[Squirrelloid]

Ano:
LandRAND and games like it seem to be the best testing ground for 'balance' because there's no diplomacy - diplomacy dominates any game balance issues when its conducted well. CBM 1.6 is also relatively new, or it would be easier to refer to more games.

Besides, if a 'hopeless' nation can do well at the hands of a 'veteran', then its not so hopeless, now is it?

Regarding the Gorgon - since all I can do is point to poorly priced examples, I pointed to one. There's *tons* of poorly priced pretenders. Indeed, if you chose a pretender in vanilla at random, chances are its poorly priced. The gorgon just happens to be one of the most obvious offenders. Pretenders like the PoD and Cyclops were also too cheap for what they did. Most of the rainbows were too expensive for what they did. And so on.

The correct response is not to say 'lol, he only provided one example', especially as I intimated a large number of other examples. Indeed, it should be blatantly obvious vanilla pretenders aren't balanced. (Look at the distribution of pretender chasses that are actually played, its pretty skewed towards a few choices in Vanilla games.) Why must I do the work of tracking down all the imbalanced pretender chasses to make the claim - presumption should be for the claim that the game is imbalanced because its a negative claim. Its the counter-claim that vanilla is balanced that requires proof. (And given the designers have explicitly said they weren't concerned with balance, well, its pretty obvious any such claim is doomed to failure.)

So by all means, prove Vanilla is balanced, or just accept that its not.

PS: Balance is a global claim over the entirety of the game. A single counter-example disproves the game is balanced. At which point it just remains to determine *how much* imbalance there is.