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.