I’m pretty harsh on Far Cry 5 in other places, the series never handled its Just Leave theme perfectly even at its peak but they completely bungled it in Far Cry 5, and the game is also just buggier and less polished than previous titles in the series, even playing it long after launch. Weird that they put so little effort into the game whose spicy theme made it the biggest swing of the series so far.
I say that up front only because I want to clarify that this post isn’t a criticism. It’s kinda funny, but, like, it’s fine. It’s not a problem to be solved.
See, Far Cry 5 tracks how many kills you’ve gotten in the game. A lot of games do this, and I like to doublecheck this figure at the end of my playthrough and guesstimate what total fraction of the enemy forces I am single-handedly responsible for killing. Usually it comes out to somewhere between 0.1% and 5%. The upper end of the scale gets kinda funny, while the lower end, though still absurd in the absolute body count involved, suggests I was only critical to the war effort because everyone else was too lazy to push the go-button on an outpost takeover mission.
In Far Cry 5, though, the battle is for a single Montana county. If we take the least densely populated Montana county, assume that Eden’s Gate replaces, rather than adding onto, the people there, make up about 50% of the population, and only 10% of their membership are combatants, they could plausibly have fewer than thirty armed members. I killed 1,986. So, probably no need to lowball things here.
If we instead assume that Hope County is at about the median size county for Montana at 7,000, that 75% of those original inhabitants are old enough to vote/fight against the cult, and Eden’s Gate combatants outnumbers these potential opponents 2:1, that gives Eden’s Gate 10,500 combatants. This is a really high mobilization rate, even for a death cult, but the cult doesn’t have to sustain it long term. It’s a burst of total mobilization within driving distance of their homes, made possible because they’re all living off of stockpiled food for the handful of weeks the conflict takes place over. Even so, I single-handedly eradicated nearly 20% of their forces. That’s the level of losses past which units start breaking and routing altogether. The militia might actually have just shown up to garrison outposts I sacked, without ever taking any offensive action or facing any significant counterattack outside of that which I was personally present for.
Given the cult seems to be near-totally eradicated by the end, though, probably even at this scale, and this level of absurd lethality on part of the protagonist, the militia was probably still responsible for destroying another 60% of the cult, with the remaining 20% fleeing into the wilderness.
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