Joccaren wrote...
Your evidence for this is?
The only hard numbers we have is that there are 50,000 ships in the Quarian Flotilla of varying sorts, and even then that's pre the battle with the Geth. The highest estimates of Reaper forces place them at about 20,000 Capital Ships and 60,000 Destroyers. They outnumber the individual Alliance Fleet, but the combined fleets of every race in the Galaxy more than likely outnumber them. In a 1 to 1 ratio victory, we would likely win.
I don't like talking numbers, because estimating Reaper numbers is really a big unknown. I agree that there should be around ~20,000 Sovereign class capital ships for ~20000 cycles. But I feel the number of destroyers are far higher than 60000.
Taking this cycle alone, we have asari, drell, elcor, hanar, human, salarian, turian, volus,
batarian, krogan, quarian , vorcha, rachni, yahg. That makes 14 known species. Minus humans (Capital ship) and yahg (left alone for next cycle), that makes 12 species. If we assume that there are more or less the same number of species in each cycle, that places the Destroyer numbers to be approximately: 12(no.of species) x 20000(number of cycles) = 240000.
20,000 Capital ships and 240000 Destroyers and limitless ground forces seems to be a hell of a lot of Reapers to take on.
Now talking about strength, it is well argued that 4 dreadnoughts can bring down 1 capital ship. That makes 80000 dreadnoughts needed to fight an even battle. Do we even have that many? I have seen arguments that Alliance dreadnoughts number in the hundreds, at the most.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about any assumptions. I'm only trying to be logical about our chances.
To be fair they likely didn't have that many tactics fighting them in previous cycles. They cut of the government and closed down the Relays. Any fleets they faced they would have Zerg Rushed instantly with 100* their numbers, with those fleets having no hope for reinforcements thanks to the closed relays. The Reapers relied heavily on that tactic, so far as we can tell, and in taking that away we have already forced them to fight a war it is unlikely they have fought in over 1 billion years.
While I totally agree that every war is different, saying that we can outsmart the Reapers in conventional warfare is I feel, a bold and overstated sentiment because they absorb the knowledge of every species they harvest. That includes the Protheans. It would not be wrong to assume they have the military knowledge of the Protheans + all the cycles before them. I think it would be far more logical to assume the Reapers would pull a smart tactic on us rather than the other way round.
You mean like everyone does for the Catalyst? Or for the Reapers defeating us at Earth with a much smaller force than we have? Or the plot armour the Reapers have against Thanix?
Yeah, there's a ton of plot holes, plot armour and other nonesense already in ME3. A bit more really wouldn't make that much of a difference.
I don't like the Catalyst. I've always maintained that. But let's not forget why we are upset with the endings and BioWare. Simply because the last 10 minutes is full of plot holes, plot armors and nonsense. By suggesting new endings to them without thinking about it thoroughly and picking it apart critically ourselves will not make a good case for BioWare to think that a conventional ending might have been better.
Hardly. How is Millions of deaths and years of war more sunshine and unicorns than Synthesis?
Seriously, the sunshine and unicorns are there in the current endings. Conventional just adds in the idea of free will. And to be honest, nothing is theoretically better. As ME is a product its quite arguable that whatever satisfies the customer more is better, and in that sense Conventional victory is the better option. Taking everything into account though there really is no right or wrong answer in this regard as its largely subjective.
Agreed on the whole.
Maybe it's because I'm ex-military myself, I feel that a conventional warplan must be watertight to minimise casualties on our side. Handwaving a battle plan just leads to more deaths and disaster on the battlefield. It makes the mark of a bad leader, of which I don't believe Commander Shepard is.
Modifié par spiriticon, 16 juillet 2012 - 03:29 .