Very cool DOS game I still play every day:
Begin: A Tactical Starship Combat Simulation
It's a turn based game, each game can take between 5 and 30 minutes, based on the complexity of the battle you set up. You choose which government you are (Federation, Klingon, Romulan, or Orion), then you configure both fleets. The technology is TOS era, with the pre-TNG warp scale (eg, an Orion Assassin (basically a warp drive with a phaser and a crew cabin bolted to it) can sprint at warp 14).
Each race has a bunch of different ship types. For example, the Feds have Interceptors, Destroyers, Heavy Cruisers (same class as the Enterprise), Dreadnoughts (think heavy cruiser with a third warp nacelle, more weapons, reactors, etc), tugs, tankers, and Starbases.
The Klingons have Escorts (roughly like an interceptor, not a lot of weaponry), Frigates, Battle Cruisers, Dreadnoughts, and Outposts.
Romulans have a few different types of Birds of Prey (slow, but has cloaking device and plasma torpedos).
The Orions have six different types of ships, ranging from the Assassin (mentioned above) to a slow but large ship with 3000 designed for capturin ships.
You set up battles with up to a hundred ships and start it up. When you pick up enemy ships on your scanners, you issue commands to set heading and speed, load torpedos, lock weapons on target, and close with them to engage.
Here's an example of the typed commands:
helm 285 warp 5 (sets course of 285 degrees, warp 5)
load all torpedos 220 (sets all torpedo launchers to load the default torpedo class with a proximity fuse of 220 distance units)
lock all torpedos on Medusa spread 2 degrees (lock torpedos on the Medusa with a spread of 2 degrees.)
fire all torpedos (or fire torpedo 1) (commands for firing torps)
If you're within phaser range of the enemy ship, you might fire all phasers in a tight beam with:
fire all phasers 10 degrees
An example ship might have 5 power producing reactors, two warp engines, 4 banks of emergency power batteries, two phaser banks, a torpedo launcher, and a 10 person transporter. A bigger ship might also have a probe launcher (which can launch a slow weapon with a large warhead, dangerous to use as it might be set off by nearby weapons fire when it's close to you) and a tractor beam.
Each vessel has 6 shields providing protection as a hexagon around the ship. When they drop to 0%, you can beam people to them to capture them (some hand to hand combat might be needed, so I like to kill as many with my ship based phasers before I board them). Sometimes I will lock onto the ship with a tractor beam to pin them in place while I boil off their crew with energy weapons. Once I capture the ship, I set a prize crew and the ship will fight as part of my fleet. You have to plan your use of weapons if you intend to capture a ship. A ship that has been gutted with torpedo fire and has had a warp nacelle blown off isn't terribly useful in a space fight, for example. One technique I like it to knock down their shields with torpedo fire, then close and try to poke out their eyes by knocking out their scanners, then I can fire low powered phasers into them to take out their crews and leave the ship relatively intact.
If you finish off an enemy ship or you've conclusively destroyed its abillity to fight (visualize a ship without warp, weapons, shields and barely breaking even on power to run life support) and have no interest in capturing it, you can set a heading away at a leisurely warp factor and, almost as an afterthought, drop a slow homing pod with a 30-charge Matter/Anti-Matter warhead that will close on the ship and detonate, usually causing a chain reaction that destroys the entire ship.
The fleet command stuff is great, you can order your fleet to open fire, give assignments like 'order the Farragut to defend the Lexington' (that exact command), tell them to tow ships, and so on.
The game is easy to learn, the EGA graphics are so simple that it's timeless, and sometimes it's very satisfying to fire a brace of torpedos into the unprotected flank of a ship, crippling it before it detonates.
If parts of this sound familiar, it's because it is based off a game called 'Starfleet Battles'. The modern PC game 'Starfleet Command' is based off the same source, but I find the tactical aspect of Begin to be superior gameplay to the twitch-style playing of SFC.
Here's a link to download it:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=2948Here's a screenshot from the link above. Blurry, but it might look familiar if you've played it before:
