So I realized that with 1.3 v2 you can go into each planet and adjust the wheel. However. I committed to play with ONLY playing via the empire wheel and not specialize each planet like most of us do. It is FAR harder to get what you want done. FAR harder! It feels much like it did in GCII where I would set my sliders to 25 production, 25 economy and 50 research. This was my most common setting in GCII and so I am playing with it now. Since you cannot specialize each planet you can literally jump around the wheel each turn rushing some buildings while trying to keep your economy afloat.It is making the game more hands on I think.
Now specialization will be done via buildings which as it always should have been. Want a production planet? Build factories. Need money build some econ buildings. I am playing on gifted and think I may have to drop down to normal as I think the Ai has too many bonuses for me to keep up but I am going to stick to it. I have only 8 planets and 1 shipyard. I need more shipyards.
Also some of the Factions available via the workshop were causing me to crash to desktop but that is another issue.
So I would invite everyone to try playing without tweaking any planets at all, just use the global wheel and see the ai surpass you quickly. I can see where planetary specialization is really a terrible terrible exploit in favor of the human player. The lack of planetary specialization brings us down to the level of the ai and keeps you from gaining a huge advantage.
I will give some feedback on how the Ai conducts war and invasions when I get to that point.
Can we bump up the ideology buildings to produce 1 point per 5 turns instead of 10?
Is Vidz war mod still viable in 1.3 or is the ai better now?
more to come....