- balancing a game isn't quite easy, i'd like to see your nooby ass try, and this was the best aoe3 balance patch so far. balancing a game with 14 patches (vanilla) is something else than balancing it with 1 patch, and this one patch fixed a whole lot more than any one of those 14.
- let me give you a little lesson about balance issues. main point is that below captain/major level players do not know how to (ab)use a civ's OPness because they don't have the skill to perform the OP strategies optimally and lack adaptation/micro skill to use their armies optimally. a luitenant's japs are easily countered by any captain+ player for exactly this reason. hence OP or UPness does not exist below luitenant level. only if both players play a near perfect game (say 2 iamgrunts face eachother) can be concluded whether or not a civ is OP.
be honest, did you think of japs being OP yourself or did someone else tell you (who, in turn, got it from an expert)? balance issues only affect good players, and you are certainly not one of them.
now you could say japanese are an easier civ to win with on lower levels. this however does not make them OP, it just means they are somewhat easier to play than other civs, which indeed they are. how can ES fix this? that's right, they can't... if an easy civ is nerfed so that it will be harder to win with, it will be UP for experts and won't be played on higher levels; obviously, higher levels are all that matters, one can't mess up a game for the experts because noobs are complaining.
take ottos and dutch, 2 clear examples of OP/UP hard/easy:
dutch are a hard civ to play and back when they were OP, no noob complained about their OPness, only experts, because only experts were able to play the dutch perfectly and leave the opponent no chance of winning. now they got nerfed and on lower levels you'll hardly see them winning, while experts can still play them because they are now balanced.
the ottos are exactly the other way around, they were UP but easy to play, which made them a popular civ among noobs, but barely played on higher levels because they couldn't win against opponents that knew how to counter them. this has also been fixed with patch and they're now more playable on expert level, which is what the patch is meant for.
my point: as a master sergeant you encounter no balance issues and have no idea what you're talking about. all you could be complaining about is a civ's somewhat easier difficulty level, which makes it harder to counter. this is similar to OP or UPness, but cannot be fixed by ES by nerfing or boosting the civs in question for the reasons stated above. there is no solution and to play a more balanced game, you'll just have to get better.
i'm not saying the game is 100% balanced, but balancing a game like aoe3 100% is impossible, because the civs are very different from one another which makes even the tiniest balance issues very hard to fix.
btw nilla isn't perfectly balanced, spain is still OP and ports are UP.