So, let's sum up the "balance" changes.
Negative changes (costs more, things are not as powerful/effective):
* Heavy Legion - damage nerfed
* Gathering blessing - more expensive
* Numerous research costs - more expensive
* Raider - training time roughly doubled
* Animal blessing - time was returned, but still more expensive than it was two updates ago. Addition of another diamond to the cost along with the addition of another diamond to the cost of training blessings makes this blessing far less likely to be used, as players will spend most of their diamonds on training blessings.
* Training blessing (negative for French civ) - training multiplier effect eliminated
Neutral-ish changes (where multiple changes more or less balance out):
* Training blessing (neutral for all non-French civs) - twice as long, but more expensive and not as effective.
* Timed goals are given more time but become more difficult with each age
Positive changes (costs less, units more effective):
* Factory troops affected by training blessing (doesn't matter before the Industrial Age; not sure how much it really matters then)
* Napolean attacks slightly faster at higher levels (whee!)
You can go back through every previous "rebalance" and see the same trend: every one is severely slanted towards negative changes. Why? If BHG was genuinely following the data, as they like to claim, there would be a more even distribution of positive and negative changes. We see some troops made stronger, some bonuses increased, some weaker nations improved. We never see that.
Simple answer: BHG is not so much interested in rebalancing as making the existing game features more expensive with each passing update. Each "rebalance" is primarily designed to force players to spend more time or to spend more money than they did before. This one is no exception: diamonds are going to become more scarce, which means fewer training blessings to go around. Training blessing effectiveness drops from 70% to 60%, which will mean spending crowns to finish training. Raiders now take nearly twice as long to train, which again, means spending crowns or twiddling thumbs.
Go back, and you'll see each "rebalance" makes Dominations more expensive to play. Each one tosses out a couple of crumbs (hey, the more-expensive training blessing helps with tanks and higher-level Napolean hits faster!), but mostly each rebalance makes the game more costly in either time or money.
And, not so coincidentally, there's frequently a single civ that gets knocked down a peg. I don't know why anyone would switch nations - BHG is just doing a round robin of nerfing nations to get people to spend crowns to switch. Hang with your weaker nation for a few more rebalances, and it'll be back on top.
I promised myself I'd give it one more update to see if BHG would stop making things more expensive with each rebalance, but clearly their cost-inflating is never going to end, and they're going to focus on ways to increase the cost of playing while real features and gameplay issues go unaddressed, so I'm done. They sucked a bit of money from my wallet, but not nearly as much as they could have had if they hadn't gotten greedy.
