I don't think that's what 'balanced' means. I would say a 1v1 competitive game is 'balanced' if for any pair of actors A and B, a top player piloting A wins a

I don't think that's what 'balanced' means. I would say a 1v1 competitive game is 'balanced' if for any pair of actors A and B, a top player piloting A wins a substantial proportion of games against a top player piloting B, and the sum of all matchup advantages and disadvantages for any character isn't very big. So for example this is a matchup chart for a really balanced game: http://wiki.mizuumi.net/w/Chaos_Code/Tiers http://wiki.mizuumi.net/w/Chaos_Code/Tiers And this is a matchup chart for a really not-balanced game: http://static.squarespace.com/static/50f14d35e4b0d70ab5fc4f24/t/53f1bc0be4b097fb5adac03e/1408351252284/ThridStrikeDiagramCropped2.jpg?format=750w http://static.squarespace.com/static/50f14d35e4b0d70ab5fc4f2... For instance, in StarCraft, it's reasonable to say that the races are balanced even if Zerg and Protoss have no analogues to the Terran ability Scanner Sweep. This isn't a very useful post for me to make though; it looks like you are already on the right track and you meant something like "homogeneity" when you said "balance" initially.