Profile of Mr.Smith

But in 3v3, on a lot of maps we just get stomped. The More OKW, the worse it usually gets.

Could you be a bit more specific about how these games look like?
- Poor early-game map control due to flanking (e.g., such that MGs would help?)
- Being led into a stalling arty-fest vs OKW?
- Being overrun by early vehicles (e.g. Luchs)
- Lategame cheese? (Command Panther, Jagtiger)

From your collective build order, I would say that you suffer the most from lack of early aggression (no light vehicles, no squad upgrades). Learning how to use PIATs and losing that AT gun would help give you an edge. Do what it takes to keep the enemy team busy.

However, if you localize that your problems appear first in the early game, go double Vickers (it's a safe, but limiting strat, but it will get you started).
The UC is a good idea vs all-OKW, but only if you use it to push enemy squads around with it (don't waste any of your resources on UC upgrades; it never pays off).

What does your commander selection look like?

If you could link to a replay about how a "typical" stomping looks like, people would be able to give you better tips.

holy shit what a mess. So just to get it clear.
Vickers K have the same stats like the Tommy variation of the bren gun except the have a better aim time (.05 vs .1). So its better to equip Tommies with Vickers K. On the other hand Sappers and Commandos are better of with Brens from the weapon rack because they get a better version of the Bren gun compared to the Tommy one. Right?

Exactly!

And just to make matters a bit more complicated, when a Tommy/Sapper/Commando drops their Bren, it reverts back to the default Tommy version.

Thus, if you pick up a dropped Bren from the ground, you always get the crappiest variant

Again, plenty of other squads work like this too. Tommies are just unique in that they are the only squad that can get four slotted weapons consistently. (Except for maybe jaeger lights that pick up two weapons?)

Not quite.

Each of these weapon upgrades confers a significant bonus to the affected squads. Depending on the weapon, the squad gets:
- Better accuracy on the move (G43's)
- Superior short-range DPS (PPSH)
- Snipe-crit chance (Pathfinders, JLI)
- Anti-vehicle capabilities (PTRS, Boys AT)
- (apart from G43's on Stormtroopers/PGrens of course; if you tech them it's your own fault)

What is the exact bonus that SLEs are supposed to confer to the squad to justify their existence? A 10%-15% DPS increase in two models, with the same -75% accuracy-on-the-move penalty?

Moreover, the squads you are thinking of are either:
- Specialist units
- Main-line infantry with opt-in upgrades

In other words, it's supposed to be "your own damn fault" with those squads/upgrades. Instead, Tommies are supposed to act as the main line infantry of UKF. Bear in mind that Tommies:
- Have no AT snare
- Can tech for a grenade that is completely unsuitable for their long-range profile
- Their out-of-cover reload penalty prevents them from using AT weapons efficiently (even if we didn't have the Vet3 "feature" that is)
- Have absolutely terrible accuracy on-the-move
- Are the only source of healing for UKF (thus, having 2 Tommies is mandatory)

Without weapon upgrades, I struggle to see what is supposed to be Tommies' claim to relevance in the end-game.
Show Spoiler

PS: Double-Bren Tommies would probably be OP with their Vet3 "feature". However, I am sure that there are other ways to hamper their performance in other ways which are not so blatantly RNG-dependent.

EDIT: Actually, I have two questions, regarding the modifications you propose:
1. What happens to the squad/squadmember if the Tommies happen to be carrying a weapon not in your exception list (e.g., a pilfered LMG42) when they reach Vet3
2. After the squad has reached Vet3, what happens if you try to recrew an abandoned team weapon with them (do they retain the original Enfield, or does the SLE carry along?)

Bravo

That's a nice, thorough and lazy (i.e., attractively easy to implement) approach that will fix the issue.

Here are some other equally-lazy options:
1. Completely remove SLE's from the game (if necessary, counteract with a small stats bonus)
2. Reduce the number of awarded SLE's to ONE, and buff its performance (that way, the SLE causing slot items to drop becomes justified)

Implementing weapon priorities would be the more thorough way to solve this

Weapons should be given priorities, so that higher-priority weapons overwrite lower-priority ones. I would envision the following 3 priority classes (from highest to lowest):
- Minesweepers
- Slot items (e.g., LMG42, Brens, Schrecks)
- Non-droppable weapons (e.g., G43's, PPSH, Scoped Lee-Enfield)

This would also solve a host of other issues in other squads in the game (e.g., G43 & Schrecks upgrade turning PGrens into pinatas, etc).

I am not a modder, but I suspect this might involve going deeper than the mod engine. For the reasons outlined in Svanh's signature, things might never be implemented that way.

PS: In case somebody suggests this: Simply reducing the chance for Tommies to drop weapons (in the same way that Guards were modified), will definitely not solve the problem. The whole crux of the problem is the following:

If the item doesn't drop, it is stored until the squad is reinforced to have enough members to equip it.

i.e., Tommies performance becomes extremely unreliable at Vet3, even if they don't drop their weapons.

Yes, the vast majority of artillery in this game scale well beyond what they should in bigger game modes.

However, the bigger culprit here is map design which doesn't take into account the effects of:
- Territory lockdown from emplacements (Brit emplacements, OKW FlakHQ)
- Forward retreat points

That's not necessarily the map designers' fault, as many of these maps predate WFA. It's more of a question of why such maps are still in the map pool to begin with.

Thus, maps that would already be considered to be bottleneck heavy are completely annihilated by these two mechanics, and aggressive play becomes unattractive. In the end, the army with the better artillery will win.

Mortars and Stuff

One idea would be to at least nerf auto-attack stats. The idea is to force a user that makes heavy use of mortars to actually have to invest some micro into them as well (just like the opposition has to invest in some heavy dancing to negate their effect).

One idea I had was to reduce the AoE on autoattacks:
https://www.coh2.org/topic/49543/mortars-howies-nerf-autoattack-maybe-buff-barrage

However, I recently saw a better idea, which is reducing the range of autoattacks:

<snip>

Mortar Pit:

- Mortar Pit Auto-fire range reduced from 115 to 80
- Mortar Pit cost reduced from 400mp to 350mp
- The 2nd mortar weapon used for the barrage now has the same kill radius as the other mortars (bugfix)

The auto-fire change means that you must actually use micro to use the Mortar Pit to its fullest and the cost reduction helps offset the new micro requirement.

<snip>

(the quoted post was in an emplacements-themed thread, thus there was no mention at all of other artillery pieces. I'm sure we can come up with similar ideas about mobile artillery though).

Rocket Artillery

Without arty, how am I going to break a PAK wall?

This is a big issue. However, I don't think you need something stronger than 1 (maybe 2) Katyushas to really break a pak wall. If other artillery needs to remain stronger than the Katyusha (for whatever reason) their cost, and particularly their popcap cost needs to be nerfed to reflect that (e.g., 18-20 popcap).

To give you an example of what true Artifest Hell looks like:

LOL YOU'VE CLEARLY NEVER WITNESSED COH1

(Truer words have never been spoken)

The Walking stuka only takes up 4 Popcap in CoH1. Factor in some long stalemate matches, and try to picture what the current meta revolves around.

For every single thing that CoH2 seems to be doing wrong (e.g., sniper meta, call-in meta, pak-walling, artillery), CoH2 is literally lightyears ahead from its predecessor in terms of game design. Kudos to the designers/balance team for that.