Before I say anything, I'd like to say thanks to the team for making such a well-made, solid addition to the game. But in my games over the last few days, I've noticed something.
Is it just me who thinks that the machine gun on the motorcycles is vastly too effective against the earlier Soviet infantry - Ingenery and conscripts?
Both against people and the AI, I find that a Wehrmacht player just has to build a few motorcycles, then spread them about. Even without the suppression effects, both Ingenery and Conscripts lose all of their men within about ten or fifteen seconds, even with cover. These units seem to have some tweak making them especially vulnerable to all automatic weapons, and aside from the Command Squad, which lasts a little bit longer, having two units of Ingenery being slaughtered by one motorbike is rather depressing. In the -very- early game, there doesn't seem to be a counter to this - until one of the second-tier structures can get up, the Soviet player has absolutely no weapons that can do much damage to motorbikes - only tiny increments of damage, which the motorbikes easily run away from even when below 25% health.
The damage part is less of a problem, but I'm simply finding, from both sides, that just spamming motorbikes and Pioneers is an extremely viable Wehrmacht strategy. Capture with the Pioneers, each unit accompanied with one motorcycle, and I've been able to press at the borders of the enemy base even in larger maps before the Soviets are able to produce tank hunters or guns, which means I already control most of the map and have effectively won.
And from the Soviet side, this is an obvious problem, when even groups of several Ingenery or Conscripts have to fear encountering a lone motorcycle unit, making very early-game capturing impressively difficult, and no unit with any effectiveness against them coming in for a while. While the early game units can -later- be upgraded to be somewhat more effective, you're practically in the mid game by that point, and the trouble is very early game, the initial dash to capture stage.
I'm not certain how I'd fix this, personally, not knowing the architecture of the game files: ideally, tweaking the resistance level of the two starting Soviet units solely against the motorcycle's non-suppressing machine gun, so that they don't simply die against it even from cover, or making one of the starting units able to actually do damage to the motorcycles without spending nearly thirty seconds getting it down to <25%, losing many men, and then watching it run away.
Purely in terms of MP costs, it can hardly be right that one initially-available scout unit so hugely dominates the early battlefield, to my mind. But I'd like to hear the thoughts of others.
