I think I’m starting to see the picture. Since we so far don’t have an AI capable of playing as well as the top human players, in order to figure out what’s out

I think I’m starting to see the picture. Since we so far don’t have an AI capable of playing as well as the top human players, in order to figure out what’s out of balance you have to watch a sufficient amount of PvP games. And then you rebalance and must start the process from scratch. And unless you hit the perfect balance by accident you will always need to keep rebalancing. The only other way I can think to do this would be to either change units incredibly quickly to not allow players to get too far into any particular strategy development before the unit is retired. Or introduce things like variations between units: two different marines might have different stats to not allow their 0.2 DPS advantage to add up, etc. Or I guess introduce acts of god type situations that might throw off a specific strategy. Napoleon supposedly lost at Waterloo partially because of a stomach upset that required him to keep running to the latrine and unable to focus on the battlefield. Imagine if you suddenly got fog of war over the area of combat because of “broken communication”. Basically more variability that would require the players to not concentrate on a single strategy and instead having plans A through Z for various eventualities. I’m not sure if that would make for a more exciting experience or not but might be fun to experiment with.