You are still not answering my question. I originally ended my post with "Questions that could potentially lead to some answers, other than what are or aren't good examples." but ultimately deleted it as it is more passive aggressive than what is appropriate.
Perhaps I'm not making it clear, but to put it in the most impolite bluntly clear way possible:
"Unless Elemental is the most intensive RAM game ever made (for some strange reason), other companies had to deal with this as well and all of them so far (to the best of my knowledge, feel free to correct me here, the only case I know of are high resolution texture packs requiring 64bit system, which is really not the same) decided against it. Stardock is not an AAA developer and your games aren't groundbreaking from technical point of view. If companies "better" than yours don't see it worthy enough to do, the most obvious answers to "why Elemental?" are:
A: Stardock is leading the way here, all need to do it but for some reason (let's say scalability to current level gen of consoles) none had. Insert some PR talk about how Stardock is privately owned daring medium budget gaming company that can do what others can't.
B: Elemental is for some reason programmed or designed in a particularly inefficient manner and throwing more memory at the problem is the solution picked there.
When the obvious possibilities are either "they have great vision" or "they are incompetent" the more frequently correct one is clear. Or there is another explanation.
Which is why I think you should explain this more. Were we not on Fallen Enchantress beta forums where we all wish you to succeed but in some gaming "public" (r/gaming and so on) I'm reasonably sure the voice of the majority there would be pretty close to mine here: "Turn based strategy game like this to be the first one to demand 64-bit system? That is bizarre. What have they fucked up?"
Which I presume would be incorrect.
I'm going to stop posting in this thread unless I get a response so that I don't spam/derail it.
(Since you keep on bickering about examples: no, that is not a memory constraint in D3. That is a performance, efficient use of budget and mainly readability question. Blizzard games are designed for some time now to keep hardware requirements low and the gameplay readable. SC2 looks horrible from technical POV when compared to significantly older games like Company of Heroes, but having individually textured zerglings each with their own different model would be counterproductive. It needs to look like a zergling, players and viewers need to recognize it as such quickly and "everybody" should be able to play it. Same with D3 even though that is not designed to be an e-sports game. Long sword is a long sword, having many models for the same thing is useless and confusing from gameplay perspective. It should look like a long sword and telegraph what special ability it has if relevant. Hence it glows red when it has fire damage. And for example animating monk’s abilities with different weapons has been simply a budgetary decision as was stated long before release in their podcast as not worth it. Btw D3 takes around 900MB of RAM on my system. This is again irrelevant since I'm sure correct examples exist but you keep on bringing the specifics.)
Outside of visuals, there's nothing inherently more technically advanced about a first person shooter or an RPG versus a strategy game.
Most games would gain relatively little from more memory presently (though this is changing as texture sizes get larger so that even a handful of units start to use a lot of memory). Strategy games, however, have to keep an entire map in memory and keep track of all units at once.
In a first person shooter, the player may only "see" a handful of units and be viewing a tiny part of the map. RPG's can bring up loading screens to swap out one piece of a map for another. But strategy games can't. They have to keep it all in memory at all times. This limits the number of units and the size of the maps.
Suffice to say, the strategy games, particularly TBS games, are very memory hungry. The maps tend to be bigger, there tends to be more objects to deal with and there tends to be a lot more units. Those things require memory.
One of the reasons TBS games tend to look crummy (besides budget) is because the textures have to be smaller so that each unit uses less memory.
In FE, it's exacerbated because players can design their own units so you get a lot less memory sharing than you would otherwise get. Not to mention, all those champions running around who can be equipped with their own armor, weapons, etc.
Frankly, I'm kind of astounded that you don't see Fallen Enchantress as technically sophisticated. You're playing a game where the map is deformable, your champions and sovereign can be personally equipped in great deal and visually change on screen, every AI player's computations is threaded out to as many CPU cores as you have, you can design your own units right down to their hair -- in both male and female versions which means doubling not just the models but also the equipment. And you don't see how this is memory intensive?
Also, since you don't seem to be aware of it, Stardock was also the company that made the first 32-bit commercial game (Galactic Civilizations for OS/2). It was also the first company to release a commercial SVGA true color game (Avarice) -- the lead on that game went on to be the lead on the Age of Empires series. It was also the first company to release a retail game digitally at the same time (Galactic Civilizations for Windows). The art lead on the GalCiv aliens now works at Blizzard and was the lead character artist on Diablo 3. And lastly, Galactic Civilizations was the first commercial multithreaded game.
And why did Stardock do that? Because it was incompetent? No, because the game design required it. Huge maps with thousands of units require a lot of memory (that's why I needed OS/2 to do GalCiv -- I needed a multithreaded OS and I couldn't be limited to 640K if I wanted huge maps with thousands of units).
Hopefully, I've answered your questions (and anyone else wondering the same thing) as to what 64-bit DLC would make possible -- bigger maps supporting more units for starters.
