It is not hard to play. It's just harder than 99% on the bullshit on the market these days because people are not open for learning anything anymore. IMO it's a pretty good mix between Arcade and Complexity.
People need fast games without much thinking, such as CoD. In CoH you have to learn all the units and their weaknesses, this takes hours to days.
That's something all RTS games suffer from these days.
Due to player complaints about poor performance, we discovered that the game was defaulting to safe mode, which wasn't using the player's video card drivers