The sliders can be adjusted for each planet. When you are in the planet management screen look on the lower left and you will see the management button. Click this and the sliders for the planet will pop up.

If you don't want to manage the economy set it in the middle on the main screen and go ahead on. However, you should know that the AI does play with theirs (economy sliders that is)

As you get more familiar with the game all this stuff will start to seem simple and not tedious. Managing constructors and star bases can get a little tedious later in the game but managing the economy does not, once you fully understand it.

I mostly think the focus slider mechanics is at odds with the way planetary infrastructure building works. To begin with, there are very few reasons not to set your slider all the way to 100% and super-specialize your planet. You basically decide if it's a production planet, a research planet or a money planet and then build everything towards that goal, because if you don't it'll be wasted.

For instance, if you build factories everywhere on a planet, then you have to put the slider all the way to "production", or you'll just be wasting your planet's potential since money/research won't be producing anything. But if you build, say, 50% factories and 50% labs, and then set the slider halfway... each will be producing 25% of what specializing in only one area would have given you (50% from the slider * 50% of the tiles...)

That said, it's fine to encourage specialization, but planetary building management then becomes unnessarily complicated. If you give us tools to make ad-hoc, complex tile-by-tile choices, then these choices need to matter, or we're just wasting our time.

Quoting JorgenCAB,

reply 2

Was I asking for advice?!?  

 

I am fully aware how it works... I'm complaining it is an unnecessary and very gamey mechanic that just increase micromanagement and that make long term strategy less important than min/max the slider all the time.

 

That is if you want to play the game efficiently...

No you were not. I misunderstood your post and thought you were a new player that didn't understand the mechanics. I figured out I had misunderstood you a few seconds after I replied and if we had a delete button, I would have trashed the reply.

Incidentally, I don't agree with you and if you poll a thousand players I doubt there would be more than a few who feel compelled to adjust the sliders so "efficiently" as you feel the need to do.