                            *******************
                                  Z-Plan 
                            v1.31 - 12 Mar 2000
                            *******************

                     New Campaign for Pacific General
                                   by 
                              Steve Strayer


FORWARD:
Germany's battleships fought in the arctic blizzards and sub-zero temperatures of the Barents Sea and the Kara Sea.  They probed the mists and ice-floes of the Greenland coast and, during the bombardment of Spitzbergen, were operating within 750 miles of the North Pole.  They prowled the convoy routes of the North Atlantic and pushed beyond the equator searching for prey in raiding sorties that took them from the shores of Brazil and Uraguay to those of West Africa.  The Admiral Scheer penetrated as far east as the Indian Ocean.  Another, the Bismarck, sank the Royal Navy's most famous ship, the HMS Hood - while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau destroyed the carrier Glorious off Norway and humbled English pride by breaking through the Dover Straits in broad daylight.  This all happened historically without the ambitious Z-Plan ever being pursued.  What could have happened had Hitler given the Kriegsmarine top priority?  This campaign seeks the answer to that question!


INTRODUCTION:
This archive contains the files needed to install the full version of the Pacific General Axis campaign called Z-Plan. The campaign setting is a hypothetical German naval expansion for competing with the western allies of Britain and the United States. The campaign was assembled using Bill Haering's Campedit program for creating new campaigns for Pacific General. Fred Chandla's ShpEd & Briefing Editor were also used, as well as my own Armory Equipment roster files. The campaign and installation have been tested with version 1.1 of Pacific General. If you have version 1.0 and have not patched to version 1.1, you should. 


OVERVIEW:
Based on the historically true case of the "Z-Plan"... which was Germany's pre-war plan to build a huge German surface fleet to deal with the western powers, the plan called for the construction of six
battleships that made the Bismarck look small by comparison, along with a host of other capital ships and supporting vessels.  Historically, the Z-Plan was scrapped when the war began.

This 10-scenario campaign will assume the Germans do NOT scrap the Z-Plan and continue to give it funding and follow it through. The campaign will start with the "traditional" German assaults into Poland, Norway and France, then will set off on a more "navaly-western" course of events, and there will be many land-sea-air battles that take place in the campaign with a few new twists and surprises. 

The campaign starts in 1939, and won't end till 1945, so you will have the FULL capability to upgrade all your equipment as the years go by, and the majority of the maps in "Z-Plan" will be new never-before-seen maps that are geographically correct. 

To top it off, the campaign includes a self-installing setup file, and an all-new graphics pallete for PacGen which will "Germanize" the graphics including unit info, turn screens and the main & strategic maps! 


BACKUP:
Installation of the campaign alters files in the scen and data directories. Using the backup option will save all of the files in those directories to directories called olddata and oldscen (if you have directories with these names already, please change them before installation). This will take 40 megabytes of disk space. Unless you are short on space, the backup option is highly recommended. (Alternately, you could copy the scen and data directories to a different drive or backup medium manually). 


INSTALLATION:
To install the program, the archive "UnZipMe2.zip" should be unzipped into it's own folder (that you create) in the Pacific General directory, such as "newcamp". If your main Pacific General directory is C:\PACGEN\ then you should unzip the files in C:\PACGEN\newcamp. (data and scen directories should be on the same level as newcamp) If all of the options are installed, about 50-55 megabytes of free space must be available on the Pacific General drive.

The campaign is then installed by running the batch program file named installZ.bat. Several options are given during the installation. 


INSTALL OPTIONS:
Install text - You need about 10 megabytes of disk space to do the installation, but the final installation will leave about the same space as you started with. This will give the proper introductory text to each of the scenarios.

Install new graphics - this will temporarily use about 40 meg of hard drive space but in the end, no disk usage will be added. The graphics replace the between move and scenario graphics with scenes that are more appropriate to a German campaign - as well as replacing all the rising suns with German emblems on the main and strategic maps.


LOOSE ENDS:
Once the installation is done, the files extracted from the archive can be deleted.  You will probably want to keep the archive, and the following files:

playorig.bat : if you have made a backup during installation will allow you to revert to the the SSI original.

playzpln.bat : if you have made a backup during installation and used playorig.bat to switch to the SSI original, running playzpln.bat will restore Z-Plan as the default campaign.

zplan.doc : gives detailed background information on each scenario.  Please do read this file if you are interested in learning more of the "history" of the Z-Plan timeline... this doc file contains more detailed info than you will read in the in-game briefings.


IMPORTANT:
There is a bug in v1.1 of Pacific General that cannot be fixed by this (or any other) campaign or 3rd-party patch.  The specific bug is that when playing ANY campaign game, when you've finished one scenario and are ready to move on to the next scenario in the campaign, the game will ask you if you wish to save at this time... DO NOT SAVE WHEN IT ASKS YOU THIS!!!  Saving at this point in the game (especially if you EVER reload this saved game), gives you essentially double the prestige you are intended to receive in the campaign.  In theory you can continually reload the game and obtain in infinate amount of prestige before resuming the next scenario in the campaign.

The Z-Plan campaign is intended to be a challenging campaign without using any type of "cheats"... this undocumented feature however, may sneak up on unsuspecting people who are looking for a challenge without hand-outs, and so this is why I bring this bug up.

If you wish to play the Z-plan as it is intended to be played, and wish to be challenged with the amount of prestige the author of the campaign supposed it to be, please follow these save-game tips:
1) NEVER save the game when it asks you to save between scenarios!
2) If you do not wish to deploy immediately when ending a scenario, please remember to save your game right before you take that last objective hex in a given scenario... this way you can pick up the game later, and go straight through the deployment screen
3) Simply play straight from one scenario, through the deployment screen and into the next scenario without saving.  If you save AFTER the deployment screen at the beginning of the 1st turn of the next scenario, this is a safe way to save a game for later.


VERSION:
v1.31 - minor fix to Antwerp and the Albert Canal in FallGelb.
v1.3 - minor fix concerning Fairey Fox in FallGelb scenario.
v1.2 - Expanded FallGelb scenario, new paved airport in NewFoundland,
       smaller troop reinforcements for American AI in NewEngland.
v1.1 - fixed Iceland crash bug created in v1.0
v1.0 - initial release, enhanced Iceland scenario
v1.0b - beta version playtested for play-balance


NOTES:
It is recommended that music be turned off while playing. In this case once the main screen of Pacific General comes up, the CDROM can be removed from the drive. This will eliminate the inappropriate Japanese narration and cut scenes. 

New scenarios and campaigns (plus many other add-ons) can be found on the web at the Pacific General Armory... the site's address is:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sgt_stryker/armory.htm


Comments and criticisms are always welcome.

Z-Plan is copyrighted by
Steve Strayer
strayer@bigfoot.com
May 1999
