> in practice it doesn’t work with a large number (read: greater than 2) of clients I'm not sure I agree with that. Pretty much all real-time strategy games us

> in practice it doesn’t work with a large number (read: greater than 2) of clients I'm not sure I agree with that. Pretty much all real-time strategy games use this sort of lockstep simulation, and many are perfectly playable with 8-12 players. There are various techniques for hiding some of the latency (making it less obvious). For example, for an RTS game if you issue a move command to a unit, you might locally play an acknowledgement sound immediately and animate the unit starting to turn towards the destination even before it actually starts moving. It's true that one player with particularly bad latency can ruin the latency for everyone. But the same is true even with just 2 players. It's also worth noting that a lockstep simulation is probably not suitable for games where immediate feedback on player actions is required/desirable (e.g. a fast-paced FPS), due to the inherent extra latency of having to synchronise player actions to all clients before actually simulating them.