Nice Numbers

Something I've been debating about since yesterday was whether the 'nice numbers' feature is really necessary. Right now numbers such as 24 billion are output as 2.4E10, and while people would be more familiar with the concept of 24 billion than with the standard notation for it, what about numbers like 1.2E24? Would 1.2 Septillion be that much more descriptive?

Most people (including myself) are only familiar with the names of large numbers up to trillion and maybe quadrillion. If I ever worked with numbers above that I would resort to standard notation, so the challenge is, how do I display to the user large numbers, while giving them a sense of the magnitude of the numbers they're working with?

Since this is a universe creation game, it's inevitable that large numbers are going to become a part of the game. I don't want to scare people away from the game who think you need to know a lot about physics or mathematics in order to play the game, so my goal for today is to figure out how to make the game appear more user friendly and less intimidating.


I was thinking maybe something like this:

But then all that's really happening is replacing zeros with boxes, which still doesn't quite transmit the idea of the scale of the numbers very well.

Any ideas? I'm all ears! :)