It was definitely ahead of its time, but it had a lot of flaws which doomed it. "Play to crush" sounds good on paper, but the crushed quit the game and it was far too easy to exploit / steamroll cities that took massive time and resource investments. Once your city died, it was nearly impossible to come back, which is why most servers became ghost town in a matter of a months after launch.
The game also had lots of races and class possibilities, including secret ones that require runes (like blademasters), but the XP nerfs for certain races and other penalties made it feasible to only go with a few options.
And ya, game and computer stability. 400+ people sieges became laggy slideshows and of course, sb.exe bullshit