Please Please don`t take this as disrespect it is NOT!!! And there you have it from the Top Frog!! The wheel is gone and any debate is meaningless!!Yes I`m upset over it but If not for Brad we would not have the game or even this post!! I set out o do what I wanted which was get his attention! on wanting to keep the wheel. Or as stated  The Planetary Wheel!!  I strongly feel that there will be less control over each planet input to the game now. By I am one of the players that like the largest maps and the longest games!!and Yes It`s hard to manage 200 + planets 300 + starbases and  as many shipyards as Planets and near 1000K ships!!.

So The Wheel Is Gone R.I.P. Planetary Wheel

Edit

As I wish this to be the last post on this thread Please lock this post!!  Well that did not work out never mind!

Agreed. Without getting too philosophical: a game needs to concentrate on its main topic which in case of GC is ship design and civilisation level decisions with planet MGMT as a mini game. The problem with the wheel is that it is so powerful that the player needs to use it else a huge potential is lost, but managing it takes up more time then all the other components combined as it often needs to be changed after every few buildings and this on numerous planets while in the end most players end up using the same few patterns. This is repetitive task in its finest and though it brings large benefits it should not be the focus.

Though I wouldn't have anything against the described administration game neither, today we can already build some fine intelligence reports that make strategic game enthusiasts loose their undies and these are presented to the decision makers. Heat-map of crime rates for law enforcement planning, layout of military objects and their status in contested regions or detailed geo map of buyers of specific retail installations, their buying capacity and retention rate? No problem - the days of boring (and low-effecient) paperwork in an office of decision makers are all but over or one needs to invest in IT

Bring on the governors and automate this bad boy at least on planetary level - The king is dead, long live the king!

Sure, planetary wheel in it's current form is a bit too power tool. But it's tied to how population and building works - if there would no way to control planet raw production most of planet will be losing huge amount of it. And building a "balanced" planet is harder than it seems. In one of my playthoughts i tried to build balanced planets (excluding planet one obviously need to specialize) - it doesn't work well due to how planetary tile are spread (long thin continents, big single landmass is almost nonexistent) and adj. bonus works. So in the end, 3 "bit" specialized (they have some main focus, but other building as well, and wasn't set on 100% for one thing) planets beat 3 "balanced" planets in like 3-4 times. 

In GC2 we had "focus".  If I remember correctly, you could add 50% to one of three categories and it took 25% from the other two.  With a little cleverness, you could use that to do some interesting mid-level micromanagement of planets.

The present system of governors does a similar thing, only with 10, 15, and 20 percent increments.  What I hear isn't about the wheel or sliders or any of that.  It is people wanting to be able to slam a planet into 100% of a single category as the only true definition of specialization.   Also, there seems to be some insistence on 1% accuracy in settings as the definition of "control".  

The devs are saying you can do a lot of specialization without having to go to 100% limits or 1% accuracy.  Based on my experience with GC2, they are correct.

Death to the wheel.  May it burn in game designer hell.

I know this has been done to death and appreciate, Frogboy, that Galciv is your baby from infancy onwards and your Stakhanovite efforts over nearly a quarter of a century.  But I do think that children grow up and removing such a fine toy (the planetary wheel of course) from your teenage creation smacks of rather high-handed parenting.

For a significant minority of people on these boards (which I realise is itself only catering to a minority of players) it's the best thing about the teenage game. And while it can certainly be overaddictive and is in need of steamlining I did suggest the compromise of allowing its full use on just a few favourite planets (you can use the toy but only at weekends).

If you and SD are utterly determined to confiscate it then I certainly echo the hope that you will in time replace it with something equally absorbing.

In any case, many thanks for your massive efforts. 

Jon

The per planet wheel as implemented at release needed changing. It wasted too much time and effort for those of us who enjoy the specialization mini-game. I would have preferred a solution that allowed high specialization without so much micro. However I am not disappointed with their decision to get rid of it altogether. They are essentially going back to the GalCiv2 style, where you can "focus" a planet's production with a single click, while controlling overall production with the global wheel. The adjacency bonuses add enough newness to specialization that I can still enjoy the specialization mini-game. And the amount of micro potential goes way down, at least for my playstyle, where specialization is not optional.

Two possible issues come to mind:

1. When you can focus production in a particular area, how does that impact usefulness of the research and wealth projects?

2. I'd really want the ability to choose to focus on social or military manufacturing for planets sponsoring a shipyard, so I hope they are thinking about that. Without this, all planets are subject to the settings of the global slider, which often doesn't make sense for the situation.

What's going to happen is that every new planet is going to be built in exactly the same way.  That is the most optimum path if the planetary production wheel is removed.  

Basically the developers are removing the fun parts of micro management while keeping the boring parts like starbase spam.  

And yet..that didn't happen in GalCiv II, GalCiv I or the OS/2 version.

The top strategies were 100% factories or 100% labs.  

To be fair, it's a bit more complicated than that and a lot hinges on how good the governors are and/or how much you can do with the coming focus buttons.

Even if we assume "no governors but still must use just the global wheel" then optimal production in a symmetric tile layout is "half farms, half output-buildings" except this symmetry is broken by the need to have some approval buildings plus the fact that the actual tile layout is random. There is, however, a sweet spot between farms and output-buildings that optimizes the total output which results in a "forced" build plan, although it does vary from planet to planet. Depending on how well the governors can specialize the planet the "output-buildings" on a single planet will then be either of a single type or a balanced mix because we are always optimizing the empire-wide total output. Giving how the game economy is designed, I'm hoping the governors will be good enough that the optimum will be in the single-type-output zone than the mixed-type-output because the latter simply results in boring planets and basically renders any focus system meaningless.

So, it's not that bad and with good enough governors and/or focus possibilities it could work giving you a game where the planetary sub-game turns into a puzzle where you have to figure out the optimum build solution for the planet so that the global output of manufacturing-research-wealth triplet is optimized for your game strategy. This isn't necessarily obvious depending on how the details are implemented in the game and that is encouraging. However, a degenerate solution is entirely possible if the games designers are not careful with the balancing and implementation which would result into "stupid and boring but still dominating" optimal strategies and thus kill the game.

Therefore repeating my plead to Stardock: Please, however you change the game, ensure that the change does NOT create an Obvious Ultimate Strategy that beats all other strategies.

A good game allows for multiple approximately equally-good approaches in how to win. A very good game makes these approaches complex enough so that the player needs to use his wits and creativity to make full use of them. A bad game doesn't.

Make a very good game, please.