> First, Widelands is a real-time game but with a slow pace, so relatively high latency is easy to tolerate. Second, the internet is simply more reliable today

> First, Widelands is a real-time game but with a slow pace, so relatively high latency is easy to tolerate. Second, the internet is simply more reliable today than it was 15 years ago, especially if the bandwidth that you use is small relative to the Mb/s connections that are common today. Exactly. TCP is fine if you can tolerate 3-5 round trip times' worth of latency. RTT to the other side of the world is ~135 milliseconds at the speed of light. That's roughly one second of latency for a less than optimal network connection. Probably just fine for an RTS game or a not quite real time MMO. It is not, however, good enough for fast paced FPS games, racing sims or (space) flight sims. They will keep on working better with UDP as long as there will be latency and packet loss in the Internet.