				Dominate V2.01 
			        By Cliff McKeithan and Mike Lindow
			        based on cplayer by Tim Wisseman
		 	        Copyright 1993, 1996

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.  The cheating has been eliminated, but play
still needs work for Dominate to do well now that the cheating is gone.

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 similarly to the original cplayer:

dominate.exe gamedir /123456789ab+txv=

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), t indicates to use team play, x
indicates to to use an alternate log file, and v indicates verbose output.
= will disable logging altogether.

Dominate must be run from the same directory as host in order to locate all the
host data files.

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.  Any number
of names may be in the file.

Dominate now works well with both Host and Phost.

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.

Cliff McKeithan
skye@diac.com
cmckeith@nyx.nyx.net
cmckeith@wormhole.cs.mci.com
http://www.diac.com/~skye/silicon.html
Again, Dominate is absolutely, totally freeware.
If you need to reach me via snail-mail:
195 N. Holcomb St.
Castle Rock, CO 80104
