I am very much considering the purchase of this game, but I need one final, but crucial, bit of information before I decide to do so.

Does Nexus feature true 3D battles, like in Homeworld, in that you can move your ships in all three dimensions (aka six degrees of freedom)?
Sadly, a lot of tactical and strategic space games end up resorting to only allowing movement on two planes, in which case they might as well just have been standard fare ground-based games.

Thanks!

Thank you very much for your speedy and informative reply!

I might add that Homeworld 2 was actually fake 3D (at least for the stock campaign), because the battles took part in largely one plane. In HW1, enemies would attack you from above and below. I don't remember such a case in the second installment.

There were a few missions where it was important to move ships on to different planes.

It was also something you could play with in multiplayer. There were alot of things the devs didnt get around to doing and so they cut things. I esp like how the game is fundamentally broken in terms of difficulty. It scales enemy forces based on how many ships you have when you go to the next mission. If you salvage everything except carriers and shipyards your enemy forces are next to nothing. EZ mode.

You actually could navigate explicitly on the z-axis in homeworld 2 - but no missions required it, and it had no bearing on how the battles.. sieges, tugs of war.. played out. At best you could pretend to flank things by upping the view-angle, and aligning your fleet differently than before. But essentially you played on a 2d plane there as well.

Orb did the same thing, even if the map had objects typically placed out in different heights on the z-axis. No bonuses for attacking at different angles at the same time, or any weak points in the defenses, that sort of thing.

Nexus on the other hand just uses a relative z-axis to your view-port. If you want, and you often will, you can rotate the view, and set a course downwards into the plane, changing the viewport in the process. With the line-shield missions, this is essential to understand, or you're going to have a hard time succeeding.

Same with the stealth-approach missions - if you think of the battle as a plane, you will be as dead as .. Khan in The Wrath of Khan :D, because you won't see the corridor out along a different slice of the ball you're navigating on.

This also has a pretty big impact on the battles. If you bait an enemy cruiser with an ecm-equipped ship, while letting your battle-cruiser have a clear shot at the side or rear - you suddenly have a huge advantage. Same if you can time an area-attack into a narrow corridor the enemy ships might want to pass through, for example. And making those kill-points is possible because you can place your cruiser at a straight angle towards the course of the enemy cruiser, for example.