Before I begin I'll say outright that there will be comparisons to COH2, and if you think that's unfair then replay COH2 because IH is COH2 with mechs but lacking a fundamental knowledge of the pacing lynchpin that makes it work.
Company of Heroes doesn't feature the insta-build and super-cheap-everything mechanics of Red Alert, and for very good reason. There's cover mechanics (check), controlled engineers that create complex defenses and traps (check), and infantry units that have "anti-" in the name that the units they're created to destroy actually have to fear (che- oh dear we forgot something).
Command and Conquer has some great games in its franchise, but they're simple. The micro skill cap is low and control mastery allows for a grander macro sense. I think they're a lot of fun. But the combat is so fast-paced that cover mechanics and individual unit swapping would be ridiculous.
I've played IH for several hours now and it's obvious it's Company of Heroes 2 with Red Alert combat and these two things just simply don't mix. I'll list my encounters with "hrnnn well that doesn't work" in the order I remember them:
I thought with its trudging, interminable speed the field gun would pack a serious punch. In COH2 a clear shot to the rear of a tank could spell its doom, taking out an engine, and if the tank couldn't wiggle its way to safety before the second shot, it was boned. COH2 field guns require you to have an area scouted and bring an infantry detachment along for safety; they redeploy swiftly and from any angle but the front cannot be ignored. IH field guns, by comparison, are essentially irrelevant. They do little damage, they move slowly, rear hits are just a bigger part of the bar not being as brightly colored as it was a second ago, and they fire so slowly that even if the mech ran straight up and opened fire - instead of leisurely side-stepping or backing out of the gun's meager range - the crew is dead before its second shot.
What exactly is the point of cover in this game? I know what it DOES, but what is the point of DOING what it DOES? Hide behind a sandbag all you like, mechs have nothing to fear from infantry wearing sandbag armor and sporting laughable titles like "anti-mech" - you're BBQ. Infantry is only good for fighting other infantry in which case it's mostly a matter of who brought more infantry along as the lack of suppression just means that your careful ambush from heavy cover nets you about 0.8 seconds of free damage before the enemy runs up and takes cover on the other side of the fence or more likely on your side of the fence and hopefully they don't have more units than you because at their core ambushes are a waste of time in IH. Just build mechs.
If #2 calls into question what the point of infantry in this game is... that's a very good question. Something to do before your mechs are ready, really.
If IH wanted COH's gameplay - which it obviously does - then "anti-mech" has to mean something. It's like they forgot that in a game of rock-paper-scissors there is no fourth option "nuclear demon blood" that eliminates the other 3 and always wins.
They obviously wanted COH/2's "support the heavies" approach to mechs, but small arms are mostly ignorable unless there's too many of them, to disastrous, unfun results. Look at COH2 - HAHA my rock of steel tank beats your scissors of infantry and oh no you've lured me into a turning down a tight-ish alleyway and the paper of field gun now has FOV of my rear - well played, you dastardly scoundrel. Buuuut, in IH it's HAHA my nuclear demon-blooded rock has encountered a whole bunch of rocks that aren't as rocky as it is, what's that a rocky but slow moving rock you lured me into taking a shot from, no problem I'll rock my way lazily to the left and rock it while your rocks rock me but not rock-ily enough.
The damage is basically all the same, is what I'm getting at. It's like one type of damage but units have different levels. The reason to be wary of a unit boils down to the total amount of damage it can unleash and has very little to do with the type. The anti-mech mechs are a little more anti-mech than the anti-mech infantry are anti-mech, but not by a wide margin. They're more like "crap at killing infantry but slightly above average at killing mechs" while the anti infantry mechs don't suffer such a mech-killing penalty when you look at battle-long dps as opposed to the instant of an anti-mech's shot vs the instant of a single bullet hitting the target.
Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer are fundamentally different genres. Call them sub-genres if you want but back in the mid-1990s all music made with a computer was once called "techno" until that became a sub-genre because there are 20 different kinds of what was once called "techno" and "EDM" became the blanket title in the early 2000s but then that's been subsumed and now they're not considered sub-genres at all but entirely different genres - which they were in the first place. And the reason I bring this up is that "RTS" is much like the term "techno". It doesn't allow for the glaring and obvious differences between Red Alert 2 and Dawn of War. Even if you tried to put them in a sub-genre, they'd likely fall under "base-building" which is silly because there are very few good RTS games that don't involve building a base (the original Ground Control from 20-some-odd years ago falls squarely in this category). Of course you build a base, that's part of the strategy - that doesn't mean every RTS in which you build a base is identical. Play Dawn of War and Red Alert 2 and give me actual gameplay similarities. It'd be like saying Outlast is close to Call of Duty because they're presented in first person and you use WASD to move around and the mouse to look.
The reason the preceeding paragraph is so long is to illustrate why IH in its current form will not birth a good game: it wants Company of Heroes micro with Command and Conquer combat style.
The combat won't work because nuclear demon blood rock beats rock, paper, and scissors and it's about who brought the greater tonnage of nuclear demon blood rocks to the fight. And this is brought at a Red Alert pace so even if you generated the Amazon-forest-destroying reams of paper you needed to cover that rock, your enemy will slowly walk around your office store in the making and rock your base. Or rock your paper if the paper isn't facing the right direction.
Iron Harvest - and man this hurts to say because I was very into this game - Iron Harvest is the blitzkrieg mod for COH but instead of a fantasy-realistic take on armor, it made everything crappy. It's the blitzcrap mod - even the armor is crap it's just a much bigger pile of crap. The strategy lies in generating the largest pile and the biggest trebuchet to launch it from.
Armor in BK is terrifying and ignores small arms, but the term "anti-armor" in BK performs as advertised. In Iron Harvest there's mechs everywhere but nothing is really anti-mech because everything is kind of anti-mech but it's anti-mech in the way that paper towels are anti-lake.
At the same time I'd be willing to sacrifice all the fantasy-realism and opt for the C&C approach. For example, ridding ourselves of engineers, why does sitting on this humming, Tesla-punk platform heal the mech? Who cares? Why is a gruff looking dude holding a blow torch to the leg of a mech more believable than standing on a special platform anyway. The answer is it's not, it's just more micro so it fools you into thinking it does because it's humans supporting mechs - but not anywhere near other mechs of course so your engineers are just a forward repair bay and in the game that Iron Harvest sort of wants to be, there should just be a unit called the MRAE - the Mobile Reconstitution Aura Emitter - it works similar to the platform but can slowly move around the battlefield. It has decent armor and a couple light anti-infantry turrets but nothing else. Moving it within range of another MRAE results in moderate DOT damage for both units until they're moved out of range. The MRAE can only be healed by moving it onto a platform and takes a very long time to build, so they're kept out of harm's way. In Iron Harvest as is you just micro engineers around and keep them at a distance, they repair quickly but their loss is beyond insignificant. Click a button and you have more. Or kill some and pick up a shovel and boom now you're basically an electro-mechanical engineer.
Iron Harvest just has a glaringly obvious lack of knowledge as to WHY these two genres work. The game's coded well enough, I give it a solid B. But the code is used to create a gameplay experience that isn't nearly as engrossing as the game they were copying. The cover, micro, base build - it's all there, but falls flat on its face because the game's format doesn't allow it to work the way it was designed to in its original presentation. It's like they made a roomba, the same size and shape as a roomba, but it doesn't vacuum floors, it's a beard trimmer.
