oh, and 'patriotic' and 'Prolific' are not? Patriotic is flat-out broken on any big map, because any faction without it will suffer extremely from the big empire approval penalty and Prolific is flat-out broken on smaller maps, because you can colonize the entire map before the AI gets off its ass.

Nevermind combining the two... at that point, you might as well use the console cheats.

Or we could just add this one OPTIONAL trait that makes perfect sense from a setting standpoint and would make everybody who liked the wheel happy and YOU as well as EVERYBODY else who didn't like it, Frogboy included, can just, you know, NOT use it?

Heck, even if you have an issue with the Yor getting it, you can make a copy of their race and manually set it to something else you find appropriate. It's what I did with the Krynn Syndicate for games I want to play without 'Patriotic'.

Imbalance REALLY isn't an issue in this game as long as those customization options are a thing.

No, I didn't have a reason to come to the forum before this freaking atrocity.

Considering the AI on the hardest difficulty has twice the production... which means 80% in your example while you're stuck at 40%, I would say it's actually fairly balanced for higher difficulties.

Of course it's OP on lower difficulties, but lets be real here... if you play on a low difficulty, you're not interested in the game being challenging in the first place (heck, the AI actively berates you for it), which is a perfectly valid way to play the game... you know... god-game mode, basically.

Also, you obviously don't know just how powerful Patriotic and Prolific really are.

Patriotic allows you to culture-flip a shitload of colonies of civilizations that don't have it on big maps, heck, I don't even think you CAN lose in late-game on an insane mapsize with this perk, because any conquering enemy will start to lose colonies to you once they get close to conquering you.

As for prolific... having 24 planets or more by turn 60-65 is pretty darn broken if you ask me.

Also, that disclaimer is there, because people jump to conclusions without seriously thinking about it, as you have just proved.

I agree that it might be OP in multiplayer... but you can easily make it multiplayer-illegal or just agree with each other not to use races with it.

...Actually...

This is an interesting idea.  Some version of this with proper balancing might actually be an interesting idea.  Like, the Yor, for instance, coudl totally automate their forces.

Plus, I would enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate how nasty the AI could be with this feature.  Hint: computers are good at math.

You'd need to nuke their production through the floor to get them remotely into the same ball park as the rest of the game. Like, -50% production but can use the planet wheel. And in doing so, it'd basically make wheel micro the required strategy for races with the trait, since unless they did it they'd be completely useless.

It might be interesting to have a wildly different gameplay option, but trying to balance it against focus offsets would be like trying to learn Yiddish while riding a unicycle blindfolded.

Glad that at least somebody sees the appeal.

I was thinking, that since the benefit of a specialization that isn't supported by the structures on the planet has a reduced output, reducing it further might be sufficient to balance it? Maybe?

I used to adapt the Balance to where I would produce just enough money to cover maintenance on the planet, but the rest being put into either production, research or a mix of both, depending on the world.

I also usually kept the civil/military slider so low that exactly 1 piece of production per world was send to the shipyard... with a fully loaded shipyard, that's still 6 Production which makes for a slow, but steady military force growth... assuming you have good custom ship designs.

A 40% output nerf could do it, more or less. This post from a few months back gives a rough outline of the math:

Focuses complicate this a little, since they mean the AI player gets, on average, 58% of production * bonuses for their specialised worlds, and 21% of production in the off-focused. Where ever the global wheel sits, this average will be the same, as any increase in one area will cause an equally significant decrease in another. With focuses, the total output will be higher than the above (which was written during 1.2, before offsets existed, and regards why the global-wheel-dependent AI was failing to match the player) but still much lower than the specializing player can manage.

So we repeat the exercise above. 3 planets, 100 production, 900% of specialized buildings.

The specializer's total output is still 3k.

The focus player's output (with global wheel at 33/33/33, to minimize loss) is 

econ world: 580 econ, 21 industry, 21 research.

industry world: 580 manu, 21 research, 21 econ

research world: 580 research, 21 manu, 21 econ.

Total: 1866

The actual total is 1878, as there's 1% extra you be distributed.

Moving the global wheel around will not change the total, because every increase to manufacturing in a balanced empire will cost it just as much in econ and research combined. 1878 is 62.26% of 3000, so the focus is more or less a 37.8% nerf on output compared to the wheel. That means a 35%-40% raw production nerf to races using the wheel would bring their average output more or less into line with the average output of other races.

The problem is, any focus-using empire with imbalanced colony types (so having 50% manu, 25% research 25% econ and setting the global wheel to favour manu) will permit a higher output than is possible with wheel-races., as would splitting individual planet production across multiple types in ratio to the focuses.

This is why balancing it would be hell; the optimum production strategy with focuses is to split your production on all planets, with minor deviation from a standard layout based on which focus is being used, and setting your global wheel to roughly match the %es of each type of planet in the empire.  Doing so, the player can push his production up an awful lot compared to specializing his planets (though not so much as he could if he was able to go 100%).

Consider a focus player with the same planets as above, but all set to manu. He'd naturally set the global wheel to 100% manu, which leads to his output surging up to 3k - equal with the planet wheel guy. With 2 manu worlds and 1 research world, and the global wheel set to 75/0/25 (so with focuses his planets are 100/0/0 and 50/0/50), he'd get 2 worlds producing 1k each, and 1 world producing 550. This is suddenly very much weaker.

Hence, it's not really something that can be simply balanced, if it can be at all; either wheel use is going to be weaker or stronger, and by significant amounts. The wheel user can always have 100% efficiency, but the focus user's efficiency fluctuates wildly around the average.

Well, that's the problem - it can be a bit better, but nearly doubling output is insanely OP. But strength is relative, and the strength of focuses is variable. It's attempting to hit a moving target. You'd be looking at something around 30% reduction in production at a minimum, just to bring it in to line with the costings model, and even that might not be enough. 

 

It's still much more powerful than any 2 existing traits combined without some kind of big hefty raw production nerf attached to it (and even with such a thing, any source of raw production, like techs or wonders, would be substantially more valuable to the wheel users). 

Also, although it's a bit off-topic, I do think that just about everything on the race design screen should have different points costs anyway - some stats are just more valuable in-game than others, so having them all on equal pricing when picking traits and abilities is problematic. I'd consolidate all the points int one pool, and just allow you to pick 2 abilities and as many traits as you liked - but have everything cost as many points as it was genuinely worth. 

Could mostly just use approval still, tbh. The underlying mechanic you're describing is exactly the same. As an added bonus, since Raw production bonuses are higher for wheel-use, that also means any penalty to raw production is also higher (like the one that comes from low approval). Just re-label it in the interface. You could set up alternative building sets for the race easily enough and just tag them into the equivalent techs for the normal approval stuff, then locked races with the trait from getting stadiums etc. You could then use those alternative buildings to make the wheel races much, much more approval-dependent.

Getting the production balance right is the central problem, and is pretty insurmountable. The funny thing is, the easiest way to deal with it is resetting Focuses to 100%. Once that happens, suddenly production on both sides balances again... but it does kind of raise the question as to what benefit there is to removing the wheel in the first place.