CEs have high reinforce cost and no durability, it would be pointless to use them that way.
Engineers have a very low initial cost of 170 manpower and only 21mp reinforcement cost. They would be able to swarm the map early on and be able to scale somewhat after they get the SVT's. Not saying anything about how effective it would be, haven't seen any games of it.
And I'd still prefer to troll ost by letting them take crates, so they have nerfed DPS and potentially blocked LMG, however if 4 rifles will stay, it'll be another great option for Cons, sadly, another doctrinal option, apparently cons have to be utter shit without doctrine, which is sad.
The SVT's only take up 1 weapon slot, so grenadiers would still be able to upgrade LMG. Just as engineers can still upgrade flamer in the current iteration of the patch. And penals can still upgrade PTRS. If that's worth the muni is your own decision, ofcourse.
Whats the point of SVT in crates? Penal PPSh is downgrade as their vet makes cqc suicidal and they have no abilities to support it, CE SVT is worse than flamer, only unit really benefiting from them are Conscripts, why not just make it Conscript upgrade?
Those crates would just become annoyance, you could also troll axis player with them assuming they dont know what they picking up
It's a sidegrade. Conscripts get 3 doctrinal ppsh's for 60 munitions. Penals will get 6 ppsh's for 45 munitions. Also mind that penals get better accuracy bonusses and For The Last Man to make up for their high RA. Getting close will be harder to pull off, but the potential damage will be far higher.
The flamer obviously doesn't fulfill the same role as SVT's. I'd imagine you'd use the SVT engineers like Osttruppen, in cover, so they're not as squishy.