Empire

I was first introduced to Empire, Wargame of the Century, in 1989, by a fellow computer teacher. He was totally addicted to it, and played before class, after class, and during every break time. I became addicted the first time I played it. The graphics are poor by any standard, but also appealingly simple. You start with one city and a blank map to explore. You choose how to allocate your city production. Not the mind numbing details of current simulations, just simple army, plane, submarine, battleship, etc.

The goal is to move armies to other cities and capture them. A simple computer algorithm decides the winner of each combat depending on the user selected settings for difficulty. You can set it for up to 6 players, with any combination of live person, computer, or internet/email. You also get to choose the map size, and you can also design custom maps. If you are playing by yourself against the computer, a two player game can take many hours to complete. There is a save game option. Use it on a regular basis and you can recover from battles that go badly and live to try a different strategy.
The real fun is deciding on a strategy. Find the enemy before he finds you, or avoid the enemy while capturing neutral cities to build up strength before assaulting him. Build up huge armies or a fleet of ships. A huge air force or ground troops. The choice is yours, and you have no idea what the map will look like. Many times it is mostly water, with lots of islands, but not always. It takes a lot of thought and planning to get armies, transport ships, and escort ships and planes into the right place at the right time to make your assault. I always start with one army, and then a fighter that I send to explore the immediate area. Once I find a city close by, I start to send armies to capture it. As soon as I capture all of the cities on the island I set one city to building a Transport, and all the rest for armies until I fill it up.
I have played this game into the early morning hours on many occasions. I am still playing it at work when I can, and people are always looking over my shoulder and asking about it. Some laugh, but they keep watching and asking questions. There is still a lot of appeal here for people who like strategy games.
This game was designed by Walter Bright, and he still maintains a website with lots of interesting background information about it and the process of developing and bringing it to market. There are also free downloads of the various versions of it and the source code. A sequel Empire II the art of war was published, but got poor reviews and was not very successful.