When you are playing on detected servers with high network lag on an RTS game, the game will not stutter like it has low fps. commands will just be delayed. say your ping is 250 ms when you click a villager to move to position, you will feel like there is a slight delay before the villager starts moving, compare this with singleplayer. but when it comes to hardware lag, the game feels sluggish, command are not delayed but the whole game feels like its stuttering or sluggish.
Go host a game on the sever that’s furthest to your location add a password so people dont join then fill all player slots with bots 4v4 game. then once the game starts you will see what I’m talking about. feel how delayed your commands are. but guess what your clock is blue. aka your hardware is not lagging.
To put another example to the hardware lag it’s like imagine you fill a ludacrious sized map with units every tile filled with units on local skirmish. your game will probably feel laggy but commands are just not delayed, more like the frames per second are lower because the CPU can’t keep up with the calculation it has to deal with since there are so many units it has to calculate for. based on this I think all the lag I see is hardware lag from other people. not ping lag.
Now go Stress your gpu or cpu with a benchmark tool while you are in game with the cloeset server watch your clock turn red because your hardware is struggling because it’s being used elsewhere.
That is not how this game works, yellow clock ever since the beta and red clock were tied to the fps that you get, they changed the pattern since anniversary patch, it is now displaying yellow clock on high ping games, i can verify that every single game that i am in UK west server, brazil and india where i am +210 ping.
A friend in the usa with the same cpu gets blue clock while i get yellow clock in the same game even tho the rest of my hardware is better, i don’t really need more evidence cause the ping is the only real difference, he is -+100 ping lower than i am to those servers.
hardware better doesnt necessary mean its running at it’s intended performance. one would need monitoring tools to know
@JoinedBarley655 what you said is mostly correct and I’d add a few. this game was designed back in the days with dial up in mind. unless someone’s internet is incredibly bad it would not have internet lag.
however, it is known (and tested) that online game hosted with microsoft server introduce performance lag and causes fps drop. you can test this too, do a 300 vs 300 champion fight in single player with no lag, then do a 200 vs 200 champion battle with another person with good hardware and watch fps drop to 6fps.
most of the lag is introduced by AI units pathing, but online server also limits performance. sad state this game is in.
This issue really needs to be addressed. Me and my friends pretty much exclusively play 3v3 and 4v4 and I would say the lag makes like 25% of games unplayable and 50% of remaining games a pain… Certain units become worthless because you cannot control them which is extremely frustrating if I need those to counter. Playing against each other on proper region servers everything is fine. But ranked is almost always a mess…
Anyhow, we need to be able to at least select preferred server region to get more enjoyable games!
The problem is not with the server. The problem arises when your opponent has a low FPS. And the game is designed in such a way that if your opponent has 20 fps, then you will have exactly the same FPS blocking.
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Oh, if that is so then perhaps there should be a more strict benchmark test to unlock ranked games with larger teams. It is really hurting the enjoyment of the game having to roll the die each game to see if it will be playable or not depending on how much suffering other players are willing to put up with
As I know, game engine very old and fps depend from speed game (speed vilagers, production and etc) and this problem dont resolve 
I think so too, but then it will affect online players count. Usally, players, which play the game have low performance pc. But that problem realy annoyed, maybe developers find anything resolve…
Funny thing is: game with 8 people on 200 pop ran perfectly fine for me 15 years ago in Conquerors on a PC that scores in a benchmark only a few percent of what the average PC nowadays gets… They somehow screwed it up really hard…