Opinions of RTS for LAN gaming

I am looking for a an RTS that is not laggy during LAN gaming. My group of friends have played Age of Mythology most recently and are looking for a different game that wont experience horrendous lag.

Others we are considering but have no experience with are

Batte for Middle Earth II

Rise of Legends

Command and Conquer: Generals

We are not full of High End gaming machines, so something that is P4 2.0 GHz 128 MB Video is probably best though a little more wouldnt hurt.

Thanks in advance for your opinions..........

Thanks for the input already.

A little more background. We are getting together for a once or twice a year (maybe more in the future) type frequency. We don't mind playing an "old" game, but would like it to be high quality from a gameplay standpoint. Equipment crushing graphics are not our thing. We want a game that plays well, will support 5-10 players on a LAN without much lag (preferably none). Our preferences are for fanstasy based games, but that is negotiable amonst the group.

I have not played any of the C&C games, so I would defer to others and thier experiences.

it sounds like exactly what me and my friends used to do all through out the year, we had our huge lan party over new years and our staple has long been a good RTS to keep us occupied for 4-5 hours at a time.

we have since moved apart and dont get together anymore so i can't comment on newer RTS's (Supreme Commander, Dawn of War, C&C 3 etc) but our staple for a long time was rise of nations. rise of legends is pretty, it plays well but might be more of a strain than you are looking for...again, it all depends on how much you turn down as with all games. Age of Empires 3 was a riot for us but it takes some time to get your 'home city' (as they are called) built up to take advantage of the cool add-ons (its kind of a cross between a traditional RTS and something like BF2 that tracks your progress across multiple sessions)

my vote would probably have to be rise of legends, it was really fun to play and i know it can be played on a 6600gt or a 6800gt as that is what i used to play it on.

oh and on the lag thing...that is all dependant on who is hosting the game, if the host only has 512MB of RAM you will lag when you get more units needing to be rendered...especially if you are rendering your game and the entire server. easy way around it is just install it on another computer an either run a dedicated server or join as an observer or even a player and just let them die / be conquered etc.

Starcraft, AoE2, Warcraft 3 + tower maps or Hero Seige maps

My mates and I play these and we lan every month or so. Soon to be moving into the same house so much more lanning time. But the older games always seem to be the best.

Although we are going to be playing Rainbow 6 Vegas Co-op. That is a sweet game but limited to 4 players.

Personally I love playing the tower maps of Warcraft. They keep you going for hours. AoE2 is great but playing against the computer can be hard. Especially when trying to get the right difficulty level so that simply entering their town with a peasant doesnt cause them to pack up and quit

Starcraft or AoE2 would be my choices.

If you've not tried Kohan 2, then please do so.

2004 release and it's sure to be at bargain bin prices now.

He was talking about LAN gaming though, so they probably won't play against AI.

Try Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, i played it over LAN with my friends alot, and it looks decent.

Wow all these excellent choices, but no one thought to mention Homeworld!?! I’ve played a lot of RTS games and back in the day when I had those kinds of comp spects, Homeworld, Homeworld 2 and Command and Conquer Generals where the games to play during a lan parties. Honestly, C&C3 will not run well with those systems. So, if you want a game that runs well on any system try Homeworld or C&C Generals. I used to play them on our old 56k connection without any problems, so ether should run very well on any lan network no problem.

Also lag is not associated with how well a computer can run a game, but rather how good a connection you can achieve across several systems. When a system is having trouble running a game on its own you get low frame rates. Although I have heard the term system lag time and again referring to low frame rate.