Poll of the Day > GameTok with Lok: How do you kill billions?

(+) Yeah! (+)

So you're in an FPS or RPG or whatever and you have to kill billions of enemies.

I'm excluding strategy games since, like, in Pandemic/Plague Inc. you can rather easily kill billions ... same for many Space based strategy games (death star a planet).

Nah, I'm talking about personal gameplay action... You will run out of ammo or MP or patience eventually and be defeated, unless you have some sort of plan

So what's the plan?

Easy. One human body is comprised of, by some estimates, trillions of cells. Cells are alive, by scientific standards

Kill one enemy human, and you've killed billions of enemy cells.

Lokarin posted...

So what's the plan?

I don't see how there could be a "plan" beyond find a game that happens to have a spawn area that can spawn enough enemies. but you've said "billions" not even "millions", so I'm not sure such a game exists. the only plan then, besides finding the right game with the right spawn point, is to invest an insane amount of time.

as a reminder of the difference in scale between thousands, millions and billions, see: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

You would have to be killing enemies at a ludicrous rate too, just for it not to take forever.

I did a quick test run in Vampire Survivors, just because it was a game I had installed that had a fairly high kill count. Over a three hour run I managed to kill 1,733,361 enemies, for an average of around 578k an hour. That means it would take around 72 straight days to reach a billion kills.

Based on the aphorism "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic", I would generate one thousand statistics.

rjsilverthorn posted...

That means it would take around 72 straight days to reach a billion kills.

yes, this is one of the limiting factors... although I did plan the topic around a year of combat, Vampire Survivors does have a huge count.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Easy. One human body is comprised of, by some estimates, trillions of cells. Cells are alive, by scientific standards

Kill one enemy human, and you've killed billions of enemy cells.

the other novemseptentillion cells crush you

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Based on the aphorism "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is just a statistic", I would generate one thousand statistics.

I said no strategy games, and that's clearly a tragedy game

If you're looking to individually render the kills, I don't think it's realistically possible. If every other pixel on a 1080p screen were an instantly-respawning enemy and you killed all of them once every second, that'd still only be about a million kills per second and reaching a billion would take you ~17 minutes of doing that continuously. That's doable, but that's a ridiculous extreme and would not make for a game that I'd even really call playable, let alone enjoyable, and anything less extreme (like 20-pixel enemies that you wipe every 5 seconds) than that is going to inflate that required time considerably (that example would take 144 hours).

If you do want to rack up a billion+ kills, you'll need some sort of abstraction in there, like a multikill mechanic for overkill (scaling damage non-linearly is easy enough) or destruction on a city/town scale instead of an individual one.

Meanwhile, in LokLand - even though I'm a mostly healthy duder I have a slight BARELY perceptible cramp in my left moob, which of course my inner anxiety and intrusive thoughts is convincing me is a pre-heart attack.... which in turn ups my anxiety to spread to the arm and jaw/cheek which my inner anxiety and intrusive thoughts convinces me is a pre-stroke

This is the dumbest yet worst feeling... being crippled by my imagination

...

Anyways; To Kill a Billions... I was thinking perhaps some sort of recursive combat spell would be in order; Perhaps like pre-patch D2 Corpse Explosion

Like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

Nazis easily have everyone else beat.

I tried running Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator on my new 24-core i9 computer with 128 GB of RAM and a 24 GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card, pitting 100,000 WWII American soldiers fighting 100,000 Germans.

It slowed my computer down to about 8 frames per second despite bleeding edge hardware.

1 billion characters would be completely unplayable.

Yellow posted...

Like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

Nazis easily have everyone else beat.

Yellow posted...

Like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides

Nazis easily have everyone else beat.

Not really, that list only includes things that meet the UN definition of genocide and excludes other mass killings that have potentially higher body counts. Germany was terrible, but they may not even have the highest body count in WW2.

also those were all concerted national efforts, not one dude with respawning guns and ammo

Lokarin posted...

also those were all concerted national efforts, not one dude with respawning guns and ammo

Idk what kind of answer do you want? It would take you a very long time? You couldn't come up with a strategy unless you had a specific game, and in an RPG it takes a certain amount of time per enemy so you would just do the math and end up with an impossible number

Yellow posted...

Idk what kind of answer do you want? It would take you a very long time? You couldn't come up with a strategy unless you had a specific game, and in an RPG it takes a certain amount of time per enemy so you would just do the math and end up with an impossible number

mostly cuz if you're playing as a whole nation that's usually strategy game territory.