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[BFEL]

So last night I was reading a review/discussion of Spec Ops: The Line and the various things they did to make you feel guilty for all the NPCs you mowed down, and it got me to thinking...just HOW MANY NPCs have I killed over the years without giving it a single thought.

The answer is fairly staggering.

My math assumes that I kill an average of around 1000 NPCs a day (this might be a bit high, but there are PLENTY of games I've played where this isn't unrealistic) since I was roughly six years old. I'm 24 now.

This means that in my case I've killed somewhere between 4 and 5 MILLION NPCs in my life.

[Nighthawk]

How the heck could you possibly manage to kill 1000 NPCs a day? Even if you're playing a game where they drop like flies that would take ages.

[LordPorkins]

I think he means AI's. Which would include standard enemies.

[Nirur Torir]

....4 and 5 MILLION NPCs in my life.

Ah, the innocence of one who doesn't play space 4x games.

... I'mma go cry myself to sleep now.

[Aoi]

That number actually sounds kind of low, but it'd vary tremendously depending on the type of game you play. I've killed tens of thousands of animated trees in a single game of ADoM, for instance. On the other hand, if you're playing Harvest Moon, I think I've killed exactly one cow across all the ones I've played (excluding Rune Factory, which is a whole different beast). And if you're counting indirect kills that only register on the statistical level... I sort of made it my mission to literally destroy the entire galaxy in Spore, one Planet Buster at a time...

Frankly, I feel worse for some of my roguelike characters. So many of them take two steps and die, despite somehow being able to survive to get to wherever, prior to the start of the game.

[Zorgn]

Yeah, if we're counting games where genocide is a core mechanic, lifetime scores in the trillions or higher are pretty easy.

[LordPorkins]

Man, this topic is so very very VERY Bay12

[TheBiggerFish]

Hmm.

That's a good question.

[Shadowlord]

....4 and 5 MILLION NPCs in my life.

Ah, the innocence of one who doesn't play space 4x games.

... I'mma go cry myself to sleep now.

Feeling like Londo Mollari during the Centauri bombing of Narn?

(Frankly, I haven't the foggiest idea what my "score" would be, because in RPGs/FPSes they're just algorithms, and in 4xes they're just part of a population counter, more or less - there's no life or intelligence there at all, and no reason to care besides that you might be roleplaying)

[Insanegame27]

~realizes that by playing Aurora he has doomed triillions of NPCs~


I'm not crying. *sniff* just... remembering their sacrifice... My eyes are leaking...

[ChairmanPoo]

....4 and 5 MILLION NPCs in my life.

Ah, the innocence of one who doesn't play space 4x games.

... I'mma go cry myself to sleep now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dO01h3d2xs




Funnily enough, I found stellar converters to be a weakish weapon. They were NOT the most effective way to fit firepower inside your ships (there's a weapon with 4x damage reduction that is actually much better in that regard, despite the reduction, because it's heavily damaging and you can push in much more guns in each of your ships). And there was no real point in blowing up planets: with enough firepower you could gun down their ground based defenses and simply bomb them into oblivion.

It's also strange that you got diplomatic penalties for genocide and biological weapons -- but NOT for carpet-bombing the planet onto population 0... which is often more practical than invading.

[Cyroth]

Depends on what genres we count. As mentioned space 4x games tend to add huge numbers.

I think I've murdered or indirectly caused the death of a few dozen (probably around a hundred) billion people just this year. Dropping several hundred orbit-to-surface bombs will do that to populated planets.
In Pleague Inc I've also depopulated the Earth several times, so thats another 70 or 80 billion during the last month.
Added with other minor stuff I'm at 200 or so billion this year, and it has not even really started yet...

If we add up my whole life until now I can probably reach a few hundred trillions.

[IronyOwl]

I tend to be fairly unwarlike and pleasant in most 4X games, so I'm probably pretty innocent as far as interdimensional tyrants go.

Sheer persistence means my victims are still beyond counting, though.

[TherosPherae]

I do believe that, for this scenario, it would be appropriate to use the classic metric unit of Hitlers [Hi], roughly equivalent to 6.0x10^6 deaths.

If we're talking NPCs that move, talk, and you would probably feel bad about killing, I'm probably somewhere on the order of 3 μHi - not a lot of considerate NPC blood on my hands, although there were a few times.... toriel why ;-;

However, if we're talking orcs, aliens, and other such figures which are there solely for the purpose of being brutally murdered, that number is probably somewhere in the 10-20 Hi range, due to the lack of large-scale games in my library as I prefer playing as a single entity rather than a government or empire. Gone through some pretty impressive hordes in certain solo games where the entire objective is to kill things, though - Path of Exile is my favorite culprit; and since in the Rampage league I averaged roughly 200 kills per area, 5 areas per hour, if I extrapolate that data out for all the time I've played, that game alone registers me at roughly the 1 Hi mark.

[nenjin]

I feel like there's money to be made in an application that would track this for you.