Holy mother, I'm not deep into playing this game guys, ffs. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a casual player of this game, as are my friends; I'm not looking to rehash anything, or start up shit. I am however going to be completely and bluntly honest, regardless of the consequences. I'm a developer myself, and I've dipped into the 4x genre only twice as a dev, but that's enough to get a good view of it, not to mention the other 4x/TBS I've played. Bold faced feedback is the best feedback, no matter how negative or simple it is; It's a good way to identify problems.
On the topic of the wheel: If they're going to remove the wheel, as a UI choice, that's fine, as long as they have some way to control your economy. If they're going to remove it entirely, so all you have are focus buttons, the developers would be better off ending production and selling off the company, because a change like that would be the same as putting on a sign saying 'we have absolutely no clue what we're doing for 4xs' and tank whatever credibility they still have-- and trust me when I say it's little. At least in the development community. The hallmark of 4xs is being able to control your economy, and have some method of directly influencing what your empire or faction is doing beyond passive buffs, especially on a base by base basis, or in this case colony by colony basis. Honestly, Galciv as a series is one of maybe two series I've regularly played that doesn't allow you to control production per base. And a simple focus button that changes the percent values isn't enough for the overall economy. Period.
And if you think that the wheel system, which is the exact same system Galciv2 used, just with a different Ui [and resource system], as well as the exact same system many 4xs previously used, is bad and broken, I have to beg the question of how many 4xs you guys have played. I know that just because everyone's using it doesn't make it good, but at the same time if it's stable over ten separate games, and somehow not in one, I doubt it's the system, and more the difference in that one game.
On the topic of Coercion: not addressing the 'lore' reasoning behind it, the Coercion system is....I've looked at it several ways now. In terms of balancing relational to the rest of the game, and I've come to the conclusion that it was implemented, poorly, to counter a very singular and 'complicated' [in that it took several turns of work usually] setup that a large number of players were using to ease their way through the game. Every single strategy game has this. Every one. Sometimes it's related to one factions abilities or stats, sometimes it's due to a flaw in the economic or military system, but every strategy game has the 'broken' build that everyone uses. None once has a small, single component change every fixed it. Especially not one where the actual cause of the problem was not addressed.
The Coercion system seems to be aimed at an oversight in the potency of adjacency, starbase stacking, and raw production as it related to the economy. As near as I can tell, Adjacency is still pretty much the same and untouched, Starbases I'm assuming hasn't been majorly redesigned, and raw production clearly is still the critical factor-- something that coming from not just Galciv 2 but other 4xs I still hold to as being a bad design choice-- but the minmaxing for some reason is punished. 4xs are about minmaxing. Always have been, always will be, so to introduce a mechanic that directly punishes players for going with the most logical action, especially on a planet by planet basis, is the equivalent of putting in a mechanic to punish players from aiming down sights in an FPS, too many rares or uniques equipped in a ARPG/Dungeon Crawler, or quickly stacking rows in tetris-alike games. It's bad game design, flat out, and shows a lack of understanding and foresight into the genre they're developing for.
And even without that to consider, the implementation is god awful. First it's a multiplicative penalty, meaning it'd take significantly more work to overcome it than it would be to simply move the slider back, and it's a double whammy on top of that, making for a double multiplicative penalty. Drawing from RPGs and dungeon crawlers, that's what's called a sinkhole wall; putting up stacking penalties that have no viable mechanical way to overcome them, simply to depreciate the value of a common held tactic via extremely reduced output. In layman; It's usually something used to drop damage numbers from 100% to 10%, all in the name of countering the most common build without actually addressing the problem. And honestly it's not even doing that. As someone pointed out, all you need to do is adjust the sliders/wheel so that you have something just on the line of the penalty. So instead of actually getting rid of the minmaxing, it's just been changed, and still held firm, all be it in a watered down way.
On the topic of the lore reason for Coercion: I....I've literally had guildmates and friends of mine say I should write an open letter to Stardock and Frogboy specifically explaining the numerous flaws in the logic given, as well as how such showed their utter lack of understanding of how the real world works.....So far I've opted not to to avoid a bitching war between our companies. But I will say this; The idea that the supposed 'Command economies' are functionless failures, and the 'Free-market economies' are paragons is the most absurd notion I've heard in years. I'll openly say this, they must be exceptionally delusional and ignorant to think that, considering how much damage Freemarkets have done to the world's economy and governments, and how 'Command economies' stabilized the mess created by free markets. Don't get me wrong, I utterly hate command economies; In many cases it's tantamount to slavery, if it plainly isn't. But to say that they're so bad as to justify the above system in response is showing a lack of understanding of real world markets. Most of the world's Free markets are held up by Command Economies, whether or not anyone wants to admit it.
And putting even that aside, the argument of 'people get upset because you tell them to work here and not there' has numerous holes. First and foremost, if that were true, the allies would have lost WW2. When WW2 happened, most of the Free-market civilizations rapidly shifted over to Command economies-- effectively going from a balanced economy, to a Production focused economy-- without rebellion and discord like we see in this game. Those that did show that, were jailed. To say that the government in these games would allow people to just go 'no, I don't feel like working here, so I'm just going to cause your economy trouble is absurd. And second, they assume that we're talking about civilians when most 4xs I've seen go out of their way to imply or outright say that the workers are military. You know, the entire idea of 'military workers' or 'military contractors'. These aren't private citizens in the private sector; These are people who signed up to take orders for the better of their civilization. If that were the case in this game, and they just decided they didn't like everyone being focused on one thing, then that's the lamest, weakest government I've ever heard of. And even, even if they are all civilians, even if there's no military workers, then lastly, we are talking about government built and run facilities. We are not talking about privately owned and constructed buildings, or jobs provided by some third party within the civilization. You build those improvements with resources collected from your empire; You provided those jobs as government jobs; and you incentivized work within those areas. I could understand this kind of backlash if we were talking about a true free-market economy, like the one you see in simcity or skylines, where you just zone areas and someone else builds it all for you. If you started saying 'we're going to take away all your factory jobs from privately owned companies so you can go work a service job to make us more capital.' then yeah people would get upset; Hell that's a real thing happening in several 1st world countries with Free-markets, and there's been major backlash because of it. But it's not. You don't just watch different improvements pop up, you commit your governments resources to building and maintaining these facilities and jobs, and what you do with them is at your government's discretion.
Again, there's plenty more to go into, especially where free-markets and how corporate interests relate towards macro-scale governments in such markets, hell just go watch an explanation of EVE lore wise to get an idea on that, but I won't go into it. Simply put, the explanation of why Coercion exists is non-nonsensical, and flat out ignorant, and that's why I wonder who got fired. Because if someone posted THAT in defense of any company I've worked with's decision, they would have been laughed out of the office and told never to call back because of how negatively they impacted the companies reputation and credibility.
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Now, with that said, thanks for the info on how to disable that poor feature, I probably won't be coming back to this forum, so have fun.
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