Some traits and spells weren't designed with specific intentions in mind, and were mostly created to see what players would do with them. I've always believed that if something is ridiculously overpowered to the point that the game becomes unfun, it can be rebalanced with a patch, but it's generally up to the players to ignore the more controversially overpowered traits if they're that bothered by them.
With that said, everything seems to be working as intended from what I can tell because in the end, players tend to have fun even if their teams are overpowered.
Yeah, definitely a fun game regardless. I agree that balance isn't really that important here. I just wasn't sure if some of these things met your design goals since it was far more prevalent in Siralim 1 to ignore stats completely and I had to really hunt for it here. What's more, a lot of this stuff doesn't open up until post game unless you get really lucky or look up combos online.
I do like your approach for Siralim. Less focus on balance, more content and emergent game-play. The cascading effects really remind me of the card game Innovation, in case you haven't played it.
Anyway, I am going to pivot my suggestions towards adding interesting punishments and quality of life stuff while looking for bugs/errors. Thanks for the feedback!
Couple game mechanics I want to ask about here before making any suggestions. Are these type of strategies intended to be viable? They aren't as game breaking as "invulnerability" but move the game away from being stat based and allow for infinite depth, limiting the usefulness of gene strength and a bunch of traits/abilities/spells.
Minotaur Earthshaker for example, or Mind control type effects where enemies hit themselves / each other.
A lesser offender here, but another way to go infinite. Abilities like "War Magic" allow you to gain stats in a compounding fashion, such that given if you survive a few turns you can 1 shot anything.