A nontrivial part of this conversation seems to be based on the false premise that if the game in principle lets you spend X SP on various things, then it should make X SP readily available regardless of how high X is.
I would add as a corollary the position that "if the way I do things isn't the best/most efficient/optimal/effective/etc. way of doing things, then it's the game at fault and should be changed and has nothing to do with how I approach the game", and its own corollary, "whatever is the best/most efficient/optimal/effective/etc. way of doing things, if it's not what I'm doing, is automatically defined as "unfun"." I've seen various incarnations of those arguments made by multiple posters over the past several years.
My only complaint is how officers drain your SPs like crazy, especially if you get horrible rng and have skills for more elite skills. I only have Cybernetic Augmentation (so 2 elite skills per officer) and at lvl 15 most of them still have only one elite. My fleet isn't maxed, some ships only have a single s-mod, and it's not even a wide fleet. This is why I almost never pick Best of the best, I'd never play long enough to have a whole fleet with 3-smod ships.
I don't like the officer leveling system, and would prefer for the player to just choose any available skill for the officer on level up rather than between a couple of choices. I shamelessly save scum when I level up officers until I get the correct skill.
It's not about perfect play.
Why do I have to play perfectly, with a perfect plan from the outset, that I should never change, in order to not run into SP issues because I conserved them perfectly the entire game?
Make up your mind. You say it's not about perfect play, then claim you need to have perfect play to not run into SP issues.
There are exactly
zero players who have perfect play. Right now, no one even knows what perfect play
is, much less being able to execute it consistently. Nobody can say "this is the best way to do things" because nobody has exhaustively searched through all possible ways to do things. The most someone can say is "this way seems to be effective" or "method A is more effective than method B at X". That's all anyone can say. Somehow people still manage to have plenty of SP to use.
As long as your fleet can win a fight,
any fight, you can gain SP. Every fleet composition -- as long as it can win some fight -- can gain SP. Beyond that, it's a matter of figuring out where your priorities are in terms of gaining SP (i.e. what kind of fleet you want to have), and then in spending the SP and budgeting around it. It's a matter of understanding what you want to get out of the game, understanding how the different systems work, and doing a cost-benefit analysis about which actions are better to take. "Is it really worth it to spend 128 SP to put an improvement on Mining so I can gain an extra 1000 credits a month?" "Is that item the Historian is offering something that I actually need right now, or is it just because I want to be completionist and get another feather in my cap?"
Most colony improvements basically make more credits, which is even easier to get than SP, and which is essentially unlimited and pointless later on (pointless because the things you want to get aren't really acquired via credits). Spending SP to gain more credits is usually a bad trade. If you're burning your SP on colonies, that's on you, not on the game, if you run out of SP.
That's pretty much the solution to the current state of the game. Either I use some boring meta comp like Onslaughts and Gryphons and Hyperions and turbo farm Ordos, or I cheat in with a mod to fix the problem.
If you think spamming Hyperions against Ordos represents a meta fleet composition, I have good news for you! There are
plenty of fleet compositions and playstyles that are more effective than Hyperion spam. Some of them might even be fun.
How many times do we have to repeat the same thing before you see it? The fact is the player can find themselves in a situation with no SP, no Bonus Exp, and no ability to adjust their fleet the way they want to. It's not about perfect play. It's about wanting to make a change to your fleet and not having the means to reasonably do so. Are you just not reading the posts people are writing, or what?
As long as the player's fleet can kill something, the player can gain SP. As long as the player can gain SP, the player can adjust their fleet. The biggest part of adjusting the fleet is in getting the ships and weapons (and hullmods) anyway, the smods are relatively less important. Unless the player runs out of ships for some reason, the player will never be in that situation.
The bigger deals imo are the things that consume SP and give no return bonus exp.
It is not the design intent of SP that everything you spend SP on gives you bonus XP. In fact the design intent was specifically that more "frivolous" or less impactful uses would give you more bonus XP, while more powerful uses would mean less bonus XP given. So in essence, more "frivolous" uses means you're spending the SP to get bonus XP, while more "serious" uses means you're spending the SP to get whatever effect it gives.
I change my fleet halfway through from full on mass LP Brawler spam (including smods) into capitals, and have never had an issue with not having enough SP despite effectively fleshing out two different full fleets.
