Hah, same here 9 or 10 years ago. University of Kansas recommended it for their intro to software engineering class (I think) game project. My project team created a shitty RTS that used pirated starcraft sprites. All I remember was that implementing that fog of war was a CPU hog.
Not sure if it has support for shaders but fog of war seems like an easy thing to parallelise with textures and whatnot