Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows expands again on the Sword of the Stars series for the 4x space strategy game. This expansion brings a new race called Morrigi, nicknamed the “Crows” because of how the ships look bird-like and because of the nature of crows. Sadly, this expansion does little on improving some of the weaker elements found in the game. Naturally, I still was able to enjoy the nuances without the problems upsetting the apple cart.

The story has the Morrigi, an ancient race attracted by the immense battles going on from the other races. They were thought to be extinct but prove to be worrying to others in the galaxy. Like the other races in the game, the Morrigi have their own mode of propulsion and their own abilities on which they rely. The mode of transportation relies on a new drive called a Void Cutter. This gives the Morrigi the ability to move faster when grouped together, which is helpful when the fleets get larger toward the latter part of the game. The sandbox generator has the Morrigi available for play, but scenarios are lacking in this expansion compared to the Zuul in Born of Blood.

One thing that has changed and brings an interesting addition is having imperial and civilian populations. You’ll need to balance the two on each planet since the imperials focus on production and research while civilians focus on income and trade. You’ll have to have a healthy balance of the two since the civilian populations like to consume resources that your military will need to support your fleets.

Civilians play a big role now. They can become easily demoralized under a large number of conditions, so things can quickly get out of hand. For example, losing money will cause them to lose faith in your ability to rule. If things get out of whack badly, they might desert you altogether and join the first race that comes swinging by. This makes for some interesting changes in strategy since now players can just bring in a colony ship after clearing out what satellites that may be surrounding the independent planet and lay claim to it.

Diplomacy has been given a bit of a facelift in A Murder of Crows. Things like being good or bad have been shifted, so you now find out why you are those things with another race. This can give you a chance to make things a bit better or worse with that race. That doesn’t mean you lose that flavor of building massive fleets and beating the snot out of your opponent, though. Spies have been added so you can get some information on finding out what ship designs the opposition has, or you can plan your strategies a bit better.

A Murder of Crows comes with more modules and weapons you can research to your heart’s content. While lots of them are way cool to use, you can now also exchange projects with the other races. You’ll still have to research it, though, as they are only granting you access to their tech trees. This will help you get technologies that you may not be able to get in your on tech tree. This will keep multiplayer games limited as they won’t be able to toss out technologies to get favorable diplomatic brownie points and thus upsetting gameplay.

The interface still suffers from the same things that the original game and the first expansion failed to change. We still have no research prompting, which means that a couple of turns may go by while your researchers sit idle — unless you keep a careful eye on the research icon. Auto combats still give a lack of information. This can be a bit troubling if you have a small number of battles and don’t want to manually play through them. The distinct populations and morale checks put an added problem on the player as they’ll have to keep an eye out on each planet. That may not be a big problem with small galaxies, but big maps could be a time concern.

As before, Sword of the Stars is still impressive, with battles having those touches we all come to love when dealing with massive fleets charging in to wreak havoc as they lay waste to the opponents’ ships. The soundtrack still conveys a mood to the game — even if it’s not outstanding. Watching the Morrigi ships in action is quite impressive. And the cinematic feeling has you wanting to come back for more.

In closing, I want to extol that there are other space simulations out there, but Sword of the Stars and its expansions can stand head to toe with them all, and even though we have lingering problems with the game interface, we still enjoy playing this game. If you are into space simulations of this genre, give it a try and add it to your library of games.