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There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesti

There’s a rock-paper-scissor game design in Total War, and in video games in general. They tend to distort things quite a bit in order to make it more interesting from a gameplay perspective. In general, no, it is not realistic.

frollogaston 1y ago
Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead. Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series. (It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.) > There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational. That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.
- StefanBatory 1y ago
  From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them! Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    Yeah idk about Rome 2, never played that one. It sounds like the game is unbalanced if an all-swordsman army is best and nobody has come up with a counter. Then again I doubt any of those games are very well balanced for pvp battles.
    - StefanBatory 1y ago
      We had like, 10 pages of rules. And every community had their own... WH 3 basically solved this issue by making MP battles be capture the points style - genuinely, it freed us from having to make house rules.
      - frollogaston 1y ago
        Probably one of them has to do with camping, since defending armies have an advantage. Eh, most pvp video games aren't fun when people treat it like a job.

frollogaston 1y ago

Total War (at least RTW and MTW2) is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. It's situational instead. Like, spearmen are kinda even with swordsmen in a pitched battle, and you can run either down with cavalry if they're tired or disorganized, but you usually can't leave cavalry committed. There are only a couple of minor damage bonuses for balancing, not like AoE where you have the "anti-cavalry spearmen" etc.

dragonwriter 1y ago
> Total War is one of the few RTS games without rock-paper-scissors design. Total War definitely has an element of rock-paper-scissors design (particularly between cavalry/archer/spears), pretty sure its even referred to explicitly as such in some of the official strategy guides for titles in the series. (It's also not an RTS franchise, its RTT + TBS.) > There are only a couple of bonuses like spears vs cavalry, and the rest is mostly situational. That some of the advantages are properties of interactions off basic traits and not explicit class v. class bonuses doesn't make it not a rock-paper-scissors design.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  You can use archers to kill cavalry or the other way around. It's just that you don't want any kind of melee-capable enemy reaching your archers.
StefanBatory 1y ago
From Rome 2 multiplayer, I remember spearmen absolutely not even with swords :P My server played with swords limit, because then everyone would pick only them! Spearmen purpose was to buy you time and for other units to tire out, before you'd bring in your swords :D
- frollogaston 1y ago
  Yeah idk about Rome 2, never played that one. It sounds like the game is unbalanced if an all-swordsman army is best and nobody has come up with a counter. Then again I doubt any of those games are very well balanced for pvp battles.
  - StefanBatory 1y ago
    We had like, 10 pages of rules. And every community had their own... WH 3 basically solved this issue by making MP battles be capture the points style - genuinely, it freed us from having to make house rules.
    - frollogaston 1y ago
      Probably one of them has to do with camping, since defending armies have an advantage. Eh, most pvp video games aren't fun when people treat it like a job.