Frogboy, I personally like the wheel and use it.  I also agree with making the AI optimize it to its benefit as a way to improve its capability rather than getting big bonuses.  As I understand it, the main thing you seem to have a problem with is the ability to create situations where an unrealistic amount of research or production can be obtained using it.  In that case I would say fix that, not remove the wheel.  Removing the wheel would seem to be a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  Why can't some limiting factors be added.  For example, use the concept that rarely doubling anything gives you twice as much.  There is always some amount of inefficiency.  So make 50 percent not be twice 25 and 100 not be twice 50.  Add diminishing returns to the system.

The purpose of the change was not just to "simplify" things but to remove a burdensome game element that very few players used and even fewer actually liked.  It was cool at first, but after months of playing it became a mindless chore rather than an interesting feature, and I am glad to see it gone.

you are absolutely right. it take as much time to click on the wheel as it takes to click on one of tick boxes. everybody who argues that wheel is time consuming-  talking nonsense! and just playing fools!   the wheel is too powerful is true but this issue can be easily sorted. there are a lot of way to sort it out with out need of removing it. one of the ways suggested by frogman - adding cohesion. another -  just changing the way base points calculated. i have suggested one of the possible ways how it can be done few posts before.

Larse you fail to realize another point:  no one care about beating AI. when people vote for wheel - the  very very last thing in their mind - is that it can be used to beat AI.  who cares????  personally i do not play single at all and after recent patch can not even stomach multiplayer. main point is that developers taken away the ability to freely manage  planets in the game!  poor old master of orion have more options to manage planets than Galactic Civilisation at the moment.

and after all with wheel AI have  much bigger advantage to human players because AI can micro much better than any human player on turn to turn bases.

 to summarize: your point that wheel used to beat AI is complete nonsense.

I play almost exclusively on Godlike, with the only step down being to Incredible. If I am playing on Gifted or Genius, I can still zip way ahead of the AI in production and research without touching the wheel, which is the reason why I never play on lower difficulties to begin with. If you are complaining about the game being too easy while playing normal or Gifted, you need to step up your game to higher difficulties. On Godlike, even with micromanaging the wheel, the AI will still have a very good chance of crushing you if your neighbor just happens to be an aggressive faction with the opposite ideology.

Planning how to set up a planet is something everyone should have been doing. It is far more efficient to specialize than to make every planet try to do everything. It is the same way in the real world. A business is not ran by everyone doing everything, even if they could do it. It is ran by groups of specialized employees working together, such as financing, advertising, legal, etc. You would only be handicapping yourself by intentionally making balanced planets.

And of course, planning how to set up the planets while taking into account future terraforming takes up vastly more time than managing the wheel ever will.

Nilfry have you beat the ai on Godlike currently without the wheel?

I am just curious? I obviously dont micro anywhere near as good as you or some others do so I am just asking. 

You're missing the point completely.  It has nothing to do with the number of clicks or amount of time needed to make a change. That's not even remotely the point.

What the wheel does is, if you want to maximize a world's potential - in particular a non-manufacturing world - it requires your occasional attention.  On a single planet, no big deal.  The big problem is many worlds requires attention at the same time.  Unlocking technology becomes an exercise in "here we go again" because every singe time I need to upgrade my worlds, I have to fiddle with the slider on every. single. one.  (excluding pure manufacturing, of course)   Then I have to go back and set the sliders back to where they were before, only this time it's different for every world.  THUS, I must go through my planets every (or nearly every) turn to make sure I'm not letting one slack off once the upgrades are finished.  Taking away the wheel takes away that chore.  That is why I didn't like the wheel.  The wheel itself was never the problem, the problem was how the wheel influenced gameplay and mechanics in even a mid-sized empire with specialized worlds (which the game very much encourages)

ok. ones again- you do not like it? don't use it! it's OK.  just do not use it.  let others do what they want.

that's why I personally vote for keeping both systems to make everybody "happy bunny". 

but NO! here we can see again the same selfish approach in form of: "I personally do not like it so I have to make sure no one using it. "

and now back to micro problem.  tell me what is different now? let's assume u need  to speed up research.

what do you do? you going through every planet shifting it's planetary focus. using those tick boxes now.

what is different now?

I can tell you what is different now: a whole bunch of other micro problems which appeared with  social/military slider and wheel removal: one of them need to go through ship construction bases and every other turn to switch on/switch off them. 

Perhaps the best compromise would be/would have been to keep the wheel but limit what it can do for an individual colony.  Instead of max 100%, min 0%, use the focus values of max 50%, min 25%.  This might leave some people unhappy, but those values (having min/max that isn't 0/100) are really what has made the most difference in gameplay - more so than the removal of the wheel.

Given the ranting and raving this has caused, One can only tremble in fear at the melt-down that's going to occur when Stardock announce that they've dealt with the OP sensorship by allowing it to be shot down by any ship (whichever size, whatever weapons) in any part of the galaxy at any time.

Oh, sorry! Was that not public knowledge, Stardock?

Oopsie. Sozz. My bad.

But, Ziddim, if you were living in Austin and didn't like doing tech (50%) and all the jobs in manufacturing and wealth (30% each), you could look on-line/off-line for a job doing what you wanted in, say, Phoenix and move there.

In GalCiv games, there is no volontary emigration. It's controlled by the "government": A Hey, you! On to that thar Colony Ship and go colonize that new planet and probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! or B: Hey, you! On to that thar Transport Ship and, if you don't die, you'll probably end up doing the same job you were doing here! Also, there's no welfare so it's Job A or Job B or Job C (if the government that controls your people wants your colony to create Job B and Job C).

I don't know if Frogboy mentioned this in his piece about the wheel and coercion, but for me that's the rub: You can't get pissed of with the options and leave Zargibarg IV, which is 100% Tech, so guess what, homeboy? Go down to that lab tomorrow and work. And the next day. And the next day. And....

A way out of this (or to just show the negative impact coercion has) would be to have a random Colony Event: A spaceship containing 1.5b of your population has left your colony. This has affected your production as follows: Manufacturing -10%, Research -7%, Wealth -12%. So, while the idea of coercion is still underpinning every decision, you would have to consider how lowering approval might suddenly lead to x billion of your population commendering/buying/stealing a colony ship and doing a version of The Cartman: Screw You Guys, I'm Going Somewhere Else. Okay, those people may end up being shot down/landing on a lousy planet, but their misery made them leave your shitty colony which has negative impact on your production.

To mrblondini:

Natural reproduction is far too slow to cover the population growth rates of planets as seen within the game if the planetary populations are actually reasonably close to the populations given for the planets. The base population growth rate is 0.1 population units per turn, with 1 population unit representing a billion people and 1 turn representing a week. Even if you were to assume an average annual population growth of 10%, you're looking at a base population on planet of about 50 billion before natural population growth can cover the base population growth rate without immigration. Reduce either the current population or the assumed average annual population growth rate to something more reasonable, and you're looking at a population growth rate that can only represent a massive influx of immigrants from somewhere (where exactly is difficult to say; even if you assume an average annual population growth rate of 10% throughout the empire and allow internal migration, you need about 50 units of population to exist somewhere within your empire for every 0.1 new units of population gained each turn, and you simply do not have this much early on and possibly not even late in the game).

The population growth rate makes far more sense if you assume that there is an enormous invisible background population and the population numbers you see indicate how many citizens of your empire, government employees, or even just members of the military (active-duty and perhaps reserve) are present on each planet; then the population growth rate can be assumed to be some kind of limit on the rate at which the paperwork can be filled out to register a citizen or train a person for a government job or military service.

Think about it - off of just your homeworld and your first colony, your empire's population can more or less double in the space of a single in-game year (52 turns; at base population growth rate that's an additional 10.4 population assuming you settled your first colony on the starting turn, and you only started with 10 population on the homeworld and 2.5 on the starting colony ship, and these are productive members of society, not just infants), without you putting any special emphasis on population growth. On top of that, the entire planetary population is sufficiently well prepared to serve as an invasion force that it takes only a single turn to ready an invasion army (and a conquered planet's population is initially equal to the number of invading troops which survived the invasion), and the planet can be defended by a reasonable fraction of its population even with 0 turns of warning of an oncoming invasion force. This somewhat strongly suggests that the population numbers really reflect the number of (probably active-duty) military personnel on the planet rather than more broadly government employees, the empire's citizenry, or the actual planetary population.

Next, consider what the rush-production mechanic implies. Any planet I have can produce an arbitrarily large amount of manufacturing points as long as I have the credits to pay for it, and rush costs are unaffected by the local cost of production as seen by the player (unlike GCII, GCIII has a variable local production cost; a world with a manufacturing multiplier of 2.5 and a wealth multiplier of 1 will pay 1 bc for every 2.5 units of manufacturing while a world with a manufacturing multiplier of 1 and a wealth multiplier of 2.5 will pay 2.5 bc for every unit of manufacturing unless you assume that there's a hidden variable tax rate that for some reason isn't increased when you set the sliders to send money into the treasury but is increased to pay for the apparently obscenely cheap manufacturing at that planet that looks to the player like it generates ~10 manufacturing points for every billion credits of potential income). This suggests that there is a background private manufacturing sector whose production costs are more or less constant across the empire. It's fairly clear that the excess manufacturing cannot reasonably be assumed to be from overtime work at the known infrastructure; you can easily be looking at generating an order of magnitude or two of manufacturing more than your planet can actually produce. It's fairly clear that the excess production cannot always come from elsewhere in the empire, as all of the excess production has to be sourced from somewhere sufficiently nearby to arrive in a single turn and moreover the output of the other worlds of the empire may already be spoken for, and beyond that there's nothing preventing me from rushing production at every single planet and shipyard in my empire if I happen to have the money to do so. It's obvious even to casual inspection that rush costs are unrelated to apparent production costs using public sector infrastructure. Therefore, for all these reasons, rush purchase implies the existence of a private manufacturing sector on at least most if not all planets, and generally a rather significant one at that.

There's also tourism, which even at very low levels and without any multipliers is an industry worth at least a billion or so credits to each planet planet in the empire, so there's almost certainly a fairly significant amount of people moving around within the empire and visiting every colonized planet, though I suppose it's marginally possible that tourism is restricted to a relative handful of hyper-rich who end up spending enough that billions end up being collected by the government.

Also consider the overall GDP of a planet or an empire. A planet can have a wealth multiplier of perhaps 10; assuming a population of 50 and no optional production bonuses, that planet can generate 550 billion credits per turn, or about 28.6 trillion credits per year. That's the government's maximum annual income from that planet (not including tourism). Unless the value of a credit relative to a modern-day US dollar is quite high (something like $1000/credit), that is a piddly amount of income for a population of 50 billion people; a quick search indicates that the US government has an annual revenue of ~$3 trillion, about half of which comes from income taxes, off of just a few hundred million people. It's entirely possible that there are mandatory expenditures (e.g. highway maintenance, social security, wages for all the crewmen on that shiny new superdreadnought, public education funding, etc) which reduce the income generated by a planet before the player ever sees the money, but even making this assumption it's difficult to argue that the visible planetary output actually represents the entire potential output of the planet.

Last, consider that the state-sponsored trade routes have to be trading something, that that something has to be worth the billions of credits per turn that a trade route can generate, and that there is no apparent reduction in the host or destination planet's output (base or otherwise) to cover the production of whatever is being traded or the cost of purchasing whatever is being traded. This suggests, though it does not guarantee, that the goods being traded are being produced and purchased by the abstracted-out private sector rather than the visible public sector (it's also possible that the goods being traded are sufficiently valuable that the government can gain billions of credits from the route despite the production cost of the goods being so low as to have a negligible impact on the host planet's output, or that the goods are sourced from all over the empire and so the impact on any given planet's output is negligible, though given the revenues generated this is somewhat difficult to believe).

The only justifications that Frogboy has offered for the coercion mechanic that make sense are the game balance justifications; the 'realism' justifications fall apart as soon as you take more than the most cursory glance at the game mechanics and start considering what the game mechanics imply about the game universe. Fortunately, the game balance argument is sufficient on its own to justify the inclusion of the proposed coercion mechanic, even if the name of the mechanic makes no sense, and the mechanic should help curb the overproduction issues the game suffers.