Nebulas - Yay or Nay

[Starbug]

Also, if you head into a Slug controlled nebula, be sure to have your O2 and Med bay upgraded to level 2.
Them slugs will often hack one or the other, but if you've got level 2 systems you'll get a blue option to keep them just operational.
Nothing worse than trying to fight a slug ship without Oxygen... (just jump away!)

[UltraMantis]

Yay. There's no penalty to offset the slightly slower Rebel movement. More exploration = more loot. Storms sap the energy of enemies so you're equal or better off since you're more likely to have extra power.

Besides, oxygen is overrated.

[actionhero112]

I think it depends on your ship and team construction. The first thing is energy, If you have got zlotan, Nebulas is good,if you have got weapons which does not consume too much energy, it is good. The second annoy thing is intruders because you cannot see them in your ship, so if you have got upgraded door system to locate/contain the enemies, you have slug to detect their location or if you have mantis of rockman to fight a blind compact, Nebulas is good.

Once my ship has been bordered in nebulas while I have a level one door system and some one engi and two zoltans, err, dead hard

Use your systems as a detection method. When a boarding party is trying to destroy a system a little fist will appear over the green bar and a red line will gradually overtake the green one. Go to that system and kill the boarders or beat them back or whatever.

I don't go to Uncharted Nebulas
I will go to Slug Controlled Nebulas
I will go into random nebulas in random red and green sectors.

I think that uncharted nebulas have less ships, though I'm not sure. It could be a kind of superstition. Slug Controlled Nebulas seem to me to have the normal amount of encounters, and the fleet move slower.

[Magnianhk]

I tend to avoid nebulas simply because I don't like flying blind. Whenever I play I carefully choose my energy/energy output, and nebulas can seriously destroy your balance between subsystems.

However, I said that I tend to avoid nebulas. I do use them to slow the enemy fleet if I am searching for a store, or I have enough system power to handle any fight and simply wish to build more scrap. Jumping from nebula node to nebula node can net you some high scrap rewards.

Choosing what to do depends on your ship and what it can handle.

[UglyMug]

I avoid nebula sectors if I'm running light boarders. That is, two man team w/ lvl 1 teles just to capture for scrap and extras. Boarding blind is too dangerous with a long cooldown and no second team for backup. No idea where fires and breaches are, and if they got blast doors... ugh, can't run during cooldown. If I have no teleporter or a level three with a four man team - I'll happily hit them, slower fleet pursuit means more beacons hit.

[POM_Fenris]

Whilst they slow the fleet down, it seems to me that loot is much less, unless you're in a slug-controlled nebula, which is horrible, because slugs hack your systems, taking down your medbay/oxygen/both unless you have them upgraded. Generally I avoid nebulas.

[tungsten_is_money]

I love nebulas, will always go into any nebula square and will choose the nebula sectors over the others. Extra encounters and scrap is just incredibly awesome, I consider a nebula-heavy map to be extremely good RNG luck.

The energy drain fights are not much tougher than regular fights IMO and sometimes can be much easier as the AI makes bad power decisions, although it does depend on your build.

[Gus Smedstad]

Whether you can fight effectively in an ion storm really depends on how energy-efficient your weapons are. The Stealth / B for example has a terrible time until fairly late, because you need a minimum of 4 energy in weapons. A ship with a Burst Laser II like the Kestrel is perfectly happy in an ion storm - lots of damage for relatively little energy outlay. The Zoltan ships do well because you have lots of Zoltans which aren't affected, and the Zoltan Shield requires no energy so you can put everything into weapons beyond a point or two for engines.