Please leave the planet wheel as an advanced setting.

Not a chance.

Why exactly not?

Because Brad said no.  Still would like to hear why not let the AI specialize and control the wheel like the player does.  It should be very good at it and make the game harder

I think we should wait for 1.4, where there will be more details on what they envisionned to replace the wheel.

I would have kept the wheel in 1.3, until it was totally sorted out, but well, what is done is done.   Brad promised something better, so we should wait and see.

It is in the latest 1.3-2 release. You have full control. The govs are still in the game but you can ignore them.

I have been trying to not use the planet wheel since it is short but it is a hard habit to break.

If it's being replaced with focuses, we'll presumably be able to mod them to match appropriate wheel settings.

I like your thinking, Naselus. Still, I'd favor an option (which I also said in the 1.4 preliminary discussion) to have the wheel as an option to turn on.

software is not like a car saying "leave the wheel" is nothing like saying "leave the tape deck and blown but functioning speakers". Leaving the wheel would entail:

* making some kind of interface to switch between it & the finalized replacement

** testing it

* accounting for the old legacy code in any new functionality added down the line and adding extra points of possible failure as future bugs

*maintaining both

* so on and so forth

I imagine there's a chance someone will just mod it back in, and if so those folks can be happy. As far as me, I'm one of the ones glad it's being done away with because I like Gal Civ to be more of a simulator of what could actually happen, versus perfectly controlling everything. Then again, what's fun for me isn't for others.

As it stands I play the game by never letting any of the three options go above 50% because it's more fun for me that way, and it's similar to the way it worked in GCII where you could focus an aspect of a planet but not devote it 100% to that.

Meh, that really just depends on how you look at it. Personally, I think of the production wheel as being representative of government spending, rather than the total sum output of the world - there's probably a significant private sector going on, which is largely the only possible explanation for why trade routes don't seem to require you to actually, y'know, build any goods to sell. 

It also just makes a lot more sense in many circumstances. How much is a credit worth? Because you don't actually get particularly large numbers of them. Sure, it's loads compared to what you need... but if you have 10 billion people all working in cash-generation buildings, then why is your planet still only producing 50 billion credits a week? That's just 2.5 trillion a year. The GDP of the United States alone for this year is forecast to be $18 trillion, from just 300 million people or so. So, either the credit is worth many hundreds of times as much as the dollar (to the point it becomes meaningless as a unit of exchange), or what you're actually seeing is just the tax revenue. That tax revenue is then either diverted into the Imperial treasury by pointing the wheel toward economic production, spent on research, or spent on manufacturing. 

When you're dealing with planetary populations that are not merely larger than present-day Earth's, but often larger by several factors, the idea that any ship would take more than a week or so becomes silly. Even with just 10 population and limiting yourself to 50% manufacturing, you have 5 BILLION people engaged in your manufacturing process. That's like everyone in Eurasia going to work on 1 project. A huge-hulled spaceship should be churned out in a matter of days, provided the plans had already been drawn up (as they have been). On the other hand, if all you're directing is the discretionary tax income (i.e., everything left over after local infrastrucutral maintenance etc has been carried out), suddenly the game's relatively low values start to make sense. 

From this point of view, it makes perfect sense for the player to have total control over how he points his spending.

Granted. You can sort of make the game be realistic in whatever way you want to perceive, but there are definitely parts of the game that are head scratchers. It makes intuitive sense that travel between stars would take weeks for fleets, but did my population REALLY just grow 200 million on Earth in a single week, and did I really just fit 5 billion people on a colony ship? You could say it's a fleet of colony ships and that's why it takes so long, but then again, 5 billion people.

When you get down to it, maybe making realism arguments is pointless because it IS just a game. The thing is, there are tons of different ideas on what makes the game fun for different folks, and therein lies the dilemma .

Exactly. The reason why the colony ship carries billions is because a colony ship is meant to create a colony and for it to be a colony it needs to have a meaningful value in the "population points" variable. It really is just "0.5 points" or "2.5 points" and we just read it "points=billions". Of course, to get the immersion you need to apply some overlaying context, and thus the interpretation of "billions of people".

It works well enough. Provided you squint your eyes hard enough.

If you want to, you could try squinting even harder and assume the colony ship carries 2.5 billion frozen embryos...

Quoting Petri, reply 12

If you want to, you could try squinting even harder and assume the colony ship carries 2.5 billion frozen embryos...

That's kinda worse, since those embryos grow up and become fully productive citizens within a week of planetfall

Necessity makes mothers of them all?

Ew.

regarding the population in a colony ship thread of discussion, ftl drives throw a wrench into things but:  

• New York City  has:
• A population of 8.406 million humans
• has a size of around 304 square miles
• There are quite a few asteroids that could hold NYC a few times over.
• an awful lot of the nearest stars to earth are in the 10-15 light years range, with only a handful in the 4-6 LY range
• Hollow out an asteroid & cover it in some kind of insulating sealed foam/protective shell & create a biosphere inside that is self sustaining with the people living there.  
• The speed of light is 299792458 m / s (186 282.397 miles per second)
• Our current record is ~25 miles/second just the other day making it a bit over 1% the speed of light
• Lets be generous & say that our hypothetical generation ship is traveling at 10%giving it a massive jump to 186 miles per second, you are still talking 40-150 years of travel
• population growth rates from birth here on earth range from ~1.3-1.5 in europe, 1.7 china, 2.8 mexico, Bangladesh is at 3.6, India at 3.1, Pakistan at 4.8, and Zambia at 5.9.  Presumably a generation ship would strongly encourage growth putting it somewhere in the 2.5-3+ range
• Even starting with a population of just 100,000 it will ramp up significantly over the course of all those years

But just considering the demographics, it would be impossible for a colony to grow from some millions (which is what it should be; billions of people would take thousands of colony ships) to some billions. FTL travel means that they would get to their destinations within the course of a few weeks (which TBH should be months instead) at the beginning of the game. Population growth would proceed very slowly; even at high rates of fertility (6 children per woman on average) the population would grow by about 4% per year maximum.

Colony ships should carry much fewer people (the maximum of 250 million per CS in GCIII, while still too high, should work for this purpose) and should be monumentally expensive to maintain. Creating colonies with billions of people ought to require significant investment and for the first third or so of the game, one's homeworld should hold the vast majority of the population.

We build our cities 2D. Even with high skyscrapers they are basically just flat discs. In space you build 3D so if you wanted to you could fit a lot of people. Now, I can't think why we would want to but a mile x mile x mile borg-cubish spacecraft is a lot of flats even if you allow for access ways. If you can do cryo-sleep it's even more in pods. If you can upload minds and create clone bodies quickly from scratch at the destination you can probably fit even more into a fraction of the hull-size.

But anyway it's a game. The colony ship moves population points. That's all what the game does. The rest is our imagination and as there's no description in the game lore as to what is supposed to be going on, you can make it up however you like and just enjoy the game.