or Klingon Empire, although the difference was purely cosmetic and each side had identical ships. In games where one team had too many players, new players would be forced onto the smaller team. When joining, the player was presented with a list of ships on each side that were not currently being played, and could re-enter the game in the same ship if they were killed. 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. Each ship started with 5000 units of energy, 2500 units of shield strength, and 0 units of damage. If a ship receives 2500 points of damage it is destroyed, and a ship that loses all of its energy is likewise "dead". In addition to total damage for the ship as a whole, each hit would do damage to a part of the ship, which would be rendered inoperative if this reached 300 points. 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. This forces the players to first reduce the enemy's shields with phaser fire before finishing them off with a torpedo. Players could also shoot at stars with their torpedoes, causing them to go nova and destroy any nearby ship. The bases were the key strategic element of the game, allowing allied ships to be repaired and rearmed. The game ended when one team destroyed all of the opposing ships, bases, and captured their planets. Bases will fire on enemy ships within four sectors, and had massive phaser and shield power. Neutral planets were essentially small bases with a range of two sectors and less power. Bases and planets could be easily reduced by staying slightly outside their firing range; torpedoes, for instance, had a range of ten sectors. Although, like Star Trek, each user interacted through a turn-based command line, the game as a whole was essentially real-time because any user could enter commands at any time and update the global game state. This gave the advantage to players who could interpret output and enter commands faster. To improve performance, DECWAR had three different levels of "detail" in commands and output, with the tersest mode condensing commands into a code-like format. Command structure was similar to the