To be honest, the more I think about the Reaper war the less sense it makes to me. Now, I really, really want it to make sense, but every solution I fill in for a problem creates a bunch of other problems.
Let's start with the fact that the Reapers' strategy as described in Mass Effect 1 makes perfect sense. They shut down the mass relay network from the Citadel, thus effectively stranding spaceborn war assets in the clusters they currently are in. I know that there is a lot of speculation about how current-cycle ships can still travel across the galaxy in this and that many years, but from a military and logistic point of view this is useless for two reasons: first, it's too slow because you need to scout ahead to make sure the route is clear for larger ship formations, and it simply takes years to get anywhere; second, ships need to refuel and discharge their drive cores at some point, so unless you have infrastructure in place that allows you to do so (gas giants, orbital stations, secure fuel depots), it's simply not feasible. With the fleets stranded, all ground forces are pretty much useless. Therefore, preventing the Reapers from shutting down the mass relay network in ME1 constitutes a major victory against them.
Now we witness the Reapers' combat strategy first hand in Mass Effect 3. Let me start by saying that little of it makes sense. A Sovereign-class Reaper can destroy any ship in the galaxy with one shot from its main gun, and it can fire this gun every few seconds. Even if we're generous and say that it fires only every ten seconds, it can still destroy 6 ships of any class per minute and 360 per hour. Ten of those Reapers can destroy 3,600 ships of any class per hour. The only logical conclusion is that lengthy fleet engagements against Reapers are unrealistic as you'll run out of ships to throw at them pretty damn fast.
Let's look at realistic strategies to combat the Reapers to establish a more or less feasible scenario of long-lasting battles as witnessed around Palaven. As I've explained before, prolonged engagements are not feasible as you're simply lose all your ships very quickly. What you're left with is a sort of hit-and-run strategy. Engaging the Reapers head on is the absolutely worst thing one could possibly come up with.
You need to pull your ships out of the Reapers' effective weapon range (which would be anywhere beyond the point where the Reapers won't bother engaging you anymore, which I'd estimate at about 10 million kilometers or more since any lightspeed-limited targeting becomes pretty much useless [it does before that, of course, but let's be generous]). In order to create this distance between your fleet and the Reapers you need to go to FTL for two reasons: first, once you're in FTL you can't be targeted anymore; second, at conventional speeds Reapers are substantially faster and more maneuverable than any of your ships (established in ME1, see Joker's description of Sovereign's maneuvering on Virmire).
Once you're out of effective weapon range, you need to regroup, find a weakspot in the Reaper formation, ideally a lone Reaper or a small formation which you can hit with sufficiently superior force so to destroy at least one of them before they decide that you're a nuisance and force you to retreat again. The amount of time your fleet can sustain this sort of operation pattern is limited. First, your ships need to refuel and discharge their drive cores occasionally, they need ammo and supplies for the crews, and the crews need to rest at some point. Again, the resupply problem hits you in the face because the Reapers can just wait at whatever facilities you need inside the occupied system and wipe you out there. Therefore your fleet needs to leave the system in order to resupply, ideally not by mass relay because the Reapers can "camp" that as well. I conclude that supply infrastrucutre and mass relays are strategic choke points in otherwise open space combat.
All of these points boil down to one central problem: Since you need to keep your fleet mobile and supplied you ultimately cannot defend one relatively fixed spot in space (such as a planet). It simply isn't possible. If you keep your ships in orbit to hold the Reapers back you will achieve nothing at substantial cost. It would make more sense to evacuate whoever you can and disperse the population to as many systems as possible to make it tougher--or at least more time-consuming--for the Reapers to mop them up. At no point is it feasible to defend anything with your ships as you're just sacrificing them for no strategic benefit whatsoever.
Now, how is it that the Reapers' strategy doesn't make sense in Mass Effect 3? Well, we have seen how the fleets are the most important asset in combatting the Reapers even though they're very limited in what they can achieve. Why, then, do the Reapers focus on the planets? It would be in the Reapers' best strategic interest to hunt down every spaceworthy vehicle of their opposition. Without ships, combatant or not, every single living being, soldier or not, is trapped on a planet's surface, only waiting to be harvested. By largely ignoring defending fleets and descending to planetary surfaces the Reapers are giving up their one major advantage over the defending species: their utter superiority in space. While a Reaper on the ground sure is pretty nasty, the defending troops on the ground are much more expendable to the defenders than their fleets. They can disperse and, as we've seen on Earth and other worlds, are notoriously difficult to hunt down, also because the Reapers' ground forces are not particularly effective.
The Reapers pretty much tie themselves up in surface skirmishes while leaving the defenders's fleets free to escape and operate and so on. It leaves me with the impression that BioWare sacrificed canon military logic (as it can also be derived from the codex, see Alliance military doctrine) in favor of cinematic effect. While none of this is actually a game-breaking problem that completely devastates any suspension of disbelief, it makes me wonder how the entire conflict could have been designed to make more sense.
Modifié par beyondsolo, 01 mai 2012 - 03:28 .
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