Is it just me?

[Narwan]

I'm assuming you're talking about mmg MG42's here, not lmg's. Those mmg's are crew served weapons on a mount. In order to get a decent field of fire on the enemy they are partly exposed; much more so than a regular rifleman who is returning fire from as much cover as he can get. So yes, once a mmg gets into a firefight with rifleman things will go sour soon.

Those rifleman are not bunched together. I don't know where some of you get that idea but mg's opening up did NOT tend to get whole groups at once, especially not MG42's. That ony happens if the troops were dumb enough to huddle together indeed and get to fairly close range.
The game uses hexes that are 50m across and assumes that troops moving about are using a big part of it. If a 10 men squad advances towards an mg they can be spaced 5 meters apart, not even counting the distance in depth.

The MG42 was worse than other mg's in getting groups at once because it had a very tight grouping of rounds fired. That meant it was very difficult to 'spray' with it. When firing a burst the rounds of the burst were grouped so close together the targets would have had to have been literally side by side to hit both with one burst. On the down side for the target, if you were hit, odds were it would be by more than 1 round so you were much less likely to survive (which played a big part in the fear of the weapon).

If firing at full auto the weapon became much less accurate then at burst fire and chances to hit the target dropped. It also expended the ammo at a huge rate and tended to overheat the barrel. The game assumes the weapon is fired in bursts, not full auto.

Reminds me of a test done for the discovery channel when a marksman HMG gunner fired at mansized pink balloons a few hundred yards away. When firing straight at them (balloons 1 meter apart, 25 wide and 4 deep so 100 in total) with a limited amount of ammo (I think it was 100 rounds) he had hit about 15. Think about that, an expert with the weapon who could take aim and time firing at stationary targets that did NOT take cover and not taking any fire himself could hit only 15% of the targets. Translated in game terms that means 10 squads (100 men) stacked in 1 hex would on average take 1,5 men casualties (KIA and WIA). The program then went on to show what happens when firing in enfilade (4 wide and 25 deep at the same distance which resulted in about 95 hits, in many case 1 bullet hitting 2 or more balloons; unlike a body a balloon doesn't really stop a round).
Enfilade fire like that isn't going to happen in a game where squads rarely stack at all and were most mg fire comes from the front arc, not the side. So the first test result is a good illustration of how effective mg fire on infantry in the open really is.

I did some tests to see how the came deals with it. Set up was single MG42 mmg teams opening up at canadian 10 men squads moving 2 hexes in clear terrain at different ranges (400, 650 and 850 metres).
Just to be complete, the game assumes infantry moving 1 hex at a time to make full use of cover available while moving and moving leapfrog style. At 3 hexes or more there's not much consideration of making use of cover and most troops are moving at the same time. When moving 2 hexes it's a mix of the two.
Each mmg fired three bursts at the squad advancing towards it (so only half the shots available in one round). At 400m three bursts averaged into 1 casualty per squad. There were slightly more squads with 2 or 3 casualties than there were squads with none but not many. The vast majority of squads took 1 man casualty.
At 650m about half the squads took casualties, some one, some two men. Translated into chance to lose 1 men it's a two out of three chance.
At 850m getting 2 casualties became much rarer, in all there was about 50% chance of getting 1 casulaty.

Seems about right to me?

Narwan