Lan SERVER ? Really ?

They do. They just don't call it that.

I would be very much surprised if it was the case. Do you have anything to back that up ?

back it up? Well the server simulates the game. You can't play a game without simulating it.
It's like asking to back up the thesis that any car has an engine, just because most cars don't openly show you that engine.

the reason why PA has a very visible server component is because it works using the client-server concept. Supreme Commander in turn uses a p2p concept where every client is a server itself and they all talk to each other to make sure the players see the same thing. This does not scale with a lot of players, which is why PA uses client-server. In SupCom a 32 player game would be completely impossible for networking limitations.

Basically any game hides code that does what PA's server.exe does somewhere in the game's executable. It has to or there is no game.

^
What he said.

I never heard of any RTS who needs massively more ressources to play any AI offline Skirmish game. Hence my surprise.

well then we are back at our disagreement : that you know nothing about computers. ^^

......
why do you not understand that there is no difference?

the power-sink isn't the server-lan setup

that's for certain.

now if you look at simulating 12000 unit's projectiles, barrel angles, movements, collisions and pathfinding all cycled within a single second on multiple spherical magnet surface that are complicating the X.Y.Z movement of individual units through rotation upon itself and around the sun .......then maybe you've found your culprit.

no that does not run "well" on typically good hardware, you need to step it up a notch or tone down your ambitions, one or the other...

you probably also never heard of an rts with no map-size or unit count cap.

Supreme Commander needs more CPU if you play with a lot of AIs.

Also you are viewing it the wrong way: PA is not an RTS that needs more resources for offline play, it just needs substantially less resources for online play, since you can put the server workload somewhere else.
Now PA in general is pretty high on resource usage, so the client itself is already requiring a lot of cpu/ram, which is why it may seem weird to you.

It is, sorry to correct you. When I run in offline mode, I need 8+ GB of ram. When I run in online mode, I need 5 GB of ram. How do you explain that ? Because the lan server sucks up a lot of ressources. Hence my surprise when people tell me that all games do that. Age of Empire or Surpeme Commander didn't amp up their ressources use when you did singleplayer.

Somebody deal with this obtuseness... I tried.

Oh, that makes much more sense. Thanks for clarifying that.

TA also didn't use as many resources... because it was a game made more than 15 years ago.

PA simulates whole 3D worlds that units can freely move around on. There is a lot of computationally expensive stuff that PA has to do for this that was not required in older RTS. In 2006 Supreme Commander was "too much" for most computers as well

SupCom doesn't work the same way as PA.

Yeah thats pretty unique to PA as far as I know in terms of RTS. When you play online your computer doesn't do anything but provide input (keyboard, mouse) to the server and display the game on screen. Any processing is done on the server.
When playing offline your computer becomes the server and therefore you need much more processing power.

Then we are back at my first interrogation which was why is it online required. But I suppose every game dev chooses how to do it, etc etc...

And in all fairness it's a very good idea, except when you live in a country with very crap internet connections

Yes that is true - this concept needs a much stronger internet connection since all data has to be transferred - in other games the player's computers only exchange inputs from mouse and keyboard and each computer runs the whole game itself.
The downside is that once someone has a slow computer, everyone has to wait for him and he slows down the game for everyone.

But it is not required anymore. It's just that if you want to play offline you need to actually run the full game yourself Online play doesn't run the full game on your own computer.

avoid subquotes please.

Right, I understand that now. Thanks for clarifiying it for me