For what you pay for rifleman they really should eat them even more. Look at how badly volks smack around cons over 10mp and 60 Muni. Hell if you include cons side tech volks are essentially cheaper and yet they own cons.
Meanwhile I invest 120 Muni on each, 300 mp and 30 fuel at the HQ, all for a squad that already costs more to buy and reinforce.
Maybe this is more a statement against conscripts than Rifleman. But all I know for certain is volks are too cost effective.
you struggle with numbers because you are missing the only one point here.
Resources are infinite and they come as time passes by, no extra action involved as AoE would be. Only capping territories and upkeep changes some of them, you knew that already.
But costs (manp,muni,fuel) only balances the faction impact and have no relation or whatsoever to other factions similar cost.
The only exeption is mainline inf combat and generalist tank combat maybe. Because you care for a
resource efficient tradeoff (you trade manpower, not fuel nor muni), on the other side tanks do trade some fuel as efficiency for their role, but again its a really thin line between whos hunting and whos being hunted.
Back to costs, USF pays so much for bars because they already have excelent mainline T0 inf with a versatile further weapon upgrade (penals only get AT packages trading some AI, for comparison). Then you slap a couple of BARs to the squad and they become terminators to a similar vet level infantry, and even on correct set ups, they could punch above their weight as volks are said to do. You are upgrading the best infantry and expect to be "cheaper" than other factions mediocre inf, thats flawed logic.
Imagine obers being T0, able to upgrade LMG34 and IRstgs at the same time, thats batshit OP, now imagine someone wanting that to be "as cheap as" riflemen double bar upgrade. Mirroring logic as an example, dont go nuts.
Cost level each faction timing, amount of troops, resource/objective tradeoff and those decide winning/loosing in a fair balane with other factions