snip
Different factions have different strengths. America has stronger infantry with great fire on the move, so they don't get suppression right away. Brit tommies are great in cover and garrisons and get excellent suppression, but they don't have much in the way of smoke abilities. (Until Cromwell anyway.) Soviets have cheap, spammable infantry and great light vehicles but their infantry lacks the same stopping power as other factions with their weapon upgrades.
Every faction has the tools to do every job, just in different places. (And most doctrines provide tools that fill in the holes. I.E flamers for USF and OKW, PPSH and guard rifles for soviet etc. Some factions require units to work together a bit more, while others have more independent counters.
Honestly there's already been enough homogenization in the game.
[rant]
Why does every faction have the exact same mines? Whatever happened to those cheap, spammable USF mines? Why did Relic give OKW, USF and Brits fucking sandbags when the whole point of Conscripts having a sandbag wall was to give them an edge over stronger, more upgraded units? (Especially when brits and USF have trenches/fighting positions...) Why are throwables all inconsistently performing yet the best grenades in the game are cheap as shit? (Grenade assault, anyone?)[/rant]
The original post mentions T0 MG's has a more of a snowball effect in the larger game modes because it is unlikely (depending on faction match up) that it will only be one side of a map locked down by MG's at the very start but almost all of it. In 1v1 and to some extent 2v2 I agree that ignoring the MGs location makes sense as you can wander past and back cap cut off points with superior numbers but it becomes hard in the larger maps due to a number of reasons I am sure I don't need to explain.
If your a primarily 1v1 player I concede this probably isn't as big an issue for you as I know in 2v2s it isn't so bad but for the larger game modes (who many play and I do if I don't really want to think) this will be more frustrating.
Team games are shit. They didn't even divide the resources by amount of players in this game like they did in DoW2. It's horrendously imbalanced trash and never will be balanced until Relic fixes the economy.
Every Relic game I've ever played has had maps where people rush an MG into a key building. The way to be successful there was just to stack another part of the map with a teammate. Why not just ignore whatever part of the map the houses are at and attack your opponent in their backline? Are all four players in a 4v4 game building early machine guns and placing them everywhere on the map? There's going to be holes in their coverage, and if not you can make them with plenty of tools.
Also, CoH2 is the only game that has smoke that completely stop a mg in a house from doing anything and has the weakest suppression out of all three of Relic's games to feature suppression. (Coh1 and DoW2 both had much faster suppression. Green cover in Coh2 largely negates it entirely.) Every faction save for Brits has extremely early access to smoke. (most of brit smoke is on cromwells/vet0 comets.) Every faction has some sort of transport vehicle available pretty early on, except for OKW.
Honestly, if people learned to use the smoke barrage once in awhile on their mortars, they'd have a much easier time.