Excellent 4X title. Gameplay is neat, focusing is on strategy and battles. No more space Sim City, as sometimes big games of MOO2 turned into. Micro-management is limited to ship design and fleet battles (if you want). BoB (and SotS) sport a quite good AI, it reacts to your moves in a sensible manner and even sometimes is able to surprise you.

Before I get into the meat of the review, how many games can you name off where the dev team never spent time in the forums? or never released a patch for a game? or took flagrant bugs and called them "Content"?

I can name a few. Specifically, Fable: The Lost chapters, Rome: Total War, Painkiller... the list goes on. All of them are fantastic games, but the dev team does not give a rats ass about the players.

How would you like a chance to play a great game, and still be able to talk with the Great and Powerful Oz? I talk with the CEO of Kerberos on almost a daily basis over Xfire!

The best way to describe a game is to compare it to games similar to it. So I will compare it with Rome: Total War, and Galactic Civilizations 2.

The game is a 4X game by its very nature. with five races, all of which unique. This already sets it apart from Both RTW and GC2, because there are comparatively few races to play, but all of them are significantly different. (RTW has different factions, but they all move and act, in essence, the same. GC2 has no difference between any of its races.)

The galaxy itself, is fully 3d. Again, set apart from GC2 and RTW. The galaxy comes in several shapes, and new galaxy shapes are released occasionally with content updates.

The Tech tree is dynamic instead of the standard static trees found in most games. You never have the same game twice, because sometimes your scientists are obsessed with ballistics research and find beam weapons to be nothing more then science fiction!

What sets the game apart for me are the random encounters. While not nearly as varied or diverse as GC:2, All of them involve interaction on a very real level, and some of them give you the choice of destroying them... or disabling for your scientists to mull over. Some make you rub your hands together in diabolical glee, others make you scream in terror.

The new communication system is very well implemented as well, allowing you to point out to all your allies a specific world to conquer, scout, defend or destroy during the game.

Excitement! Adventure! Fresh Fruit! All can be yours in Sword of the Stars: Born of Blood!

Having played Born of Blood for a few days now, I must say that I am very happy with it. None of the new systems confuse me, none of the interface or execution is clunky.

I, personally, have fallen in love with some of the new weaponry. Nothing is cooler than seeing an incoming swarm of destroyers against your group of Corrosive Missile fitted cruisers, then having a wall of green clouds light up the space between you and them, and watching their ships burn inside of them! Except maybe the Node Cannon. But you'll have to see that to believe it.

Sword of the Stars: Born of Blood is an expansion in the truest sense of the word. While retaining the gameplay and spirit of the original release, it stretches the boundaries of every aspect in the game. New technologies, new ship sections, new map types, new scenarios, new encounters, new ways to look at and interpret the game world around you, and, of course, the Zuul. If you already own and enjoy Sword of the Stars, there is no question that Born of Blood will improve an already engrossing gaming experience. If you’ve never tried Sword of the Stars, or have been on the fence over it, Born of Blood is definitely a good reason to reconsider.

This is what happens when the Developer listens to the players, Improvements all round, another race, more Techs, and more Complexity. All in all this expansion makes a good game better. The only thing missing now is a story based campaign that takes place over several missions.
I would point out that there has been many problems with installing this (the GG version) with some other copies, but all the solutions are listed on the Forums. As a rule Re-download and run the master Directx installer from Microsoft and patch your SOTS to 1.2.2 before you install the expansion and you should not have any problems.