In another topic i had a discussion with Mr. Smith, the bugsmasher from WBP team (gj on that!), about late-game strength of factions.
Here is a shortened quote from him:
To be honest, i disagree both with that this is the intended design and more importantly that it should be!
So i want your opinions: Do you want that all factions should converge to the same late-game strength?
If your answer is no, then you should agree on having powerful early game factions winning 90% of their games early on as Late game factions won 90% of games reaching this stage.
Now how much games represent having 90% chance to win your game over the 10% of games you'll be able to survive till the late game is a mystery to me. But what I'm sure is we can have perfect balanced factions with that, with a perfect symmetry in power spikes (early vs late) but this is not going to be balanced in a game wise perspective.
If your opinion is to give every faction a fair chance to reach late game stage, then you should ensure every faction has the same fair chance to win the late game. If so, we can have some factions doing better on the early stage of the game and some others doing better on the middle stage of the game and all of them having a power convergence on the late game.
I obviously want more balance between factions on the late game. Units like Havre/KT/Comets/SPanther/STiger/Elefant are aberrations in this game in the way they are implemented. Only the Elefant isn't offending today due to Ostheer being so weak at all the stages of the game. I'm also not including the ISU/IS2/Tiger as they are balanced in my opinion and this is why we almost never see them in teamgames.
Balance is a mix of symmetry and strength and weakness on units and factions level.
Today we are seeing that the counterpart of those units aren't enough strong. What they are: Popcap, mp and fuel. They aren't enough because you can have a well balanced army and picking those unit as the cherry on top of the cake. Those units aren't balanced at all and the power they bring should have biggest downsides.
As an idea on how we could bring more balance in those units is looking at the Tiger Ace. Not going to the economy creeping level of the TA, those units should have a biggest impact on your economy, not only in popcap and the upkeep naturally going with, but a special upkeep fees in mp/fuel to maintain those units on the field, with a possibility to withdraw them and get back some of your mp/fuel investment.