338 réponses à ce sujet

[moater boat]

Laurencio wrote...

I've killed a couple of reapers with my fairly limited squad and a small under-equipped fleet. You're telling me I can't take on a dozen reapers in each system with the might of the Turian and Asari fleet?

Not according to Hacket, for some silly reason.

[Hudathan]

Hy0ga wrote...

The Turians pulled off the Palaven's Miracle! Unconventional strategy with conventional weapons and they kicked the Reapers out.

No they did not. They managed to kill a large number of Reaper forces at great cost and held on to parts of the planet, but they were far from winning in any sense of the word. It was a temporary victory in the face of an enemy who is still more numerous and powerful over time.

The problem with this entire debate is how some people chose to interpret individual victories as an indication of how the entire war would go. Individual Reapers can be killed when they are outnumbered, but the galactic fleet cannot defeat the entire Reaper force face-to-face. Not to mention people seem to think that we somehow outnumber the Reapers which is simply not true. There was a galactic limit on the number of dreadnaughts BEFORE Reapers came and blew up a bunch of them. There is no 'combined might of Turians and Asarians' that so many people seem to believe in.

Modifié par Hudathan, 03 avril 2012 - 09:49 .

[Uriko128]

daqs wrote...

You're using the wrong metric to judge Reaper success. [...]

I completely agree with u.

[buffyslayer12]

In my opinion you can use established lore to contrive a way for a win against the reapers.
(what follows is a possability that I came up with)

Facts:
While there are at least 20000 reapers made over the course of these cycles its probably safe to assume that some reapers have been destroyed by past civilizations. Shepard had a hand in killing five over the span of a few years, the prothean war lasted centuries. (I realize my first fact is an assumption but bear with me). So the reaper numbers aren't set in stone.

There is a code that can mess with the reapers.

The quarians made all of their ships into dreadnoughts for there war with the geth.

Rachni have been shown to animate dead tissue.

I propose that the geth could disable reaper shields allowing the rachni to real havoc with their organic parts. While the reaper is temp. incopasitated a fleet of quarian/asari/turian/human dreadnoughts can blow it to hell. Using a hit and run strategy no matter what reaper numbers are it would be possible to, as Kal'Reeger said kill them with mosquito bites. Aka one at a time. Destroy a reaper jump to a new system, destroy, jump, destroy, jump, rinse, repeat.

Now granted there are probably 100 people that can rip apart what I just came up with but a professional writer can pretty much do a way better job using the ME universe lore then I can. My point being, if bioware wants to write an ending where the reapers are defeated by conventional means, they are more then can able of making it believable. After all look how many people they got to believe in space magic that merges DNA with metal and plastic.

[buffyslayer12]

Sorry about spelling errors my iPhone spell checker likes to make me look stupid. (I'm more then capable of doing that myself. . ).

[davidt0504]

actually doing the math, 1 billion/50 thousand = 20 thousand. Assume that there is just one reaper capital ship for every cycle and the codex suggests that the races not converted into capital ships are harvested into destroyers. So lets say just some of the top dogs (Asari, Turians, Salarians, Volus, Krogan, Quarians, etc) We'll just average it out to be five destroyers for every cycle.
This is 100 thousand destroyers! Even if every the reapers are taking losses through the cycles, it would seem that even the best organics could muster (beating the reaper trap) we only managed to destroy 1 capital (2 if high enough EMS) and 2 destroyers (on screen). We've got a long way to go to winning that fight...

[The_Crazy_Hand]

 @OP Read the codex entry "Reaper Vulnerabilities" it single-handedly debunks everything you said.  And it's not fan ****** either, but canon fact,

"The Miracle at Palaven" says hi as well.

[OgFux69]

What people don't really think about is that the Reapers technology is limited by the species it harvest. It doesn't necessarily gets more advanced every cycle, because every cycle is begun from scratch. They may actually see the same technology rising over and over again. They just have scale and numbers, and any real edge probably comes from the first civilisation of the galaxy, the one who created the reapers, who probably had more than 50.000 years to evolve and acquire all that Mass Effect knowledge.

[ZLurps]

The_Crazy_Hand wrote...

 @OP Read the codex entry "Reaper Vulnerabilities" it single-handedly debunks everything you said.  And it's not fan ****** either, but canon fact,

"The Miracle at Palaven" says hi as well.

Codex entry is "in universe style" in similar manner as "mass relays are Prothean technology" is.

[Catroi]

Thanix Cannon... Lots of them...

I always thought that the best idea for a Renegade Shepard would have been to blow up Earth's Mass Relay (ends justify the means right?) that would have insured the Reaper's fleet obliteration...

[ZLurps]

Catroi wrote...

Thanix Cannon... Lots of them...

ZLurps wrote...
It says in codex that Alliance and Quarian fleets have Thanix weapons.

The thing is, Thanix is not super weapon giving like 10 x firepower, or even equal to Reaper. It's explained in codex too. Thanix relies in ships drive core. Even if Thanix technology were up to par with Reapers,drive core technology isn't.

Basically it doubles the fire power, which gave galactic races more time, Turians for example weren't wiped out instantly, but are able to fight back.

Catroi wrote...
I always thought that the best idea for a Renegade Shepard would have been to blow up Earth's Mass Relay (ends justify the means right?) that would have insured the Reaper's fleet obliteration...

This ain't bad, but what about rest of the Reapers? We see from the Galaxy map that control every system out there.

Modifié par ZLurps, 04 avril 2012 - 09:13 .

[Bleachrude]

In ME1 it was made very clear that the sneak attack on the citadel was the greatest strategic advantage the reapers had. This was foiled by the prothean scientists who reprogrammed the keepers. Now here is the crux of the issue. Why would the reapers use that tactic if it was completely unnecessary? Why would they rely on the keepers, a plan with obvious flaws, when they could just FTL for 3 years, swarm the galaxy, and win anyway? The only logical explanation for them using this convulted strategy is because they NEED to in order to insure victory. There is no indication in ME1 or ME2 that the reapers are simply invincible, quite the opposite in fact. Had ME3 been written from the beginning based on a conventional victory ending, no one would complaining it was unrealistic.

Um, no.

I think the problem is that you're assuming "without the citadel, reapers are weak". The reapers use the citadel because it makes it EASIER but it doesn't mean they can't do it any other way which is what I think you're implying...It's like saying Superman won't walk through an open door because he could easily just smash through the wall...

I always envisioned it as follows. The reapers are patient and like to make things easy for themselves...
Citadel is basically plan A and they went through a couple of other plans (the rachini wars, Sovereign) before they finally went "you know, screw this, let's do it old school style"

[OhoniX]

The fleet massively outnumbered the Reapers, which is the big advantage they had. Ultimately, the only real immunit that the Reapers had was plot immunity. Which was inconsistent with the codex and scenes we've seen before in the series.

I don't think there's evidence for that. In every shot of a massed Reaper force there seems to be plenty of them, and they're spread all over the galaxy. We don't have any numbers for them, but they could be in the millions, and we also don't know how they would rebuild and repair themselves, but we have no reason to believe they couldn't do so faster than the allies could rebuild. In a war of attrition, we have every reason to believe the Reapers would win.

Also keep in mind that their armor and shields are strong enough that, when fully enclosed even the strongest volleys the allies have couldn't penetrate their shells, and only when opened for firing is there a small target that can do damage, IF you concentrate a few thousand ships on a single small target, which is apparently impossible to aim at from more than a mile or so away.

Oh, and for those that said we should have blown the Charon relay, one, there's no way to do that, as even the combined might of the ally's weapons couldn't scratch the thing. Only if they smashed a small moon into the thing could they cause any damage, and that would take weeks, if not months of planning, all within the Sol system, without the Reapers stopping them.

Two, even if they did blow the Charon relay, and even if it did wipe out every Reaper in the system, there are still plenty of other Reapers in the other systems, and assuming that they could manage blowing Charon without losing the entire allied fleet in the process, they'd still have a dreadful battle on their hands, like children with snowballs verses a tank division.

[Luzarius]

I agree with the title of the OP.

[Archereon]

acrb101 wrote...

sergio71785 wrote...

It took two hits of the thannix cannon to destroy the Collector ship, which is cruiser sized. The "thannix cannon" of the reapers one-shots any of our ships, including dreadnaughts.

In the opening scenes, a Sovereign class Reaper is seen duking it out with a dreadnought over earth. It takes a few hits from the Reaper's main gun to destroy the dreadnought.

Exibit A:


In Mass Effect 1, Sovereign seems to destroy dreadnoughts with a single blow from his main weapon. I'd assume that upgrades in sheilds and armor allow the galaxies' dreadnoughts to withstand Reaper attacks.

IntoTheDarkness wrote...

Good analogy, I like it.

However, is "a god-like being who has taught organics how to use a sword and have defeated them over 2,000 times because teaching them how to use a sword and killing them in sesequent duels were his plan all along" beatable?

I think a better way to phrase this analogy would be "a god-like being who has taught organics how to use a sword in a particular way so that said god-like being always knew the weakness and then used this weakness in subsequent duels because this was his plan all along".

You do realize of course, that the reaper was hitting the dreadnought with the equivalent of a point defense guns? The c codex gives the reapers' mainguns'firepower a yield of either 154 kilotons or "megaton level firepower", either one of which would flatten a substantial portion of the city. Presumably, the reapers use these lighter beams when they don't want to fry a continent.

Thefact is, the codex contradicts itself,  miracle of Palevan is incompatible with the indoctrination codex (anyone board a reaper wow old immediately be detected, and, should they pose a threat, be reduced to a gibbering, mindless wreak by the reaper. KThere'salso the matter of megaton vs kiloton.

Modifié par Archereon, 04 avril 2012 - 01:32 .

[D.I.Y_Death]

Wait...a reaper's maingun only has 154 megatons of power behind it?
Why don't we just use antimatter on the reapers then, that vastly outclasses the Reaper's main guns.

[chazfu]

The biggest argument for a conventional takedown of Reaper forces, is the Reapers' own fear of such an outcome. If the Reapers didn't fear that outcome, then why bother shutting down the mass relays, launching surprise blitzkrieg attacks, and using tactics like indoctrination?

They hit the Protheans by surprise, wrought havoc on their fleet/leadership, isolated them by shutting down the mass relays, and yet it still took the Reapers centuries to defeat the Protheans.

Lets just look at capital class ships. The Reapers have ~1,000 - 100,000 capital class ships based on how many they create per cycle and how many have been destroyed. The Turians have the largest collection of dreadnaught class ships in Council space at ~40. Even if the other races have ten times that amount you get 440 dreadnaughts fighting a force over twice to 200 hundred times their size, that is also technologically superior. Given that level of advantage, why use subterfuge and blitzkrieg tactics? They could RSVP for the apocalypse with an exact time and place, and still win easily.

Why stack the deck so heavily in their favor, unless they learned from past cycles that they needed to do it that way? The Reapers fight like Salarians. Waiting til they are assured of victory before making the first strike, and fighting in such a way to ensure the least amount of damage incurred.

Also, how could the Reapers NOT know about the Crucible? Did they somehow manage to never indoctrinate/convert someone who knew about it? Does the Reaper indoctrination code have a "NO SPOILERS" clause? And how could they not know about the Prothean beacons left behind all over the galaxy to tip people off to their existence? And how did the Protheans get back on to the Citadel to reprogram the mass relays, when the Reapers assumed control of it in the initial assault?

So many plot holes. Shame on you ME3 ending, for making me notice them all.

[Bleachrude]

chazfu wrote...


The biggest argument for a conventional takedown of Reaper forces, is the Reapers' own fear of such an outcome. If the Reapers didn't fear that outcome, then why bother shutting down the mass relays, launching surprise blitzkrieg attacks, and using tactics like indoctrination?

.

...

Shutting down the Citadel makes their job EASIER but it does NOT mean that they can't do things "conventional style"..

Everyone seems to be assuming that just because the reapers prefer using the citadel as their attack vector, that somehow they become incapable of doing things the other way...

It's probably more of  a hassle for them but not something that's impossible for them.

[chazfu]

Why would the Reapers shut down the mass relays and drag out the harvest process for a century or more, when they could just leave them up, and wrap the whole process up in a decade or 2 by pressing their numerical/technological advantage?

And why did they leave behind the Leviathan of Dis and the other Repaer from the IFF mission? Pretty big oversites for a race that wants to stay hidden in dark space.

[Diesel McBadass]

Its simple, the crucible takes down the shields of reapers making a head to head fight possible then we determine victory by assets aquired.

[Ulmo11]

In theory it seems like the reapers would beat us all the time, but in practice I just logged into my game, and with %100 readiness we are holding our ground and winning in key locations. You never know how a war will play out, but so far BW tells me that I'm winning mine..

[Drake-Shepard]

I don't know how these space battles were lasting so long when the reaper's were 1-2 shoting the resistance. Its not like you can hide behind cover. It's space

[GnusmasTHX]

[Skyblade012]

Actually, it is completely possible to defeat them conventionally, as long as we retake the Citadel. The Citadel controls the relays. If we control the Citadel, the Reapers cannot reinforce. We can lock them out and divide and conquer. The Reapers are, idiotically, spread all over the galaxy. We lock down the relays, jump to one system, and annihilate the Reaper presence. Jump to another, do it again, taking minor time for repairs.

Destroy the enemy with overwhelming force. The Citadel Defense Force and the Arcturis Fleet destroyed Sovereign. Compare those numbers to our total EMS. We now have the full Asari and Turian fleets. The geth and the quarians. The fleets of the mercenary forces. What's left of the Batarians. And we know what we're fighting, and how to take it down.

Earth would be the only stumbling block, as there are far more Reapers there than anywhere else in the galaxy at the moment. So blow up the Sol Relay (with an asteroid strike) and take out as many Reapers as you can with the Supernova blast. Everything else, though, can completely be done conventionally.

[SNascimento]

Just a note here for those who missed: you meet Primarch Victus on Earth and he says Palaven is lost, that the only chance the Turians have is there, in that last battle of Earth.
.
So yes, it's impossible to beat the reapers conventionally, the game says this time after time.