1) Gary Grigsby's Pacific War - been playing this 1992 - there is a new improved free version on matrixgames.com with improved graphics, strategic AI and other fixes
2) Steel Panthers series - again you can get improved versions of SP2 and SP3 with both WW2 (again from Matrixgames) and modern warfare total conversions. They are surprisingly realistic as there was extensive work over the years to make 'everything as right as possible'.
3) X-Com : Terror From the Deep.
There were many X-com clones over the last decade, best of all the German produced UFO series (Aftermath, Aftershock, etc).
But none of them could match the sheer terror of deadly underwater combat like the original "UFO2" which was titled Terror From the Deep. I still have nightmares about piloting deep sea interceptor submarines against enormous alien battleships using nothing but a primitive sonar and fire control display. And yes you could set it up so that you had multiple subs engaging the same target simultaneously. Way better than STO carrier pets as you could manually set attack patterns, fire weapons individually etc.
You researched and designed the loadouts for your attack subs manually, by yourself. You paid to manufacture their weapon systems or bought them from government sources. If you lose the sub you paid for the replacement yourself. Same for ground combat, either do inhouse RnD, reverse engineer alien equipment or buy from government sources.
4) Falcon 2.0 and 3.0 + MiG29 expansion
Were my first taste of flight sims and I eventually learned to play them with full systems complexity and realism settings. Those games were quite advanced for their time and omg, 20 floppy disks.
Fighting Steel (with NWS expansion)
This is also a very, very old 3D naval combat simulator. It has once again been made almost completely historically accurate by third party developers - NavalWarfare.net
Battles are very challenging because with good weather you can fire battleship main guns to their historical ballistic ranges, with also period-authentic fire control effectiveness. That means you have to use target aspect ratio, wind speed, ballistic computers, radars (if USN) in order to secure victory in historical or fictional fleet batties.
The historical battles are such like the Battle of River Plate where realistic orders of battle are used. Campaign generators give you 'what if' scenarios like what could occur if you had a battleship engagement between Japan's new Yamato class and the US Navy in early 1942.
Unlike simplified combat games like STO, Fighting Steel models historical armour protection systems and shell ballistics. So yes, you have to engineer your strategies so that your shells will do maximum damage to the weak points of enemy ships. Battlecruisers for instance, had weaker deck armour so were vulnerable to plunging shots through the deck from long range.
And as for going up against the Yamato... you're going to learn to use a lot of desperate tactics. You can't go one on one with her in an early war American battleship... but you can screen your BBs with your CAs and make the Yamato waste precious main gun shots trying to hit the screening vessels, using them as sacrificial protection if necessary. Load cruiser guns with HE shells to basically plaster the Yamato with hi explosives to disable fire control systems and other soft components outside the implenetrable armor belt. I managed to disable the Yamato's fire directors and caused significant damage to the superstructure after about 2 hours of constant battle, but it was a wasteful and indecisive engagement as not a single destroyer or cruiser could get a torpedo solution on the Yamato as her secondary triple 6" gun battery actually performed to historical specs... each secondary turret to be able to engage enemy escort vessels individually.
And as for battles taking 2 hours or more to resolve... that's perfectly realistic for a WW2 naval engagement too. Ships had 300 or more main gun rounds per magazine but that's really not enough and you do have to conserve ammo and fire on valid solutions and use a lot of thinking skills to 'cross the T' and deliver some effective punishing blows
Unlike STO where you destroy thousands of enemy ships a day (well, you could, in the Gorn Minefield), you worked for hours or even days to sink an enemy ship in those old naval battle sims. And that made each 'sinking' tremendously satisfying.
Star Trek...in 1982..on my dad's TRS-80,64K computer. The Enterprise was represented with <E>, and the Klingons were <K>.It took 25 minutes to load from a cassette tape in machine language. It only took a neck breaking, lighting fast 10 minutes to load when he upgraded the memory to 128k.I think I have photos that require more memory than that now..
What they did with Starflight and on 2X 5,1/4 floppy disks, its awesomeness can never be matched. I got immersed and lost in that game for months if not years. So much to explore, plot and chart.
EA hold the rights for it and it was recentyl re released on GOG. Was only $5.
Yep! I snatched it up on GOG right away! I also found the Sega Genesis version for a couple $ on ebay last year. Tis an excellent, enhanced port.
Ah, I miss that game. I'm surprised no modern equivalent has taken its place. Sure, you can explore places in a space sim and pick up salvage to upgrade your ship, but you can't land on a planet and dig through ancient ruins. Hmmmm, I guess STO would be like that if it were a single player game instead of an MMO.