Okay so I started a fun project on my own to attempt to create a tower defense game, and seeing how other tower defense games perform when many units spawn and move (e.g. via pathfinding and velocity), I see that their received network jumps above the target of 50 KB/s once many units have spawned (the received network fluctuates, lowering as the units get destroyed once reaching the destination or increasing once spawning and going their path).

This made me consider wanting to try out a different approach where I basically do all the pathfinding on the server and then offload the animation (linearvelocity) to all clients. I am aware that that clients should not be trusted and there should be regular sanity checks such as regularly verifying/validating information from the client to the server to prevent desynchronization, interpolate the positions and ensure clients do not provide far off information that doesn’t resemble that of other clients.

Now, my question here is whether I should offload the animation to recreate this network replication in order to increase the performance in first place, whether I should use something like zap/blink to further enhance the performance, and whether this system is reliable or has been proven to be reliable (and if there are any notable games having implemented this).

To be honest I have never really encountered a problem with too many units on the server-side as they get destroyed once they reach their destination and thus lowering the received network, but I was still wondering what a good practice for my use case would be.