Instead of desperately searching for a new source- you could balance your use vs your supply from purchases and production and make rational choices about what will deliver most benefit to your ship.

Or instead you could whine about not beingg able to have everything all at once

decisions decisions. Tough call

That is interesting.

I don't think the game should be easy. As has been shown before, the amount of EM you need to generate is 15k/day (I just redid the maths) which isn't a huge amount. Heck, I buy/sell roughly 1M EM per week so it can't be that hard to get a hold of 100k a week from trading alone. 60kMPH = 1200 EM; with 168 hours in a week that's over 200kEM per week which is more than enough. Anybody with MP lower than 30k MP probably isn't within the rank range that legion missions are intended for anyway.

355k EM across all the legion missions.
8 legions missions, 3 days each; 24 days.
355000 / 24 = 14791.666666... EM per day for legion missions.

If you REALLY need EM, then purchase it. I think we should have to decide between things to do and not just be able to do everything that's out there as often as we like and as much as we like and I think that maybe Dan is doing this because he tried making lots of energy intensive things to limit people from endlessly autoranking and doing EVERYTHING, so he's taking another approach.

Yay... Another thread asking Dan to fix something because of our long term strategy. How much EM was practically given away for the last 2 years or so? How many legion bases popped to level 6+ in a matter of days or even hours? How many toxic uplifts have been sold for CTP?

Made your bed, now lie in it...

How many people have 60k Mining per hr? I only have 16k MPH and I'm doing fine on upkeep but like everyone else starting to run low on EM. I shouldn't have to make, buy or steal 40 more toxics to break even on EM for missions. For that matter, how many people have enough mining storage that they can collect 100% of 168 hrs of mining and never lose a single hour to RL?

How many people need more than 50k EM a week? Based upon my mining, people over rank 1200 should at least be getting close to 30K MP; especially that as you increase in rank your NPCing goes up and as a result, so does your mining.

This is for me definitely the most interesting solution - planet artifact to be created in CTlab or gained thru mission chain - can be extracted.

I like the earlier idea of having EM be a full-fledged fourth resource.

Maybe a way to include some of the other suggestions would be if Exotic planets had a natural passive effect where they produce 25% bonus exotic matter. Provided they have structures on them that do so.

That said, I do agree with Darth and others that the sudden scarcity of EM makes it interesting. I like that I have to be careful with how I spend it, and I keep a hoard which I don't let drop too low. I like it being a valuable alternate commodity.

THAT said, the inflation on it is going to start to get bad, because I suspect we're using more than the game can produce.
Every successful legion completion of an EM-needing mission costs like 1.5 million EM. Like Kirk said, I make about 1k per hour. With 60k mph, I can sustain my needs, but most people can't. EM will only get rarer and more expensive, and start to be out of reach for lower level buyers.

So I suggest that EM become a directly producable resource, with +12 buildings and the whole shmeal. BUT! No production bonuses. Every planet is Average for EM production. Exotics get a 25% bonus. Rings would count. That's IT. No 28x's. No 15x's. A huge planet loaded to the gills with EM production might give you 150-200 per hour. And keep in mind that it would no longer be a standard part of the mining draw. You would have to devote planet space to get ANY. This could offer a good balance of keeping it fairly scarce, but make it possible to take more direct action to get EM.

While I don't think there should be alternative means, this is just a ridiculous statement. The game changed recently, with the addition of LMs and the purger costing nearly 3x as much em. You can't honestly blame people for poor planning when they had no idea what was coming.

I manage to keep up with my use of em, however my game play is completely different than say kirk's who has built his ship to do the purger mission and scan a lot. The problem I see is that, Dan saw this and nerfed the purger for what I think is to slow down people from doing this exact thing.

For newer players plan ahead with what is currently available. For the old, sorry you got screwed, but you have to adjust like everyone else has when Dan implements a game changer like massive uses of a certain artifact or resource.

Although I love the sound of Exotic Matter being a full-fledged fourth resource, I have to believe that Darkstar nerfed EM for a reason, and thus won't be doing anything to alleviate the "suffering" of those who don't know how to adjust their budgets.

That being said, I believe the numbers being thrown around are exaggerated as well. To use Malevolentia's formula:
That's only ~10273 MU/hr based on my current rate of acquisition, (though even this isn't quite right because it doesn't take into account which rewards are stackable, ship limits, etc., etc., to establish the frequency of actually doing the EM-devouring ones, and thus the true rate is likely lower than guestimated).

Regardless, we both know Legion Missions didn't strain the Exotic Matter market, changes to Stellar Cartography did.

Not saying this instance is totally poor planning. Yes, Dan kinda threw a curveball with nerfing Stellar Cartography and adding EM requirements for Legion Missions. And I agree that is more the reason why Stellar got nerfed rather than to stop autoranking. But, as Dixie pointed out, people need to learn how to budget. When the price of gas goes up, you don't run to your boss and ask for a raise. You learn to give up some luxury so you can pay for your gas. Same thing here. I said the same thing when people were all into the legion tax crap. Your lifestyle needs to fit your income, not the other way around.

I know this, but that's not the point that everybody is making. They're making the point they find themselves unable to do the legion missions because of not enough EM. We've both shown that it's easy enough to make enough EM for the legion missions, so people will have to start compromising between the missions and planet scanning. I don't understand why you've changed the maths... One person can't do all three tasks of a mission, can they?

A legion like hers and mine split the tasks up evenly so each member does each one equally. That is not true for all legions though.

Perhaps, but each individual member only does one task so only needs that much EM per person. I just realised as well how the maths works to divide it again by 3. Who doesn't have 10k MPH? That's like rank 500+, easy.

I mean it takes 3 iterations of the same mission for me to do the same task so even though a mission has a em requirement for a task doesn't mean I will do it. I might do one of the other tasks, which is what she is accounting for, but since not all legions do it's not really an accurate correction

Yeah, that's what I realised. My basic point is that anybody who can meet the other requirements for legion missions should have the mining production to meet EM demands for legion missions.

I apologise. Things don't come across with the intended tone on the internet. I agree with you too and my main point is that we don't need more ways to get EM; we should have to make decisions and compromises to make the game a little more challenging rather than sitting at the end of a production line and letting cookies fall into our mouth.

That is not a good analogy, because I bet a lot of us would love to have cookies falling into our mouths.

: P