Although I could say Yay, I'm afraid that things look grim. I am thankful for the prompt reply though.

That's not to say that there's no pleasing me, but if the wheel is an optional modded/pref point, then this doesn't cut it: You either design the game with it or with out it. Having such a major system optional breaks/fragments the game & experience.

And I'm not convinced that the AI has nothing to do with it at all. And it's not good at all to point your finger to your customers and judge us on what we can or can't do, or how we understand your game.

Is the rest of the game, and in particular the AI capable of handling a player using the wheel? If you just tell me "Hey you turned on the wheel so that's why the AI or X/Y can't keep up with you or doesn't work" then it doesn't cut it. Modding problems aside, adding optional or completely new concepts in a game either with a mod or an option always has the side effect that the AI can't handle it in almost all 4x games to date.

If you just add it with a disclaimer "not supported or updated in our current or future design meetings/brainstorm sessions" then its not part of the game experience/evolution.

And I feel the need to discuss micro management: You think the wheel is problematic when you support games with hundreds of star systems, hundreds of races, hundreds of bases/resources and thousands of ships? You should obviously re-direct your mm reduction efforts. Besides, after the planet was developed and excluding some upgrades or terraforming, I would make one final slider setting and forget about a planet for 100's of turns or for the entirety of the game. I would even mark that planet so. So for large games everything is a MM hell, yet somehow that seems to be allowed. Perhaps we should decide on what galaxy size settings the game is designed for, cause at least for medium with medium habitable planets, the wheel was never a micro hell.

And tell me, what have you done/will be done about starbases, constructors and fleet management among other things?

You hit the nail on the head. What utility is there for the slider to be on an empire level when you make static infrastructure decisions localy? Answer: None, It was a relic from GC2 where we didn't had local specialization. And it was the easy way for an AI to manage its empire.

And specialized planets are all the rage in sience fiction: mining planets, manufacturing planets etc etc. You even added tile/bonuses to push us in this way.

Besides, there's no planetary concept model for a flexible planet. It could work if we had buildings that added equal amounts of bonuses for 2 or three resource categories, but these building don't exist, so barring an emergency set of turns there's no reason or room for general planets both from a flavor and a strategic standpoint.

Please spend your dev time elsewere, I can't stress this enough...

The AI can be scripted in such a way as to fully specialize planets (in fact, I've already done so); and the rest of the game can be balanced around it reasonably easily, if time-consumingly. The wheel disappearing is a UI change. The underlying economy still works exactly the same way. Being able to reverse the change means that yes, modders will basically be able to make the AI play in a manner that is challenging for a player using the wheel without bonuses.

So what? A whole lot of the rest of the game is incredibly 'gamey,' too. Need an army? No problem; some random planet has a large population and an attached shipyard, so within a week (turn) I can have a fully-equipped and fully-trained army of a size limited only by the population of the planet and the troop capacity of the transport. Need to modernize the fleet? Good thing extensive hull modifications, installing new components, and stripping out components I no longer want only requires money and maybe a week or two but no actual shipyard facilities. Also a good thing that my shipyards, no matter how little industry is backing them, can always pump out even the most advanced ships I can design within a week if only I throw enough money at them. Oh, and those carriers I have? Yeah, all their fighters are magically upgraded as soon as any new technology that might result in improved fighters being developed becomes available regardless of how far from home their carriers are.

Singling out the wheel for being 'gamey' is a bit ridiculous, especially as it's far from the worst offender as far as 'gaminess' is concerned. Well, maybe it's the worst offender as far as gaminess is concerned if you insist on it indicating that the government is setting the jobs of every single person in the empire, but on the other hand, that also implies that there is no private sector economy, and if there is no private sector economy, then it is in my view reasonable for the government to set the jobs of every being in the empire; after all, they are the only employer in the empire, and if you don't want to do what your boss tells you to do but you have no other job options? Tough luck. Plus, without a private sector economy in the abstracted-out background, it becomes very, very difficult to explain where exactly all the production for the new superdreadnought that I rush-purchased at the shipyard sponsored by a world with only markets built on it came from; you're talking about orders of magnitude more manufacturing output than the planet can manage based upon what public sector improvements were built upon it.

Initially, I used the local wheel because it simplified playing while climbing a rather high learning curve. Very quickly, however, when I understood other aspects of the game better, I disliked the wheel.  While I don't care for the wheel - I stand by my conviction that games need to offer players options.  Allowing the user to activate the wheels via an ini entry is a wonderful way to maintain the option.  A tick box in the game set up area would be preferable for those who are shy about editing ini files.  But the ini is better than no choice at all.

The wheel is not for me - but, since its already here - why deny it to others who may prefer it?

Got to say this does seem like a very knee jerk reaction by Stardock.  The patch has only been out in full for a day and they backpedal, sure it was in opt-in but how many players actually take part in that?  They probably should have given it more time, asked people to at least give the new system a chance (by many of the posts it's clear a significant number of those vocally against the change had not) and then reassessed in 2 weeks or a month.

Next dev stream it will be interesting to hear what Paul has to say about this.  Will be very interested to see if anyone asks him who made the decision to remove it and who made it for it to come back.  Though if he was forced to by on high I don't expect him to say so, he is an employee after all.

Oh well, what has happened has happened.  We probably should all move our focuses to dealing with the diplomacy system, because current that is a poo storm.

Just trying to help, sorry if I come out too strong from time to time. Perhaps I should give GC some 3-6 months or breathing dev space and come back to it later for another go.

Idea about the wheel.  What if a brake or governor (mechanical model, not person/office/leader) is part of the wheel?  Only allow it to be adjusted a small amount each turn (or five turns, yada).  This way, rapid, radical, gamey/exploit y moves blocked. 

Well I really wonder what kind of game does Stardock and namely Frogboy want to create. One that is perfect in his eyes or one that people love to play. Games exist for people to have fun. Try to repeat that sentence few times. FUN. Take away our fun and you take away our interest. Make a "perfect" game that is not fun and you sure know what future it shall have. Continue to chop away things we like about this game and you will lose people willing to buy your DLCs and next games...

So that said I really like the wheel and it makes me happy playing with it. I don't care what reasons, what logic and what problem it does or not. I like it this way and I am not alone. I tried it without it and I am not having fun. Does Stardock need to know more?

If you played the OS/2 version then you should know this already to be true.

In the OS/2 version, you could click on details on a planet and set specialization to a very fine degree there.  I wrote the AI to exploit this because humans aren't as good as computers at optimizing spending based on what improvements they've built on a planet.  Humans tend to  min/max, an AI can do the optimal amount.

I don't mind people arguing their beliefs passionately.  But there is a threshold where people stop remembering that there are OTHER people on the other side of the screen.

1.4 is a magnificent update.  The production wheel, as it was implemented is a terrible design concept that forced players to micro planets in order to get the most out of them and even worse, resulted in production numbers that were not well considered by the design team.

The game was never intended to have players researching the tech tree in 70 turns or cranking out huge hulled ships every turn.  That's not what GalCiv is about.

I will be having them implement a system that I think will make everyone happy. The production wheel will become a racial trait and I'm going to ask that the concept of coercion be implemented (it'll affect morale).  You want to command your citizens what to do globally or locally? Fine. But don't expect your citizens to like it.

Well, I never cared for the Terran Alliance, so I am happy with this.

In fact, most of the time they are part of an enemy alliance and I wipe them out.

No regrets.

That's not true. There are plenty of games where challenge isn't a factor, such as 'chutes and ladders', for example... or ANY game that relies on dice-only.

the same can be said about videogames. the LEGO Tt games have ZERO challenge, but they are a lot of fun for their humour, exploration and imagination.

On a more related note, SPORE isn't very challenging, but it's very popular to this day for its ability to let your imagination run wild.

Why? It's got a thriving, occasionally growing and shrinking, dedicated community.

If you go to the SPORUM, you will see that people are still very active in it.