***IMPORTANT***
This is a Mass Effect 3 Game Owners thread and is in no way affiliated with
BioWare, EA, etc.
This article relates solely to the increase/decrease of the percentage Galactic
Readiness Level in Mass Effect 3. Please do not post spoilers regarding the
game.
As many of you will be aware, Mass Effect 3 includes the online only Galaxy At War feature, with a major part of that being Galactic Readiness. According to BioWare and the Mass Effect Wiki, Galactic Readiness is a key feature to securing the ability to access all possible endings to the game; apparently,
according to BioWare, it is still possible to get them all without it, though some players dispute this. I personally don't know what they are as I have not currently finished the game yet, so again no spoilers please.
However, a lot of people are still somewhat confused by what this does and how it links into the in-game War Assets, etc. this guide will attempt to clear up the clutter and make it a little easier to understand.
War Assets & Total Military Strength
War Assets are gained through general gameplay of Mass Effect 3. These include fleets, personnel, equipment & technology gained through scanning star systems or by acquiring them during various missions; essentially they are the equivalent of Mass Effect 1's land-based resource pickups or Mass Effect 2's mining mechanic. Each War Asset has a "Military Strength" point’s value which can range from as low as 5 to a few hundred points.
Total Military Strength is the sum total of the Military Strength points of all your currently held War Assets. On it's own, it simply gives an indication of how big your army will be for the final push for Earth. But, and this is the big but, on its own it does not tell you how well you will do during the final battle, nor which endings you will be able to get. That will discussed later in "Effective Military Strength".
Note, however, that some of your decisions in throughout the previous games and Mass Effect 3 will cause the values of each War Asset to vary. See the War Assets page on the Mass Effect Wiki for more on these updates (please note that breakdown of War Assets on these pages may contain spoilers).
Galactic Readiness & What Affects It
From an in-game perspective, Galactic Readiness tells you how prepared each regions of the galaxy, and the galaxy as whole, are for the final battle, and how well they are resisting the Reaper invasion. From a players perspective, Galactic Readiness is a Percentage Modifier that affects your "Total Military Strength" (see "Effective Military Strength" for more info).
In order to increase your Galactic Readiness Rating, you need to do one or all of the following things:
- Play Mass Effect - Infiltrator on iOS Devices. Playing through Infiltrator, you can pick up "Cerberus Intel" packages from some downed enemies. These can then be traded-in in the in-game store for in-game credits (which can also be purchased with real money so be careful when using them), or can be sent to Galaxy At War to increase your Galactic Readiness Rating. Additionally, completing Infilitrator gives you a "Cerberus Escapee" as a War Asset, with an individual Military Strength value of 40.
- Play Mass Effect - Datapad on iOS Devices. By far the simplest and least intrusive method of improving Galactic Readiness is by using Datapad. Available for free, at the time of writing, Datapad allows you to deploy "fleets" of ships to various planets in the galaxy. Upon completion of their missions, these fleets can be reclaimed and give you in-game credits to purchase fleet upgrades (such as reducing the time take to complete missions) and improve the Galactic Readiness Rating of that Galactic Region by between 1.3-1.67% per mission.
- Play the Mass Effect 3 - Multiplayer. Playing Mutliplayer is the fastest method of improving Galactic Readiness that I currently know of. Depending on the map settings, playing Multiplayer increases Galactic Readiness by 2% per completed mission at minimum, so long as you get to above Wave 5. Other factors affect this and the actual values can be as high as 9%, on successful "extraction"; i.e. having at least one player finish a map alive. Additionally, when a Multiplayer Character reaches Level 20 he/she can be transferred into the single player campaign as a War Asset with a Military Strength value of 75 per character transferred; note, however, that this resets that character back to Level one so you need to retrain them. All other multiplayer unlocks, such as weapons and gear, remain unaffected when a character is transfered (see Mass Effect 3 Manual > Multiplayer > Character Screen > Promoting a class).
Effective Military Strength
In order to make the final push for Earth at game’s end, you need to push your Effective Military Strength past a certain minimum level (see picture above). Once you've hit this level you can try to make the push for Earth, though it would be better to get your Effective Military Strength as high as possible before this.
Effective Military Strength is calculated simply by multiplying your Total Military Strength by your overall Galactic Readiness Rating (Total Military Strength * Galactic Readiness = Effective Military Strength)
For Example:
Total Military Strength = 2000
Galactic Readiness = 50% (0.5 as a decimal value)
Effective Military Strength = 2000*0.5 = 1000
It should be noted that if you do the calculations yourself on a calculator
then you should round down any decimal points, i.e.
(Using the picture as a guide)
2591*0.5 = 1295.5
Normally, this would be rounded up to 1296. However, as the picture shows, it is actually rounded down to 1295. Bear that in mind if and when you do this yourself.
Notes About War Assets & Galactic Readiness
War Assets reset for every playthrough. This of course makes sense because technically you haven't received/retrieved them yet. For example, you don't meet certain characters until later in the game, but when you do they are added to the list of War Assets. Therefore it wouldn't make sense, or even be possible to have two of these characters as War Assets.
As many players will be aware, Galactic Readiness decreases, though there are conflicting accounts as to how quickly. A brief experiment of mine shows an approximate decrease of around 3.56% every 24 hours though some say it can be as low as 1%. Also, the speed at which Galactic Readiness decreases also seems to be affected by how much you play the game; see the below experiment notes for more info. Stats are stored both server and client side but only server side values decrease (see wiki), therefore if you get 100% readiness then disconnect from Xbox Live (or the Internet in general) you can maintain 100% until you reconnect. Also, many players are reporting that Galactic Readiness starts at, and never falls below 50% per region, therefore, you will always have an overall Galactic Readiness Rating of 50%.
Galactic Readiness Reduction Experiments
As previously stated, Galactic Readiness Ratings decrease over time. As there has been no official word on how quickly these values decrease, it has been left to us players to figure it out, and the number vary be very large margins. However, after conducting a few short experiments using Mass Effect 3, Datapad
and Multiplayer, I have figured out some rough numbers to use as a general guide.
Experiment 1: Not Playing Mass Effect 3 – Fleets Deployed in Mass Effect Datapad
Start Time: 07:46Z
Starting % Readiness: 100% (Overall) – 100% (Per Region)
End Time: 20:46Z
Ending % Readiness: 98.07% (Overall) – 98.07% (Per Region)
Time Span: 13 Hours
Overall % Drop: 1.93% (Overall) – 1.93% (Per Region)
% Drop Per Hour: 0.15% (Rounded) – 0.148461538% (Unrounded)
Notes: At approximately 20:45Z, the Ending Readiness was sitting at 98.22%. When I deployed a new fleet at 20:46Z, the Galactic Readiness of every region dropped to 98.07%. This seems to show that the server updates the Galactic Readiness percentages approximately every hour.
Experiment 2: Playing Mass Effect 3 Single Player & Multiplayer – Fleets Collected then Redeployed in Mass Effect Datapad at Start Time
Start Time: 20:46Z
Starting % Readiness: 100% (Overall) – 100% (Per Region)
End Time: 23:16Z
Ending % Readiness: 99.07% (Overall) – 99.07% (Per Region)
Time Span: 3.5 Hours
Overall % Drop: 0.93% (Overall) – 0.93% (Per Region)
% Drop Per Hour: 0.27% (Rounded) – 0.265714286% (Unrounded)
Experiment 3: Playing Mass Effect 3 Single Player – Fleets Collected then Redeployed in Mass Effect
Datapad at Start Time
Start Time: 23:16Z
Starting % Readiness: 100% (Overall) – 100% (Per Region)
End Time: 12:00Z
Ending % Readiness: 98.21% (Overall) – 98.21% (Per Region)
Time Span: 14 Hours 44 Minutes (Total) (14.73 Hours) - 3 Hours (Playing) - 11 Hours 44 Mins (11.73 Hours) (Not Playing)
Overall % Drop: 1.79% (Overall) – 1.79% (Per Region)
% Drop Per Hour: 0.12% (Rounded) – 0.121520706% (Unrounded)
From these numbers it could be said to appear that playing different aspects of Mass Effect 3 (Single Player & Multiplayer) seem to cause a bigger drop in Galactic Readiness than simply playing the Single
Player on its own. That said, the numbers appear to be different enough that it could also be said that the percentage drop fluctuates based on some, as yet unknown, algorithm. Also, these experiments were done on an arbitrary basis, so their results will be skewed slightly. However, from this we can derive the very rough average of approximately 3.56% drop in Galactic Readiness per 24 hours regardless of playing any aspect of Mass Effect 3.
Notes on Infiltrator & Datapad
Cerberus Intel is used to purchase in-game credits or be uploaded to Galaxy At War. Once used they cannot be reclaimed unless you playthrough the game again. Cerberus Intel is dropped seemingly randomly from my perspective, though it may actually be dropped in greater amounts depending on your in-game performance.
Datapad allows you to upgrade your fleets abilities during play. You can increase the number of fleets you have up to a maximum of five, decrease the time taken to complete missions, increase fleet shielding (which reduces the likelihood of them being crippled, prevent use for up to 1 hour) and increase the amount of Galactic Readiness that is added to each region. When these upgrades are maxed out, these are the kinds of values you can expect for the missions.
Short Missions
Time To Complete: 1:07:30
Credits Received: 75
Readiness Rating Earned: 1.3%
Medium Missions
Time To Complete: 3:22:30
Credits Received: 600
Readiness Rating Earned: 1.48%
Long Missions
Time To Complete: 5:37:30
Credits Received: 1,125
Readiness Rating Earned: 1.67%
Please note, that an Internet Connection is required to use the Galaxy At War aspect of Datapad. However, it does give you the ability to access the games entire Codex (Primary and Secondary Entries) offline. Also, the above values only include the four basic upgrades you can make. Once these are all maxed
out, a new upgrade (Galactic Command Coordination) is unlocked and this apparently allows for significant increase to the Galactic Readiness Ratings of these missions; however, they are not cheap, with the first upgrade costing 500,000 credits, which I don’t have.
A good tactic is to use Mass Effect Datapad to balance out the percentages achieved through other means. If one region is down at 82% and another is at 84%, focus on the 82% one to balance it. Once you have achieved 100% Readiness in all regions, Galactic Readiness decrease each region at the same rate, therefore the best plan would be to deploy 1 fleet per region, selecting a mission that suits your time needs best; i.e. 5 Long Missions, 5 Medium Missions or 5 Short Missions. That means that once all of them have finished you can collect the Readiness Ratings and redeploy them at the same time, maintaining an overall balance of Galactic Readiness Ratings; also it means that you can go away and do other things while they tick over, rather than checking back 5 times every hour.
Improvement Notes
I don't currently know if completing Infiltrator multiple times gives you more than one Escapee, therefore if anyone does know, please post here. That said, they show up in your BioWare Social Network profile so I'm assuming that once you get them, you can use them again in later playthroughs.
Also, I do not currently know how much 1 Cerberus Intel package from Infiltrator increases overall Galactic Readiness by. If anyone knows how much Readiness is gained via Cerberus Intel please post here; preferably as 1 Intel = x% or 10 Intel = x% as that makes it easier to work out.
At the time of writing, the only War Assets that I know of that probably
don't reset are "Cerberus Escapees" and "N7 Special Ops Team" (your
imported Mutliplayer Characters). I say that, only because they show up
in your BioWare Social Network interface for Galaxy At War, so I'm
guessing these values are stored in your account and not the game.
Seeing as I haven't finished the game yet they may well reset and I just
don't know it yet; does anyone else know? If so, post here please.
That may be a lot to take in, but as there is no current official guide, I am hoping that this makes things a little clearer, and a little easier to understand. If anyone finds any faults in the above, please send me a message and I’ll look into it.
Peace out
Other Links for Reference (may contain spoilers)
- Mass Effect 3 FAQ - BioWare
- Mass Effect Galaxy At War - Mass Effect Wiki
- War Assets - Mass Effect Wiki
- Effective Military Strength - IGN
- How To Increase Galactic Readiness - Game Tip Center
- Galactic Readiness Decreases Over Time - BioWare Forum Thread
- How To Increase Galactic Readiness - Just For Gamer (Blogspot)
- ME3 Question Regarding Readiness - Day One Patch
Modifié par Lord-Erebus-The-Exile, 27 mars 2012 - 12:31 .
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