I agree with the comments above that Civs don’t need to be “balanced” ie equal power levels. But they all need to be fun to play and so none should be crushingly sub-optimal or there abilities just never get used.
To be clear though, at this point, I don’t think the current Civ balance issues in the game are actually Civ balance issues.
The Civs that are seen as weak or not fun are usually like that because they leverage some mechanic that needs tuning. FXS need to fix mechanics not directly rebalance Civs (mostly).
Specifically:
- England, Spain, other Coastal / Colonizer Civs: these Civs by and large are getting hurt by Coastal Cities being slightly weaker on average and not having a really distinctive use case; and by having Colonial Cities not being too hard for the limited rewards you get. A few Civs here get away with this just because they are so strong, eg Indonesia, but they’re still hurt by bad underlying mechanics.
- England, Japan, Germany, Netherlands: these guys suffer from IZs, IZ buildings (particularly Factories) being underpowered. Other than England, these Civs generally have other stuff going on which is good (eg Hansa), but England really suffers given it's also leveraging Coastal and Colonies (and also Military Engineers are also weak ... Sheesh, England really does use all the weakest mechanics, right???).
- Georgia and maybe Poland and China: Walls and Forts suck, which really hurt these guys. We really need a rethink on how Walls work (I think one level of Walls then two levels of Castles with wider benefits beyond Defence), and Forts need to be more useful overall.
If you fixed the above mechanics, then I think almost all the Civs would be well fairly balanced, with maybe just a few needing some small additional tweaks (England, maybe France (let’s see if the Chateau gets another pass)).
The only Civ I think has real “balance issues” is Canada. They’re just an awful design. I don’t really care that much because they’re not my go to Civ, but I think there is a good case for #fixcanada and giving them a complete rework.
This is why I’m quite disappointed with the patch (even though, to be clear, I think it’s a really really good patch). For all the stuff that has been patched, there are still a lot of core mechanics that need tuning. (Although, good god, at least Pikeman are better priced now. That’s progress!)
Guess we keep waiting.