My take on the brits - am I doing it wrong?

So, Ive been playing quite alot of CoH2 again lately and had great fun fighting against the brits. Havent personally played with them yet cause Im broke as fuck and cant afford to buy the dlc at the moment, so all my experience comes from fighting them and watching videos/streams to try n learn how ppl use them and how much each individual unit costs, compared to other factions units. As I havent played 1v1 in over a year or so, my PoV is going to be based off of mostly 2v2 and a bit of 3v3, playing as the germans.

Now, first and foremost I wanna say that I really love the new faction. Playing against it feels very very different to playing against the russians and americans. It feels like you get swarmed alot less but due to the strong emplacements you are hard pressed to gain as much territory early game as possibly, before anyone can park their emplacements in spots where theyll be an absolute pain in the ass for you. Both of those things combined, make for a pretty interesting concept that I quite enjoy so far.

More often than not though, I find that we somewhat dominate the early game, just to be pushed back hard by a counter attack followed up by a nasty emplacement somewhere in the middle of the map, where the counter attack pushed us back for half a minute or so. Here starts my first problem - emplacements feel way too strong to be. Not much in terms of firepower(the mortar barely hits shit and is more of an annoyance if anything and the AT gun should be very powerful. And while the bofors might be a tiny bit overperforming vs infantry, it is largely on par with the OKW truck Flak in terms of penetration and damage from what Ive experienced) but actually in terms of survivability. Sure, if youre fighting against someone who is oblivious to the fact they can brace their emplacements, youll have an easy time but as soon as brace kicks in, theyre virtually undestroyable.

Now, from what Ive gathered so far the emplacements cannot shoot while braced. Unfortunately, more often than not, I and my teammates fail to exploit that fact and attack the emplacement while it cannot fire back, largely due to the fact that the brunt of the enemy force seems to always be relatively close to emplacements, making it very hard to near impossible to focus them down without exposing yourself to other units. Im sure skill plays into this to a certain extent too, but this alone cant be it. Tried all sorts of stuff to beat them. Frontal assault with tanks usually fail unless your enemy is half asleep. Artillery as OH seems to have a relatively good effect, especially when the enemy moves in to repair them and you get a lucky shot on their engineers. The price of the howitzer however and the lack of heavy tanks and any meaningful offmap makes this choice not always viable. Ive also tried the fire barrage from the luftwaffe doctrine. And while that has a good effect if you catch your enemy off guard, cause it drains health fast, it is generally a massive munitions sink and not too viable against players that have a decent amount of awareness. Imo, if the brace ability would cut damage in half while allowing the emplacement to shoot at a much slower RoF would be a much better solution than what we have right now. Am I doing it wrong, not seeing the obvious, completely failing? Any ideas on how to get rid of those things in a more reliable way?

Next thing up the line is the standard infantry. While fairly weak in the open and generally on par with early game OH so long as they stay in green cover(and before the germans get LMGs), they pose a serious problem to OKW players on maps with lots of houses, especially if those houses are made of concrete. For OH this is less of an issue with how fire damage has been reworked. I found that a fast flamer HT does the trick pretty reliably most of the time and if all else fails, you just park your LMG grens in a house next to the enemy and let them handle it. For OKW however, lacking any sort of meaningful early game garrison counter, there is much more of an issue to be had. Any suggestion on how to deal with this(suggestions excluding "call your OH buddy" please) would be much appreciated.

Last thing that is bugging me is the churchill. Any variant really, where as the vanilla one is the least of any trouble really. Having 2 Paks facing the enemy, able to swivel around to cover each others flanks if needed and a P4 is seemingly not enough to kill a croc churchill. I dont know what Im doing wrong, but my Paks seem to have issues penetrating it and even if by some lucky chance they do, because of its massive health pool the thing just shrugs its off and then flames both Paks to death, before finally coming in to chase off your P4. Im not asking for a P4 to be able to frontally penetrate that thing or to single handedly beat it but when 2 AT guns and a tank are unable to deal with 1 tank, you start to question why youre building AT guns in the first place. I even had 2 vet1 Paks shoot the thing with TWP and while that had enough of an effect to scare the guy off cause he got roughly down to half health by the time he was able to move again, he was back a minute later, just to kill my paks within seconds again.

The AVRE seems to be a miniature sturmtiger with more armour and health. Dont know how else to sum it up. While the explosion seems to be smaller and the reload seems to be quite substantial, unless you have something like a panther or bigger, you usually wont scare it off. And even then I often times find it still trying to get a shot off at my panther(and if it hits, Im roughly down to 1/3 health) rather than trying to back off.

The normal churchill seems to be a tiger with a shittier main gun but more health, more or less. Problem here doesnt lie in scaring it off. A panther usually does the trick here. Problem is in actually killing it before it manages to get to something like vet3. With the massive health pool and it more or less regularily bouncing panther shots from the front, I found that you need 2 panthers to actually reliably kill one. That, or make it drive into a teller. In any case, Im having much less issues with that one than with the other 2. Any advice on how to beat them would be appreciated.

To sum up my experience so far:

Much boom, very wow, so emplacement.

No, but really, Im enjoying the brits so far. It feels like relic actually had some good ideas for once. And while the faction is still not perfect, having some useless units here and there and some overperforming ones too, it seems very interesting and Ill try picking it up as soon as I can.

Oh and one last thing - anyone else find themselves stealing brit HMGs whenever they can? I dont know if its the MG or the allied infantry but whenever I pick one of those things up I manage to get some 30 kills on it within 2 or 3 minutes. Its crazy. ^^