I believe that tourism is overpowered, currently, as well.  The whole wealth mechanic (along with taxes) are being overhauled and balanced, which is to be expected in an open beta.

I super-appreciate the market centers taking wealth, and giving approval.  Brilliant.

Looks like changes are still ongoing.  I started a new 3.0 game and now market centers can be built on more than one tile per planet as before.  I don't know if shopping centers are back yet because I've not researched that tech.  Tourism still appears to be grossly overpowered as before.

So my posts aren't entirely negative I want to stress that I really like the game and many of the changes made for the latest beta. 

Market Centers don't upgrade to shopping centers in the latest version (at least not with the tech with which they're grouped anyway).  As for the final release, I believe it is on April 11th.

I see where you're coming from and agree you don't want to simplify the game too much, but remember most players play the game on Easy level and Small/Tiny Galaxy level. So they just want a quick and painless experience.

If tourism income is going to be this easy to generate, it should be this easy to disrupt (ie any pirates in your zone have a sharply negative impact on tourism income (at least 30% downwards until they are destroyed, for example), which is extremely immersive, as that's what happens on Earth.

The simplest solution - more Setup options at the start to personalize how in depth your control is. So you can do more things to get food if you want, more control over wealth creation etc. Those who want the easy game leave things as is...

Too many options can easily be worse that too few. The more options you have, the more time you have to spend testing each aspect of the things you add to make sure it's balanced in all options and combos. Eventually that would become impossible.

So very quickly you have people playing almost entirely different games and the feedback and criticism they send becomes almost meaningless since everyone is playing from a different baseline.

Personally I think they have done a good job of lettting the player concentrate on the overall picture and not be as bogged down in the details of food production and whatnot. The food is now relatively simple to manage and your decision point is which planet to put the cities and how to maximize your output based on what you are dealt.

As far as Tourism, it may or may not be too high but I'm sure that is just a matter of tweaking it to fit what they envision it's role being....ie, primary source of income or a supplement to trade/planets etc. It does give a good reason to push for Influence and expand your borders, something that was fairly unimportant before.

Out of curiosity, what has really changed in the economic and food systems that has completely reversed the game from ‘complex econ’ to ‘overly simplified’?

 Is it because they removed the exploitable mechanics that allowed players to abuse the mechanics and break the game system? Sure, that took some time and effort to come up with but clearly it’s not what the designer intended to allow (ie, planets making 250 research or production etc).

 Are there other changes that were made which ‘simplified’ it? The Arable land mechanic does remove the decision as to where to put Food but the decisions before weren’t much deeper…mass up farms and crank the pop on a few planets to insane levels and break the game again.

 I’m not sure how else they can restrict things from being abused without putting limits on what can be done. Many people were unhappy with the removal of the ‘wheel’ because they loved to exploit it and they made the same argument….the game is being ‘dumbed down’. I guess I don’t see it that way. I see a loophole that needed to be closed.

 So are there other specific areas that have been simplified to ‘appeal to the masses’ that I’m not seeing?

Influence now expands much more rapidly as well.  That has a role to play in why tourism is, in my opinion, overpowered.  I play a custom race I've intentionally crippled on a number of key statistics (including influence, diplomacy, economy and popularity (which affects tourism) and it's still a completely thoughtless process to reach massive wealth.  The economic output of the colonies is rendered immaterial as tourism income is an absurd 90% of total revenue. 

I'm holding judgement until they actually release all of the mechanics for Intrigue....

I suspect this is more balanced than it appears... 

I could be wrong however.

You can keep tourism like this and make another game out of it as "Galactic Tourism"  

Not sure I like this new market combined with the overbloated amount of money you make with tourism.Makes a big part of the game redundant  ala getting resources.The market needs to have a proper supply and demand ala ES2.