If you fight with smooth bore muskets there is almost no need to used concealment or camouflage. Fight with rifled weapons, and conceal/camo hugely increases your chances of survial and in turn becomes a important tactic.
Any type or amount of fire can suppress somebody. Using muzzle loading guns, only Company and Battalion tactics are important because hundreds of soldiers are needed to lay down just a few rounds a second of fire.
With Breach loading rifles one man can suppress one if not many, tens of men can lay down many rounds per second. Platoon and squad fire and movement tactics become both possible and essential.
Fire team are only truly born out of the machine gun, where one man can suppress countless Only. A squad can divide, with each ft able to laydown enough fire to allow the other to move.
Whether these tactics are employed in game and if any balance, realism or perceived negative issues arrise from its availability, depends on a lot of other factors.
Are the weapons realisticaly modelled. E.g. an inaccuratlly firing rifle could allow players to run across open ground for longer than is possible in rl. Making napolionic style tactics more the order of the day than they have ever been in the last 150 years!
The existence and layout of cover, concealement (HA!), open space exists and flag objectives on maps. E.g. a maps containing locations with both cover and concealement (bushes) and a clear field of fire (underline) over a similar location that is flag, with smaller peices of cover and concealement between the two, demand suppression and concealement tactics from the player in order to capture the flag.
If you had the above landscape but no machine guns, a squad could not (underline) divide into fire teams and have 1 ft lay down sufficeient fire to allow the other to advance. Making it very hard to employ the tactics needed to win.
The reverse, have a machine gun but in a landscape with very little openspace and little cover. Now you have no safe place to fire your mg and you dont have a clear field of fire over the enemy. Again, making this no place for many fun tactics
. All the same applies to the Grenadier kit. Its is capable of causing the same affect as the machine gun: suppression but it just delivers it in a different way, from above! Making the GL more affective than the mg at suppressing enemies inside buildings, landing shells through windows but not as so against enemies in a thick wood. Just as importantly, if not more in very open areas, the GLs smoke shells can create whopping ammounts of concealment. In these regards, the GL allows a squad suppress enemies in all situations, create concealment where there is none and therefore allow squad movement in all situations. Sounds like pure WIN to me, a 40mm in the head of stalemate and trench warefare!
But just as poor map design can affects the machine gun influence in game play, so can it on the GL. Maps with too much flat ground, and too few ditches and mounds and oh how you will regret issuing one to every squad.
