Snowballing happens when there is no diminishing return on something you can accumulate, like champions. Champions are also more resource efficient then their CS counterpart, as well as population efficient. There are no diminishing return with them, quite the opposite. Fast melee champions units have no counters, and can hardly be "outplayed" because they can pick battles they want, therefor securing an advantage you have with them is easy. Fast units contribute more to map control, therefore it is harder to recover if the enemy can just easily find and crush anything you try to rebuild. There is almost no limit to how much strength you can coil up with champions, as you replace workers / CS with champions, your strength can grow despite the population limit. The players that do play on snowballing don't send their CS to battle, they keep them on eco and replace them (even delete them) with fast units, be it champ cav, or cav. That makes me say that CS as workforce don't contribute to snowballing, instead they often provide an opportunity for defenders to keep eco, while the attacker is losing an opportunity cost of moving his army around. Turtling is often done like this : build forward defenses, force the enemy to move his army and waste time on defenses, while you keep doing eco with most of your population; therefore you can catch up with any economic disadvantage you had.

This is very welcome, but Tlthe main emphasis should be civ differentiation.

We're not talking about the balance here. We're talking about what happens when one player loses a lot of his units, either defending or attacking. Does he, assuming he has the necessary macro skill, have a chance at coming back into the game? As things stand now, he doesn't. That is snowballing. 

Great work on this patch. The performance fixes are especially appreciated, and it’s nice to see older hardware getting smoother gameplay again. The Windows 7 support and the crash fixes for GPU Skinning and Vulkan will help a lot of players too. Thanks to everyone who put time into this release. Looking forward to Alpha 28.

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