[skittlebrau]

You can run your updates faster than the slowest ping. You just need more command latency. So when you, say, command a unit to move somewhere, there's an agreed-upon future time when that's going to happen. This time has to be longer than it takes for the command to get to everyone. If it's not, then you stall. If command latency is very high, the game feels very unresponsive though (and tricks of showing local/visual-only confirmation of your commands only goes so far).

You can't run updates any faster than the slowest machine can run them, though, or again you stall. This was a bigger problem on Age 1 and 2 where render rate and update rate were linked. On Age of Mythology and beyond, the render rate was decoupled from the update rate, so updates could happen more slowly while animations and so forth could still look smooth via interpolation.

[a_t48]

I used command latency to do multiplayer for an RTS\Tower Defense on mobile (https://youtu.be/tRAdI0x7L7c?t=300 - think Battle Cats but in 3D). All units were AI controlled, and placing a unit meant it had to go through a spawn animation. It meant the game worked with ping times in the range of seconds. Add in some positional interpolation and events for when each unit changed targets and it worked great.