With an RTS, you can hide the lag. You let the game keep running, as if nothing has changed, run animations, let the user scroll and select units, and all that good stuff. Enemy units will act based on the last information they got, and most of the time, they won''t be visible to the other player anyway.

When you get the command, say, to run away, you make the animation of the object that ran ahead too far, run away faster than normal until it catches up to where it "should" be.

Volkers:

Hey, thanks a lot! Those links to the format info -- particularly the actions -- shed a lot of light on how I would handle messages (and more specifically, what messages I would need to include) I''ll probably start a simple chat/IM program tonight based off Johnnie''s Winsock Tutorial (in case anyone else is interested)