Frigate
released on Jan 01, 1988
Frigate is a real-time, text-based strategic game which pits you and your ship against a Soviet fleet of vessels. The object of the game is to destroy as many of the Russian ships as possible while avoiding destruction. Points are awarded for destroying you enemy while avoiding their missiles. Your ship, a nuclear powered guided missile frigate, has many advantages over its Russian counterparts, but you are outnumbered by a large margin. You will be operating on an area of 1,000,000 square miles. At your disposal you have radar, sonar, jamming equipment, anti-missile capabilities and three types of ordinance.
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Frigate is quite a remarkable game: a real-time/turn-based hybrid ship battle simulator made entirely in a text UI. Radar and sonar contacts are tracked with headings and distances, navigation is via manual coordinate input or relative to your targets and you're constantly outnumbered and outgunned. There's a fair bit of strategic depth as well; ammo is limited, radar can be jammed and damage to the ship impacts the ship's systems.
Going back to replay the game on archive.org it brings it all back, but in such a discordant way. I remember finding these battles so exciting and so clearly visualizing the play field and the action and now it's like hey fun spreadsheet. Clearly baby Josh had a much more vivid imagination (and smoked a lot less grass... a robust short-term memory is a critical skill here).
I guess I can't really recommend this now unless you're really into text-based games or milsim stuff, but boy did I have hours of fun with Frigate.