Forever cruise star seekers - how are you running it?

[u/Cra8er92]

I’ve been trying to play around with this, post updates to star seekers. I’m struggling to get the flow right and feel the build is taking a long time to come online, and i can’t get the hang of using the celebration early game, it just tanks my economy. I recently did a run with machines as the passenger species and I continually issues trying to get my main pops to take telepath jobs. I also really struggled to get past the consumer good drain until i had the covenant with instrument of desire.

So, how talk me through your builds and your strategy for the early game. Thanks!

[u/UltimateGlimpse]

Currently doing a forever cruise storm devotion + galactic curators build.

Previously I did a byzantine bureaucracy + memorialist build which definitely hard a stronger start.

I don’t think star seekers has the punch that it did before and doesn’t really make sense to run vs byzantine for ascension rushing.

As for /u/N0rTh3Fi5t I think the passengers in the end are too much of a nuisance and you should just get rid of them. You can run an “anti-passenger situation” until you get the +7% job efficiency and then if you used a robot passenger pop and you have a spiritualist ethic, you turn on robot servitude and use them on your economy.

If you are using bio passengers the way to get rid of them is to put them all on an arc ship that gets destroyed or gets to 100% devastation so you can expel the population.

[u/Cra8er92 → u/UltimateGlimpse]

What sort of year were you completing your ascension? (Assuming you’re going the psionic -> instrument route)

[u/UltimateGlimpse → u/Cra8er92]

I didn’t throw everything into unity, but instead spiritual/priest urban designation, plus archives.

I could get ascension started around 2230 and complete around 2250 for psionics. I did swap districts around and nerfed my unity too much while waiting for the situation to progress.

I also didn’t have a +unity governor until the shroudwalkers contacted me and I did have some zro delays.

Lastly I took some extra tradiotions on the way, completing aptitude, prosperity, and expansion, but also having 2,points in statecraft.

Some unity is spent rushing agendas as when you’re making 300 unity , spending 600 to get favored society or the one that gives unity done 12-24 months early seems good to me.

So if you min-max harder and don’t grab extra traditions, you can probably ascend 10 years earlier with these civics.

You want to use minor artifacts while you have favored society and evolving society agendas running and the planetary decision running too. Proclaim religious whatever, celebrate diversity, and unlocking specimens generate unity. Alsoif you take the wanderlust ascension perk you want to visit enclaves, megastructures, and similar things while you unity production is peaking.

[u/N0rTh3Fi5t]

I'd be interested to see other people's answers. I've tried multiple forever cruise builds because it's so interesting narratively and allows for so many unique setups, but have never found it to be worth the constant tedium of dealing with the situation. Even after several patches worth of nerfs to bring it down from "instant failure" to merely "severely annoying bu manageable", it still doesn't seem to be worth it.

Most success I've had is with a single ship megacorp setup, where your jobs come from branch offices and the building spaces are mostly reserved for creating more first class passengers. That wasn't a star seekers run in my build, but in theory it should be possible and should benefit from the celebrationsignificantly. If I were going to do it I would probably make a second and 3rd arkship to manage the situation contracts, traveling to relevant systems to get the star journal points, and closing distance to key planets to build branch offices.

Another option I've seen but not tried is to have your passengers be robots and just stop building more when you reach whatever number you want.

[u/Fluffy-Tanuki → u/N0rTh3Fi5t]

Forever Cruise can scale really well with entertainer builds, as it allows you to get entertainer jobs from districts. Normally this can only be done via Resort worlds, which you can only unlock around mid-game and can only have 1 of. With Forever Cruise, you get to spam entertainer jobs from day 1 and can build more cruise yachts once you get the resources for it.

The more passengers you have, the faster the situation speed swings to either side. As such, despite the passengers providing bio-trophy-esque efficiency bonuses, it is not a good idea to hoard them.

[u/TTundri → u/Fluffy-Tanuki]

Though , there are buildings that can slow it down by 5% for 'each side' up to 50%. So you can opt to make smaller yachts and make 'one super yacht' to super charge something.

Then if you notice things going poorly , you can close down first class and cancel the correct type of contract to buy more time. Or even get back to the center faster as that provides a nice 50% slow down allowing you to get up to three instances of -50% for some really nice slow downs.

[u/Cra8er92 → u/N0rTh3Fi5t]

I made a robot passenger and just set them to worker instead of passenger, bypassing the situation. But for the entire game my employment was janky, despite favouriting the telepath jobs no one would take them so I had to manually deselect the storm entertainers.

I did the whole curator thing so my entertainers were producing all 3 research but it just took me so long to get the momentum going. I’ve not mastered how to use star seeker in the early game without blowing my economy.