Excellent idea- I'll do this promptly (for once). Though I need to think a little about it.
The physicist in me feels like the unit
should read "cubic lightyear" though, because, you know, space isn't flat (despite what this game makes it look like).
Actually, this made me curious as to how that value is actually computed, and digging into the code, I discovered it apparently simply multiplies the number of plots you own by 1000.
How boring. Also, how inaccurate. Stars aren't that far apart.
Alpha Centauri is 4~5 light-years away (4.3 something, according to Google). The distance between solar systems in a random standard FinalFrontierFlat map I generated looks to be
no less than five plots. That would mean each plot has a length of roughly one light-year. That would also mean that each plot has an area of roughly one square light-year.
Wikipedia suggests that "close stars" to the Sun are 5-15 light-years away. If we take the maximum there, each plot has a length of roughly 3 light-years, and so a surface area of 9, and a volume of 27.
There are plenty of scale problems with the game already though, so I don't think it needs to be terribly accurate. So for now I've rounded up to 30 (this means space controlled will now be computed as # plots * 30), changed the unit to cubic light-years, and changed the description to "Space Controlled (Volume)"- which I'm not completely happy with but I can't think of anything better right now.
Any thoughts on the name? Also, any serious objections to the change in how the demographic is computed? I should point out that the approximations and handwaving I just did (assuming the next solar system over in game is not much further away than Alpha Centauri) kind of breaks down for the SpiralGalaxy map type, and potentially any other map types that come along that are intended to represent larger areas of space. But as I said, there are already enough scale problems in the game that I'm not too worried about trying to make it rigorously scientifically accurate. (But since we're changing the name of the unit, I reasoned I might as well check if the numbers given could be at all accurate).
If you notice any other flavorful nitpicks like this, feel free to pass them on. As you may be able to tell from the above ramble, I'll be happy to take them seriously and fix them.
