I just reached the Ordos killing part of endgame, and even that is annoying if I want maximum story point game because I need a specialized story point farmer fleet (ships and skills) if I want maximum skill point gain (to get +300% or more instead of 100% or less bonus xp and pay off the story points eaten by respec). It feels just like bringing a magic-find sorceress (decked in specialized magic-find gear) to farm items from Mephisto or some other boss, only instead of items it is story points.
Let's put in some numbers here to put it in perspective.
After level 15, you get 1 story point per 1 million XP. It's not Vespene gas, it's basically just XP, like in pretty much any other RPG. You kill stuff, you get XP for killing stuff, you use that XP to upgrade your character. (Vespene gas is different, you farm Vespene gas which doesn't involve combat, and you don't get any more from killing enemies.) After all, such games reward the player for
going out and actually doing something, i.e. killing baddies.
Level 10 Hegemony deserter bounties give around 500k base XP (assuming double from SP bonus), and the DP for the XP bonus (
not the fleet's actual DP) is roughly 700 DP or so. This means if the player's fleet is 350 DP then you get +100% XP bonus (i.e. 700/350), if the player's fleet is 500 DP then you get +40% XP bonus (i.e. 700/500), etc. By the way, bounties go higher than level 10 (which corresponds to about 300k credit payout), I've seen level 13 bounties already, just that I've already collected data on multiple level 10 bounties at this point. So higher-level deserter bounties will pay out even more.
The personal bounties tend to cluster together in the same region of the map. So it's easy to take a fleet and do a lap to kill them. Say you knock out 3 of them, and they're level 10 (noting that this isn't even the highest-paying bounties). That's 1.5 mil XP right there,
assuming no XP bonuses, plus whatever you get from the XP bonus, meaning you should be netting around 2-6 SP per bounty run, depending on your fleet. It's easy to get
multiple SP points from doing a bounty run, and you don't need anywhere near an endgame fleet to do it. Claims that you need something specialized to get SP is completely overblown when we're just talking about regular faction fleets at this point and not even talking about [REDACTED] fleets.
For full-size [REDACTED] fleets, it's roughly 700k base XP, with a DP for XP bonus (again,
not the fleet's DP) of roughly 1200 DP. So you should be getting
multiple SP per [REDACTED] fleet. Endgame fleets actually pull together multiple [REDACTED] fleets at once to maximize the XP bonus, and hence why you can get upwards of 10 to 15 million XP (i.e. 10 to 15 story points) per fight if you had an actual, optimized endgame fleet. Hence with such a fleet you're talking about getting
dozens of SP per hour of gameplay.
Long story short: if you're finding that SP gain is too slow, then it has to do with how you built your fleet, and/or
because you're wasting them frivolously and then complaining about how hard it is to get more.
And if I bring a small fleet, I cannot carry much loot (limited capacity) or recover more ships if my fleet can handle another battle before leaving (because bonus xp drops).
No. Civilian ships (with the actual CIVILIAN tag in ship_data.csv, not the civilian hullmod) count for 1/4 of their DP in terms of XP. So even an Atlas, which is 10 DP, only counts as 2.5 DP in terms of XP. That's a drop in the bucket when your fleet size is hundreds of DP.
Also, ships without any weapons on them (i.e. when you recover a ship and are lugging it back home) also only count for 1/4 of their DP in terms of XP. So again, they're not going to impact your XP much.
Then the game shouldn't advertise itself as ironman-friendly. Spending 10 hours grinding story points to recover from a fleet wipe isn't friendly.
Um, ironman in any game is generally for powergamers who want an additional challenge beyond what the regular game provides. Almost by definition it's for those who want to make the game the most challenging possible because it's already gotten too easy for them otherwise. Why a game needs to be "ironman-friendly" is beyond me. If a player is playing ironman, they're expected to know how to handle themselves.