Too much sense for this forum probably

This is a good question. I would think wealth production could be tied into it, but that would need an overhaul of the wealth buildings and techs to prevent specialization in that department. Another way would be some global unhappiness mechanic tied into research and production, but I don't think that would be acceptable or fun for most players.

Maybe redefine tech costs? So that instead of just research beakers, you would need to invest in credit production as well to get the later economic techs and so on? Maybe even have to invest production into early weaponry to get later weaponry techs etc.? Just to make the specialize everything into research while not going broke less viable, and more flexible planets more useful.  

One way to increase the importance of redundancy and to give a real penalty for ultra-specialization without taking away the benefits of specialization is to go even further with the risk of losing an asset: Make them interdependent.

Consider the economy model in "Settlers" where the idea is to build efficient production flows where raw resource A is turned into B is turned into C is turned into D which you can actually use to do the thing X. Removing any link in the chain will break it.

So, suppose that in order to generate research you need an analogous chain of a supporting economy. You could then build a complete chain on the same planet. That would guarantee you a world that would generate research regardless of what happens to your other planets. However, because the whole chain must be there using up the limited amount of available tiles you are losing lots in specialization utility. Or, you could build an interstellar chain where each planet specializes in one thing increasing greatly your output because of focused use of tiles but at the cost of making it extremely vulnerable. Lose one planet and the whole system crumbles down.

Oh I wish they had picked up on naselus's devstream question about customized resources...

Notice I said "option". I don't find the v1.2 planetary management fun. Its quite tedious. Figuring out the optimal building placement is not difficult. Your forced to adjust the wheel frequently. Not fun.

Remove the wheel. Not as tedious but I don't think it then becomes fun. Give us the option to automate it completely.

It depends on what you mean by a "balanced planet" strategy. Are we talking about planets which produce meaningful amounts of two or more outputs, or are we talking about planets which have more than just one type of improvement built upon them?

If the latter, we can make a 'balanced planet' strategy meaningful by restoring the old project functionality; under the old projects, any planet capable of attaining sufficiently high multipliers to (effective social) manufacturing and one other output would be better off building improvements to keep those two multipliers approximately equal to one another rather than building only improvements of a type aligned with the desired final output. Thus, assuming any bonuses you had from things other than the planet's own improvements were approximately equal, the 'optimal' research world might have factories on half of its tiles and labs on the other half rather than labs everywhere.

If the former, then while I agree with naselus that the improvement bonuses should probably come down, I think that it'll be more important to change how production is split. Right now, splitting production between output types will always give you less overall output than focusing it on one specific output, regardless of how you build the planet (unless you do something stupid like building 100% factories and setting the planet to 100% research), since the overall output multiplier is m*(1 + M) + r*(1 + R) + w*(1 + W), where m, r, and w are the research, manufacturing, and wealth allocations (m + r + w = 1), and M, R, and W are the planet's total bonuses to those three output types. With such a formula for the overall output multiplier, you will maximized the overall output multiplier by allocating as much as possible to the output with the largest bonus. I would suggest changing the model so that when you have m, r, and w allocated to manufacturing, research, and wealth, you have an overall output multiplier which looks more like sqrt(m)*(1 + M) + sqrt(r)*(1 + R) + sqrt(w)*(1 + W); even without changes to the attainable values for M, R, and W, this change makes it look as though the 'balanced' world has more production. Assuming that you can attain a bonus of B to each output and a bonus of 3B to one specific output, a 'balanced' world which divides its production evenly between the three outputs would have an overall output multiplier of about 1.57 + 1.57B under the revised model (under the current model, this would be B + 1) whereas an equivalent fully-specialized world will have an output multiplier of 1 + 3B. This change would go a long ways towards rectifying the difference in power between 'balanced' and specialized worlds; depending on what the revised model ended up looking like and on what the attainable bonuses end up being after a hypothetical revision to improvements and relics and other bonus sources, you might even be able to get a system where 'balanced' worlds produced more output overall but specialized worlds gave you more output to their specific field (getting that with the model given would require significant reductions in available bonuses, as 1.57 + 1.57B < 1 + 3B for B > 0.4, well within reach on mid-size planets even with fairly early-game improvements without the aid of non-improvement bonuses using current numbers).

Works for me, but may result in the 'optimal' output position shifting on a turn-to-turn basis. That invites even more micro.

Frankly, I don't really mind if we're just given 3 buttons with 100% manu, 100% research, and 100% wealth on them (though it again actively increases the micro required on planets by preventing you from taking simple micro-easing measures like 10% manufacturing offsets). But the fact is, this is a UI change to fix a balance problem. The purpose here is to prevent us from getting 100% out of planets, because it makes planets too powerful. 

To which I ask, too powerful compared to what?  

If it's to balanced planets, well, then let's get rid of balanced planets. They're useless, and they only get used by people who've never played before and the AI. They're not really compatible with the pop-prod model. Actively tell the player to specialize his planets in the first tutorial mission (whether with buttons or the wheel or whatever). Make the AI governors specialize like madmen (i.e., NOT 44/28/28 - just 100% manu til everything's built, then 100% whatever-gets-the-best-output). That's what we want them to do; that's what most of us were expecting when governors were mentioned. Optimized output automatically. That's the bit that the governors can do WELL, as opposed to their hilarious attempts at building placement.

Too powerful against the AI? Tell the AI to use specialization. If you're making the planetary governors do that anyway, this is easy. Two birds with one stone. Instantly, the AI is powered up immensely in EXACTLY the place it is presently weakest; the part which is actually hurting the balance of the rest of the game.

Too powerful in terms of sheer output? Nerf their output then. We can increase prices and lower building bonuses easily enough. If there's a balance problem, the way to address that is with balance changes. Get rid of the entire idea of balanced planets; people don't use them because they are just a bad strategy in this economic model. They always will be. Forcing us to use them when we can see that they're hugely wasteful and ineffective is simply going to infuriate the player base. At least if you force us to use 100% settings, we have the consolation that that's where we wanted the wheel to be anyway... and the further consolation that the game is more challenging mechanically, rather than increasing the difficulty through having a UI that prevents us from doing what we want to do.

Well, to be fair, at least for me after playing a couple of first games in GC3 i thought "Specialized always win" not only a main valid strategy, but it was  especially made this way. Adj. bonus, tile placement (on medium-quality world you usually could build only one  useful "hub" or "cluster"), planets traits and Colonization Ideology choices - with additional "wildcard" - tile bonuses and planetary resources it's all scream about need for heavy Specialization. Mix in the wheel  - even if quite uncomfortable in terms of UI - and we get a rather nice and logical pictures that works quite nice until we push game to the extreme galaxy size and planets number(and in EA people tested game on galaxy sizes where micro isn't a problem yet). I was quite surprised that current situation isn't that SD wanted and Frogboy vision on the game he recently posted is quite different from that i expected.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way, tbh. The question shouldn't be 'are specialized and non-specialized balanced?', but should be 'are wealth, research and industry balanced?'.

Specialization will always beat non-specialization. That's pretty much what 'specialization' means. It will always be better than a non-specialized planet at the thing it does really well. And there's only 3 things for it to do really well, so frankly unless you're playing on a ridiculously tiny sparse map you're going to be able to cover all the bases. Specialization should basically be assumed of anyone playing over Normal, in much the same way 'building farms' should be assumed of anyone playing over normal; it's simply better play.

But what matters is the difference balance of worlds within the empire. Do you have 30% of your empire comprised of research worlds, 50% manu, 20% econ? Or 20% manu, 50% research 30% econ? Which is the strategic correct choice? In a game with limited capacity to tell my population what to do, I just have 100% mixed planets, ideally using identical building ratios to the optimum global wheel position. Yay, using 1 of each type of building over and over...

Specialization is what gives my empire flavour. The fact that the 5 planets of Ettihad VI have famous shipyards which endlessly churn out ships for the royal fleet, while the universities of moons of Blargon are a great center of higher learning - as opposed to Blargon's third-rate technical colleges which are mildly better than average and Ettihad's one shipyard that's slightly superior to the one at Blargon.

I don't have time to write much right now, but as I've mentioned everywhere each category of production (manufacturing, research, services*, food, etc.) should produce a certain amount of revenue for each unit produced. Applying total production to produce these outputs, however, should result in a quadratic cost, and building and maintaining the structures should carry a fixed cost every turn. Moreover, wealth should not be a category in which to inject total production, but should instead be a byproduct of the economic system.

As a result, the profitability curves for every industry should be parabolas of the form -ax^2 + bx - c, where a, b and c are positive numbers. The factor a, which represents the monetary cost for each additional unit of production plowed into final production, will be a certain value for each yield but may be altered by various technologies (or ideological choices reducing, holding stable, or increasing wage rates), while factor b would be equal to (yield category + yield bonuses)(wealth + wealth bonuses). Given a certain capacity for total production, the computer should optimize its use such that maximum possible profit is produced. If there is not enough total production to get to the peak of each profitability parabola then additional total production capacity should be installed, if not then total production (and in turn, population) will be underutilized, leading to unemployment, lower approval, and discontent.

As naselus mentioned either here or in another thread, the level of percentage bonuses in all categories should be reduced dramatically. Otherwise levels of sustainable production will simply rise too far, too fast, leading to the game becoming excessively fast-paced by the end. My idea further helps to keep a lid on this by creating a maximum profitability level over which private industry will simply not go. In a sense, this creates a floor performance for the AI because to a major extent production will be done purely by algorithm.

Production will generate profits, and the player (and AIs) should be able to use this profit in order to generate tax revenue. This tax revenue may subsequently be spent on a variety of fields, from fleet maintenance to making use of unused (unprofitable) total production capacity for one's own purposes (research, manufacturing, etc.). However, collecting tax on a planet will reduce approval there. On the other hand, unemployment (unused production capacity) will also reduce happiness, so there is a good optimization point to be found between taxation and unemployment as well.

There are many places that one could go with this (stock and bond markets, wage rates, etc.), but as I mentioned I don't have much time to write so I'll leave them for a later post.

*Note: services will produce a small amount of approval.

In this new system a revamped model of approval would also be produced in which entertainment centers would play a much smaller role. Approval would instead be determined by ((some factor * services output) + entertainment center morale + other morale) * (employment rate) * (1-tax rate)) / population. Combined with rebellions and other features this could make approval a real factor in determining the governance of an empire.

This thread is some days old, but I do not believe this has been mentioned ...

I think it would be very important to have clear documentation to support AI modding. The wiki page is virtually empty, and I could not find anything resembling a "manual", only bits and pieces on the forum, where the efforts of a few brilliant and dedicated people who dug into the xmls and run countless soaks have led to a partial understanding.

It should not be the case. Documentation is a very important factor in the quality of any product.

This is probably not the answer you are looking for, but I think the solution to the 'specialized worlds' issue is political, not economic.

Here's what I mean:

We've had debates already over centralized control of the economy versus loose or little interference (governors) by the central government - for the last hundred years or so. We call these state capitalism or planned economy, or state interventionism, and capitalism (and its variations). One thing that seems clear from analysis of the last hundred years is that both have strengths and weaknesses. So why not embrace that?

At the start of the game you should only have the planetary wheel - no civ-wide production wheel at all. And your buildings, and resource collection, should be inefficient. Move up a step and get the global wheel and improved efficiencies - perhaps modest adjacency bonuses. Move up again and give up the planetary wheel and let the governors run things (retaining the ability to destroy and que up new buildings, knowing the governors may undo your work later) while getting more bonuses. Advance again to get something like the 20% improvement in raw production, and you keep the civ-wide wheel (with limits on how far you can move it) and the governors run your planets without your help.

This would require some changes in the way the economy and political parties work... but I like it.