All true, but it is never just one type of cheese that allows 10/10 victory, but a combination of cheeses.
A cheese salad, if you will.
More of a Quattro Formaggi . Except there's often more than 4 cheeses involved.
As far as what counts as cheese:
- There's the obvious "Lobby Limburger" like the "No Waves" modifier, setting your own handicap to +300% and/or hammering the AI with a nerfing handicap. If one of these is in play I don't consider the result of the game to have a serious bearing on the balance of the game. At the same time, I feel no need to deny those choices to the players: it's pretty obvious what you're doing, it's an intentional choice, and it doesn't take any inordinate amount of your time to accomplish.
-- turning on golems-easy AND spirecraft-easy, and the friendly factions to intensity-10 with no counterbalancing hostile/mixed factions would also tend to cause me to not take the result terribly seriously from a balance perspective. More mild combos of that also tend to contextualize the result for my purposes. Please have fun with it if you like, though.
- Then there's the really-stinky-cheese in-game exploits like (in the past) having a massive FF net that you could repair while other parts of it were under fire (required a lot of micro, but you could stop almost arbitrarily large amounts of fire that way until the rules were added to make an entire FF net unrepairable for X time after any part of it had taken damage), or the much more recent example of RockyBst's keeping over 10,000 threat occupied essentially indefinitely with a single jumpship and some lightning torpedo frigates. Those I need to fix because they can trivialize pretty much _any_ size of challenge that is thrown at it, and thus trivialize all other responses to said challenges except in the matter of how much micro/wall-clock-time is required to execute them.
- Then there's the "hilariously overpowered" things like Martyrs. It's no secret that Martyrs are overpowered. They've actually been nerfed several times over the past few years, but their sheer threat-stopping power is incredible. I'll probably take another whack or two at them before too long, but ultimately the point isn't to redefine them to some actually-balanceable role. Because they're too much fun as they are, and even they have limits that can be overcome by a sufficiently powerful AI or a sufficiently big player mistake, and their nature prevents the player from relying on them to the total exclusion of other tactics. So even if someone is spamming martyrs like crazy I still pay attention to the balance implications of the game.
-- Area mines might go in this category, or the next one, it's not clear to me yet.
- Then there's the more mild-cheddar types of units. I'd put Riot Starships and Neinzul Railpods and various other such things in this category. They're really strong if used right, and if used in combination can defeat absurdly larger forces. If a strict balance were a priority for me, I'd have to nerf these. But again, too much fun the way they are. So there are occasional efforts to moderate them without redefining them, but overall it's ok.
And there's a bunch of stuff I didn't mention. Overall the target is fun, and making sure nothing is so out of balance that it's reducing fun. After that I try to make 10/10 just-barely-unbeatable (on normal challenge, against the top players), 7/7 a stiff challenge to a new player, etc.
