Yea, I remember those days too. The best game out there was a text based Star Trek game called Space Wars because of possible copyright infringement. It took about one minute to make a single move or fire a torpeedo. If you warped into a sector with more than two Klingon ships, you’d better use phasers and knock them out in a single salvo or you may not get a second chance.
We had that game on our high school PDP-8 computer. The key was to do a scan of the entire universe so you knew where the klingon’s were. We had a grid made the represented that universive size, and could determine the number of units to warp to each occupied space. Also used photon torpedos to pick off individual klingon ships instead of phasers that used lots of power.
I believe we did clear the galaxy once, but it was a lot of work to do so!