Creative Assembly’s Total War games offer up a wide spread of factions, from rampaging Gauls to furtive and disgusting Wood Elves, but they’re all a little beholden to the ancient game of rock-paper-scissors: spears beat cavalry, cavalry beat swords, swords beat spears.

I think Creative Assembly generally do an impressive job of softening that triangular countering logic by means of terrain considerations, flanking, morale and other supporting mechanics. Cavalry won’t necessarily beat swords if the cavalry are all tuckered out and spooked. And then you have wildcards, like heroes and war machines, who can mess with the logic more dramatically: Rock paper Mortis Engine! Still, I can’t deny that I often feel drained on firing up a DLC-fresh Total War army and realising that, yep, I’m roshamboing again.

There’s been a lot of talk about rock-paper-scissors in Total War over the years, not all of it incandescently angry. Total War: Medieval 3’s creative director Leif Walter recently kicked off another round on the developer’s forums, responding to a thread about RPS mechanics lacking authenticity and having no place in “real medieval combat”.

“If Rock-Paper-Scissors is too rigid and too impactful, battles can lose a lot of authenticity and the immersive feel of realism we are looking for, and become a simple ‘color matching’ of pitting green against red, and so forth,” Walter agreed. “But on the other hand; you obviously need a sense of countering, or – as others have pointed out in this thread – there is no strategy or tactics.

“A balancing paradigm I often look at is Starcraft 1 from back in the day,” he went on. “Yes, you had counters (even some pretty hard ones, like Reavers to Zerglings) – but there was a lot of contextuality and nuance.”

Medieval 3 is apparently going to prioritise the circumstances of war over the on-paper specifics of what each soldier is packing. “A good example would be knights,” Walter continued. “There really shouldn’t be a hard counter to knights. They are the best equipped and best trained units on the field. BUT – what if you use the terrain against them? What if they become exhausted and disorganized? What if they put themselves into an un-wise position, like being crowded by a lot of other units?

“So I would say we are really trying to lean into context and situational counters, rather than too ‘black and white’ classic Rock-Paper-Scissors hard countering.”

Walter ended with a word of approval for another post exploring how knights might form the backbone of your army early on in Medieval 3, then grow less important over time with the advent of superior knight-slaying methods and technologies. This idea certainly seems in keeping with his comments elsewhere about how the game’s regional retinues might evolve from decade to decade.

As you may guess, we here at Rock Paper Shotgun are ambivalent about rock-paper-scissors at large. Myself, I dislike how ubiquitous RPS mechanics are in all sorts of videogames, but I also have a tendency to get lost in my own house, and fare better in strategy sims with a certain pronounced symmetry. I would probably get on OK with a Total War faction of units who are literally armed with rocks, paper and scissors. They could sell shotgun units as DLC.

After browsing the rock-paper-scissors Wikipedia page, I’m also slightly concerned that everything might be rock-paper-scissors, from legal proceedings to the mating rituals of common side-blotched lizards. I’m interested to hear Thoughts about other kinds of countering logic in videogames. I guess the obvious comparison is the four or five element system adopted by a million RPGs.