The solution to the scouting would be to,

- Immediate return the scout
- Reduce gains by 20% since there is no longer any travel time.

But that side steps the actual purpose of it, which is to try and drain cores and perhaps also have people log in all the time.

The obvious solution to Core part would be to have scouting cost cores as the factory costs resources.

Just a token price would be needed to make up the same amount that is gained by people paying to avoid the 20% return time. In fact, even a token amount would likely drain a lot more summed up over the total population.

Which again could be balanced by being more generous with cores in other areas or simply add small events to scouting such as Flower Knight Girls reward or boss map spawn chance when a map is completed. Here simply for a scouting completed.