Please Please don`t take this as disrespect it is NOT!!! And there you have it from the Top Frog!! The wheel is gone and any debate is meaningless!!Yes I`m upset over it but If not for Brad we would not have the game or even this post!! I set out o do what I wanted which was get his attention! on wanting to keep the wheel. Or as stated  The Planetary Wheel!!  I strongly feel that there will be less control over each planet input to the game now. By I am one of the players that like the largest maps and the longest games!!and Yes It`s hard to manage 200 + planets 300 + starbases and  as many shipyards as Planets and near 1000K ships!!.

So The Wheel Is Gone R.I.P. Planetary Wheel

Edit

As I wish this to be the last post on this thread Please lock this post!!  Well that did not work out never mind!

Sure, planetary wheel in it's current form is a bit too power tool. But it's tied to how population and building works - if there would no way to control planet raw production most of planet will be losing huge amount of it. And building a "balanced" planet is harder than it seems. In one of my playthoughts i tried to build balanced planets (excluding planet one obviously need to specialize) - it doesn't work well due to how planetary tile are spread (long thin continents, big single landmass is almost nonexistent) and adj. bonus works. So in the end, 3 "bit" specialized (they have some main focus, but other building as well, and wasn't set on 100% for one thing) planets beat 3 "balanced" planets in like 3-4 times. 

Death to the wheel.  May it burn in game designer hell.

The per planet wheel as implemented at release needed changing. It wasted too much time and effort for those of us who enjoy the specialization mini-game. I would have preferred a solution that allowed high specialization without so much micro. However I am not disappointed with their decision to get rid of it altogether. They are essentially going back to the GalCiv2 style, where you can "focus" a planet's production with a single click, while controlling overall production with the global wheel. The adjacency bonuses add enough newness to specialization that I can still enjoy the specialization mini-game. And the amount of micro potential goes way down, at least for my playstyle, where specialization is not optional.

Two possible issues come to mind:

1. When you can focus production in a particular area, how does that impact usefulness of the research and wealth projects?

2. I'd really want the ability to choose to focus on social or military manufacturing for planets sponsoring a shipyard, so I hope they are thinking about that. Without this, all planets are subject to the settings of the global slider, which often doesn't make sense for the situation.

And yet..that didn't happen in GalCiv II, GalCiv I or the OS/2 version.

To be fair, it's a bit more complicated than that and a lot hinges on how good the governors are and/or how much you can do with the coming focus buttons.

Even if we assume "no governors but still must use just the global wheel" then optimal production in a symmetric tile layout is "half farms, half output-buildings" except this symmetry is broken by the need to have some approval buildings plus the fact that the actual tile layout is random. There is, however, a sweet spot between farms and output-buildings that optimizes the total output which results in a "forced" build plan, although it does vary from planet to planet. Depending on how well the governors can specialize the planet the "output-buildings" on a single planet will then be either of a single type or a balanced mix because we are always optimizing the empire-wide total output. Giving how the game economy is designed, I'm hoping the governors will be good enough that the optimum will be in the single-type-output zone than the mixed-type-output because the latter simply results in boring planets and basically renders any focus system meaningless.

So, it's not that bad and with good enough governors and/or focus possibilities it could work giving you a game where the planetary sub-game turns into a puzzle where you have to figure out the optimum build solution for the planet so that the global output of manufacturing-research-wealth triplet is optimized for your game strategy. This isn't necessarily obvious depending on how the details are implemented in the game and that is encouraging. However, a degenerate solution is entirely possible if the games designers are not careful with the balancing and implementation which would result into "stupid and boring but still dominating" optimal strategies and thus kill the game.

Therefore repeating my plead to Stardock: Please, however you change the game, ensure that the change does NOT create an Obvious Ultimate Strategy that beats all other strategies.

A good game allows for multiple approximately equally-good approaches in how to win. A very good game makes these approaches complex enough so that the player needs to use his wits and creativity to make full use of them. A bad game doesn't.

Make a very good game, please.