Let me translate what is written above: "proper 3D RTS" simply means 3D real time strategy. The fact was that RTS games that involved resource collection and technology development had already long since been established with Warcraft and also Starcraft at this point. When Relic Games and Sierra Stuidios decided to try their hands at the industry they made a game that was essentially the same thing but in 3D.
This game was epic in that nothing of this magnitude had ever been done before and it took place in the dark expanses of space, which is always terrifying - for many people that made it an even better project. Unfortunately, for most it was a terrible game.
The problem at the time, which would seem silly today is that the system requirements were out of this world at the time it was released in 1999. Basically, you needed to have a super powerful computer in order to play it and at the time yours truly did not have that.
Gigantic space battles with load of ships flying in this way and that which needed to return to motherships in order to refuel was just the thing of dreams back then and this is why we all bought the game and try as we may.... mostly we just thought it was a load a crap.
The problem was that you needed a Pentium III and 32 MB of RAM in order to do the minimum required graphics at the time - which seems completely absurd now when even if you guy a stock standard laptop you are going to have 40 times that amount of processing power. In 1999 however, the computer world was a totally different story.
This was honestly the first time in my life that I felt as though the gaming world and the computer hardware manufacturing world were connected in some sort of conspiratorial way. No one that i knew had a computer fast enough to play this game outside of a few ultra nerds and when we would see them play it on their machines, it blew our minds.
For the rest of us though, this game crawled. It was barely playable on a machine that would easily do anything that Starcraft wanted of us. This is including the Brood War expansion of Starcraft which had been released just half a year prior.
Homeworld wasn't, in its essence, so different from any of the RTS games that came prior to it other than the fact that it was so graphically demanding: You got resources, you built units, you attacked and defended.
But when it came time to actually locate these units they were contained on a 3 dimensional plane and this meant a lot of scrolling and then holding down CNTL to rotate the camera to actually find them.
It was fun, but on a machine like mine in 1999 that was probably worth about $600 at the time it meant that every time you rotated the camera to actually use the 3D aspects of the game..... it would crawl very slowly.
It was a fantastic game but i would only realize this many years later when technology caught up. The fact that this game was so demanding as far as computing power was concerned at the time is largely responsible for it not being an iconic game in the world of......well, anything really.
The most relevant thing that might have emerged from this game that most people would immediately recognize is an iconic song that ended up getting turned into a bunch of EDM music over the years.
The author of that music is named Paul Ruskay and he is just a musical genius in general.
Homeworld ended up getting load of accolades by professional press but that was always going to happen because if you had a good enough machine it was a fantastic game and still it to this day. However, if you were a gamer in the late 90's who purchased this game on minimum requirement specs (which is how we did things back then) you were sorely disappointed because the game was almost unplayable.
While I am sure the people at GamePro and Eurogamer had access to the latest machines in order to give the game a go those of us normal people in the normal world were subjected to a slow-moving mess that didn't hold our interest for very long.
Years later I would return to this game with a machine that was 20x as powerful as necessary to run it and it was an awesome spectacle. I'm not saying this game was bad when it was released because it clearly wasn't.... it was just far too demanding of the systems that 95% of us happened to have at the time.