In short, build a prosperous city, feed the peasants well and tax them moderately while trying to keep your rating up.  If you make your people unhappy they will ultimately leave, bringing your economy to a halt.  No workers means no army.  You get the idea.

You can relive four historic campaigns as Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the Sultan of Syria.  You can also conquer the Crusader Trail.  There are 50 linked skirmish missions, each one more challenging than the next.  You can storm the enemy with many different units.  Knights, archers, and swordsman, to name a few, over 25 in all.

Even if combat is really not your style, you can play in a peaceful castle builder mode.  Here you can build to your hearts content.

The tutorials are quite nice and even the manual suggests you can skip some parts that you can later find on your own during the game.  The way the game progresses is also quite nice.  As the game progresses it definitely gets harder, but you learn as you go.  What this means is that you do not need to know every aspect of the game to get going.  You will do just fine learning as you go.  Very Nice!

All in all SC is a solid game whether you are a castle sim fan, or RTS fan.  Taking place in a barren desert is a nice twist and makes the player go for some other strategy that he may not be used to while playing similar games where resources are plentiful.  The developers did a nice job of taking some un-needed micro management out of the picture, which make the game even better. Nice job Firefly.

Gameplay: 8)
Overall pretty decent, but if you loved Age of Empires, this felt a bit limited.

Graphics: 8 
Not exactly stunning, but the animations were quite good.

Sound: 8
Sound effects were decent, monologs could use a bit of work.

Difficulty: Easy to Hard
Starts out easy but can get pretty tough.  Internet play will prove the toughest of opponents will prevail.

Concept: 7 
nothing new here, but trying to forage for food in the desert can be a bit difficult., though may not be the freshest of ides, still fun to play.

Multiplayer: 9

Set up on a LAN was easy and games can be found at Gamespy Arcade.  Personally I am not a huge fan of Gamespy because of all the pop- ups and would have liked to see the developers host their own games.  Other than that, not bad at all.

Overall: 8
Many hours of gameplay here, and multiplayer adds all kinds of re-playability.