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In all seriousness, please NO. Only scientific (engineering is slightly acceptable) but ANYTHING else is a stain on the incremental genre. When the only thing that matters is being able to tell at a glance how many zeros your number has after it, maximizing that should be encouraged, and anything else expunged.
I can't even follow that example :-D How is anything easier when thinking about it "in factors of a thousand" instead of...not thinking about any factors, and just looking at "number bigger"?
Like 1e3 to 1e12: "Oh, 12 much bigger than 3, very far away :-("
1e115 to 1e116: "Ah, only one away, nearly there."
There is absolutely no benefit in knowing "how many factors of a thousand" 1e86 is away from 1e127. It's a lot, don't even think about completing it in this lifetime without a lot of buffs.
Suppose you want to calculate 4e14/8e13, which is obviously 5.
Using scientific, you'll need to take a close look at the powers 14,13 and do some quick maths 14-13=1 and 40/8=5. (This is the quickest I can think of)
If you try to ignore the time consuming power step, by looking at the coefficients 4/8, you can only make a guess whether its 50,5,0.5 or 0.05.
Now using engineering, its 400e12/80e12, which instantly yields 5.
Even with 4e15/800e12, its still familiar to us with 4k/800=5.
Again if you try to ignore the powers, you're guessing between 5000,5 or 0.005.
But in-game, the fact is, you should have a general idea of your answer before even calculating, while its a bit hard to lock the magnitude by factors of 10 using scientific, you're surely to lock the magnitude by 1000 using engineering.
So using engineering, you could almost definitely ignore the precise powers when doing calculations of RELATIVELY CLOSE NUMBERS . This helps a lot when the two numbers are in different tabs since my brain is just good enough to remember the coefficients.
(Just a side note that engineering works well even when the power gap is large, as long as you have a nice general idea of the answer)
In a similar way, engineering also helps with addition/subtraction of RELATIVELY CLOSE NUMBERS .
So yes, I do think that engineering becomes less powerful when it comes to comparing big number gaps. But since in-game I'm more often comparing similar numbers, which is usually crucial to time managements, I would prefer engineering to scientific.
I disagree, even close numbers are easier in scientific.
4e15 to 800e12 is exactly the problem. With scientific, the number after e ALWAYS shows how many digits there are behind the first number. 4e15=15 zeroes. But 800e12 messes with that system without any reason, because 8e14 says the exact same thing, just without the extra step of internally calculating the two zeroes from 800 into the e12.
4e15 / 8e14 = Aha, one has one digit less, but double the front = /10*2 = /5
4e15 / 800e12 = Okay, one has THREE digits less, but then one hundred and double the front = /1000*100*2 = /10*2 = /5
The calculation you need to do in the end is the same, just with an extra step because you are mudding the perfectly uniform principle with useless steps of 1000.
PS: The ONLY reason to use anything else than scientific would be when the digits behind the leading digit are important. But that mainly is the case in small numbers, so anything below 1e5 being written in total is fine by me.
But even 5,6587e14 is better than 565,87e12 in my book, as again, you always have the number of digits behind the e, and the relevant digits themselves in the front. It doesn't get easier, simpler, faster to compare than that.
I know you explained my trolling perfectly. If someone plays a game with scientific notation until the endgame, they will not want anything else.
You're sort of missing the crucial point in my reasoning: the ability to ignore the powers and to only focus on the coefficients.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2471100/discussions/0/600765572565761276/?ctp=2#c600766041376723102
That way, someone can evaluate all your arguments and claims before reading into the entire discussion. Especially knowing the developer might also be reading it and having it all in one post summarized could actually help to get it implemented if the arguments are sound vs. the time and complexity needed to implement it from the developer point of view.
As for me, I do not mind either way. Hell, I just count the numbers in my head as numbers of cake if I want to, as there is no point truly in the game where calculations have a serious impact on the player progress. You can simply look at the timer and the visual cue to see if something can be done.
For example, I need to spend 8.10 e100 per synth material production. Which to me is useless information as a player compared to me hovering over the item and seeing 23 hours to max level and simply checking back in 23 hours later.
I'm new to forums, thanks for pointing this function out
But you always have to check the powers anyway, because 50e12 are worthless if you need 200e15. So you need to check the powers anyways, and at that point it doesn't matter if it's 200e15 or 2e17. Or better said: At that point it's once again easier to have a uniform way of checking.
I didn't know how it worked, figured it out quickly, and its easy.
BIgger number = better number
why would anyone want to further comlicate it? 200e50 are 2e52, because me smart, me add number of zeros to exponent, gives correct result.
but is more work for the player. one addition more, one half second wasted every time it occurs. and it happens very frequently.
Isn't it basically useless and a detriment to the player when the system is changed?
In cases where you don't have those ridiculously large numbers, positional notation is more convenient to work with. We have more exposure to that and can do a lot of calculations at glance. 5 * 7 = 35 comes naturally in a way that 5e0 * 7e0 = 3.5e1 doesn't.
If you do math with scientific notation (and aren't just sticking it in a calculator and seeing what comes out), you often have to take steps to put it in non-normalized form and/or got a non-normalized result that you then have to normalize at the end. For example 9e4 + 5e3 + 5e3 would need to be changed to 90e3 + 5e3 + 5e3 to add up, and the resulting 100e3 would then have to be normalized to 1e5 at the end.
Engineering notation then tries to split the difference. You still have the potential to deal with really big numbers, but the mantissa goes from 1 to 999 instead of just from 1 to 9 and numbers are more likely to have the same exponent, so you can more often do math on just the mantissa with the intuitions you have from positional notation. 90e3 + 5e3 + 5e3 = 100e3 is just a valid expression in engineering notation.
The exponents being multiples of three also goes along with Western digit groupings and the SI prefixes. So you have 20e3 as "20 thousand" (or "20 kilo"), whereas the normalized scientific notation of 2e4 is a more opaque "2 ten-thousands".
With all that said, I do still prefer the normalized scientific notation in my incremental games. It's more convenient for quickly seeing which of two numbers is bigger and how many orders of magnitude apart they are, and those tend to be the most common operations in such games.