Balanced games feel like a chore: you just sit through them, trying to avoid those mistakes that aren't balanced away and there's never any hope for some positive discovery. Decisions do not matter and the pro-balancing crowd even thinks that this is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, discovering the city-per-tile problem in Civ would ruin the game for you (I never did). That clearly is the bad kind of overpowered. But sending that single chariot to the edge of the known universe before it gets constrained by phalanxes? Awesome.
Agree. Over-balancing everything in single player games sucks out the fun.
"Single-player" here is key - minutely perfect balancing is often a necessity in multiplayer games, and I suspect sometimes that mentality is carried over to single-player experiences without stopping to question it.
The trouble with the internet is that it's hard to stop competitive mentality leaking in; the game may be single player, but there are lots of people playing it, and they can watch each other and show off.
(this basically killed puzzle / mystery box games, which survive only in a weird corner for not-very-online people playing on mobile)
Yes, discovering the city-per-tile problem in Civ would ruin the game for you (I never did). That clearly is the bad kind of overpowered. But sending that single chariot to the edge of the known universe before it gets constrained by phalanxes? Awesome.