Hello everyone,

I've been playing around with the riftborn for a bit today attempting to utilize the strategy of sending pops around from "builder" planets since the cost of building each pop increases with how many you currently have.  I have found the whole setup to be painfully slow and was wondering if they have a long ramp up time from your experiences?  Do they pick up late game as a dominant force in a worthwhile manner?

From my experience (which is not uhhh... considerable... [having trouble on Hard difficulty lmao]), the thing to do with riftborn is find that horrible system with 3 lava and 2 ash planets that nobody wants and fill it full of riftborn. That will be an industry powerhouse which can mass produce ships in moments. For population, make sure that your builder system isn't one full of Ice planets, since there's next to no production there and building riftborn will be slow even if there aren't many of them there.

Riftborn ramp up quickly if you're able to set up the right sort of feeder system: my fastest science victory (turn 73 on normal speed) was with the Riftborn, and while that has a lot to do with the buggy behavior of one of their singularities, it also owes itself to having multiple systems fully developed by around turn 50, something that's at least as good as most of the other factions. The key point is to have zero Riftborn and at least 50 industry in each feeder system: this lets you build one Riftborn population per turn. Industry doesn't overflow in the same way when building Riftborn as it does with system improvements (if it does at all) and so having 50 industry is very important. You'll build population half as fast with 49.

It can be tricky to hit 50 industry with zero Riftborn population, especially since you want to develop your feeder systems to the point that they can start exporting as quickly as you can. I've found two approaches that work well. The first is to use non-RIftborn population. Minor faction home systems in particular make great feeders, and you'll want to prioritize assimilating a few for that reason. The second is build an outpost on a Fertile/Temperate planet and speed up its conversion to a colony by spending strategic resources (while it takes 640 industry to build a colony on most such planets, converting an outpost to a colony takes 300 regardless of planet type, so this doesn't take much longer than colonizing a lava planet in a new system). Build Xeno-Industrial Infrastructure in your new colony and the +30 industry/turn that it gives you makes hitting the target of 50 very easy.