Agree, CMM Composites requirements are currently unrealistic and an unnecessarily harsh time-sink. Even for the smallest Outposts you need about ~4700 which is crazy. Keep in mind you have to go to surface bases for this commodity and they are always low in stock (100~200 at most and that's if you're very lucky).
They said they greatly increased the restock but either that's not working or it was abysmally slow before already. It is not possible to keep visiting the same surface site and load up to bring it to a carrier in orbit, so this will require finding a new surface base for each trip while praying they have at least ~100 in stock.
Doing it solo just for an Outpost, that means at least 50 visits to a surface base but it's likely much more than that.
A tier 3 station reportedly requires 45000 CMM Composites, which means at least 450 trips assuming you're lucky enough to find 100 CMM at every base you visit, which you're not. If you average an optimistic 50 CMM per surface visit it's going to take 900 surface visits... Even for a decently sized squadron or player group that's madness.
As a solo player even without the time limit if this remains unchanged I would likely not even try to build beyond that first outpost. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if we're going to get a lot of claimed systems that will have only an finished outpost and are then left abandoned because who's going to do 500~900 surface base visits to gather the required CMM Composites for a large station?
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Possible fixes I guess:
- If visiting surface sites really needs to part of this, make the required amount like one of the smaller ones (other commodity requirements already have less than 100 or even 50)
- Replace the CMM Composites requirements with something that's widely available.
- Massively improve the restocking rate and increasing the max limit so you can at least grab say 400 or 750 to fill up an M or L sized ship on every surface visit.
