Yeah. Still, leaving them in tatters was not the best of moves. Spios are fine. 300 MP, 4 man engineer squad that melts. Expensive and dangerous. Nothing wrong with that. Fact is that pios are not really the strong ones, but REs are useless. Literally like having no squad at all. Well, they can capture territory, so there's that. And the tank traps, if well placed can actually be better than the sandbags due to their survivability. But still, no proper mines, extremely weak early game, veterancy that can only really be acquired with zooks, or in 1v1 with LMGs. If a miracle happens and COH3 is a success and Relic decides to give a gift of a balance patch to the COH2 community (hardly that the COH2 community will die with COH3 release), I would like to see a removal of volley fire in a muni starved faction, more XP for vet1 and a buff to close-mid range performance
I thought I should check the data before I posted and it turns out RE DPS is comparable to CE, getting better at close range. Main difference is that they don't have a flamethrower of course and the moving accuracy is 0.25 vs 0.5 for CE. RE are clearly not meant to be firing on the move in any situation. They're both terrible against mainlines and bad vs pioneers (say your prayers against SP) but idk what to suggest. Maybe your suggested change would help, but needs to be carefully scaled. Volley fire doesn't really do much even in the best situation (even volks will eventually get up and shoot you in the face) and the suppressed squad has 50% RA vs most small arms(?) so it can work against you.
But I think this whole business is part of a wider issue of USF needing a rework I think. I'll admit their early game is pretty unpleasant to play and mortar is a must get vs OST or just get memed by 2 x MG42 openers.