				Dominate V1.00 (beta 1c)
			By Mike Lindow and Cliff McKeithan
			base on cplayer by Tim Wisseman
			Copyright 1993

INTRO

Dominate was written to begin a journey to having a competant computer
player for VGA-Planets.  It is generally accepted that while the original
cplayer works, it does not play well.  Dominate plays better, but is still
a far cry from being complete.  Eventually, the Dominion will improve until
it plays competantly without cheating (at least that is our goal). (note 
that "the Dominion" is the formal name for "dominate").

The following are some specific things that Dominate does better:
1) Builds almost every turn at almost every starbase.
2) Planets build more defenses.
3) Ships run out of fuel less often, less predictably.
4) Somewhat more aggressive.
5) Planetary economy developed better.
6) Cheats less (though it still cheats - see cheat.txt)
7) Lays an occasional minefield.
8) Uses some race-specific abilities (RGA, Pillage, etc).

There are other improvements, but it is left to the reader to discover them.

The Dominion has not been extensively tested, especialy against human players.
Use it at your own risk, there is no warrenty, expressed or implied, etc, etc,
etc, ad nauseum.  The program is written as freeware, and by executing the 
program you agree to accept responsability for all problems you may encounter.
I have done my best to prevent any possible damage to host files, and there
are no known cases of damage at the present.  If you encounter one, send me
e-mail and I will get to work on fixing it.

Dominate is run identically to the original cplayer:

dominate.exe gamedir /123456789ab+-

where gamedir is the subdirectory you are hosting the game in, 123456789ab is
the player list you want the Dominion to play, + indicates to play as
unregistered (limits tech levels to 6), and - indicates that Dominate should
not use the mineral teleportation cheat.

All the players used by Dominate should be included when the game is created
using MASTER, and HOST should be run once prior to the first use of Dominate.

shpnames.hst is a text file with the names dominate will use for new ships.
This file may be edited with any text editor.  Ship names are separated by
carriage returns, so ship names are limited to 20 characters and may include
spaces as desired.  Now you have the ability to mask the identity of computer
players somewhat by changing the ship name list from the default.  Up to
100 names will be used from the file.

Known Problems:
1. Dominate currently has problems running when either Lantastic or Qemm are
loaded.  I'm not sure why, but when I figure it out I will fix it (suggestions
are welcome).

2. Occasionally crashes when first run on a new game, once for each race.
It is trying to create a 'brainfile' for the race, and the create is failing
for some unknown reason.  This does not happen on all machines, but if it does
there is now a batch file "rbrain.bat" which will copy a new brainfile into
the game directory for each race.  Usage is 
rbrain gamedir

3) Phost does not like programs which edit the host files.  Therefore it does
not like Dominate.  Phost users should be careful about using dominate, as the
results will probably be bad.

There are 2 versions of Dominate being distributed - both are basically the
same, except that one is optimized for floating point coprocessors, and the
other is not.  The version on my web page is set up for use without a 
coprocessor - the other is not there due to disk space limitations.  FTP
and Getmail zip files include both versions.  Dominate.exe is the nofloat
version, float.exe is the optimized version (rename to Dominate.exe for play).
Note that dominate.exe can be renamed to anything, which is significant if you
use an automated system which looks for "cplayer.exe" to run computer players.

Dominate is written in C using the gnu C compiler.

Cliff McKeithan
at858@freenet.hsc.colorado.edu
cmckeith@nyx.cs.du.edu
cmckeith@wormhole.cs.mci.com
http://nyx10.cs.du.edu:8001/~cmckeith/home.html
Again, Dominate is absolutely, totally freeware.  That said, if you want to
send gifts to encourage further development, send them to:
195 N. Holcomb St.
Castle Rock, CO 80104
