Dragar wrote:

Riftborn population is supposed to be more costly to build as you have more pops. In practice, as this is a system effect, all it takes is one low-population with a good industry to churn out population and ship them all over the empire. This rather invalidates one of their main handicaps - and ruins their main theme of low-population worlds, which in turn makes their terraforming rather unnattractive. 

Which is functionally the same problem as Food has, whch is why I wanted percentage Food consumption for such a long time. I really don't think any of us want to deal with the horrors of Industry Consumption as a concept though.

Makes me wonder what would happen if they had Dust upkeep instead of Food consumption, as if they weren't like buildings enough already.

I had taken a long break from Endless space 2 and have got back into it recently. I started a multiplayer game, 2 humans and 8 A.I, where I played United Empire and my friend chose the riftborn. Now I was aware from when I was previously playing, several months ago, that the riftborn were pretty powerful but I had hope some balance changes might have ocurred in the intervening time. 

Within about 40 turns it was clear to me that wasn't the case (unless they have been nerfed and then buffed). I didnt have a great start to be fair, in terms of position and not many fertile planets. My friend got going quicker than me, which is fine, but by the time we got to turn 40 I had around 225 research per turn from 3 systems and one newly colonised one with a total pop of around 19, my friend had a total of about 870 research per turn from 4 systems with about 22 pop. 

Now I understand there are factors that mean a player can get ahead but to have almost 4 times my research by turn 40 is pretty incredible. So I had a go with the riftborn myself and they are still downright broken. I am pretty amazed this hasn't been looked at yet. They can spread faster than other factions as they have no food upkeep on outposts and their +5 to all FIDS makes growing pop almost as good as system improvements, they start snowballing industry, science and dust really quickly, which makes the idea of having to use industry to grow pop as a hinderance fairly redundent as the rate they get industry far outweighs this disadvantage. In terms of faction balance it would be nice if a pass could be made over all the factions so in multiplayer I am not having to almost accept outright defeat by picking a poorer faction (particularly Horatio for example) as there are some large discrepencies here between some of the factions. I will have a look at some of the other factions for the previous offending issues that had been found before, such as the first craver mission giving a really powerful ship right in the early game, so I can make posts as I hope these things can be looked at.    

My main problem with the Lumeris is that their primary feature of buying new colonies becomes a non-feature before the game is over.  Horatio's splices always matter, the Empire can always buyout stuff with influence, the cravers always get tons of FIDSI from slaves, etc. etc.  But planet brokers simply becomes irrelevant once colonizing stops.

You know what would've been really interesting?  Giving the "planet broker" affinity the power to buyout OWNED systems with dust.  A scaling cost based on pops and improvements, of course.  THAT would never become irrelevant no matter the turn clock.

As to the Riftborn, I'm not sure what the best answer is to their startling growth speed that doesn't instantly tip them from "holy crap they have HOW many systems?" to "LOL look at the scrub actually playing Riftborn."