[wgerard]

It's interesting you say that. I don't know if it's still the case, but Hearthstone used to have a decent amount of random effects (other than just basic card draw RNG). A big complaint at the time was that the randomness felt really awful if you were on the receiving end of an opponent's good luck.

Sometimes it felt like a chess match where you had executed your strategy perfectly, but randomly three of your opponents pawns turned into queens.

I get that you're talking about something more subtle than that (and maybe more akin to just, well, card draw RNG) but it's a delicate balance because it can also feel really bad for players being on the receiving end of randomness.

[viraptor]

I'm not a fan of the randomised experience really, but it's one way to balance the game a bit.

The best equaliser I've experienced was the handicap in Quake 3. I can have a great balanced match with people both better and worse than me, having lots of fun. Even if without the handicap the matches would end with scores like 30:1. I'm not sure how that would work for RTSes though - handicap on movement speed? amount of gained resources?