Before we continue with this discussion, how about we actually understand how it works first? No insult is intended here, please don't read it like one. The game mechanics implications are not very transperent unless you examine them thoroughly. This might actually be the bigger design flaw then the actual mechanic.

This is not true. I think what deceived you here, is the double penalty -% morale and -% production. Just start up a new game and look for yourself in the planet view how it calculates. The production penalty is additive with approval and starbase boni. Because you get penalized to both morale and production however it can sometimes seem like it was multiplicative to the other boni.

So what difference does this make? One difference is, that morale actually is a soft counter to coercion. If your morale is high enough to offset the -50% you only get the production penalty. With max approval and 5 eco starbases this means going down 33% of production, not 50% or more. The next thing it does is change the wheel positions where one output (in one category) is maximized. If you start with a civ which has no content bonusses you get your maxed output at about 70%. If you play a civ starting in the torian system with content +2 your maxed output is somewhere around 80%.

I will have to test a little more, maybe for a specialized research world a bureau of labor and high morale bonusses/ lower pop is actually advantageous.

 

To summarize: This does not necessarily make coercion an unflawed game mechanic. Even if it did, it would still be bad design, when people like joeball - who knows how math works - get it wrong. Heck, I wouldn't have looked twice if it wasn't for this discussion, I had it wrong, too. If your mechanic offers depth (which I think coercion actually might) but the majority of players doesn't recognize it, it is a failed design. But none of this changes my opinion which I stated earlier:

I will continue to paly with the numbers on coercion a little, to see if there actually is some depth to it, or if its numbers are wrong.

Like I said, all of this is going away. No more individual planetary focusing. The 'Stand-alone' will change how we manage economy, happiness and production and it will only allow us to do so on a global scale (I hope).  Just like in Gal Civ II you set your sliders how  you like and  your empire follows. Individual planets will not need to be micromanaged as much as empire management will be. Fortunately the expansion is voluntary/elective so if you do not want to change things  you don't have to. 

I for one welcome our now Alien Overlords (looks at Frogboy) and look forward to the change the Stand-Alone will bring. 

Hmm, are these intentions stated by the devs somewhere, or is this what you see in your (accurate or not) crystal sphere?

My guess is Larsenex is infering some of this from the paltry information provided during the dev streams. I used to do that. Unfortunately the GalCiv3 devs have a habit of under delivering on the expectations they set during the dev streams. Do you guys like the cool invasion gameplay?

Here is a quick reason why coercion is just so poorly implemented. In a typical game with typical play, the maximum output of a particular resource isn't when you set your wheel to 100% on that resource, it's somewhere else. What? It makes sense mathematically, but it feels arbitrary. I almost believe this is by design: make the average person think wheel position doesn't matter much so they will just set it and/or forget it, making gross adjustments at just a few key times in the game. Just look at some of the posts above and see that is exactly what happened.

As described in my post above, I am aware of this and I am also aware, that is maximum output position can be changed to a spot more close to 100%. I have put some more time into investigating this: if your approval is at 100% regardless of coercion, this sweet spot is at 91%. If you now have 5 economic starbases around, The sweet spot is (theoreticly) at 105%. Add to this the death furnace and you are (theoreticly again) at 123%. And yet even higher with the 20% bonus of the final motivation trait. Didn't slave trade also benefit this?

Thus under the right circumstances you 100% does do what it appears to do. I can't conclude yet, that this translates into viable play i.e. a super high approval specialist world being advantageous over an 44/44/12 100% approval world, with focus by improvements only. The problem is not that they didn't put enough thought into the mechanic itself - I think. They didn't put enough effort into communicating how it works.

It is actually pretty cool, that the Drengin with their approval manufacturing improvements and the malevolent tree are the best in coercing their work force ^^.

The main issue (to me) is the effort you have to put into finding these things out and this giant noob trap of putting the slider to 100% when it is not beneficial. What could be done, is blocking out the inefficient specialization regions (percentage higher then the sweet spot). Maybe it would have been more elegant to just block those regions in the wheel depending on approval in the first place... I don't know.

On a sidenote: specialization of worlds being better then generalized worlds before coercion was not caused directly by adjacency boni and starbases. Take those two away and two different specialized worlds would still be superior to two mixed worlds in the galciv3 system.

Most of what I mentioned is all from Frogboy's apparent dislike of the wheel from many threads. He has mentioned in several long threads that it was not intended to stay in. This contradicts Paul a bit as stated above that it was intended. 

This thread implies it is going away.

https://forums.galciv3.com/472865/page/4/#3605798

 

Quoting Frogboy (Brad):

 

NOW, let’s talk about the future

Eventually, GalCiv III is going to have a bunch of different types of governments to choose from.  The reason the Economy tab is done the way it is is because it’s been designed with the idea that eventually the type of government you have will determine what shows up in that tab.   So one type of government might have a bunch of sliders, another might have almost no controls, another might have players choosing a series of subsidy policies and so on.  For now, we just have the production wheel. But it’s never been intended to be the end-all be all.  

 

^^ from that thread. 

 

and...

 

"I understand why people like the production wheel

Imagine if in GalCIv II we let people set their taxes to 100% and there was no downside to this.  Now, imagine if we put out GalCiv II v1.4 and we made it so you couldn’t change taxes.  People would have been ticked off.  Understandably.  But I hope also that people would understand that such a system is broken.  There’s no such thing a a free lunch.

Ending the Free Lunch

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the production wheel.  By reading the forums, at length, I’ve gotten a much better idea of what the issue really is.  It’s the free lunch aspect of the production wheel I don’t like.  In the real world, command economies don’t do well against free markets in the long-run.  But in GalCiv III, they’re absolutely the way to go.  The problem ISN’T the wheel on its own (I don’t like the micro management but I have no issue with people voluntarily choosing to play that way).  The problem is that you get to coerce people without any downside."

 

^^^ the above are direct quote from Brad. 

Also there is this thread as well regarding the wheel.

 

https://forums.galciv3.com/472815/page/6/#3630568

So ecenomic starbases fixes the coercian problem. Didn't know that.

 

Yes, if you can raise your morale high enough you can ignore the coercion penalty. This is fine since you are investing time and resources into the star base modules. 

The current system works (nobody would play it if it didn't) but it feels clunky and unintuitive, particularly for people who like to specialize. It's that way because the original design was too powerful, too unwieldy, and everything since has been a patch job to correct those issues.

This paragraph is very convincing when you are talking to people who haven't been around for a while. Back to reality the idea of different economic systems wasn't really talked about publicly until 1.2 or 1.3 and it was in conversation like "we've been tossing around the idea of..." So when you say the Economy tab is the way it is and "it's never been intended", that is revisionist. Until 1.2 or 1.3, there was no talk of alternatives, only making the existing system better. None of what has happened or is happening with the economic system since 1.2 was even thought about prior.

I waste my breath (typing) trying to set the record straight. For one, nobody cares what actally happened; what matters is what happens next, and when I'm being practical I agree with that sentiment. Larsenex, I hope you are right. I hope you and other fans help steer what comes next into a good direction. Keep up the heat, ideas, and interest, because when the devs do their own thing without considering feedback, it tends to punish forum-goers in favor of the quiet masses.

Eviator, that quote is actually Frogboys, directly pulled from his post. I wrote it to show that indeed the wheel will likely go away based on his tone in that thread. 

In essence I agree with eviators point, what the devs talked about around 1.4 and what they will be able to do until next year might be very different things. I will let them surprise me positively if it happens, but I won't hold my breath for now.

Lets seevin two they had taxation affecting morale. They had the economic wall. They had sliders for production and slider for research social military. 

In three they got rid of taxation. They traded the economic wall for the large empire penalty. The sliders was replaced by the wheel. A difference was local and global. I didn't know what to do with coersion. So just up morale to fix it. 

Yeah when I first read his post back in late last year I laughed because I couldn't believe he said that. Nothing...NOTHING...prior to 1.3 or 1.4 hinted that they were looking at different economic systems, including dev streams, and I watched all of them. So either they were very tight-lipped about it, or they were re-writting history to make themselves look clever. I favor the latter explanation based upon how botched many of the other aspects of the game became. Eh, no matter. I think we both want a better future for the game, not wallow in the past.