There are plenty of games where you can become overpowered and have fun being overpowered, and vice versa. In Kenshi you spend the early game being weaker than every enemy and NPC on the map, and end up being so strong you can melt 1000s of elite enemies with your **** & balls. Both modes of play are fun. Similarly, in Rome Total War, some factions are just straight up weak and have terrible starting positions, but theyre a lot of fun to play.
This idea that every singleplayer game has to be balanced is ludicrous. Singleplayer, especially longform sandbox singleplayer like bannerlord, is exactly the arena for asymmetric gameplay. Some factions should be worse and smaller than others, the player should be allowed to experience a wide range of power imbalances, and there should be equal accommodation to masochistic speedrun tryhards, and sadistic power fantasy minmaxers.
Are we talking about "any kind of games" or "strategic + action rpg, realistic" (or in any case not inspired by a fantasy)?
I would say the second case.
And in this case (realistic strategists for example) I doubt you will find a mode that is the main one in which your faction has units so strong that they individually destroy an enemy army without having any problems.
If the aim of the game is to be a strategist, the norm will be to have a game where strategy prevails, not a single unit that disintegrates the rest.
At most you might find an optional mode where they make you create an army with modern or cool weapons and units against everything else (and here you can travel in fantasy and creativity).
But the norm for a game with a certain target is to hit that target, not to go completely astray.
When I speak of balance I don't mean "homogeneity".
I'm fine that there is asymmetry between the factions, the same reality is like that.
What doesn't suit me is the unreality of the armor system, which is the cause of the imbalance in various areas.
By balancing in the armor system I don't mean the armor values of the soldiers of one faction relative to the other, but the conception of the armor system itself, which I consider unrealistic and which is applied to all units of any faction.
The imbalance is not between one faction and another due to their intrinsic difference in strength, but is due to the fact that a certain type of unit is used more in a faction than another and this unit enjoys some advantages given by the armor system, not because the unit itself is strong or if it plays better.
The most classic example is "archers vs infantry".
Archers enjoy the advantage of being able to hit any hurtboxes of the infantryman's model and in each of these hurtboxes will inflict significant damage.
So even if the infantryman were armed with a shield, if he were hit in the leg, which is protected by the boot, he will still suffer a significant damage.
Conversely, if most of the infantryman's hurtboxes were with very high protection and the rest were unprotected but covered by a shield, then the archer would not be able to hit him in the open areas. If he hit him in the legs, they would be so protected that they would suffer only negligible damage.
But the current armor system does not provide for a division of hurtboxes into 2 categories: coverable and non-coverable.
Therefore the developer cannot raise the armor value significantly, because if he did it would cause an imbalance in hand-to-hand combat that is too large between units that have equipment of different quality.
This involves having armor with low armor value and therefore not very effective.
But the worst problem is that archers benefit more than others, and therefore also the factions that use archers the most (especially if they are on horseback, because they are elusive).
Therefore a misconception of the armor system leads to an imbalance between the types of units, and this imbalance is reflected in the relationship of strength between the factions which, being characterized differently due to asymmetry, will use more types of different units, which will lead to if those advantages and disadvantages that the armo system entails.
Precisely for this reason the biggest complaints are addressed:
1) to the archers themselves against any other unit.
2) the strength of the kuzhait compared to the factions that use far fewer archers than them.
I point out that point 2 is a consequence of point 1, and this is due to the armor system.