Talk:Changing How the Impact of Investments is Calculated/@comment-27102309-20151021091332

Instead of tracking each resource as a unit, you could let the number of significant digits decrease with scale. That lets you use scientific notation to record investment values.

Since scaling is linear, then there's no practical difference between having "123 quadrillion" of a resource and "123 quadrillion, four thousand and ten". So instead of recording 123,000,000,000,000,000 in memory, you record "1.230000E+17" (in whatever format is easiest for the language you're working in), and then don't let me buy anything less than a billion units at a time. You get all the game benefits of being able to handle extraordinarily large numbers, the performance benefits of working with reasonably sized (32- or 64-bit) integers, and I think it's pretty safe to say that nobody's going to be upset that they can't buy a hundred units at a time when they're dealing with units in the quarillions.