Tips for Riftborn?

[Red Destiny]

I can steamroll (Endless difficulty) Cravers 1v1 just fine with Vodyani, but I am struggling to even hold ground as Riftborn.

Issues:
1) I can only have 2 colonies at a time (Homeworld + 1 more). Cravers appear to have far more.
2) Population requires industry to grow (pro and con).

Any tips on how I can succeed with Riftborn? The Cravers are consistently pulling double my score and I just can't win against them.

[JH]

Where's that "only have 2 colonies at a time" coming from, I wonder? Just build more colony ships. As for where to settle, it's round the other way to the normal factions. You want all those harsh and horrible planets where normal life struggles to survive. Settle a lava world for example, and your Riftborn will be built super quick.

[Red Destiny]

Oh it's due to the Colony Expansion Disapproval. It's in the F1 screen at the bottom left. If I create more than a single additional colony, I get hit with a big disapproval bonus.

Also, ironically, these harsh planets contribute to disapproval, despite being a planet devoid of organic life, and thus more suitable for Riftborn, yet makes them unhappy for some reason.

Then I get perks that make organic life happy which then makes my Riftborn happy, despite my Riftborn being uncomfortable around organic life.

Probably due to dev constraints, this can't be completely redressed from the top-down, but it does limit Riftborn gameplay.

[JH]

Sounds like a tiny map? All the happiness things work the same for Riftborn except for the planets. They still show the usual planet disapproval on the tooltip, which makes it look like the harsh planets are no good. What happens is you get a +20 on sterile as part of the faction traits which makes up for the planet unhappiness. Watch out for bad anomalies though.

[Apheirox]

Hah, Riftborn are incredibly strong. If you are familiar with Endless Space 1's Sower faction they are essentially the new version of them and should be played mostly the same way.

Expand very aggressively from early on, lots and lots of Geist colony ships. Settle primarily Lave and Ash worlds. Because your Outposts require Production instead of Food and are not dependent on supporting Food ships from your homeworld, Riftborn can expand much, much faster than any other faction so long as there are these high production worlds available to settle. Again, since no support from homeworld is required you can even pull stunts such as outfitting a colonizer with several engines to create a very fast ship then run it to a completely different part of the galaxy and establish a functional and powerful settlement very easily. No other faction can do this as easily, not even Lumeris.

The way to win as Riftborn very much involves getting these high production systems settled. Since other factions can't even settle Lava and Ash early on there are good chances you'll be able to do so.

There are even ways to [ab]use game mechanics that will make them outright unfair: Once you have level 2 System Development and can transport population between worlds you can remove all Riftborn from a planet. This will cause new Riftborn population to cost only 50 production. You can then use this world (which you can fully populate with non-Riftborn populations) to produce Riftborn workers very inexpensively for other nearby worlds.

Originally posted by Red Destiny:

Also, ironically, these harsh planets contribute to disapproval, despite being a planet devoid of organic life, and thus more suitable for Riftborn, yet makes them unhappy for some reason.

Then I get perks that make organic life happy which then makes my Riftborn happy, despite my Riftborn being uncomfortable around organic life.

No, that's not correct. You get +20 extra approval on Sterile worlds. No planet produces more than 20 disapproval when colonized. Thus, so long as you settle only Sterile worlds, your approval level will always be better than what the organic factions that settle mostly Fertile worlds have to deal with. The Biophobe trait is supposed to be a malus at -5 points but it's actually mostly an advantage, and certainly is so for Riftborn. Even their disadvantages are advantages...