That's actually true, though I imagine it's mostly because the subject has been so thoroughly debated here that it was assumed everyone knew.

I haven't been reading much in the forums and the manual is unchanged, so I'm in the dark; the changelog said that production foci were added, but really it replaces the planetary-level production wheel?

We're sure it's a feature. It was very heavily debated over the last 2 months. Also, planets not attached to a ship yard will always produce 100% social manu 

Quoting antibor,

reply 6

  What is done is done. But this was very poorly done.

 

People and game studios must live with their choices. Both good and bad.

Well I don't have time for betas as I used to anymore. I tend to me more selective and 1.4 missed that mark. I saw the change on the friday stream and I screamed!

If you make changes to your product that "come as a big shock" to your customers, perhaps you shouldn't be doing them. Not the least in a post release patch.

They did post about it on their forums six weeks in advance, engaged directly in a dozen different threads about it, and spoke about it repeatedly on their regular dev stream (one of the streams was almost entirely about it).

That's a lot more communication about it than you'd get from, say, EA. I don't think you can really complain about SD failing to signpost this. Yes, a lot of player's won't use the forums; that's not something SD can be blamed for. It's like refusing to take phone calls from someone for two years and then complaining that they never talk to you.

They used the channels that they had. You didn't look at them. But they didn't just suddenly drop this with no warning whatsoever. The information was freely available to anyone who looked for it. What do you want them to do? Drop you an email outlining it? Text you? Pop round to your house in person to make sure you know? Take out a front-page add in local papers around the world? The changes have even been playable on Steam for the past three weeks via the opt-in. They have not suddenly come out of nowhere.

If you make no effort to keep up with the news on something, then don't complain that you didn't hear the news. Your complaints about the removal of the wheel are valid (and are much the same ones I raised when the idea of getting rid of it was suggested, back in August). Your complaints about SD not communicating about it aren't.

It's not white knighting to point out that this was announced and discussed exhaustively for the last two months when someone says SD didn't communicate the changes.  It was first discussed on the 28th of August, there were a few dozen threads about it, all with a lot of interaction from Frogboy, the entire following dev stream devolved into a 'losing the wheel' Q&A, it was discussed again in the dev stream two weeks ago, and for over a week and a half before the patch anyone with steam was able to literally play the patch on the opt-in branch.

If someone hadn't heard the news from one of those sources, it's doubtful that they'd bother reading it on Steam either. That's not some value judgement about them; I don't read the news relating to 95% of my games either, because life's too short. But that doesn't mean that the designers aren't communicating changes, it just means I'm not paying attention. When Sturm said "Btw, we might change everything at any point in time and the only way to figure it out is to constantly track an online Forum", what he actually meant was "Btw, we might change everything at any point in time and the only way to find out about it is to read the primary source of information related to the game at any point over the two months preceding the change", which is a rather more reasonable expectation.

Since only a single digit % of GalCiv players overall even used the planetary wheel it wasn't even considered a big deal. And since we openly discussed it for months and it wasn't considered that controversial, it seemed to validate that the change wasn't  big deal.

We've seen how passionate some people are about this feature so we're working out a way to provide them a path to have it. 

I can assure you right now there will be a lot of much more drastic changes to the game over the next few years than this just like there were for GalCiv I and GalCiv II.  Diplomacy is about to get a change. Invasions are going to be changed.  I'm sure someone won't like those changes too. 

Planet/Economy managenet is the core feature that drives all of the other game systems. And is the de-facto system that builds winner empires. Don't expect such passionate arguments for other changes. i.e. for invasions.

Analytics can be useless, misleading or even entrap you: if the % of the people that used the wheel was in the single digit value, say 9% then you should consider the fact that the rest 91% doesn't have a clue what they are doing when playing your game. But you don't come out and say that do you?

I think the point is that people appreciate some notice for a change which is so noticeable and impacts the gameplay rather significantly. Especially since it was a feature which received quite a notable amount of time in the limelight early in the game's development and is now out of the game's (primary) future plans.

To draw an analogy, you don't want to know that your local government increased tax rates to 80% only when your tax bill comes. Nor do you want to have to regularly visit the town hall to check the noticeboard for latest changes in your tax policy (discussions and threads on the forum). You would appreciate if the local paper reports about it (Steam news since someone will notice that before launching the game, the v1.4 announcement was about AI). You might probably also appreciate a flashing billboard on your way to work (a pop-up notification on the main menu just after you have updated to v1.4). That way you don't have people wondering whether the world went topsy turvy or they did something wrong in their tax filing to get an 80% tax bill.

Even if everyone was using the planetary wheel it was a bad design.

A planet that could do 100,5,3 being able to be turned into a 1000,0,0 is not a balanced system.

As I said in another thread, if this was GalCiv II, I would have just capped output to 200 and called it a day.

In this case, we're trying to find ways (partially because we have more budget) to work in a system where players can have their wheel but also balance it better.

It's only coming back as a race trait. Of course, it then needs to be balanced to match it up with production via the focuses, which kind of begs the question as to why not just use the wheel for everyone; amongst other things, it would be a lot easier to balance it if everyone was using the same system, and also the wheel+coercion just sounds a lot more interesting and cooler than either wheel-alone or focuses-alone do, since it produces a system where many points on the wheel are valid.