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.