Well yes, that's what I meant. If you define balance as multiplayer human balance, well that's not what I meant by balance. As you mentioned, MOM (without 3rd party hacks) was single-player only, and the AI wasn't good enough to offer much challenge to a player who figured out what some of the more powerful techniques were, and who didn't prevent himself from using them. So yes, you could say that rather than being unbalanced, the AI just wasn't programmed to be able to compete against a human who had learned tricks. That's true of essentially any very complex game, and it becomes a matter of degree (how long it takes players to learn strategies the AI can't counter; in my case I don't think I ever actually lost any game against the MOM AI). Perhaps you could even claim MOM was balanced, because every choice of human nation could be used to wipe out the AI.
Naturally, there are different ways to define balance. (Edit: Another way to put it - there are different types of balance.) Ability to steamroller the AI using certain fairly simple techniques, and relative impotence of a large number of game features are a couple of them. Those were what I was referring to.
If you could play MOM multi-player, though (and yes a couple of 3rd party hacks allow this), there might be many interesting choices of nation and strategy which could be balanced and interesting to play against each other.
PvK
[ February 03, 2004, 23:09: Message edited by: PvK ]