Hear hear! 

While I don't think it was your intention, this thread is borderline flamebait.

I don't think it's selfish to feed back to the developer that they're unhappy with a change. After all, there were other ways to achieve the same result without remove a feature that a significant number of players enjoyed, and most of them would have done the job better. My own favourite would have been a massive production nerf, reducing building bonuses by about 25%, nerfing adjacency into the ground, and probably halving raw production and stripping it off colony hubs, too. 

As for this forum constantly being full of economic debates... well, yeah, the economy was broken as hell. It was going to be spoken about a lot. And the wheel change was a massive change in gameplay, and so was also likely to get some air time over the months before it's arrival. The AI couldn't use it, which was making the AI suck. The player was able to manipulate it so effectively that he could produce insane levels of output (you still can, to a lesser extent, since the major problem with it is excessive populations - a limit to maximum pop based on planet size rather than just farms would be a good move here I think). 

Funny thing is, we'd been moving much more into debating Diplomacy over the past couple of weeks, partially because it's the next big thing to be changed, partially because it's in need of a lot of work, and partially because we finally figured out how the hell it works so we were able to start discussing what was broken with it and how. Wider economy threads were running low, because we all knew the wheel change was going to sort out a lot of balance problems. 

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to start a flame war. Secondly, I feel like it is disingenuous to say that I'm calling expression of opinion selfish. If you have a problem, by all means express it. However, the degree of emotion and volume of these opinions about something that is without a doubt a feature used by a small minority detracts from discussion about features the majority could use. When you see the forum clogged with posts about economy and the wheel, there's a problem and at that point it becomes selfish to elevate a minority issue into one that obscures majority issues. But as Frogboy has clarified, it isn't taking away much development time which is fine then. Nevertheless, these threads should die down now.

I'm really surprised to hear that only a small percentage of people were using the wheel... (How was this measured btw?)

Planet-local specialization was boosting your efficiency by at least a couple of hundred percent total... How did you ever reach the higher tech tiers without it?

These kinds of discussions always arise whenever you take something away from the game. Don't integrate stuff into the game, esp. if it's overpowered and players use it in order to play/win the game, if you'll have to take it out or nerf it at some point. Remember how forums went hot on the CargoSensorboat-dilemma? It's much better to do it the other way round, esp. if the quality or strength of specific thing is yet foggy: Introduce weakly and subsequently buff until a balanced state is reached.

However, a game that is under constant development, on xpacs etc, will introduce completely new stuff which will demand to rebalance older things - things that previously were balanced. Hence, you'll always encounter the crybabies that don't understand the greater scope of it.

That 2000 per turn research would require quite rare circumstances I think. Think best I've had was 1500 from one big(ish) planet which had favourable geometry, a pretty healthy population and every 'one per race' tech building I could stack on it (research capital, temple of enlightenment etc)  plus the 5 per colony bonus from the benevolent ideological tech line. Its not very reproducible really. Also if you have got to the point where you have 2000 tech per turn from one or more planets the game was probably over long ago effectively and you have just been mucking around. You can do a lot of things to try and pad your numbers after the fact if that's what you're into. Do we really need to balance around such outliers? Would be interesting to know if that was before ultra terraforming got taken out of game as well because that would be a factor for sure.

Hard caps or building/production nerfs would seem to target that problem more surgically though.

As to the OP, why it feels like a big issue to me, is that having spent quite a while evolving a play style to be competitive against the higher AI levels, I found that having local planet control and playing the adjacency game were crucial to remaining relevant against opponents that had 8 times my raw production and a host of other bonuses besides, especially in the early game to mid game. So its not just some peripheral feature its an integral part of a playstyle into which I have devoted many fun hours. Playing the game without local planet control feels a bit like controlling the game with your feet, its kinda the same game just a lot more awkward and clumsy. You obviously did not learn to play (like that) so the change seems insignificant to you but for those who did it is quite a big deal hence the potential for some emotion (helpful or not). 

Can we adapt to playing with our feet, I guess. I suspect that dropping the difficulty level down to where the AI plays its best but with reduced production bonuses  and learning to play over from scrathc might keep the game fun but I miss how the game used to be, to be honest.

The issue for many of us who want the wheel to come back is that there was NO reason to remove it in the first place. Sure, it required some balance and there was plenty of things that could be done to reduce the micro management it caused for those that didn't like it but still, there was NO reason to remove it. Dev hours were wasted removing a feature which only required some balance changes and a few UI buttons to fix. Now more dev time is being wasted re-implementing it in 1.5? You complain about us being selfish for wanting the dev's to waste time reintroducing a feature they removed without blaming them for wasting time removing it for no reason in the first place?

The wheel was a massive reward for micromanagement in a way that was simplistic and duplicative.

As to it being simplistic, you gain the most from a planet by maximizing one particular asset, the depth of this fact applies even to having a single manufacturing structure.  Short of a heavy bonus, you're far better off paying for structures on non manufacturing planets, and using all merchandising planets to fund the construction.  The wheel was a matter of setting it to 100% for whatever factor you set the planet up to produce.  No thought was required

As to it being duplicative, this is true both in impact and realism.  You already gain more from specializing planets, without the wheel, specialization is thus already a bonus, and simply becomes that much more effective, narrowing the game to only one effective way to manage planets.  The realism of having a populace focused on research is already obtained by building all research buildings, again negating the need for the wheel.

Specialization should be a benefit when a planet is weighted towards a particular factor, not simply the only effective way to manage planets.  The wheel greatly detracts from the depth of the game by amplifying what is already a system weighted towards one effective means of playing, while adding nothing worthwhile.  You may like having your super planet chock full of research or money production because it lets you win more easily, but you're simply exploiting a very poor design that the AI isn't utilizing, one which would be the only possible way to win were they to start.

Are those registered users only?  Or can you see everyone that owns the game?

"selfish"?

That's needlessly incendiary.

Would you have read the article if the headline had been phrased more mildy? We live in the age where peoples attention spans mean they crave inflammatory discourse or reactionary critique, hence the success of click-bait articles.

Social commentary aside, I think it's a necessary part of the discussion regarding how this game develops going forward. Whilst I'm of the Jim Stirling view of 'if you release a product as 'released' it's fair game to judge it as is on release day' and I think it's fair to say that GC III was not what was expected of it upon release based on its promotional material, but as that ships sailed, we can now hope that this game will see iterative improvements as time goes on after release. I feel that the wheel debacle has prompted a necessary discussion in terms of what people want out of the game. A lot of focus of GC III has so far focussed on min/maxing production, and I feel the immersion and civ management side has taken a back seat.

As Brad has recognised with his feedback here on the removal of the wheel, it became apparent that the wheel only further moved the game away from a civ management game and more of a very pretty, adjustable excel spreadsheet to get the most out of your production. The lack of finesse of the civ management side has I feel allowed those players more intruiged by the min/maxing side of the game to come to the fore, hence the massive backlash on these forums when a system instrumental to that play style was removed. 

Are they selfish? No. Are they right to kick up a fuss about removing it? Absolutely. Whilst I don't mourn it's absence, having a part of your audience complain at sudden, fundamental changes to the gameplay mechanics is all part of a healthy creative process. Yes, SD are set to lose some people by doing this, but it's also allowed them to rethink how to implement these ideas to accomodate everyone. Brad stating that he will re-add the wheel as a racial trait I think is a great half-way house for keeping those who enjoy the production management play style available, whilst allowing for a better way to play the game from a civ managenent perspective is a shrewd move, and one that ultimately wouldn't have emerged if those who disagreed with the changes had not been so vocal about it. 

They play differently than you do.  They specialize differently than you do.  They realize you can still do a lot with less than 100% control, sort of like dealing with human beings.  That does not make them sub-human, or improbable. Are you the only person who plays the game?  For example, am I a figment of your imagination, an improbable situation?

Focuses are lower on the micromanagement and the impact, but no, they're still a duplicative mess of uber specialized planets.