Stars!! Finally another living human who has heard of it.

I remember finding the limited demo on one of those "101 games!" $1.99 CD-ROMs, and then tracked down a full version at some remote Circuit City. Still have the installer and the key, and occasionally load it up on a VM (plays fine, only needed like 32mb of RAM :P )

A great game, but another one which suffered from the burden of overwhelm in the late game stages, and was hampered by the un-expected and abrupt limitation that you could only have 255 fleets (or some such thing). I read a breakdown that the cause was due to the designers only using an 8 bit integer for the FLEET_ID, so once you had that, the game would just discard any additional fleets you made.

Ahh, nostalga.