Battle of the Bulge mod

No one made topic with this mod so i'll be first MVGame

What can i say about this mod? Gameplay is more realistic like it is in Blitzkrieg mod, also, units are based on this Historical battle, so for example we won't see Pershings on allied side, in exchange there are plenty of other shermans

This mod offers two factions - USA and WM, each faction has 3 doctrines with 3 doctrine trees (that's how it's called?) so each doctrine has overall 9 abilities to get unlocked

About doctrines, let me quote what moddb says

Airborne Division:
becomes the defensive tree. You have a lot of powerful infantry like airborne infantry, AT-teams and heavy mortars, but only little choice of heavy artillery or vehicles force you to really use airborn tactics - dig in and wait for the Cavalry.
Doctrines will even strenghten your infantries combat value, until you get full ( and I mean that!!) air support in the late game.
( note: during the real battle, both US Airborn Divisions were transferred to the battlefield by trucks -
so you wont be able to paradrop in this mod, either. )

Infantry Division:
still well rounded, with good defensive and artillery units,
combat engineers and fair armor. Doctrines give you more production bonuses and send armored
combat groups to the battlefield.

Armoured Division:
Like in vCoH, this is the most powerful, but slowest to build Division... but mobile artillery like Priest, and many tanks like the Sherman Easy Eight, Jumbo Sherman and the M36 let you gain the initiative.
You will even receive tank reinforcements by the British.

7th Army
Consist of Volksgrenadier and heavy Fallschirmjager Infantry, light artillery and heavy antitank equipment, Mobile units are mostly antitank...the doctrine gives you enhanced defensive options like trenches as well as some armored support.

5th Panzerarmy
The most rounded tree... good Infantry units like Panzergrenadiere, some early ATs, mobile Artillery and fair battle tanks as well as doctrinal refitting options and powerful offmap units like Jagdpanther and Sturmtiger

6th SS Panzerarmy
Focussing on heavy mobile Firepower... mobile artillery units like Hummel and Maultier and the heaviest tank in the game, the Kingtiger, give you full force in your advance.Fanatism boosts your troops fighting spirit and the hidden "Operation Griffon" Teams spread sabotage and confusion behind enemy lines.

Offmap call-ins are epic, you can call in Montgomery british forces with like 4-5 tanks and some infantry, on german side - Halftruck with panzergrenadiers, kingtiger and grille, operation Greif units (best call in from it - panther with M10 turret, some other tank, halftruck with grens in US uniforms, all units from operation Greif call-ins have passive camo, they will be detected on close range or when they start shooting)

This mod also offers new Capping mode - it's something like it was in CoH2, when you are around the point you cpture it, in this mod you just have to stay on this territory point to capture it, capture rate and who captures territory depends on number of units, and value (for example - volks will cap point rather than engineers). But still you can play on vCoH capture point system

Also you won't spam arty that much because each shoot costs you munitions (unless you have like +100 income but forget it)

Each units gain veterency by killing other units, vet 3 unit is extremely hard to kill, but also, it's hard to gain that vet

I dunno what to say more, i'll just quote more important text from moddb and link download file

The overall game changes are too many to mention, here are some extracts:
More than 30 completely new winter maps, mostly historical battlegrounds, designed from photos and maps.
some maps even have dynamical weather, which influences units sight range, battle performance and movement speed.
Tons of new unit models ( Sturmtiger, Jagdpanzer IV, Panzerwerfer 42, M21 Mortar Halftrack, M36, Sherman Jumbo, Sherman E8, Stug III, FW 190, Me 109 , M5 AT Gun, Pak40, leFH18, M1a1 Pack Howitzer and many, many more)
realistical penetration values of Guns and armour, historical movement and turret rotation speed and loading times
smoke screens for almost all tanks.
New veterancy system: All units gain veterancy by fighting, each vet step increases accuracy, sight range, shortens reload times, decreases inflicted suppression of a unit.
special vet abilities
dynamical sight range - moving units wont see as far as standing units, cause they have to pay attention to their movement
new upgrade system, units can only upgrade when near to HQ or other special buildings.
removed unrealistic features, like building bunkers in 30 seconds
vehicles give cover for soldiers, tankwrecks cant be crushed and have to be demolished
barb wire may damage tires and tracks of vehicles
limits on almost every support/armored unit
heavy Infantry squads already have a bar / lMG when built.
smoke Grenades for Infantry Squads to conceal movement.
line Engineer Squads cannot repair tanks or vehicles anymore.
Special vehicle repair crews or repair stations have to be used to repair them.
and so on and so on - but maybe test it out yourself.

Link to Moddb
BotB download link version 3.0
Never surrender patch fro version 3.0 auw ye, cuz french couldn't play it MVGame

Note: if you'd like to see how surrender worked don't download "never surrender patch" because it's only removing it from game because i heard it was bugged somehow

No voice cast from this mod

+1

It's an awesome mod but beware... it's resource heavy because of the beautiful skins and extra units on-screen. If you have a high end comp then it's OK but if you don't you will be tinkering with the settings a long time to get it just right.

But it looks and feels brilliant, I'm amazed it was never as popular as (say) Blitz or EiF.

Am reinstalling it now!

cool, so far i've got some polish mates to play this mod, add me on RO - IIEXITIIIBartonPL

Cool that they've painted grove trees and pines in white (but not roofs?!!) I am a fan user of WB and working on snow maps. Would be great to import trees with snow and manage to paint house's roofs via Corsix. The point is how to set that BotB stuff in WB datas.
For roofs, I 've got a short tuto linked to Corsix file concerning how to paint texture on existing elements but... Seems to be not enough detailed with a proper walk through (from how to import files to set the modified one in WB).

Any suggestions? Thanks.

If you manage to paint a single snowflake on those roofs ingame, then please tell me how you did it.

If you change the stuff with Corsix and use skininstaller you automatically got the changed ones in WB.

models\environment\art_ambient\Buildings\Choose1ofthe4\shared_textures\decals

you can change the doors, windows etc. like some snow on them.

The roofs, well nobody found out how to change the roofs apart from the buildings under "objects"

maybe you are the one to find out.

I am afraid I won't be the champion. I 've already checked the roof textures made in BotB via the Corsix viewer - which look like crispy snow and are really nice - the associed files are mostly generic for there's mainly 3 sorts of shapes : tiles roofs, slate roofs or metal for industrial. And yes, the reason why they are still unseen in WB or in game stays a pain for the mind. Walki from the EF team mentioned the same point as you did : "some buildings do not reference any texture files in their entire .rgm (hexcode) and still display as they should".
On my modest side and concerning the changed textures (which work in game), the thing I've noticed is that, the tex are changed in multiple ways. Sometimes by a basic and single tex_ whatever_rgt, sometimes by a whatever_diffuse_rgt (bridge in that case)or sometimes by a bunch of them (plus decals). If we consider the HUGE ammount of different type of buildings in datas sharing those 3 main tex-files. Yes, this must be a bit.... Complicated. :-D But I enjoy problems. This preserves my old brain from Alzeimer! (And sorry to the room for that long post).

And if you love problems to solve as I do, there is one other - which may have something to do with the tex one - A weird detail in WBuilder references path:
If you point any art_ambient objects or art_nature features with your mouse, the little windows pops up and tells you the path of the element (like: ebps \environment \art_nature \tree_l \pine_l_01) which is the case for all objects. Except Buildings. Here you will have something like: ebps \environment\art_ambient \buildings \normandy_rural \buildings\roughstone_2x1_chapel_01 \roughstone_2x1_chapel_01 (!!!) So it gives the reference twice! This works for any buildings and only them.
This, even when the WB is open via the original CoH Mod without any other Mod installed.
For me, this looks like a probable case of conflicts in various circumstances.

Well. The first who get through the both enigmas win a bottle of Jack Daniel's! (Which is also good for Alzeimer)