I was thinking if a soviet faction was added to CoH3 how could you make the early game feel different enough from the current 4 factions.

If they started with being able to build units of conscripts but when produced the unit is only half strength. So you would build the unit and it would contain only 4 soldiers and then you can reinforce up to 8 initially with a later upgrade to 12. If you limited the squad to a max of 3 at any time then it wouldn't skew things.

This way early game you can decide to create small units that you can expand as it progresses.

At the moment there's no unit that builds without being full strength so maybe that's a limitation of the engine. This could be avoided by having a per-unit weapon upgrade for 20 ammo to increase the capacity ('more rifles').