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Game Designer, Artist, Renaissance Man.
The Command & Conquer approach (used by them and some others in the era of gold masters) was to release expansions to the game that incorporated the balance and other fixes as part of the release cycle of the game. In those days they didn't do independent patches because of the logistical complexity. It was an entirely different ecosystem before the Internet was common-place.
No, most games don't do it this way now. When I created this type of networking in 1994 it was to solve the particular problem of lots of units and low bandwidth. Now where bandwidth is much less consideration games typically use an authoritative server (even if that server is a 'headless' process that runs on a machine with a client). All clients send turns to the server and it sends out the authoritative results to all the clients. Unreal and Unity both have some documentation I believe on how their networking works at the high level - they are really adequate for most cases.
LAN times were typically 14 to 20 msec ping on our blazing fast 10Mbits office lan at Ensemble Studios.
Human cognitive reaction times are a lot mroe latent than connections are now. The quality of play percieved by the players in the studies I did back in the day was much more about consistency of responsiveness and not that direct number of milliseconds. Best possible Human reaction time for cognitive tasks is still around 250msec for most players - it would be great to see updated information for tournament players (who are a different class of player) on what their actual perception-to-action time is in their favorite games. AOK and beyond code used an adaptive scaling system to go faster when the network would reliably move packets more quickly - so it would auto-adjust to 'lan speed' (actually a combination of the best render speed of the slowest PC plus an estimate of the round-trip latency). Also - the command confirmation is not waiting for RT latency - you are getting confirmation when the command goes into the local buffer - 'command accepted' - once that happens it is going to execute so you get the confirm bark sound from the unit or building queue - or the movement arrow triggers. The games actually do their command simultaneously when all machines are executing the turn.
People played lan games all the time with very low latency - I actually had to patch the code specially for the exhibition match at the AOK ReleaseToManufacture party because the Lan they were using had <1 msec latency - we had never had close to that even in our office so my code didn't handle it well and performed poorly on that optimal network.
There were a lot of extra checks and code involved in the synchronized RNG - the results were loggable (to track down sync failures) for instance so bloating that up with every random fire flicker from a burning castle would have been crazy.
My personal favorite. !14 !14 !14
(Original author here) - here was a really hard-to-find bug - in some instances more than one quantity of fish could be placed in the same location - that meant the game would work fine until someone fished that same fish the second time and the fishing boats would diverge in the different simulations. The world sync check only counted the tile contents so we didn't see it. - There were actually two RNG's in the game, one was synchronized with the same start seed on all machines (basically the same random pool) for combat and whatnot - the other was unsynchronized and used for animation variance, etc -things that weren't gameplay related. Not knowing when to use one of these specifically (e.g. animals facing seems like animation but definitely affected gameplay if they could be hunted) could alter the code path and cause an out-of-sync condition.
(Author of the original article here) It was really pretty naive - nobody would plan for an RTS now without planning a series of patches to do the inevitable adjustments. Even for AOK we planned to patch and adjust. The 'general argument' was a MS publisher stance as quoted by Matt Pritchard - to do a patch in those days through the MS system meant a lengthy and expensive full test process, rollout, creation of a patch system, etc - so it was something you planned and budgeted for. The concept of 'day-one-patch' would have been pretty horrific. Patching is now something you integrate, plan for and expect - because we aren't shipping on gold masters to a printing company.