The Skirmisher is a small tool allowing you to create your very own space battles in the real-time strategy game 'Nexus: The Jupiter Incident'. If you don't own it, go get it! It's available on retail shelves as well as the popular Steam platform by Valve.
Skirmish matches against AI opponents are fun, but sadly Nexus doesn't feature a flexible skirmish mode. With the help of the Skirmisher you can create your own skirmish battles against a capable and configurable AI fleet whereever and however you like. You can configure the fleets, the ships, the weapon layout, the battlefield and even the background music.
First you'll obviously need the game, preferrably patched to version 1.01. Then download the most recent version of the Skirmisher and install it. The tool comes packaged with an installer or can be extracted manually using just the .zip-archive. Install/extract it to your Nexus installation path. It may or may not prompt you to overwrite any existing files - just confirm the dialog and continue.
Start it using the shortcuts, if you used the installer. Otherwise, just start the 'Nexus Skirmisher.exe' inside your Nexus installation. You're then good to go. Most settings are self-explanatory anyway.
This is pretty straightforward: you select one of your installed mods (or use the default one, "NEXUS Skirmisher"), choose a name and battle location for your mission and start outfitting the fleets, both yours and the AI fleet. You can select up to 10 ships per fleet and even customize them with a click on the small "C" button next to that ship. Shiptype and equipment names use the internal format of the game, so might be somewhat hard to read, though. Just use a little trial and error combined with some common sense and you'll soon have no problems creating your own custom battle. Clicking on "Create mission" will create all necessary files for you. You can now start the modification you just created the mission for and start playing.
Each mission you create with the Skirmisher needs to have its own number assigned to it. Don't use the same number twice for the same mod or the game will crash when starting up! The only exception is when creating missions for the same mod, that use the same number AND the same mission name. You can do that, though you'll overwrite the previous mission each time you click on "Create mission".
Unfortunately you can't with the current version of Nexus Skirmisher. Sorry. You CAN alter the created .mission files directly to add in fighters and bombers manually, but that is pretty much out of scope for this FAQ. Check the Nexus modding manual on how to do that.
Simply select a different location in the top right or use the "alternative location" tab. It depends on the mod how many locations will be available to you. However, you can always create your own star systems using the editor, that is provided with the game itself. Simply create a new star system for your desired mod and it'll be available in the Skirmisher. Instructions on how to do that can be found in the modding manual of the game.
These utilities come with your copy of the game. When installing the retail version you can deliberatily choose to install the mod utilities, which will supply you with everything you'll need. If you didn't install these, you'll need to uninstall and then reinstall the game in order to get access to them.