+1 on that. 

I saw the planetary wheel go active after researching something, but don't remember what the tech was.  It's really hard for me to keep my mitts off of it, but I'm trying to use the global wheel and buildings like you said.  Full disclosure, I have 15 hammer planets at 96% manu and something like 3 planets that I specialized via the wheel for economy when it tanked.

I'll try to keep my fingers off the planetary wheel next game, but it's sure tempting when it's there and you see negative econ looming.

The trick is to just build farms.

Farms are vastly more powerful than any other building if you don't have the planetary wheel. No only do they give their full benefit regardless of the wheel position, but they're also more powerful than any industrial building until you have 3-4 of them, too.

Let's say you have a pop 10 planet on 50-25-25 global wheel. It has 5 manu, 2.5 research and 2.5 econ.

Adding 1 T1 factory will give you +1.25 manu. Adding a T1 farm will give you +1 manu, +0.5 econ and +0.5 research. Until you have 16 pop, the focused T1 industrial building will not produce as much overall output as a new T1 farm would. Until you have 8 population, an industrial building won't even give as much as it's own bonus as a farm would.

And farms benefit much more from productivity bonuses and food bonuses, too. So yeah, build huge numbers of farms everywhere. Any planet with <10 tiles shouldn't contain a research lab, factory or market center at all, just lots of farms and approval buildings; researching farm upgrades should take absolute priority over improving other buildings (T2 farms are a 50% improvement over T1 farms, while T2 factories are only 20% better than T1), and the % food increase buildings are now by far and away the most powerful things in the game.

Welcome to Galactic Agrarian Empires.

Yup. Progress!

What's going to happen is every planet is going to built in the exact same way.  If the goal is to prevent lock-step specialization, this is going to backfire pretty badly.