How to play the riftborn?

[ltkrogoth]

So far I only played one short session with the riftborn. I love the story, the design and that you play them in a different way. Unfortunately I started right next to the Lumeris and their influence overrun me after 30 rounds from all directions.

How do you play the riftborn? Any hints on the strategy playing them?

- I used the time compression bubble at the beginning alot and used all my strategic ressources. The boost is immense, but I guess it would be wiser to spare it a little bit and use it when things get serious?
- Somehow I wasnt able to produce new troops. After colonizing my 2nd planet it told be I am short on troops. I produced them on my homeworld, but the Manpower never rose. Sometimes it went in one round from 0 to 80, just to drop the next round to 0 again. Is it a bug or did I miss anything? I was not building new ships neither was I under siege. Why did they disappeared again?
- Building new pops is very production intense, especially on the new planets. When is the best time to build more? I started with the drone network and went straight for new pops.
- What techs do you go for at the beginning?

Looking forward for some strategies and hints :)

[I Am Atomic!]

expand for sure, because they dont grow naturally its a good idea to intergrate lots of minors so they can boost your early game, dont forget to make use of the spaceports from lvling up your colonies to transport your pop between systems, and it helps to start with techs that let you colonise any high prod worlds + prod boosting improvements since you will building pop and manpower along with impovements and ships

speaking of ships, strategic resorces are your friends! with them you can unlock extra mod slots for your ships, making them signifigantly stronger. - if you have access to strategic resorces early on consider developing them asap so you can rush somone.

ofc any race can use these tips, but the spaceport/move pops around is crucial for riftborn because new worlds will have a hard time building pop, better to send them pop from already developed production centers that can easily rebuild the pop they send off.

[ltkrogoth]

Thank you for your feedback. I see my lack of competence here, because I never heard of the spaceport before :) That would really help me alot, I will check that out. Also the use of minors is a really good hint.

[Alien]

With the Riftborn you have to build the manpower yourself, it doesn't grow naturally.

[ltkrogoth]

@AlienSpectator: I tried to build it but somehow it didnt work. I selected the production, and in turn 1 it produced me 80 Manpower. Next round (i kept the production of manpower active) it dropped to 0. Next round it was on 80 again, round after 0... and so on. Seems like a bug to me. Or did i miss anything?

[I Am Atomic!]

i know manpower is distributed to everything that needs it, ships, other planets for example, it may be a bug, or it may simply be getting redistributed to ships before going to your planets. i havent tested it enough yet to be sure either way

[Astasia]

My advice is very different from Robo Gandhi's. To me it seemed the first few new pops in any system were very fast to construct, and because of the race's huge bonuses per pop I found all the other pops almost completely useless. The one use I did find for all the crappy minor pops that ended up in my empire was to convert them to manpower using chain gang, and if I didn't need any manpower I would "store" them in spaceports out of the way so I could maximize production on all my planets. I didn't see any reason to "grow" other pops, and the time spent building riftborn pops is well worth it due to their massive resource gains. You can also completely ignore all the food techs and just focus on industry and science, dust isn't an issue because they produce so much naturally, and they build so fast you don't need to worry about rushing things that often.

You will likely have to have several systems building manpower for a long time. Probably by the time you got around to it most of your fleets and systems were very low on manpower, so every bit you generate is being consumed to fill those empty pools and it will take a while before you start to build up a reserve.

[I Am Atomic!]

sure you CAN build some pops in 3-4 turns each, maybe even 2 turns if its a high prod world + compression singularity, but the trick to any 4x is to expand fast, wich means building scouts, defenders, colonyships, happyness buildings to offset expansion disaroval, and dust prod to pay for maintenance for growing fleets.

after all that then its fine to build pop, but if you sit on a just a small few systems building pop then your opponents will get more worlds and you will have less room to expand + the later you expand the longer it takes to get those new colonies to be productive.

minor races allow you to exploit a planets tile bonuses without the time delay of building pops, you dont want them everywhere ofc because riftborn pop get excellent bonuses, but that just means that once youve followed the previous steps you can focus building pop for awhile instead of improvements.

still thats just how i like to do it, astasia's method is nice for growing tall instead of wide, wich can be good for setting up to invade someone early.

[Astasia]

I mean, it's the opposite really. On endless you can "grow" a pop in like 20-30 turns using food (it would be faster with food buildings and such of course, but you don't want to build any of those), or you can build a riftborn pop in 1-3 turns, it's not until like 20 pops in a system that it slows down to like 4-5 turns per. You gain pop like 10 times faster, and you can build colony ships really quickly with all that industry, so it's extremely effective for playing wide and covering the map with your systems and pops. Buildings are almost trivial in comparison, you just spam ships and pops, the pops are so strong your systems become powerhouses. Later on you build the stuff that just multiplies that strength.

[Quinox]

The cost per Riftborn pop on a system increases for every pop you have / build there. Early colonies build at approximately the same speed as fully developed systems. The only advantage fully developed systems have are system improvement bonuses, and even then that's 1-2 turns benefit off about 5 turns, depending on game speed.

Don't even bother with spaceporting around Riftborn, the time save is minimal and utlimately useless. Just have the colony build Riftborn and use the surplus of Dust you should have been developing to buy system improvements, industry first, as needed.

Building Pop is basicallly the cornerstone of Riftborn at the moment. Each pop adds +5 Production, Science, and Dust, on top of any standard planetary and system bonuses. System improvements only do one of those and cost you dust to maintain. The only ones worth it are the +X per Pop, and only after you've built 5+ Riftborn or so.

Really, why pay for system improvements early on when just making more pop and colonizing is far more effective? The best way to go tall or wide with Riftborn is to build pop, research colonization tech, condense time on your systems, and run rampant over the galaxy.

Oddly enough the Fabricated Forces option might seem like a downside, but it's more of a side-grade for the Riftborn. You have to spend production time on it, but it gives you comparatively massive amounts of manpower for the military in a short time.

The only real hole they have is Influence, they just don't make very much of it at all. Thus they have issues wiht maintaining governmental laws. Not that any early laws are as extremely useful as Compression Singularity. Combat wise you can go make some upgraded Cipher / Rational-class with 5 Hyperium Engines and watch as they just tank anything for days, that 50% dodge rate is stupidly good. Gets around the naturally slow ship speed at the same time.