		Welcome to pei - Perl Empire Interface

  The pei manual is rather long, and if you're like me, you'll just
want to take pei out of the box, plug it in, and see what it does.
Here's how you can do just that:

Type "make" in the pei directory.  This will make the program "highlight".

If you already use eif:
  Type "pei" at your unix prompt.
  pei will then convert your ~/.eifrc into ~/.peirc, and you will be
  faced with the familiar "Local%" prompt.  To connect to a game, type
  the game name.  (Note: pei does not have a "connect" command.)

If you have never used eif:
  The quickest way for you to start is to type something like
    pei mycountryname mypassword game.host.name 1617
  at the unix prompt, or to change the four lines at the top of the
  file called "pei".  However, you are STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to do the following:
    1. Copy the file called "example.peirc" to ~/.peirc.
    2. Remove the aliases in this file that you don't like.
    3. Edit the game stuff at the bottom, specifying the host, port, etc
       of the games that you want to connect to.  
  PEI should work without ~/.peirc, however I have heard that it doesn't
  always work quite right, so use ~/.peirc to be safe.  (Note that
  you'll only be able to access multiple games if $country is NOT
  defined at the top of pei.)

Now for the magic:
  After you break, type "nova" and watch pei explore the entire island
for you.  Once you've got ships, assault an island with about 30 mil,
and then next update type "nova" again and pei will explore that
entire island too.  Make sure that your #0 realm is big enough,
because nova won't explore off the edge of a map.

  Once you've got lots of civs, and maybe you've bridged to a
neighbouring island, use "cmvr" to migrate your civs to the "New
World".  If you don't have alot of civs, but you want to spread them
out, then you can type something like "cmvr 50", and pei will try to
get 50 civs into each sector.

  If there is food in your game, type "setfood" and then "fmvr" to
get the right amount of food to all your sectors.

pei has lots of other neat features, but I'll let you read about
them in tools.man and pei.man.

These are the files included in this distribution:
  README        Things that users of older versions of pei will need
                to know about this latest version.
  INSTALL       Installation instructions.
  BUGS          A list of known bugs in pei.
  CHANGES.1     Version revision history for pei 1.x.
  CHANGES.2     Version revision history for pei 2.x.
  WISH_LIST     Changes that we hope to implement in the future.
  pei           The program you run.
  local.pl      Contains all the pei local commands.
  parse.pl      Parses server output into internal database.
  tools.pl      Contains tools (nova, cmvr, ...).
  mail.pl       Contains mail, wmail, tele, and anno tools.
  simu.pl       Contains the "simu" tool.
  sock.pl       Contains all socket I/O routines.
  example.peirc Stuff for you to put in your ~/.peirc file (NOTE: don't
                make a ~/.peirc file until pei has had a chance to
                convert your ~/.eifrc into ~/.peirc).
  help.pei      Pei users manual--you can also get this by typing "help pei"
                from within pei.
  help.local    Manual for pei commands that you can use at the local prompt.
  help.tools    Manual for pei tools--you can also get this by typing
                "help tools" from within pei.
  highlight.c   A program to pipe the output of "sect" to.
  Makefile      For making highlight.
  README.hacker Information useful to hackers.

ENJOY!

Sam Tetherow
tetherow@nol.org
