[Theorycraft] Balancing

What is the best way to balance melee map-oriented techtrees?
Parallelism - Both techtrees are essentially the same stuff with different names. (See warcraft 1 / 2)
Kill-base: Each unit has a certain number of kills it can achieve w/o any buffs on its own w/o dying. The kills of each unit are added up and the total must be the same on each team.
Rock-Paper-Scissors - self explanatory.

What do you guys think? What method do you use to balance?

I personally get an excel spreadsheet and input all sorts of data, like HP, mana, armor, spells, avg. attack, attack speed, etc.

Then I just sort of compare and see what fits best.

Kill-base makes sense. The only other way to be sure is with lots and lots and lots of play-testing...

Rock Paper Scissors is really the way things are done... look at Starcraft and Warcraft...

Rock Paper Scissors is the easiest way of doing things, but I prefer the way which Westwood used to do it with almost-parallelism where the techtrees was more or less alike but with a few differences on each. Like one had a flamethrower unit and the other had a handgrenade unit.

I like it when things are cool. The best way of balance is to make things fucking cool, then play, and then nerf the strong and beef the weak.

QFT.

Balance < Fun when starting out. Make the fun, THEN make the balance.

Nah. Don't nerf the strong. Just beef the weak :)