So firstly we hugely appreciate your very long development of this wonderful game and superb commitment to its development.

But as to the wheel, there's clearly a conflict between a smallish minority of "hardcore" players who love it and a majority who don't. And you, SD, think of excessive micro-managing as overly tedious if not an exploit.

What I'd suggest is that you leave the wheel in but only for a tiny minority of favourite planets. The first planet would have one and perhaps one more license would be available at the start of the game and then you could research a tech line which would increase the number of favoured planets up to some small maximum. When a new licence becomes available - a crack bureaucratic team if you want to place it in context - then that licence (team) can be assigned to a nice planet at any time but probably never reassigned. Of course you'd have to consider what happens if a favoured planet gets captured and there are other ramifications I imagine but nothing too terrible.

I'd also suggest that on colonisation players should have full control of a planet for a few moves - 10 say. Just after colonisation it makes no sense that you wouldn't put all your efforts into building up the infrastructure first and that has some verisimilitude as well.

If you don't want the number of wheel planets modded then you can hard code it - otherwise leave it in an xml. 

That way the obsessive  "hardcore" players would get to play with the wheel but without taking (wasting) too much time over it; and I imagine that the rest wouldn't mind having half a dozen planets to micromanage at most if they want to. (This equates to levels anyway. Removing the wheel is bound to make the game a bit more difficult - ie push the levels up.  Incidentally the number of planets it's allowed to micro-manage could also equate to the AI level too, though I appreciate that then you'd have or at least be tempted to put work into getting the AI to micro-manage them well.)   

Any thoughts?

Many thanks,

Jon