I think you can describe it as vibes but I prefer to call it "Balance Design Goals".
A game starts with a vision. A vision for gameplay among other things.
Tangents will be in the spoiler tags.
[Spoiler]Even in singleplayer games, balancing the options you give to the player can be important and enhance the gameplay experience.
You can give the player new overpowered weapons and abilities as a sense of progression or as a reward. There is nothing wrong with that, but if you wanted the player to experience a multitude of gameplay, weapons and abilities, and they keep using the same overpowered thing, maybe it is the balance of your game that is off.
Now in the same vain, even for an RTS you can give the players overpowered units.
Superweapons are a good candidate for overpowered units even in competitive settings for RTS.
Superweapons can be designed as a definite end to the game.
Superweapons can be designed to make or break the player building it and decide the game if it gets done.
Superweapons can be designed as an escalation tool for long games, or be so prohibitively expensive that the will never come out in games before one side has a big advantage and uses it to end the game.
However, balancing something as complex as an RTS is very hard.
Often it will done iteratively over several years.
[Spoiler]When Chris Taylor and his fellow game developers made the original Total Annihilation 28 years ago, they too had a vision.
In their vision, the cost of units was very varied where the values of buildtime, metalcost and energy cost seemed to have been created in a very robotic fashion without nice human comprehensible round numbers.
Maybe these values remain perfectly balanced according to some ancient algorithm created long ago.
It remains a mystery to me to this day why and from where those values were chosen and how involved humans were in choosing those values.
Many games, including Zero-K and BAR, have broken away from this vision.
We have used human numbers comprehensible to our sensibilities for ease of balancing and gameplay comprehension.
RTS are particularly hard to balance because they are supposed to remain strategically deep even at high levels of play after years of play.
If one unit or strategy remains dominant for too long, it can be argued that it should be nerfed for the strategic depth of the game.
Is Zero-K perfectly balanced?
Every player has the same starting options available so the answer is yes.
But don't players choose commander chassis, factory and starting position before the game starts? That is true. Zero-K is not perfectly balanced. Those are basically blind choices made before you start the game and before you know what your opponent is doing.
Factory choice in 1v1 can be compared to a race in Starcraft or a civilization in Age of Empires.
Is every factory balanced to every other factory? No. Some factories are simple better on some maps like civilizations in Age of Empires 2 are better on some types of maps.
Okey. But at least mirror match-ups are balanced in Zero-K, right?
No. Even though mirror match-ups are perfectly balanced they might not be balanced in strategic depth.
The current strength of Hermit would be an example where it hurts the strategic depth of Zero-K.
Is Hermit overpowered on all maps and in all match-ups? No.
Is Hermit overpowered on some hilly maps and in a spider mirror? I would argue yes, but this would be on so called "vibes" or balance design goals.
There is still some strategy on a map like Ravaged in a spider mirror where the expansion patterns matter and you want to use Fleas, Venoms, or Redback before you start spamming Hermit. However, once you are on Hermit and have them on autoretreat and repair them, there is little reason to do anything else.
[Spoiler]Recluse do potentially counter them en masse but you usually lose too much ground trying to do that which means that the Hermit can simply overrun the other player or you can simply switch to a counter to Recluse like Phoenix, napalm bomber, or Firewalker, napalm artillery.
Venom is simply too fragile and kills Hermits too slowly to contest with Hermit spam.
Fleas can distract and kill some lone Hermits but is easily countered by Lotus turrets, Venom or Redback before they manage to actually kill Hermits.
Redback generally gets kited and struggles to finish off Hermits when they are massed.
Crab can simply be outmaneuvered and is easily stunned by Widow if it tries to stay mobile.
Hermit is still pretty tanky even though it is the "lightest"/cheapest assault and can mostly shrug off artillery, and napalm like Phoenix and Firewalker.
I would argue that Hermit takes up too much strategic space at the cost of too many other units. It is simply too good and kinda boring as a skill expression.
It can be argued that some maps or match-ups being dominated by singular gameplay strategies is not all that bad.
In Total Annihilation, large open maps like Comet Catcher was typically dominated by light rovers/tanks/raiders like Weasel(Dart in Zero-K) and Flash(like Scorcher in Zero-K), and people are still playing those maps in TA to this day.
Escalating beyond that is only a reward you could get in really close games or if you already were far ahead already.
I think mono raider gameplay is much more fun in comparison to monohermit in spider mirrors.
Glaiveman will you have you convinced that cloaky factory is peak but that cloaky vs cloaky is still a boring match-up because it is just a mirror matchup or something.
