I recall that Supreme Commander used the same technique, a fully deterministic sim run in lockstep by all multiplayer peers. For it's era, it had very very high scale for an RTS game. (thousands of units and enormous game maps (the biggest of which took 15+ mins to send naval units across)
If I recall correctly, there was another benefit. You could save a multiplayer game by just having all peers dump the current game state to disk and resume it later. Since a big SupCom game could take HOURS this was a great feature.
However, there were 2 issues with SupCom's implementation.
1. It wasn't perfect and sometime hours deep into a big game, you would get a "desync" error and it was unrecoverable.
2. Everyone needed to be able to run the sim at the same speed. So the game could only progress at the speed of the slowest player's computer. And SupCom was VERY compute intensive.
If I recall correctly, there was another benefit. You could save a multiplayer game by just having all peers dump the current game state to disk and resume it later. Since a big SupCom game could take HOURS this was a great feature.
However, there were 2 issues with SupCom's implementation.
1. It wasn't perfect and sometime hours deep into a big game, you would get a "desync" error and it was unrecoverable.
2. Everyone needed to be able to run the sim at the same speed. So the game could only progress at the speed of the slowest player's computer. And SupCom was VERY compute intensive.