Money, money is great, who doesn't just love the stuff. It lets you buy cool ships and guns, get fancy colonies, and pay off annoying space fundamentalists.
That's why players will often undertake repetitive tasks that might not be so stimulating, so that they have the financial ability to undertake more entertaining tasks, like firing reapers at everything that moves.
For that reason its important to remember that
every single decimal digit of supplies or fuel per day spent, means a considerably longer grind.In order to avoid that, consider your fleet composition, do you really need to drag a cruiser all the way to the edge of the sector to scan a derelict ship? Probably not. The more you bring only the ships you really need, the more efficient the tasks undertaken.
A smaller fleet might be more vulnerable, but it will also be harder to spot. So remember that you can easily modify ships thinking in the task they will perform.
S-modding logistic ships should be a priority, since if you don't do anything particularly wrong, you will be using them for the whole game, and they'll never blow up. There's also the issue that you can normally only add 2 logistic hullmods per ship, but S-mods don't count, so you can have a colossus, phaeton and salvage gantry that have solar shielding, insulated engines, surveying equipment, and augmented drive or efficiency overhaul. The earlier you get these, the more money they make you throughout a playthrough, and you might use them until the very end of it.
You can have a fleet for exploration, where even the warships have logistic S-mods like Solar Shielding to make you life easier, or efficiency overhaul to diminish your expenses, while having separate ships with more optimized builds for harder combat.
Insulated Engines is very recommended for any exploration fleet as well, since you don't need to have firepower against enemies that can't see you.
When doing sneaky beaky things:
You can grab only a few shepherds and a valkyrie with insulated engines, and go around the entire core, doing raids, spysat deployments and smuggling with extreme ease, while leaving the rest of your fleet in a station somewhere. Later on in the game you can improve this setup by exchanging them for a Revenant and Phantom, making things even easier.
A neat thing to have in mind when raiding, is that patrols can be distracted by sensor bursting with you transponder off, causing them to come investigate, then you sneak around them with go dark, avoiding having to fight them, and in doing so, the need for bigger rep hits and having to bring along combat ships to.
Finally when optimizing combat:
You just need to read every post regarding ship loadouts in the forum since 2015, try and fail building a decent aurora 10 times in a row, cry in a corner after getting rushed by an LP eradicator, spend 300 hours in the combat simulation, and have a knife fight over the lategame viability of your favorite destroyer. Or maybe it isn't that hard. But it sure is harder than optimizing the campaign so you have the cash money moollah to simply throw fleets against a wall until you get good at combat.
So all in all, make your resource acquiring easier and more efficient, so you can enjoy the juicier part of the game without frustration. There will be time once you're good enough to do all the challenge runs you want.
