Increasing the coercion penalty to 50% just lost me to Galactic Civ forever. It's now a game of moving ships around lots without any real strategic input into running an empire. My wife and I were willing to play with the .ini file patched to keep the wheel. We didn't like, but stayed with the 25% coercion penalty, but 50% breaks it. Galactic Civ is done for us now. It's quite literally the only game I've played where the majority of patches have made the game successively worse and given the player fewer options to manage their empire, and seemingly all because the designers don't like people who think useful micromanagement is a gameplay strength, not weakness. Ah well, back to infinitely better strategy games such as Civ 4 for us, I guess. I don't harbor any illusions that anyone will miss us, or even our money, because there are always people willing to pay for shallow but graphically nice pseudo-strategy games. I don't even blame them - if that's their taste, then cool for them. I just don't like being sold a fairly good empire-management game, then being forced to apply patches that increasingly remove my ability to manage my empire in any meaningful way.
And yes, goodbye cruel world (though the rant did make me feel better)!
Edited to add: Also the first game I've played where i could confidently state that the patches made the game worse than any of the bugs they fixed did.
