This will date me a bit but I got my first PC in high school and this game was bundled up with it.
Full disclosure: I'm not sure if this is a fair score to give it because I've hardly played any other RTS games due to being utterly hopeless at them. Nevertheless, I know I enjoyed my time playing the game; the campaign mode was great, featuring interesting maps and varied objectives, and the core gameplay was quite easy to get into even for an RTS novice like myself. Some minus points would be the lack of anything really distinctive that sets the civilizations apart from each other, and some instances of 'cheating' AI (enemy archers are able to shoot at you while walking away from you, something that a human player doesn't seem to be able to do!)
Full disclosure: I'm not sure if this is a fair score to give it because I've hardly played any other RTS games due to being utterly hopeless at them. Nevertheless, I know I enjoyed my time playing the game; the campaign mode was great, featuring interesting maps and varied objectives, and the core gameplay was quite easy to get into even for an RTS novice like myself. Some minus points would be the lack of anything really distinctive that sets the civilizations apart from each other, and some instances of 'cheating' AI (enemy archers are able to shoot at you while walking away from you, something that a human player doesn't seem to be able to do!)