Im not sure if this would even have much of a popular market, but i would love it.

I like being a tech heavy person for my level, and i want to stay that way. However, part of having better tech is generally better engines, and due to the the exp ration inevitability being around 2 exp for 1 energy, i have no choice but to level and lose my advantage.

I want to be able to max energy, do lots of missions, and not end up a bloated star destroyer 20 tech levels behind guys with less engines, but who took more time to gain research on the way there.

I want to be sitting there with huge energy stockpiles, able to destroy my missions and targets, without ending up leveling ahead of my tech.

I want the ability to catch up on all my missions sitting there, without ending up 5 levels higher just doing the fortnightly mission. (and getting perhaps 2 techs in that time)

I guess ideally i would want relays that reduce exp gain rather than max energy, but that would be getting greedy, eh?

Anyone ever felt the need to slow leveling, without feeling hopelessly energy inefficient?

i can honestly say ive never NOT needed more xp, because i always have more researched tech than i can install on my ship, and when you start NPC hunting, your gonna wish your had more decks for everything.

you can certainly advance your research and slow leveling....Just dont use your energy and burn research everyday. I can tell you what will happen though, your planets wont advance, you wont get the expanded decks you need and you wont be able to afford any of the research you learned.

You really can't get to far out of whack in this game and honestly the more i read these forums the more I realize the most important part of the game seems to be the most overlooked or trivialized. The planets, these are the most important thing to making you stronger, and the only way to get more is to level.

i think Dan did a pretty nice job with balancing the game in terms of

Research = the minerals you can get at your rank

In a lay man's term Even if you have very high tech gadgetry. you will not be able to pay for it unless you rank up a bit. get more mining planets and get better minerals as you rank up..

Simply stopping your ranking up will not stop the high upkeep that your ship will need with the high tech research you are having..

Imagine yourself with an upkeep of 1.1 billion per day with the amount of minerals you are receiving and the amount of planets that you have... oh and as the game progresses. to research a single module it take 800K research.. you would spend a lot of time just to get there.