Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows Review

Game: Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows

Platform: PC

Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive

Developer: Kerberos Productions

ESRB: Everyone 10+

Genre: 4X

Players: 8

What's Hot: Somehow, even more unique items to research; the new race provides more than just a new face to work with; goes beyond the basics by overhauling or trimming up a large number of core gameplay elements for the series.

What's Not: Sudden balance and gameplay changes may be a bit of a surprise at first for fans – new players may also find the morale system initially frustrating to deal with. Doesn’t come with a 36-hour day for more play-time

In the black, cold depths of space, an ancient race stirs uneasily. It notices the stumbling movements of the younger, newer empires that have risen to power in the galaxy. Blind, arrogant, single-minded, and uncaring of where they trespass, these empires openly defile the ancient’s relics in search of new cudgels to wield in their pathetic wars to gain dominance over the others. This race, calling itself the “Morrigi”, has seen enough. They intend to restore the glory of their long-dead empire, and to teach the newcomers a lesson about how war should be fought.

Opening with a dramatic introduction to its new featured race, A Murder of Crows is the latest expansion pack for Kerberos Productions’ hit 4X space strategy series, Sword of the Stars. Aside from the aforementioned race (complete with a unique approach to engine technology), the promoted new features include a horde of new weapons, ship modules, and other cool gizmos to research, expanded communication and diplomacy options, and tons of little tweaks to the economy, colony management, and combat system

The first thing fans will notice are the changes made to the colony interface. Planets are now split up between “Imperial” citizens, and basic civilians – these affect a planet’s overall production and income respectively. A new dialogue has been provided to track these population levels in more detail, as well as a new “morale” ranking. While a planet’s Imperial population will keep smiling throughout the worst catastrophes, civilians in contrast are finicky and will start to get unhappy if any number of factors occurs, such as your empire going bankrupt, or a planet’s population limit being hit.

To keep people happy, this population limit can be increased, with the negative effect of slowly consuming a planet’s resources each turn. This presents an interesting management challenge until morale can be properly controlled by mid-game technology research (such as through the new “Police Cutter” ships), but it also rebalances the game by discouraging players from plunging their empire deep in the hole with massed ship build-ups – something that was easy to do with minimal repercussion previously. Just be careful, as planets that have extremely low morale will revolt and declare independence, forcing you to re-capture them again.

The expansion also enhances your ability to interact with other races – something I’ve given the series criticism for in the past. While the game still doesn’t quite provide the range in-depth diplomatic facilities as Galactic Civilizations 2, it’s now possible to send the AI-controlled races requests for their opinion of you – a feature that is much more useful than the basic “warmer / cooler” relationship arrow the game previously relied on for gauging if a given AI player would be open to diplomacy or not. Spies are also now in the game, and can be used to collect a lot of interesting data – such as a player’s overall tech tree, or their event notifications for the last five turns.

Most interesting however is the fact that the developer has finally conceded a little on its stance to keep each player’s randomized tech tree unique. You can now offer to trade certain research projects with other players, but with some interesting limitations – primarily, being able to only exchange certain projects (depending on a number of factors) stops one player from “mass dumping” a whole bunch of unfamiliar tech onto another in an unbalancing, unrealistic way. Furthermore, trading the tech doesn’t actually give the other player the ability to ‘use’ it right away, only the option to research it themselves. And no, you can’t do something silly like give the Human’s “Node Drive” technology to the Liir – each propulsion type is still strictly race-specific.

Much like how Born of Blood introduced the “Zuul”, this latest expansion puts forth equal effort into presenting the new “Morrigi” race. The series has always given special focus on keeping each race’s mode of travel unique, and the Morrigi are no exception. The new race moves through the galaxy using a “swarm” or “flock” theory – while a single ship can travel to any system in range within a decent amount of time, results are best obtained when you pile a whole bunch of ships into a single fleet, and combine them with the new “Gravboat” hulls (which cause friendly ships in a fleet to go much faster, and enemy ships in combat to go slower when deployed).

Aesthetic-wise, I’m also happy to say that the art team behind the game haa pulled off some amazing visuals yet again with the new race. The Morrigi ships have a distinctly elegant, bird-like appearance and serve as an exact contrast to the Zuul’s patchwork, crude (yet artistically interesting) designs, but a really cool touch to watch for is how they transform during a fight. When enemy ships come in range, pylons and armor plates sweep back and expose a vessel’s gun ports, setting it into a sort of “combat mode”. This is a new kind of animation I’ve not previously seen with the series, and I really love the extra touch. This race also pairs well with the new beam lasers and “Drone” technology, turning combat scenes into something I’d expect to see out of Babylon 5.

While I’ve commented on some of the most significant new features that contribute to the gameplay experience, there are still a lot of little changes to discover in this expansion that I won’t cover for the sake of brevity – such as the completely new random encounters, the combat system improvements (including the ability to force an enemy to surrender his colony to you without firing a shot, once you’ve sufficiently researched their culture), and even the addition of a special “Q-Ship” freighter that can be built, for those who like exploiting the game’s trade route options but have problems with raiding parties.

Despite these enhancements, there are still a few areas for improvement. One thing that stands out is the new “morale” system – the only way I could find to view a planet’s morale was by going to each planet and clicking the special population icon – a somewhat tedious process late-game when it would be much easier to compile this information into the at-a-glance “Colony Overview” list already built into the interface. And while the game’s combat engine delivers some of the best graphics and animations I’ve seen in any recent 4X game, I still can’t help but crave even more detail, such as more complex damage scarring on a ship’s hull, or visible maneuvering thrusters.

These are minor complaints; Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows is what the de-facto sci-fi 4X experience is all about and while there should be no question that any existing fan should absolutely pick this up, there’s also more than enough here to interest newcomers as well. Just be prepared – the fact that I’m writing this at four in the morning while trying to decide if I really should hit that “End Turn” button in the game window one more time, or just go to bed is evidence of how easily this game can destroy your sleep-cycle, social life, and any other practices you might happen to care about which don’t involve playing it.

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