[Arryn]

The odds of the 76mm M1A1 gun to penetrate Tiger II frontal armor at even point-blank range (far shorter than 500m) was virtually nil. True, the gun could kill at side or rear aspects, but you first had to survive to get such a shot, and that was problematic at best, given the lethality and range of the Tiger's gun. The Tiger II's main weakness (besides an appalling lack of mobility) is that you never found them in sufficient numbers that they couldn't (eventually and at great cost) be surrounded and thus expose their less-defendable aspects. The Germans, being no fools on the battlefield, understood this and tended to compensate by turning their tanks into semi-mobile pillboxes, forcing the allies to attack from the front. The allies typically responded by just pounding them flat from the air. The best way to get rid of any tank.

The M26 and M36 arrived too late in the war to be significant in any battles, same as for the soviet 'stalin' tanks (the design forerunner to all modern russian tanks).

The $ figures you cite for the German and Soviet war economy are meaningless, and ludicrous. They fail to account for real national production. Worse yet, the soviets were notorious for "cooking the books" to hide the true cost of their military. Also, the Germans extensively used slave labor, which lowered their costs significantly. A much better way to gauge economic strength is to measure the quantities of raw materials consumed into the production of armaments, or to simply measure the output (not in units, but in tons). The Germans did not even remotely match Soviet military production of small arms, artillery, and tanks. To claim that by the Germans spending as much as the Soviets (a dubious claim by itself) they had similar industrial capacities is absurd.

American submachineguns were markedly inferior to their German counterparts. So much so that GIs made a habit of picking up and using captured German weapons, despite having ample supplies of their own arms. The US bazooka was also distinctly inferior to the panzerfaust and panzerschrek. The only thing the bazooka was better than was the even crappier british PIAT. Of course, for the GI, a bazooka was better than having no bazooka at all, and trying to face a tank.

The Sherman (75mm models) were by no means superior to the Mark IV F-J models (and not even remorely close to the Panther), combatwise. The german tank had a far better gun and a lower profile, making it harder to hit. The Sherman's claim to fame (besides sheer numbers of them) was it's mechanical reliability compared to the german tanks, and it's superior mobility. Countering this was the Sherman's noted tendency to explode when hit, and the ease of hitting it.

The M26/M36 could defeat all German tanks, but that's meaningless because the same could be said about any German tank mounting a long 75mm or any 88mm gun versus any American tank. What mattered was how many tanks were available. It's that which heavily disfavored the Germans. Losing through being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. OTOH, the numerical superiority of the allies would not have mattered as much had just one of two things been different: had they not had total air supremacy, or had Hitler not been running the war. (In Dominions terms, it doesn't matter how good your units are if the player wielding them is a fool/idiot/moron.)

Can we please stop discussing WW2? It's irrelevent to Dominions, as Johan has already pointed out.