My bet is that they decided on Epistis after all because it'll give Riftborn more political variation at the beginning of the game, since Epistis are Ecologists whereas both Riftborn and Remnants are Industrialists. Their faction quest's evacuation path's last step also requires (or at least did previously) you to raise Ecologist popularity in your systems, which will be no doubt easier to do with guaranteed Ecologist pops. Riftborn in general seem like great for Ecologist minor faction focused play since their own pops have to be built manually, and last two Ecologist laws benefit from pop diversity.

Riftborn also seem to have gotten other unannounced changes as well. Tower of Temporal Paradox got its increasing Dust bonus / turn doubled, their two starting singularities got nerfed (increased cost) while all the other singularities got buffed heavily. I haven't played them in new patch yet and I'm not sure whether their new bonuses have wrong tooltips, but +25% Dust / Science / Influence on entire empire rather than just one system seems quite broken good, at least on paper and especially if they happen to stack. 

Also I'm not sure whether the bonus effect applies to Riftborn themselves always, or do they buff enemy empires if you put it on their systems, f.ex. does the time stop singularity which seems most useful to use on enemies now give them an empire wide +25% Influence buff as well?

Hi hera35,

I played it few days ago with the patch. The bonus is for the entire empire where the anomaly is deploy (I used it in multiplayer game on the empire of my friend). I found it a little strange when you have to use the last anomaly (stop all production of a system) on one of your system to get a +25% of influence in your empire, and so to give the bonus to an onther empire if you want to block him.

Regards,

Elphealer

It seems Riftboorn are not very popular fraction in MP(even less for now).

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