But in my opinion the traits do not need to be totally balanced, that's simply not a prerequisite for a good game in general.
Oh I completely agree they vary with stuff like where you are on the map, and can't be balanced perfectly anyway, but that doesn't mean they can't be balanced well.
It's more the trait combinations in specific leaders than the individual traits themselves, that are potentially overpowered. I also tried to pair stronger trait combos (like Inca with Financial / Scientific for overloaded research) with weaker unique units and/or buildings to compensate (Inca Warrior is only useful in Prehistoric which goes by quickly, and their Granary kinda sucks).
Another example is Industrial / Financial, which was ALWAYS my favorite go-to combination in the past when you could pick a single leader for the whole game. But now that's been nerfed b/c you can only use Bismarck for 3/8's of the game.
At one point, for example, I was concerned Prolific sucked too much b/c it was only useful later on when you had a lot of high-food tiles, so I added the city growth rate effect... That's balance tweaking.
Then there's leaders like Tokugawa, Ragnar and Genghis who have double-military traits. We've never played as one of these before so I'm just assuming they work... They can definitely be trouble when playing against them early on, lol.
You could instead increase the build-points of the Dreadnought slightly.
I am very happy to make
that sort of tweak, b/c I know you have a better handle on game balance for this sort of thing from playing it competitively. I just had reasons not to change the tech or resource situation here.
I'll either increase the cost or nerf it to 28 str, or both... gotta take another look first hehe.
The REAL problem is that the Destroyer is a fully-modern ship (replaced only by the futuristic Stealth Destroyer later), whereas the DN is not. The Destroyer was handed out early in the vanilla BTS tech tree just b/c it's the weakest modern ship, and I kept that basic design. So that's why it's Oil-only and the DN isn't.
