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I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "most balanced". A lot of machines have Tournament Mode settings which takes most of the random element out of the scoring, so they would all be pretty balanced. TotAN has a glitch with stacking Harem Multiball and the final Genie battle which makes it unsuitable for tournament play, and a few other tables have a mode or two whose scoring is out of whack compared to the rest of the table. But the latest Pinburgh tournament that PAPA ran used 180+ different machines, so there are a lot of options.If you meant more just general flow, accessibility to both novices and experts, and all-around pinball goodness, the Williams and Bally machines from the 90's have a strong claim to "most balanced", but that's of course a very biased and subjective statement - those were the machines I grew up with. If I had to pick specific tables, I'd probably choose Theatre of Magic and Cirqus Voltaire. Medieval Madness would be up there, too, but its Battle for the Kingdom final mode is not exactly accessible to the average player, much less completable, and sometimes I feel like I've run out of things to do on MM. ToM and CV have more accessible wizard modes (although completing them is still a challenge, as it should be) and those two tables always seem to have something new to offer. (CV has eight multiball modes, for heaven's sake!) Addams Family is also very good, but it's a harder table.The 80's tables were too simple for my taste (although they have a loyal and vocal group of fans), and the early 2000s Stern machines were baroque monstrosities - Ripley's in TPA has done nothing to change my opinion of them. Modern Sterns seem to have shed a layer of complexity, but I have not played enough of them to know.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "most balanced". A lot of machines have Tournament Mode settings which takes most of the random element out of the scoring, so they would all be pretty balanced. TotAN has a glitch with stacking Harem Multiball and the final Genie battle which makes it unsuitable for tournament play, and a few other tables have a mode or two whose scoring is out of whack compared to the rest of the table. But the latest Pinburgh tournament that PAPA ran used 180+ different machines, so there are a lot of options.
If you meant more just general flow, accessibility to both novices and experts, and all-around pinball goodness, the Williams and Bally machines from the 90's have a strong claim to "most balanced", but that's of course a very biased and subjective statement - those were the machines I grew up with. If I had to pick specific tables, I'd probably choose Theatre of Magic and Cirqus Voltaire. Medieval Madness would be up there, too, but its Battle for the Kingdom final mode is not exactly accessible to the average player, much less completable, and sometimes I feel like I've run out of things to do on MM. ToM and CV have more accessible wizard modes (although completing them is still a challenge, as it should be) and those two tables always seem to have something new to offer. (CV has eight multiball modes, for heaven's sake!) Addams Family is also very good, but it's a harder table.
The 80's tables were too simple for my taste (although they have a loyal and vocal group of fans), and the early 2000s Stern machines were baroque monstrosities - Ripley's in TPA has done nothing to change my opinion of them. Modern Sterns seem to have shed a layer of complexity, but I have not played enough of them to know.
