Planetary wheel going away is nothing but a win.  The design of infrastructure already rewards specialization, compounding that just made the game broken with horrendously powerful specialized planets.

Brad that would be an acceptable solution to me.  I respect the opinions of those who h8 the wheel.  For me its one of the coolest game features cuz I love to micromanage planets.  I was close to hanging the game up with it gone.  It would be like Ford taking the stereo out of my mustang.  The prefs ini solution works for me.  Would this be a 1.5 release?

Yes.  Almost nobody used it.  However, nearly 20% of players who have more than 100 hours into the game use it (Which is a lot).

I think I follow your reasoning Brad and I am glad you made that post. Hopefully that will make things less confusing for many people.

My knee jerk reaction to the removal of the wheel was frustration but I gave it a try and I do not really feel the game to be less enjoyable.

The solution of making the wheel toggable in the prefs.ini is a good compromise. But what about making it a non-default but toggable option at the start of a game? It can have a strong influence on the overall difficulty and style of a game. So making it a permanent choice at the beginning of the game, like AI difficulty and galaxy size makes some sense.  At least it does to me.

In any case thank you for at least making the option easy to toggle back, I am sure some modders will do this justice.

So if we can get 20% of people with 100+ hrs we can dictate where the game goes from here?  Nice to know.

Good. I did ask for it to be something we could mod back in when the change was originally announced. This should keep most people happy. I also said there'd be a whirlwind of rage over the change, too... this whole debacle  was fairly predictable and could've been avoided.

Brad, The wheel is still alive, in my Version of the game    (the 1.4 opt-in final)

also the console is disabled and dosent work in any way.

And the Assault fighter module bug, has come back to life, from the beta Version (0.70-0.90) 

I am in need of great help at the moment, is there any thing i can do.

(here is what i have tried to do)

Install the game again (dint work) (verify the content on steam and validate the files, that also didnt work.)

so PLZ (i am desperate here) i need some kind of support, i havent tried yet that can fix my game to the current state of the game.

Strumknecht: Have tried going eco? (in the actually game)

Cause i have and i found the best way to make Money. (Your Capital planet + Raw Production and population, starbases spec in eco,)

so what you are saying is very wrong. (the planet Wheel is not needed.

what you need now that the wheel it is gone, is raw Production starbases (eco) population above 30 in the mid game to get good amount of BC Just from the Capital.

(also rush the eco Tech in the age of expansion and anything that can give raw-Production + population.

  at least for me that Works. (also i dont use the Wheel even if i can, but it will ruin my experience of the game for me.

Why? It's an option that can be toggled on or off, defaulting to off, and unsupported by SD. If you don't want to use it, then it will have no impact on your life whatsoever. What possible reason is there for objecting to that? 

Meh, I don't think it was good game design. It has good and bad aspects, and whether the good (bringing production into balance with spending; there's also great potential for micro-reduction based on the feature in future, though it's not in the game as yet) outweighes the bad (limiting player control and causing a massive shit storm for two months) is highly debatable, especially since the positives could have been achieved in other (albeit more labour-intensive) ways without the negative impact. The fact is, the community is remains very split on this even beyond this forum, as the number of new faces who've suddenly popped up in the last 24 hours to declare they hate it and that the game has been ruined for them shows.

That makes it hard to say whether the change is good or bad; especially since many of the players who claim to like the wheel's disappearance would still insist on using it if it were available in addition to focuses. A good change is not one where even the supporters think it's the worse option when given a direct choice. It has good balance implications; this needs to be recognized (and should be stressed far more to those disappointed by the wheel's disappearance), but we also need to recognize that removing player freedom was not the only way to achieve that, and that using UI changes to address balance issues is never a good solution.

Bringing it back on a prefs toggle is a good compromise, and really there's no solid reason for anyone to object to it.

Don't spend precious dev time on putting the wheel back!

Spend it on refining what we have now.

"No civilization functions where last being can be assigned a job by the government. "

Actually, that's not true... but a good point regardless. For a race like the YOR, it makes total sense...

Also, hive-minded races like the Borg from star treck...

Or a theoretical race where the ruler can take control of any one subject's body independently at any one point in time.

you know what? Make the local-wheel a Race-Trait! Call it *Control*... or something along those lines. (also maybe add the traits available to 3 instead of 2 for every race)

Indeed; it was particularly galling, when faced with the atrocious AI and the obvious use of handicaps, to be told by Paul that SD couldn't teach the AI to specialize because 'it would be so good at it that people would think it was cheating'. Oh, so the AI playing well would be cheating, but obviously handing the AI giant cash grants every dozen turns and tripling it's production is OK? That's a little bit patronizing, frankly, because it implies that the player base are too stupid to recognize the difference between good play and blatant cheating.

We know that a commercial product's AI is never going to be world-class. But we expect the AI to make up for it's other deficiencies by doing all that micro that we can't. We defeat it in spite of that, and that's what makes us feel good when we beat the game.