Quote Originally Posted by Cheetah
Going just one step further it is not hard to realise that there are many ways to balance a game. What might the "perfect balance" for one might be the "worse game" for someone else. Just as before the fine details of "perfect balence" depends on your taste and depends on your previous experience.
Balance is not arbitrary. You need units in each category of the RPS, and those units have to be cost effective otherwise they won't be used. Imbalance in the units will cause the solution to converge to a limited army composition. We saw this in MTW/VI where sword/cav armies dominated. You need balance between maneuver and attrition which means setting the morale at the proper level. The range of morale over which the system works properly is very limited. You have to set the fatigue rates properly relative to the size of the map, and how long units fight. You have to have the fighting time balanced such that a local superiority achieved by maneuver isn't negated by supporting units coming from long distances, and yet you can't have fighting time so short that there isn't enough time for flanking attacks by supporting units or allied armies that are close.

If you've worked on stats as much as I have, you can see the units falling into a certain mathematical relationship as the gameplay improves. You can also see that changing the stats of a single unit causes a ripple effect that affects the balance of other units. In fact, it's easy to imbalance a stat, and good players can exploit relatively small imbalances on the order of 10% or possibly even less.