I agree, it makes colony management tedious and the only reason for not doing it is the choir of doing it even if you know you are handicapping yourself.

There are one area where a dual industry/research or industry/wealth is more efficient than a planet with 100% research or wealth, but that is usually late game when you can get obscene amount of production bonus and then multiply that further with research or wealth using production projects. There are other threads discussing this.

If I had any say I would simply cut the ability to set a specific focus for individual planets and leave the empire wheel as it is. That would force you to build planets long term and using planetary features would become important. It would also REDUCE MICROMANAGEMENT to a bare minimum... who would not like that?!?

I also think that these focusing wheels are mainly going to distract the average gamer who simply don't understand how to use them properly, the mere fact there are features that give bonuses to both research and wealth at the same time are just a trap to develop bad colonies. It is just pure seduction techniques...

You don't have to micro if you don't want to . Set your research and production sliders to 50/50 then as you need money move the wealth slider vertical. Then just build building based on what you think you need. You can get pretty far doing this. Microing will help you edge out bigger turn advantage.

Actually that might change Andro. In the Beta 6 patch 2 patch notes they are going to get rid of the flat bonuses / 4 and do a percentage boost. So we won't know until the opt-in goes live. 

They haven't released the numbers yet. I'm guessing it will probably work the same way as in FE and it's a flat boost on everything. I'm just hoping it's a new multiplier instead of another additive percentage. 

Like production * allocation * (1 + bonuses) * (1 + project bonuses)

I'm kinda guessing this is how it will work out. Then the slider wont need min maxing for the project bonuses like it did with the old method. 

For a competitive player saying anything like you don't have to use the slider to maximize your worlds is like telling a race-car driver to not use the turbocharge in his engine...

I mostly play with tons of self imposed regulation in most 4x games rather than giving the AI more bonuses, currently I need to gimp my own hand and give the AI bonuses so it can keep up.

Also.. it is NOT more efficient to use industry as soon as you get to 300% from a mathematical perspective it is more complicated than that. If you never build a single manufacturing plant on a world and you want to calculate how many and at what level those plants have to be in order to gain more than you loose is not as simple. It also depends on so many other factors... such as you overall strategy and urgency in this particular moment.

The same is true for upgrading infrastructure on planets which often are a waste of resources as long as you are settling new worlds. It can for example take more than 100 turns for a research world to break even on an upgrade from tier one to tier two buildings when you look at the gain and cost benefit and that is not taking increased maintenance into account either. So... efficiency are many times not to upgrade planets but just settle new ones until you can't expand anymore. Money are generally only useful for covering the maintenance fee and to some extent buying improvements.

The Projects will be changed in the upcoming patch so that part should be fixed. It obviously don't fix the overall problem with terrain bonuses generally being ignored once you understand the game mechanic.

To be honest I don't understand why you design a game with bonuses that in general are for the most part pointless after you realize how the game works. It is also very easy to change this whole thing by one very simple fix... remove the focusing wheel for individual worlds... now colony management actually becomes an interesting game of multiple choice. The slider only add micromanagement and one dimensional colony planning.

No one is forcing anyone to play the game to win and go through all the tedium necessary to reap all the benefit, but should you really have to?!?

There is a simple solution to the problem...

I doubt there will ever be a change to this, it is to ingrained with the work on the AI and how it plan to build colonies and manage them. It would require a completely new economic AI if you remove the wheel.