You could only choose between a TOS-style Consitution-Class, Klingon battleship, or Romulan bird of prey. You could fire phasers and torpedoes, but all you could really do was fire in the general direction of your enemy and hope you hit them ... (not very accurate)
Klingons and Romulans could both cloak, I'm pretty sure. All ships could drop "starbases", and the K & R could cloak those as well -- and then set them to auto destruct, which would cause a fairly big explosion and wipe out whatever other player was nearby.
Run into a star or a planet and BOOM! You're gone, restart, etc.
There were wormholes, which would take you to another level (for lack of a better term). There was an actually rather intricite system for jumping from system to system, and me and my buddy Nate spent one afternoon figuring it out ...
But this was many, many, many years ago ... 1995, played in Atholton High School's Mac lab, which consisted of a bunch of very old Apple Macintoshes.
Ahhh ... but it was so much fun
Especially the "ghost" player ... we think he was networked in from somewhere above us, but damn did he always kick our asses ...
I tried surfing some sites on the "new" versions of NetTrek -- wow! It's really changed!!!
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Star Trek Gamma Quadrant
Average Rated 7.5 out of 10 Smileys by Fabrux
***
Shop Smart -- Shop "S"-Mart
I myself am an avid Netrek Player. Though the version I play may not be the same as JK plays.
The Game field consists of four territories: The Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and (what appears to be) the Orion Syndicate (with its homeworld curiously labelled as Orion). Of course, ships blast each other with phasers and photon torpedoes, but the objective is to take over planets and turn them to your side using your armies. The cool thing about it is when your opponent has only one planet left (usually the home one), and everybody tries like crazy to get their armies onto it. BTW: You do get more armies, it all depends on how many planets your team has.
You have a variety of ships, from scouts, to cruisers, to battleships, to Starbases. One thing I enjoy is if you fire torpedoes into a pack of ships, and if one blows up, the others might get hit and cause a "chain reaction" explosion. This is cool if you blow a Starbase, and it blows an assault ship jam packed with armies!!!
JK, try this: http://www.netrek.org
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"My Name is Elmer Fudd, Millionaire. I own a Mansion and a Yacht."
Psychiatrist: "Again."
Basically it was just an excuse to run around the galaxy eliminating other starbases becasue we thought they were 7-11s or Cumberland Farms & spreading the glory of the Quik-E-Mart empire. Plus we got t'do our really bitchin' Apu Nahasapeemipetilan impersonations.
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"Reading snow is like listening to music. To describe what you've read is like explaining music in writing." ---Smilla Jaspersen