sounds. But there isn't so I'm just bored.

Yet what really killed it for me was the controls making this game the first one ever I had refunded. They're just clunky. Even the similar controls in Homeworld—which had its problems—are superior to what's provided here. Everything about this game screams that the developers wanted to make another Homeworld only to fall short on every account that matters for a game like this.

If you want to play a game like this get the Homeworld Remastered collection. Or even better, if you don't mind turn of the century graphics, HW: Cataclysm. Nomad Fleet is a poor substitute at best.

I enjoyed this game - lots of fun.

A few notes worth doing:
1 - More Research - lots more... guns, armor, shields, weapons... it could do with more.
2 - Guard option - to have ships follow ships
3 - agression status - shoot from location, chase and shoot, dont shoot - something like that
4 - formations - sometimes individual ships will be way in front and die
5 - (to be different from Homeworld) an attack/retreat option, ie attach until damaged then retreat to save ships
6 - repair ships should heal most damaged first, then least damaged

But, really nicely done - I like it!