With the current economic model, the production wheel is a very useful tool that makes perfect sense in the way the game has abstracted the economy. The workers aren't subject to coercion because the wheel isn't a tax rate it is a schedule/assignment tool for your workers. If doesn't matter what percentage the wheel is at, the workers can execute any job with the same amount of skill. The workers require no training and they either aren't paid at all or their pay is another abstraction. Also, the workers can only choose to work in a state run factory, a state run bank or a state run research lab. It doesn't matter if the percentage is 100% manufacturing or if it is 33/33/34 manufacturing/research/wealth at the end of the week the workers spend all of their time at their state run job and don't get paid for it. So they've already been completely coerced, the only difference is before removing the wheel, players could spend time to efficiently allocate their workers if they choose to do that. There is no free lunch in the current system. If a planet is highly specialized, then workers, despite having the same innate ability to perform any assigned job with equal vigor, will be able to produce more at 100% of their world's specialty because they have better tools to do one job compared to the other two jobs. No matter what you have the production wheel set to, there aren't any more workers and they don't work any harder. It comes down to the facilities on the planet. Some facilities will allow the workers to excel at research, some at production and some at wealth. There is probably even a setup where 33.33/33.33/33.33 is the most efficient.

If you want to add coercion as a factor, the simplest method would be that the workers take home a percentage of what they produce. For simplicity sake, let's say the default rate is the state(player) receives 25% of current output. The wheel still exists, because like I said it is a scheduling tool, but there is now another slider for tax rate. If you increase the tax rate the workers experience coercion and become unhappy in most instances. If you decrease the tax rate, it should increase happiness to an extent.

If you still want to add coercion as a factor and think adding in a tax rate is too simple then you need to do several things.

1) Provide jobs in private industries for workers that are outside of state control.

2) Have workers earn a wage at both private jobs and state ran industries.

3) Have each worker require some kind of training before they can perform a job. So if they want to/are forced to work in a state factory they need factory training. If they want to work in a research lab they need research lab training. No switching jobs without training, unless their is a huge performance penalty. This training takes time.

4) Workers have needs/wants that they use their wages on. Some items could be food, shelter, entertainment, transportation etc. If they can't obtain these, then this should decrease their happiness.

5) Workers need to have some kind of motivation/values. If a worker is motivated or values money they should want to work in a high paying field, if a worker values democracy they should want the government to be a democracy.

This would require a much more in depth revision of the economic system, though it could be worth it.

Yes, Frogboy stated that already.

My immersion is already quite limited. You manage only the buildings that are relevant for gameplay, all others are abstracted away. On a world with "90% research labs" you will never have only research labs, but also all other buildings (and therefore jobs) that a society needs to function like hospitals and restaurants and supermarkets and whatever.

As someone else stated in another post it would be great if the points where corercion begins differs from race to race.

I hope that won't happen. That was exactly the problem with the wheel. I (and obviously a lot of other people, too) felt forced to go to each planet each turn to adjust the wheel to its optimal position, and that shouldn't be necessary anymore since that's no fun at all.

>Planets in Galactic Civilizations III can be specialized much more than in previous versions.  An industrial world, through adjacencies, can result in massive bonus manufacturing.  However, on top of that, players can direct their citizens to work more in those factories via the global production wheel (and previously the local production wheel).

This isn't the way your planetary output should be viewed. When I've assigned production on the wheel before I've always assumed you were selecting what product you wanted your citizens to provide to the civilization. By putting the wheel fully 100% into production, you're saying I want to tax my citizens in the form of manufacturing output. 100% research you're saying I want access to all of the available research capacity of the planet. 100% commerce would mean simply a monetary tax on the citizens. 

So this basically boils down to from a morale nerf to a production one? good going only problem is the evil races can get around this? eg it wont apply to the Yor and the Drengin wont give a crap? As much as I would like the LEP gone I don't want something equally as bad in its place either?

I've just reread quite a chunk of this thread and I think that several different things are being conflated.

Brad has spent a huge portion of his life creating the iterations of this splendid game and it's obviously his baby. He wants of course to make the best game possible but is also repulsed if that game rewards political systems that he finds offensive.  As a Brit somewhere in the centre of our politics I, coming from a very different place from him but that isn't the point at all.

This is a game and in game play you make choices you wouldn't dream of making in real life. Take the two versions of Civilization I like and know best 2 and 4 (I can't be doing with the graphics of 5 - so pleased that in Galciv, clarity has trumped alleged prettiness).

In Civ2 in the endgame I always thought the best choice was Fundamentalism at 50% science, 50% happiness. The latter meant that many of your worlds were celebrating which moved them up an economic level; the former kept the science going and happiness converted into gold fuelled the economy.

In Civ4, I normally like Universal Suffrage, Free Speech,  Emancipation, State Property (unless you want to use corporations) and some religious set up - Theocracy if you're warlike and powerful. 

Neither of these would be at all fun to live in, in the real world. But it's a game and that seems irrelevant. It is interesting though that while they were prepared to have Stalin and Mao as leaders, Hitler - quite rightly in my opinion - was not included.

Moving  on from ideology to game play, it's clear  that in Galciv3, the adjacency bonuses are a toy that created unintended consequences - they simply work too effectively. The question shouldn't be how to find ideological reasons for nerfing them - any extrapolation from mankind to aliens is tenuous at best - but how to balance them.

I was very opposed when the planetary wheel was first removed but have adapted a level or so down to the focus buttons and aren't unhappy with them. What I do echo is the request that Stardock settle on one system or other - or  a mixture; and then tweak in forthcoming versions but don't make huge changes.

The idea of "coercion" or whatever else you call it doesn't have to be justified by some attempted logic or political argument - it just has to be implemented to improve the game. And whatever economic system is used the most important thing is that the interface is improved to reduce fiddling. Obviously this should apply to all aspects of the game, including the economy, planetary management and ship control.

The improvement of the interface is a different topic but I would like to make one fairly simple suggestion, which is to return players to a planetary screen as soon as a terraform has been completed. The most arduous - though quite a rewarding - part of the game is going through a vast list of planets after a new terraforming tech has been unlocked, trying to optimise them. Presumably, you'd like to use the new squares once they're enabled but at the moment you have to make sure to cancel any project that applies so as to be reminded to do this. On the same topic, it would be useful if terraforming options appeared at the very top of the list of possible improvements. 

 Anyway, I echo everybody looking forward to 1.5 and thank Stardock again for a splendid if still flawed game. 

Jon

BTW, will the focus also disappear or cause coercion?

Frogboy, you've made enemies of the Keynesians in the community. You know about the Chicago school with all that talk about free lunches, right?

I've hated the necessity to micro-manage and tediously specialize everything to get optimal results on a per-turn basis. I'm happy with most things that reduce that necessity.

Perhaps we could add a bit more benefit / slop for going over the manufacturing / researched required for a thing, maybe adding the excess to next project? It'd make more sense, too, since workers and scientists wouldn't keep researching / building something that's already done. They'd immediately move on to the next project during that time, and one can think of the weekly choices as leader as happening at the moment that the stuff gets finished and not at a set date where the dudes have been twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. Or am I horribly misinformed and that's already in the game?

I think that coersion is an extremely organic and believable mechanic. Maybe not its current values, but...

I'd like to go one step further and implement the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

It might make for interesting gameplay, where one has to choose between economic stability and gov't production.

Granted, of course, that a galactic civilization that has any centrally controllable component would necessitate gov't monopoly over things like infrastructure and starships.

Yes, you are horribly misinformed, but to your defense the ui does a horrible job at showing this.

With techs it's most notable as you can get multiple techs in a single turn if you pick something further down the tree and have enough research to get two or more tech in a turn. But the ui does a horrible job at showing that you can chain research and it's currently only possible when you go down a single branch.

With buildings and ships it's harder to notice since you can for whatever reason only build one per turn but the buildqueue has a tooltip that shows carryover production(but that tooltip is hard to get because the hoverover area for it is horribly defined).