> So as much as this is a fascinating piece of history and an impressive technical solution to the constraints of the time, I think modern games ought to move past it.
But why? As far as I know mega-hits like Warcraft III and it's new, updated, version, "Warcraft III: Reforged" which came out 20 years later still use that technique.
The benefits do go well beyond being able to "send" hundreds of units across the wire: a deterministic game engine allows to create tiny replay files and, very importantly, allows to find and smash bugs way quicker.
Having the next game state being a deterministic function of the current game state + player inputs is great.
What would RTS games win by "moving past" that? To do what instead? How would you then implement the replay functionality? You'd also invariably run into a class of bugs which would be hard to reproduce but which would be trivial to reproduce using a deterministic engine.
From a latency point of view you're not gaining anything either: you need to receive the other player's units position anyway. So what's the difference between receiving the hundreds of unit's position or receiving the player input that created these unit's position? Just compute them, deterministically, as soon as you get the player's input.