26 réponses à ce sujet

[Aurica]

I don't know if this is the place to post this or if I'm understanding the WAR correctly.  The reapers were described as near indestructible and truly a force to be reckoned with.  Even in game cinematic from ME1 & ME3 shows how they swat away those fleets like flies.

So how is it that it took them centuries to conquer and wipe out the Protheans?  Also it seems like Earth & Palaven is putting up pretty stiff resistance too.  
If the Protheans could last this long against the Reapers, does that imply that they have managed to successfully destroy a few reapers?  If so, why aren't there any evidence left behind.  Like more derelict Reapers or parts of damaged Reapers?

[Evil_medved]

Protheans had more balls than krogan do, so they gave Reapers run for their money,

[theManic]

I've had this discussion with a friend since basically after ME2 was released, and I think that ME3 does a pretty decent job explaining this. Reapers are very powerful; they can kill almost anything. But when it comes down the harvesting of organic life, they really can't go in guns blazing; they have to send in ground forces and shock troops, and once everyone's on the ground those huge advantages that the Reapers themselves have mean a lot less.

[Verkir]

The reapers no doubt collect their fallen to avoid the next cycle from using the tech. As for how the turians or even earth held out for that matter, think Vietnam the reapers were the US and earth is the VC and NVA. We don't have a base of operation and we just hit and run reapers all day, reapers aren't immortal just really tough remember.

[John Locke N7]

We still have the citadel and the relays. the other races had neither.

Even then it just takes time to set the groundwork for the next cycle AND harvert what they needed to harvest.

[theManic]

Verkir wrote...

The reapers no doubt collect their fallen to avoid the next cycle from using the tech. As for how the turians or even earth held out for that matter, think Vietnam the reapers were the US and earth is the VC and NVA. We don't have a base of operation and we just hit and run reapers all day, reapers aren't immortal just really tough remember.

Yeah, this is a good point. I think that in the first two games, Reapers definitely were overhyped; we basically only saw one in action, and it was terrifying. The codex does a good job of explaining how powerful the Reapers are (way more powerful than we are) while still noting that they AREN'T indestructible; what was it, three or four dreadnoughts with coordinated fire could take one out?

In ME3, a lot of the fear and misunderstanding we had in the first two games got replaced by actually seeing them in action (and by also noting that not every Reaper is a capital ship like Sovereign and Harbinger).

[Archereon]

^ No, the entire 2nd and 5th fleets were needed to take Sovereign out, and that's a big "IF", considering the only reason Sovereign was destroyed is because Shepard disabled its shields.

Does a single full size Reaper even get destroyed outside of the ending?

[Militarized]

I think a lot of people don't pay attention to what makes the Reapers so powerful in all the previous cycles... it's also what pissed me off about the ending.

The Reapers main weapon is surprise, they caught the Protheans off guard and destroyed their central leadership of an Empire(most Empires don't run well if you assassinate the leader). They took control of the Relays by having the Citadel right away, cutting off systems from each other and taking them down one by one on a galactic scale. Javik himself says they fought a war of attrition, planet by planet.

This is NOT what our cycle did. Except fighting for main homeworlds, humans especially, abandoned our planets... we evacuated as many people as possible and regrouped. From what I understand we did something unprecedented and marshelled an overwhelming response.. the Reapers are tough yes but no where near invincible and in the Codex it states the smaller destroyers make up MOST of the fleet. The Quarians kill one while from quite a large distance in 3-4 hits... and they're not even using the new Thanix cannons that are on all the Turian/Human/etc ships.

Now... in ME3, earlier in the game we see the Turians fighting the Reapers but I think their mistake was they got stubborn and tried to fight a more conventional war against them, which the ME1 codex states are smaller fleet engagements. That plays to the Reapers advantage, it's a war of attrition that we CANNOT win.

This culminates to my conclusion that I think it would be possible to defeat the Reapers in combat at the end of the game, or at the very least do hhuuggee amounts of damage till the Crucible finishes them off.

Feel free to disagree with me... but this is what I think the game should have ended like and this is why all the assessets should have mattered. Organics uniting, a bold new strategy out of desperation and it should have been represented as such.. If you have enough assessets you can win, if you don't you fail. Obviously you can produce a lot of variable endings out of that... specific fleets/races get annihilated due to not enough assessets in their "accounts", renegade options being saboting Alien fleets at the end if you look like you can achieve victory to secure human dominance or something of another.

Just makes more sense to me... again, feel free to disagree.

[theManic]

Archereon wrote...

^ No, the entire 2nd and 5th fleets were needed to take Sovereign out, and that's a big "IF", considering the only reason Sovereign was destroyed is because Shepard disabled its shields.

Does a single full size Reaper even get destroyed outside of the ending?

Keep in mind that Sovereign wasn't alone in the Battle of the Citadel, he had an enormous geth fleet alongside him. Also keep in mind that humans at that point couldn't legally build that many dreadnoughts. The codex entry I was citing is "Reaper Vulnerabilities", under the secondary codex. It basically states that Reapers have to use kinetic barriers and that even though they are stronger than ours, four dreadnoughts can take them out.

Then again, you are right - I don't think I saw a Reaper capital ship get taken down in the entire game.

Modifié par theManic, 11 mars 2012 - 01:50 .

[Militarized]

You actually do sort of see a dreadnaught get killed in the space battle if you have enough assessets, it takes out a small frigate or a cruiser in it's last moment but it does get taken out.

[theManic]

^ Is that in the last battle? I thought I saw a Reaper getting torn apart but when it started taking out other ships I wasn't sure. It's nice to know, even in the anemic way that BioWare presented it, that my coordinated fleets could have taken out a decent number of Reapers.

[Militarized]

Yessir, if you don't have enough assessets you instead get a clip of a Reaper destroyer jumping ontop of a cruiser and slicing through it.

[SaltyWaffles-PD]

The Reapers have to be extremely thorough and take a large number of people alive. That takes time, with regards to a galactic civilization.

They're also not as godlike powerful as they were hyped up to be in ME1 (Sovereign is apparently the class-leader for the class of the toughest Reapers; Harbinger is apparently stronger slightly, but unique). Most Reapers are significantly weaker than Sovereign, who actually WAS overhyped constantly (it only actually fought the Alliance fleet, aside from taking a few hits in the beginning from the Citadel Fleet, and it was quickly ripped to shreds once its shields went down).

[theManic]

^ Exactly. As disappointed as I am in retrospect, I still appreciated the way that BioWare made the war seem ridiculously one-sided while still giving us reasonable grounds for hope (intense ground battles still matter, not every Reaper is a capital ship).

[SaltyWaffles-PD]

Militarized wrote...

I think a lot of people don't pay attention to what makes the Reapers so powerful in all the previous cycles... it's also what pissed me off about the ending.

The Reapers main weapon is surprise, they caught the Protheans off guard and destroyed their central leadership of an Empire(most Empires don't run well if you assassinate the leader). They took control of the Relays by having the Citadel right away, cutting off systems from each other and taking them down one by one on a galactic scale. Javik himself says they fought a war of attrition, planet by planet.

This is NOT what our cycle did. Except fighting for main homeworlds, humans especially, abandoned our planets... we evacuated as many people as possible and regrouped. From what I understand we did something unprecedented and marshelled an overwhelming response.. the Reapers are tough yes but no where near invincible and in the Codex it states the smaller destroyers make up MOST of the fleet. The Quarians kill one while from quite a large distance in 3-4 hits... and they're not even using the new Thanix cannons that are on all the Turian/Human/etc ships.

Now... in ME3, earlier in the game we see the Turians fighting the Reapers but I think their mistake was they got stubborn and tried to fight a more conventional war against them, which the ME1 codex states are smaller fleet engagements. That plays to the Reapers advantage, it's a war of attrition that we CANNOT win.

This culminates to my conclusion that I think it would be possible to defeat the Reapers in combat at the end of the game, or at the very least do hhuuggee amounts of damage till the Crucible finishes them off.

Feel free to disagree with me... but this is what I think the game should have ended like and this is why all the assessets should have mattered. Organics uniting, a bold new strategy out of desperation and it should have been represented as such.. If you have enough assessets you can win, if you don't you fail. Obviously you can produce a lot of variable endings out of that... specific fleets/races get annihilated due to not enough assessets in their "accounts", renegade options being saboting Alien fleets at the end if you look like you can achieve victory to secure human dominance or something of another.

Just makes more sense to me... again, feel free to disagree.

This, especially.

Just one correction, though: the turian home fleet was actually WINNING until the Reapers FTL jumped some of their ships past the engagement and began bombarding turian cities, forcing the turian fleets to fall back (which was actually the wrong decision and their undoing).

[Militarized]

Ah! I had forgotten about that, thank you for bringing that up. Turians are quite bad ass I think that just solidifies my post even more.

[Militarized]

No other opinions? Did I win the interwebz?

[Tom Lehrer]

Do we ever get any numbers on how many capital-ship Reapers there are or how many of the half size destoryers there are? Since the Reapers supposedly make one capitalship each cycle its a safe bet they have at least 740 of them.

[theManic]

^ I don't think we do - at least, there's nothing in the Codex (that I can see) that gives any hard numbers. However, keep in mind that the Protheans were the dominant and most successful species of their time and they weren't able to be "Reaper-ified", so I'm guessing that capital ships have some pretty harsh requirements and there might not be one for every cycle.

[Tom Lehrer]

theManic wrote...

^ I don't think we do - at least, there's nothing in the Codex (that I can see) that gives any hard numbers. However, keep in mind that the Protheans were the dominant and most successful species of their time and they weren't able to be "Reaper-ified", so I'm guessing that capital ships have some pretty harsh requirements and there might not be one for every cycle.

Other then EDI speculating do we learn anything thing else that says there is not a Prothean Reaper? The Collectors could have been the left overs kept in storage until the Reapers needed samples gathered in preparation for the next cycle.

[theManic]

^ I guess we don't; I don't think Javik mentions anything about a Prothean Reaper either, but then again I doubt he would have known anything about the creation of a Reaper based on his species. Then again, I would ~hope that BioWare would have mentioned a Prothean Reaper ... although who really knows?

[Aurica]

Thanks for adding your view points everyone.

Militarized wrote...

This culminates to my conclusion that I think it would be possible to defeat the Reapers in combat at the end of the game, or at the very least do hhuuggee amounts of damage till the Crucible finishes them off.

Feel free to disagree with me... but this is what I think the game should have ended like and this is why all the assessets should have mattered. Organics uniting, a bold new strategy out of desperation and it should have been represented as such.. If you have enough assessets you can win, if you don't you fail. Obviously you can produce a lot of variable endings out of that... specific fleets/races get annihilated due to not enough assessets in their "accounts", renegade options being saboting Alien fleets at the end if you look like you can achieve victory to secure human dominance or something of another.

Just makes more sense to me... again, feel free to disagree.

I agree.  Because of this, it seems almost possible to defeat the reapers w/o blowing up the mass relays. 
Instead of retaking earth with a huge armada for delivering the Crucible.  Maybe it is possible to overwhelm key locations where the Reapers aren't as strong. 

If their fleets are crippled, their ground forces would be stranded.  While they could quickly convert the captives into husks.  I doubt they would be able to rebuild a cruiser sized Reaper in short time span.  Especially considering the fact that they need to harvest sufficient "essence" of a certain species in order to create new Reapers.

If Protheans could hold out for centuries.  Given enough time, this current cycle may even be able to win this war. 
Then again this is just speculation from meta-gaming since we don't really know the Reaper's exact strength & base of operations. 

[tersidre]

it comes down to the galaxy being a damn big place.. even for the reapers.... they need to harvest the organics not just destroy them... this means cutting them off from each other then sending forces out there and then going world to world first beating down the heavy resistance then sending in ground forces to go and find them in the holes they are hiding on in each planet...

then once you do all that you have to go back and check AGAIN to make sure you havent left any traces of yourself behind... but even with the reapers super intelligence and methods they still missed clues that allowed things to slip past... though it could be argued they did this on purpose to ensure the organics were pointed towards the mass relays again


and dont forget that its been shown that the reapers are not invincible.. they are incredibly powerful but they CAN be killed by traditional means. They are not invincible. 

and i think thats how the series is going to really end.. after shepard wakes up from his indoctrination he is going to rally the forces together in a final stand that will show that we can kill them if we work together.

Modifié par tersidre, 13 mars 2012 - 11:25 .

[OverwatchGMX]

During the horrible ending of choosing red, blue or green if you watch towards the Blue-side in space you do see a Reaper get blown away.
Yeah, they're tough bastards. Made out of materials we can't even begin to dream about... But they can "die".
Another side note... If the fleet gave target priority and shot the Reapers one at a time with every ship in the fleet.. I doubt they'd be able to withstand that much firepower. Sure... Alot of ships would be torn to shreds but you bring everything down on a one-to-one basis.

A post on the forum earlier summed it up quite nicely with "The galaxy being Protoss/Terran and the Reapers are Zerg... Send in a Korean commander with 200+ apm to finish the job."

[jerms510]

ignoring the fact that harbinger puts it in everyone's butt (including shep's) when they're trying to rush the portal?