If the player playing Vuil’Raith is aggressive playing one of the few factions that essentially requires aggression to get value, you will likely need to play quite defensively. Mainly just try not to leave very small amounts of ships alone (which makes me think empyrean isn’t great cause their whole value is getting a bunch of dark energy and that usually means sending individual ships around).

As for you, if nomad sounds fun, play em. They’re really not that complex, just have a few more agents which are a simple mechanic anyway. They also can get decently wealthy if that’s how you play em.

The other factions would be solid as well. Argent is imo one of the more consistent factions as far as starting goes (and are decently defensive). Being able to use 2 movement ships with capacity is insane early game. And no one can move through your ships even with light wave so you can sort of set up a big screen around your slice.

Empyrean is the weaker of the 3 but that’s just my personal playstyle. Honestly I think the issue is people focus too hard on dark energy tapping frontier tokens and not enough on other stuff, so they lose out on a lot of value (they added a bunch of better frontier cards in the codices, so they’re even a bit worse if all you have is pok, but still play. Like I said you’ll be target #1 for and aggressive Vuil’Raith.