The cheesecake is pure advertisement, nothing to do with game.
Im having a good time with it so far. You build up your cities and armies, ally with other players and/or wage war against them.
The combat is completely abstract and the game merely compares the forces and gives you the casualty/victory report.
You build farms, lumber mills, stone quarries, and Iron mines. The resources trickle in. After a week I gain 14k food; 32k wood ; 27k stone and 15k iron per hour.
Build Barracks, Academies, Warehouses, Housing and city defenses (traps, guard towers, catapults) each building can be advanced to level 10.
Building structures or learning techs takes between >5min to 36 hrs (level 8+ walls)
You get a week to build, then you and other players can attack each other directly - successfully attacking another city means you loot his resources.
Otherwise you can attack NPC cities. Taking over a city has lots of restrictions, and is done only rarely.
Its more like a facebook game (ie mob wars) than a RPG.
Hope this helps.