[Emjayen]

It is, in fact, inherent to this model. While there will be some tolerance threshold as to how far behind in the simulation a machine may fall, it still must be rather conservative (generally a few seconds), as elsewise the context (state-) sensitive inputs start frequently failing -- if I issue a command given at world-state time t, will it be meaningful/valid at state t2? The answer is where you get your threshold and it's always just a conservative approximation.

[reitzensteinm]

If it's not valid, just throw it out!

I've built and licensed a time traveling variant of this model (GGPO style) and spent years with thousands of concurrent users playing my games. And they operated just as I describe.

Company of Heroes is more of a traditional AoE style and will happily queue up unit orders for a minute or more while it attempts to reconnect or catch up.

[hot_gril]

You could probably build something better than what the AoE2 remake has now. I don't know if it'd be viable in 1998, though. Wasn't like today's constantly self-updating games; each patch risked fragmenting the community, and they only released like 2 patches across 15 years of activity. They chose something simple that'd work well enough without having to tweak it. And old PC specs, and no dedicated servers. You said it's better to disadvantage laggers than to punish everyone, but that requires some balancing to ensure it's fair enough. AoE model is always fair and can be lag-free.

Yes it relies on the players trusting each other a little to avoid extreme lag, but there are plenty of ways to ruin this kind of game besides lagging. It's not like CoD where a few useless teammates won't make a big difference, while it didn't have automated ranked play like Csgo. (but the recent DE remake does, and yes it needs better netcode)

Time-traveling netcode... I know Slippi does this, and it works great.

[Emjayen]

Are these players interacting in any way? If they aren't then it could be more tolerable, but one player being more than several seconds behind others is going to lead to a rather undesirable experience, especially in the middle of a battle (and having most of their commands dropped due to being invalid equally so)

[reitzensteinm]

Giving the undesirable experience to one player is strictly superior to giving it to all of them.

There just aren't many modern multiplayer games where slow players can negatively impact the experience of others, and that's because the industry has learned how terrible the experience is.

And that's for players playing in good faith on bad connections - abuse by inducing latency was a big thing in the past. Think a player that runs out the clock when they're a move away from being checkmated.

Basically the only time you'd ever want to operate the system to pause if a player fell behind is during a tournament, where fairness is more important than player experience and they know that going in. And even that, IMO, is questionable.

[Emjayen]

I'm of the opinion that it's an acceptable concession that a brief pause occurs in gameplay to permit another player to recover from transient issues (network hiccups, brief machine resource starvation, or generally: stalling) in favor of fairness rather than punishing the player too harshly for factors that are frequently out of their control.

Consider for instance the situation where-in one player's simulation enters the spiral-of-death, under the policy that you're proposing this player is effectively removed from the game; I would say this is a substantially worse trade-off -- I know that I would personally prefer some mild annoyance of brief pausing as opposed to a player leaving the game (and in session-based games, as RTS's generally are, a team-mate leaving often ruins the entire game)

Abuse is indeed a problem that most games I've seen of this nature don't address, and while there's no perfect solution, it can be quite effectively curtailed. In the systems I've designed, the basic principle is that each participating player has an allocated amount of wait time which serves as a quota that is charged while-ever the game can progress/run, but cannot, due to them being in a wait-state (connecting/loading/reconnecting/stalling/explicit pausing/whatever). There's some extra logic for handling the oscillation of wait-state.

[reitzensteinm]

The spiral of death trade-off does not happen as you describe.

While a client is catching up, you run the sim in a loop and don't render the game.

The deterministic simulation code is only a small part of the overall game logic, and you can run it much faster than real time.

If a client is slow enough to genuinely experience a spiral of death, the game will not be playable for them, and "mild annoyance of brief pausing" is not remotely what the other players will experience if they're forced to stay in sync.

Wait time is the common solution in older games to prevent abuse, yes. But it doesn't prevent somebody with high ping making a game run at half speed.

Go play Company of Heroes 2 with a packet loss simulator. Even as the bad client, it's totally playable. For everyone else, it's silky smooth.

I don't think you'll come back and tell me you prefer the implementation in AoE II Definitive Edition.

[Emjayen]

The simulation is, rather obviously, what's being referred to with the spiral-of-death -- it's not unusual for instance in Age of Empires II to encounter transient periods where-in steps take an order of magnitude or more than the period they're simulating on less-capable machines (due to some O(n*n)'s in the AI system).

In the end this is still a decision regarding how to handle player's falling behind; too far and they're effectively taken out of the game as they're no longer interacting within a sufficient approximation of the current state.

Under what design is "high ping" going to cause the game to run at lower "speed"? The only possibility I can see is where-in the turn period is, for some bizarre reason, also the granularity of the simulation step and you're also adapting the turn based on player latency (in aid of fairness, usually)

Having implemented such a system myself, a few times now, it has in practice performed sufficiently well.

DE is garbage in general so it's not really a fair comparison.