I personally prefer to micromanage all of my planets, but even though I say that, there is not actually much micromanage to be done. Sometimes, I fail to see how people can complain about too much micromanaging in this game. The most micromanaging in this game comes from cleaning up the hundreds to thousands of ships the other factions have, NOT from taking care of the planets. For the most part, once I use the wheel to set allocations, I am leaving the planet alone until everything is done. I only check back once in a while to see if the planet has grown enough in terms of manufacturing to one turn all future improvements, or to dedicate the planet to research if it has completed all unlocked improvements. In case anyone is wondering, I am almost always playing on massive+ maps with everything set to abundant, so there is plenty to manage.

As it stands, I personally prefer the wheel as it seems plenty realistic to me to be able to allocate whatever percentages you want to wherever. Do not real governments set allocations as necessary as well? What seems unrealistic is going back every turn or few turns to optimize it. However, this should never be necessary as the growth resulting from a few turns is negligible in mid to late game, especially with Birthing Subsidies capped. Taking away the wheel is just putting an unreasonable handicap on the player and reducing the player's control.

And people think 2K research is a lot? I get over 4-6K easy with just my usual specialization setup (seven tiles), and by late game, I have anywhere between 15K to 150K research points as my galactic base even though all of my planets have 0% allocated to research. The wheel is just a means of allocating resources. If it is overpowered, it is the math that needs fixing, and not the ability to split your resources however you want.

I vote we have the option of switching between the two methods.

"Tedious"  Yep, that's the right word to describe the planetary wheel.  The options for management of a research world, for example, came down to A) Under-utilize the planet and ignore the wheel, or B ) work the wheel whenever I needed to upgrade/build something new, then set it back when I'm done.  The focuses remove that choice from me and now I can fully optimize my planets without worrying about upgrades.

Now, some people will try to argue that the more choices and control a player has, the better.  I disagree.  The above "choice" is lacking in good outcomes - I either willingly handicap myself, or accept the tedium of wheel management.  With a rule change (which is what the removal of the wheel is) I still have some options, but the results of my choices are no longer "get screwed this way, or get screwed that way."

While I don't accuse wheel-lovers of being selfish, I think the removal of the wheel is good for the game.  And not down-the-road good, but an immediate, tangible, quality-of-life improvement.

Have a banana. That's the nub of the issue.

See, the problem is, the math is still at fault. And so we can still produce insane output numbers.

Let's say I decide I'm sick of wasted production. So I'm going to make most of my planets industry and keep the global slider at 75% manu(so that, with focuses, I get 100% output on them). I set econ to zero and research to 25%.

Bang, I'm straight back at producing a superdreddy every turn from every industry world. Sure, my econ output is low, as every econ world can only work at 1/4 efficiency, but since money is still pretty easy to come by I can live with that. And yes, my research world operate at half-power... but that's not much below what they're be getting if I was splitting global production three ways anyway, and my TOTAL output is vastly higher. I am still perfectly capable of cranking output up into insane levels. It's worth noting that I'm also still being just as coercive as ever before; I'm just doing so at an empire-wide level. Finally, it should be noted that this is EXACTLY why the whole all-factory vs all-lab thing emerged in GC2 - because the perverse incentives that the system introduced meant that mathematically, the only way to minimize wasted production was to specialize the whole empire rather than specializing individual planets. Rather than encouraging us to produce individual planets, it encouraged complete uniformity, even more so than the wheel did.

Moreover, the problems with production were actually twofold. There's problem 1, which was that production numbers were completely out of scale with costings. Focuses fix that, unless I'm willing to sacrifice a resource, in which case as we've seen they don't; even if I just drop econ and set manu/res to 50/50, a 25% reduction in output isn't enough to deal with the difference.

But there's also problem 2, which is the difference in output between a full-factory planet and an otherwise identical no-factory planet. This is actually a bigger problem than the cost-output imbalance, since the relationship between them determines what 'massive over-production' really is. And the whole focuses vs wheel thing doesn't impact on it at all. Allow me to explain.

It is a necessity that the cost of buildings is largely tied to the low end of manufacturing. Even planets which have no industry need to be able to build things in a reasonable amount of time. So our costings are, by and large, capped at a point where any individual item cannot realistically take more than 10 or 20 turns or so for a planet with only 1 or 2 factories to build. 

Now, an all-factory planet will produce some multiple of the non-factory planet's output. The size of this multiple is thus crucial; it should be maybe 4 or 5 times as high. Once we start getting to 10 or 15 times as high, we reach a point where it takes a very long time for a non-factory world to produce something which the factory world can still churn out in 1 turn. 

Changing from the wheel to focuses doesn't alter that multiple. If you take a world with no factories and set it to manu focus, it's manufacturing ratio to an otherwise identical all-factory world is exactly the same now as it was with both just set to 100% manu on the wheel. Thus, if balance is adjusted to make low-manu worlds capable of building properly, then we'll end up in exactly the same boat as before with massive overproduction from specialized planets. The actual numbers themselves are pretty much irrelevant, since all that really matters is the number of turns it would take a planet to build a structure with no factories, and the number of turns it would take it to build the same structure if it only had factories. If that ratio is over 5:1 or 6:1, then nothing gets fixed, as we either end up with non-factory worlds being incapable of developing, or factory worlds being massively over-productive.

And that's really the point. The reason all the explanations given for swapping the wheel for focuses are so unsatisfying is because focuses are themselves pretty unsatisfying for dealing with any of them. We were told it would reduce micro; it does, to an extent, because MM is less worthwhile now, but it's not as effect as giving us proper macro-management controls would have been. We were told is would help with balance; and it does, to an extent, but not as effectively as actually balancing the output and costs properly would have been. We were told is would make governing feel less coercive... and it doesn't really do that, because as many others have said government is still directing what everyone does, it's just doing so more incompetently now. 

I completely agree with this. Yet, in GC2 when playing an All-Fac strat, you were faced with serious economic & technological problems, mainly because (nameing only the differences to GC3 now) 

- you had to pay for raised production, which was exacerbated by the fact such a strat yielded ~*75% more total output than a mixed slider approach

- new technologies were much harder to gain, ofc there were cheap ones/fields, but some key techs could increase in cost more fastly than your global RP output, esp. militairy one due to inflation. That is, you never reached a point were ALL techs would only cost you 1 turn (and at point, the necessity or value of labs in GC3 greatly diminish)

- maintaning a positive economy, esp. early on, was so much harder

Right now, production is the way to go because it has s good as no drawbacks and offers so many gains, and yes, that relation doesn't change by a general flat nerf of the games complete economic model.

Ok, but that's a crude + extreme unbalanced example, and also I'm missing a solution here, because as you say, numbers-tweaking won't solve anything....

First off, if you want to build up a world you need to build factories, because that's what factories do for you. The amount of factories decide how fast that goes. You cannot expect a 100% lab world to build itself up as fast as a factory world - and this is a good, good thing. If it wouldn't be like this (if labs could build themselves up as fast as facs can) there would remain no reason whatsoever to build facs at all.

Now you might argue that you don't want facs upon a specialized lab world, as it would diminish your final max RP output, but these facs actually enable you to get your RP up & running much sooner, and IMO in a TBS sooner things are better/stronger things. 

You could also rushbuy stuff; now an moneyworld won't buy itself fastly because of the rampup time it needs to become really profitable, but once you have a few of those they can do these can be used to support this.... once the ball gets rolling it'll roll ever fastly...

What I miss is some of the flexibility that we had in GC2, to put alot of early/cheap "filler" structures onto a planet and subsequently, overbuilding them with structures that are your final design. Either low/0-maint econ/popgrowth improvements in times of economic stress or tier1 facs to raise planetary production in order to fastly build end-tier labs/else...

I have about 100 hours played. I rarely bothered to use the wheel and i mostly build my planets to be self sufficient, so no negative economy. Also depending on where it is defense structures or influence buildings.

No, numbers tweaking will solve it But nothing else will - there's no shortcuts, like nerfing base production or using focuses to limit control.

Of course we want industry planets to be better at building than non-industry planets. But it's not a binary switch - the options aren't just 'better' or 'the same'. It's how much better that is important.

Presently, you can get around +1000% manu bonus on an end-game planet fairly easily. That basically means an industry world is 11 times as productive as an identical world with no industry. So if we take a top-level planet to be one with 100 pop and +1k% industry (which is frankly conservative compared to some of the game-breaker pictures we've seen on this forum), and say that builds a dready in 5 turns, the same planet with no industry builds it in 55. And a planet with no industry and 50 pop builds it in 110. It would take a starting planet (5 pop, no bonuses) 1100 turns to produce the dready that the end-game indy world makes in 5.

So far, so good; we probably don't want low-end research worlds churning out dreadnaughts in anything less than glacial time periods. But let's turn it around.

So we have the 'starting' planet - 5 pop, no bonuses. This needs to be able to build a factory in something like 6 turns (regardless of whether that's 6 turns at 60/20/20 or 6 turns at 100/0/0); for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that 1pop=1prod (because the actual numbers don't make a difference, since we need that 6 turns to be a constant). So the factory needs to costs something in the region of 30 manu. The 100 pop, +1k production planet will produce 1100 manu per turn, and so could produce about 36 basic factories a turn. The top-level factory needs to cost 36 times as much as the bottom-level one, just to make it take 1 turn for the big planet to make one. If we want it to take the same 6 turns as that first factory did, it needs to cost an astonishing 216 times as much. The present difference is more like 10 times as high, so late-game industry planets upgrade themselves almost immediately. We might say that an end-game manu planet is 220 times as powerful as a starting colony.

So really the problem is in that difference in scale. The reason we're churning stuff out in a turn or two is because the low-end planets are getting stuff in reasonable time frames, and the only way to change that is by shrinking the power difference between the OP planets and the non-OP ones. If we're gonna be able to have planets with 50+ population, then we need manu/research/econ bonuses to be hugely reduced; if we cap population somewhere around 30 or so, then the reduction can be much lower. 

If it was more along the lines of 'population is capped at 5*planet class and building bonuses are 5%*level'. then  that would shrink the gap. A lot. Very, very high-end, late game industry worlds might get 100 pop and +500% industry, and so might be 100 times more powerful than a starter colony at the same slider settings. This would go a long way to dealing with overproduction, without affecting immature planet development.  That's the actual solution to overproduction - nerfing the causes of overproduction.