Why three factions? Which RTS game invented the trend?
I guess this previous thread from a year ago already sort of asked it, so let me be more specific, and add a few other questions:
Why do so many RTS games have three factions specifically? Is it purely a rock-paper-scissors thing? I feel like in theory it should be possible to achieve balance between more than three different sides, though it's very dependent on the specific game mechanics. Warcraft III and Supreme Commander seem like major counterexamples of RTS having four factions.
Which RTS started the gaming convention of featuring three factions? Was it Dune II?
Isn't it interesting how in other genres like say in MMOs you only see 2-3 factions at most? (Obviously there are plenty of genres like say 4Xs where you can have many factions, but maybe RTS and MMO games are examples of genres where a game can only support a limited number of specialization or differentiation between factions.) EVE Online is like the only MMO I can think of that has four factions. Wouldn't it be cool if there was an EVE Online RTS game in the mold of Homeworld? Couldn't go any worse than CCP's other attempts to make spin-offs.
Looking at some of the counter-examples in that other thread, could the 2-3 faction restriction be less of a product of game balance, and more of a thematic thing? Age of Empires, Total War, Rise of Nations, and other historical games have tons of factions because that's the nature of history, many civilizations and peoples. But when you're coming up with a completely fictional setting, it might be difficult to invent a ton of different groups and the unit types for them? It's weird that Blizzard was able to come up with some many faction concepts for Warcraft (see this sub-thread about how WC3 was supposed to have six factions) but they're not really even able to think of four for Starcraft. Maybe it's just a creative blindspot / WC follows fantasy genres more than SC follows sci-fi genres.
Anyway it's just very interesting to me because IRL there are rarely three-sided conflicts. There might be a civil war situation where a country collapses into many warring gangs or factions, but you don't really see three bonafide countries / alliances go to war with each other.