Peoples General

[Mount Suribachi]

I just got given an old copy of Peoples General by a friend.

Now, back in the day I spent countless hours playing PG & AG on my old Playstation. I loved those games, few things are more fun in life than having your tanks rampage through the French countryside http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif

Anyways, are there any mods or fan sites for these games?

Cheers

MS

[Ser Clegane]

Quote[/b] (Mount Suribachi @ July 03 2004,07:06)]I just got given an old copy of Peoples General by a friend.
I recently reinstalled this game on my PC but it turned out that it did not run properly under XP (the graphics for the menus were messed up.

Are you using XP and did you manage to make it run properly?

[Vlad The Impaler]

OMG.
Panzer General 1 was the second game i ever played after the first civilization.
unfortunatley i dont have any copy of the series now.i played PG1 , Pacific General, Panzer 2.
i think that a patch for playing this on XP is needed
if some of u find/have this let me know.this post remind me of this games and i ll try to find them again http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-2thumbsup.gif

[Mount Suribachi]

Yes I am running on XP, and no I haven't installed it yet......

We need to find a fan site with a fix on it.... http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-computer.gif

[econ21]

Panzer General was my introduction to computer wargames and still one of my all time favorites. One thing they got perfected during the development of these games was play balance, so you'll probably find the People's General campaigns are fine out of the box without mods (if you can get it to run). I found the US PeG campaign just right in difficulty level - never got into the Chinese one. By contrast, the original PG1 campaigns just get way too easy by the third or fourth scenarios.

I believe the most active current forum for PG type games is:

http://pub131.ezboard.com/bjpspanzers

The main resource I've used in the past is:

http://www.wargamer.com/5star/

Most of the modding action seems to be with Panzer General 2. On the wargamer site, look out in particular for Steve Brown's PG2 campaigns page. There is a pretty large stock of campaigns for PG2. Steve's campaigns are brilliant but very nasty - too tough for me and although I admire them, I find them an exercise in frustration. But I really like the mods that expand on the original blitzkrieg PG2 campaign (the Miller blitz plus ones). Also there are some very nice high prestige equipment files for PG2 that make the good stuff more pricey and so encourage more realistic armies. Getting the modded campaigns to run is a bit of an ordeal - you need a dataup and soundup files, plus to download lots of (beautiful) user-made campaigns. Steve's site should explain all this clearly though and it is all worth it.

I got PG2 to work recently on my laptop with XP. I can't recall specific issues although I suspect I did have problems. I notice I am running it in Win98 compatibility mode.

On my computer I notice I have the following copied notes, which might be necessary to follow:

On Win 2K (at least with PG2) you cannot run the game using the CD which means you have to move all the maps to your hard drive. A lot of help with this is in PG2 Mods for Dummies which you can get from the Clearinghouse (the green link below ) but what you have to do is:

1. Create a new folder called MAP in your mail PG2 folder
2. Move all the files from the MAP folder on your CD to this folder
3. Select all the files in the new MAP folder, right click, select Properties and un-check the read-only box (this is VERY important)
4. If you normally play with the music; open any scenario, select additional options, select music volume and click the on/off button above the volume slide to turn the music off (otherwise the game will keep trying to access the CD). If you want to hear the music, that's something else for another day .
5. Remove your CD and start the game, it should work...

I don't know about peoples General --- but it's probably the same

[Mount Suribachi]

Quote[/b] (Simon Appleton @ July 03 2004,18:11)]I notice I am running it in Win98 compatibility mode.
Thats what my friend has just told me

Windows 95 compatibilty - First install the game as normal then right click on the game icon (where ever it may be - on desktop or in program list). Select the properties tab at the bottom and a screen will appear with three tabed pages. Click on the third one compatability and select Win95 for the compatabilty mode.

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/gc-computer.gif

I've just started it up and it seems to have worked
http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif

Thanks for the links btw, I'll check them out later.

As for the PG series, my only complaint is that some of the scenarios are more puzzles than wargames in the sense that (especially for the shorter scenarios) you have maybe 12 turns to conquer France. In order to do that, you have to make the perfect moves every turn and if you sent just one unit the wrong way it screwed up the entire mission. I hated it when you would have units 1 hex away from your last objective and you ran out of turns http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/angry.gif

On the other hand, I loved starting the campaign with a green unit of Panzer IIs in Poland and 5 years later they are hyper-vets rampaging around Russia in their Panther Gs http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif

[econ21]

There was an element of puzzle solving in some of the scenarios in PG1, but others were pretty epic and involved fairly historical grand maneouvres (the Norway, Balkans and Kiev ones come to mind). PG2 downscaled things, so it plays much quicker but is rather less impressive.

BTW, the France scenario in PG1 had a bug, so the deadline for a major victory was something like 12 turns when it should have been 21 or thereabouts

[Ser Clegane]

Thanks for posting the tips on getting the old PG games running on XP Simon and Mount Suribachi.

I think I'll give it another try and hopefully will get these games running again. http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/bigthumb.gif