Actually, China had its own armaments factories back then. After all, the Hanyang 88 rifle was domestically produced, not purchased from foreign countries. Under the control of warlords from different factions across various regions, China’s own armaments factories also produced many distinctive submachine guns and firearms. Although the output was not large, they were at least the main weapons for warlords controlling certain local areas—equivalent to China’s domestically copied and newly improved versions of the Thompson or other submachine guns. There were countless types of machine guns and other weapons, so to speak, all kinds of bizarre ones. However, in terms of actual combat effectiveness, they were still far from sufficient. Therefore, they can only be included as a short sub-tech tree alongside the main tech tree.
If Finland hadn’t been persuaded by the Allied Powers, it would have continued to fight alongside Germany against the Soviet Union in WWII and thus become a defeated Axis Power. It was only because Finland betrayed Germany at the end that it avoided sanctions. But apart from the BT-2 tank, Finland’s weapons only featured innovations in firearms—for example, attaching a PPSh submachine gun to a flamethrower. The only legendary tank in Finland’s arsenal was the lone KV model, so it can stand its ground as an event reward or a premium squad. Otherwise, if Finland were added as a sub-tech tree in the game, using Germany’s Panzer IV, the Soviet Union’s T-28 and T-34, and then claiming it as a “major update,” I really wouldn’t like this perfunctory attitude. It would be better not to add it at all—it’s just outright laziness.
Of course, at that point, German players certainly wouldn’t complain about Finns appearing in the Battles of Stalingrad and Berlin
Just think about the Mosin-Nagant in that premium German engineer squad. Even though it’s a Mosin-Nagant, it’s a Finnish copy. Yet its ergonomics are infinitely better than the original Soviet Mosin-Nagant—so smooth it’s practically like the Japanese Arisaka rifle