Great writeup! Vividly remember this being a thing especially in multiplayer. What was that janky match matching service, MSN something?
Also a really underrated game, the mechanics (line of sight over the horizon stuff) and isometric graphics were pretty cool for the time and it had a well developed story/campaign mode.
Btw, I recently did my first patches with ghidra. Is there any way to avoid jumping into a code cave by shifting all the instructions up then updating any statements referring to those memory locations? Seems like it should be simple enoigh in theory, but I didn't find an implementation on a cursory search. Could probably code up a plugin pretty easily.