Higher ping is a killer of performance in multiplayer

[Kristijonas]

Internet speed is not just mbps but also ping time. In games like this it is very important to have low latency because I guess there are thousands of packets going in and out every moment so if there's a delay of ~50ms between the packets, it will lead to a massively slower game. I noticed this when playing the game with European (I'm European) and South Americans. With Europeans the game is usually fast enough in multiplayer but with people living far away from Europe it's unbearable. PC speed didn't matter, I made sure everybody had fast PCs so it's not as important. I think it's easy to understand because even if we'd consider internet travels in a straight line at speed of light between Europe and South America, it would still take almost 100ms to travel back and forth. In most other games this isn't a problem (not sure why) but in this game that's a killer. With other European games light travels ~3ms back and forth so it's not a problem.
Question: Is it possible to optimize multiplayer to work faster with higher latencies?

[George Geczy]

Question: Is it possible to optimize multiplayer to work faster with higher latencies?

Unfortunately the Supreme Ruler engine uses Multiplayer based on Microsoft's DirectPlay, which is nowadays an old (and unsupported) technology. Among other things, the multiplayer is also "peer to peer", which introduces two issues:

1) Every player needs to have some level of communication with every other player. Even though there is a single "Host", which does take on the largest load, when a player does an action (say, move a unit), that is transmitted from that one player to every other player individually. This means, to some extent, that the "longest ping time" is *everybody's* ping time, since all other systems will eventually get too far ahead and will have to wait.

2) The slowest system and slowest connection in the game sets the standard for how fast the game will play, as everyone else will have to wait to stay in sync.

There are not easy technical solutions to these problems, and at present our updates are focussed on core engine improvements that apply to all game mades (single and multi).

-- George.

[Kristijonas]

Thank you for the reply, I understand it would be damn near impossible to fix this as it was just the way software worked back then and also how this game works. Every little detail needs to be shared between players and so latency is just inherently important I suppose.