Hm. Soviets also spam Conscripts because conscripts-en-masse-builds are very strong and have good synergies with all kinds of supplementary Soviet units, most noticeably recently Guards.
While the status quo might be bland, its also somewhat balanced, and if you take out one piece of the equation without changes elsewhere, this balance will suffer, which is all I am saying.
Probably, but the status quo has been a topic of many frustrations. I'm not advocating a change just to mess up something perfect, I am advocating a change because what we have now is bland, spammy and predictable. Having a bit of extra balancing work to do is worth it if it means a diversity of the meta and increasing the viability of combined arms.
Making heavy use of conscript standbags (for that sweet 50% reduced green cover) really helps deal with rifle nade spammers. But Aerohank I think your putting the cart before the horse when it comes to riflenades being OP.
Is it bullshit that the sound/animation doesn't play? Yes it should be fixed.
Is it dumb that they can shoot as far as an MG can fire at vet 2? Oh yeah
Is it shitty that they can be fired while suppressed? You know it.
Those things need fixing, and after those are fixed if they are still vastly over preforming then we could get into the nitty gritty of how much damage they do.
Green cover does help, but you still have to retreat the maxim after the first grenade because now your squadmembers are all at half health and the next one will kill it. The result is that a single grenadier squad can force a retreat on a maxim this way even while they attacked from the front and the maxim was in green cover. This is exactly the type of BS that happened with Oohraing conscripts being able to molotov MG42s from the front. This has been fixed for the axis thankfully, but with soviets you are still far better off just sticking a conscript squad behind that sandbag. There is simply a lot of risk involved with getting a maxim over another conscript squad, and not enough reward; especially when facing Wehrmacht. Part of this is the rifle grenade (too much risk) and another part is the lack of AoE supression (no real reward there)