WAR and DECWAR are essentially multiplayer versions of the classic Star Trek game, but with added strategic elements.
[1] In Star Trek, a single player would hunt around the galaxy looking for an invasion force of Klingon warships, and return to a number of starbases to refit and repair.
[1] The game was no longer run as a single instance, but instead as a number of programs (or "jobs"), one for each user, communicating through a shared memory.
Another addition was a single computer-controlled Romulan ship, who would be spawned into games with less than full players in order to give the humans someone to fight.
[1][3] Bill Louden, who was in charge of games at CompuServe, purchased a version of DECWAR from UT Austin after having been told of its existence one night on CB Simulator by Merlyn Cousins.
[2][4] The new version, MegaWars, went live on CompuServe in 1983 and ran continuously until 1998, although there were a few times where they closed it down during that period only to revive it after receiving complaints from the players.
Numerous additions were made during its run, notably different classes of ships, and later versions looked little like the original DECWAR.
Merlyn Cousins (Drforbin) later reverse engineered the source back to a form which would run on standard TOPS-10 and simh.
[9] The basic aim of DECWAR was to take control of a "universe" consisting of a 79 × 79 "sector" grid (in v2.3, it was smaller in earlier versions) containing a number of planets, bases and black holes.
Players could join either the Federation or Klingon Empire, although the difference was purely cosmetic and each side had identical ships.
Each ship was equipped with warp and impulse engines, photon torpedoes, phasers, deflector shields, a computer, life support, sub-space radio, and a tractor beam.
[3] Another change from Star Trek was that fully charged and operative shields would deflect torpedoes completely, whereas in the original they often overwhelmed the Klingon ships with a single shot.