342 réponses à ce sujet

[Aimi]

CitizenThom wrote...

The Greeks had no chance against the Persians... until they acheived a miraculous naval victory...which they had no chance of winning...until Greece discovered new silver deposits, with which to finance the construction of more triremes that were deployed for that naval victory.

Not comparable situations. The united Greeks had a qualitatively superior military, in terms of both land and sea forces, and the Achaemenids massed so many troops (far short of the ridiculous million-man army Herodotos claimed for them, but still in all probability a highly respectable number) that they ran into serious command and control problems. Furthermore, the Greeks were able to neutralize the best of the Achaemenid squadrons in the battle off Salamis with misinformation, and those fleets never saw combat again.

Whereas the Reapers don't seem to suffer from any command and control problems at all. At the same time, they both outmass the fleets of the united galaxy and dwarf them in qualitative terms. There is no prospect of diverting Reaper forces so far away that they cease to become a relevant part of strategic calculations, unlike the Phoenicians in 480; the Reapers would just come back and keep Reapin'.

If a hackneyed historical comparison must be made, one might take a look at the Plains Wars, most often associated with the 1870s in the American West. The US Army faced a succession of indigenous forces, some of which could sometimes inflict embarrassing local defeats on isolated units, but none of which had any real prospect of beating the Americans outright. And all the Plains confederacies were defeated, ultimately. Obviously, in this case, the Americans are the Reapers and the likes of the Sioux or Nez Perce were galactic society - outnumbered and outgunned, with too much economic weakness to last the enemy out in a waiting game.

[o Ventus]

dreman9999 wrote...

Pheonix57 wrote...

You know, I think the other problem is that they tried to make our enemy "nicer" at the end.
"We aren't killing you! We're harvesting you so we can preserve you eternally in synthetic form!"

I liked my bad guys when they were actually bad.

When in ME have the bad guys been inheritly evil? Saren was a puppet who thought helping the reapers was the right thing to do, the collectors were puppets, TIM beleive he was logically and ethicly right. Having the reapers be antagonist that beleive they are do ing right is hard persed in the rest of the series.

Saren, not inherently evil?

You don't know anything about Saren, do you?

[WarGriffin]

ME3 is the only one without a Thresher Maw battle

[shodiswe]

Conventional victory would sell the story cheap imo, I wouldn't mind if it had been a partial conventional victory and then add in some special warfare tactics, dirty tricks and what not, perhaps a superweapon, trick the Reapers to chase it enmasse and then reprogram a relay to send them crashing into a black hole by redirecting a relay to a different relay at the opposite side of a blackhole.... Kill a few here kill a few there and then hit them big when they have been thinned out somewhat.

Reaper viruses, once they get immunity use a different strat, lure them into trap, find a few straglers and blow them up..

The thing that makes conventional victory seem very silly is athe fact that the Reapers have been doing it for thousands of cycles, noone managed ot beat them when there were fewer Reapers, how are people supposed to beat them conventional when there are thousands more of them?

Though I must say I was hoping for more finesse.

The EC improved the ending though. But yea it didn't seem that immaginative imo, and the final assault on the reapers around earth seemed far too standard and text booky!

Im fine with the EC ending but I admit the ending could have been more interesting, A simple purely conventional victory? No thank you! That would make Shepards journey absolutely pointless, just go and sit on the beach sipping exotic drinks from across the galaxy and let the Turians and Asari handle the Reapers "conventionaly" They were the people with the fleets initialy.
Their conventional approach ate most of their fleets in the initial attacks though.

Using some unconventioal conventional tactics could have made it more interesting but only as extra spicing to the game.

Modifié par shodiswe, 26 août 2012 - 08:00 .

[shodiswe]

WarGriffin wrote...

ME3 is the only one without a Thresher Maw battle

IT still has the biggest Thresher Maw in the series however, and it did eat a reaper destroyer... That's kind of a battle..

[MacNasty]

shodiswe wrote...

WarGriffin wrote...

ME3 is the only one without a Thresher Maw battle

IT still has the biggest Thresher Maw in the series however, and it did eat a reaper destroyer... That's kind of a battle..

Too bad you couldn't ride it. 

[Cobretti ftw]

fail ending is fail

[Ridwan]

Simple works, pretend art doesn't.

[3DandBeyond]

shodiswe wrote...

Conventional victory would sell the story cheap imo, I wouldn't mind if it had been a partial conventional victory and then add in some special warfare tactics, dirty tricks and what not, perhaps a superweapon, trick the Reapers to chase it enmasse and then reprogram a relay to send them crashing into a black hole by redirecting a relay to a different relay at the opposite side of a blackhole.... Kill a few here kill a few there and then hit them big when they have been thinned out somewhat.

Reaper viruses, once they get immunity use a different strat, lure them into trap, find a few straglers and blow them up..

The thing that makes conventional victory seem very silly is athe fact that the Reapers have been doing it for thousands of cycles, noone managed ot beat them when there were fewer Reapers, how are people supposed to beat them conventional when there are thousands more of them?

Though I must say I was hoping for more finesse.

The EC improved the ending though. But yea it didn't seem that immaginative imo, and the final assault on the reapers around earth seemed far too standard and text booky!

Im fine with the EC ending but I admit the ending could have been more interesting, A simple purely conventional victory? No thank you! That would make Shepards journey absolutely pointless, just go and sit on the beach sipping exotic drinks from across the galaxy and let the Turians and Asari handle the Reapers "conventionaly" They were the people with the fleets initialy.
Their conventional approach ate most of their fleets in the initial attacks though.

Using some unconventioal conventional tactics could have made it more interesting but only as extra spicing to the game.

This is exactly the problem.  When people say conventional victory they don't mean running in using standard weaponry and fighting head on with reapers.  It's like saying you wanted a happier ending-people immediately assume you want sunshine and bunnies as the only ending with super sweet unicorns flying by and all, when what people wanted was a victory where the people important to you can be saved and have proper closure-the galaxy is still a mess and someone needs to clean it up, billions have died and need to be remembered and cared about, and a lot of sacrifices have been made to get to a happier outcome than what we got.  But what we got is shown as unrealistically "happy" even if crazy.

What I mean is that saying "conventional" is as opposed to magic handed to you by glow boy.  But that doesn't mean fighting conventionally.  It means innovative thinking, using what you have in unexpected ways and then creating new things to use in other ways.  Luring tactics, the reduction of reaper mass and weakened shields.  Concentrated fire.  Bug out and regroup.  Decoys.  Individual geth sent into reapers to destroy their cores or to try and hack their processors.  The use of radiation, toxins, and temperature to weaken them. 

The ignorance of weakening the fleets by having them all chase after the crucible and Earth was foolish.  Not a pretty idea but in many ways it might have been a better idea to use the crucible to lure the reapers to Earth and then destroy the relay and the citadel.  That would have been horrid and unconventional, but it makes way more sense then using destroy as it is.  The problem is relays only seem susceptible to asteroids and/or contrived plots with slash and burn policies for endings.

[DecCylonus]

3DandBeyond wrote...

shodiswe wrote...

Conventional victory would sell the story cheap imo, I wouldn't mind if it had been a partial conventional victory and then add in some special warfare tactics, dirty tricks and what not, perhaps a superweapon, trick the Reapers to chase it enmasse and then reprogram a relay to send them crashing into a black hole by redirecting a relay to a different relay at the opposite side of a blackhole.... Kill a few here kill a few there and then hit them big when they have been thinned out somewhat.

Reaper viruses, once they get immunity use a different strat, lure them into trap, find a few straglers and blow them up..

The thing that makes conventional victory seem very silly is athe fact that the Reapers have been doing it for thousands of cycles, noone managed ot beat them when there were fewer Reapers, how are people supposed to beat them conventional when there are thousands more of them?

Though I must say I was hoping for more finesse.

The EC improved the ending though. But yea it didn't seem that immaginative imo, and the final assault on the reapers around earth seemed far too standard and text booky!

Im fine with the EC ending but I admit the ending could have been more interesting, A simple purely conventional victory? No thank you! That would make Shepards journey absolutely pointless, just go and sit on the beach sipping exotic drinks from across the galaxy and let the Turians and Asari handle the Reapers "conventionaly" They were the people with the fleets initialy.
Their conventional approach ate most of their fleets in the initial attacks though.

Using some unconventioal conventional tactics could have made it more interesting but only as extra spicing to the game.

This is exactly the problem.  When people say conventional victory they don't mean running in using standard weaponry and fighting head on with reapers.  It's like saying you wanted a happier ending-people immediately assume you want sunshine and bunnies as the only ending with super sweet unicorns flying by and all, when what people wanted was a victory where the people important to you can be saved and have proper closure-the galaxy is still a mess and someone needs to clean it up, billions have died and need to be remembered and cared about, and a lot of sacrifices have been made to get to a happier outcome than what we got.  But what we got is shown as unrealistically "happy" even if crazy.

What I mean is that saying "conventional" is as opposed to magic handed to you by glow boy.  But that doesn't mean fighting conventionally.  It means innovative thinking, using what you have in unexpected ways and then creating new things to use in other ways.  Luring tactics, the reduction of reaper mass and weakened shields.  Concentrated fire.  Bug out and regroup.  Decoys.  Individual geth sent into reapers to destroy their cores or to try and hack their processors.  The use of radiation, toxins, and temperature to weaken them. 

The ignorance of weakening the fleets by having them all chase after the crucible and Earth was foolish.  Not a pretty idea but in many ways it might have been a better idea to use the crucible to lure the reapers to Earth and then destroy the relay and the citadel.  That would have been horrid and unconventional, but it makes way more sense then using destroy as it is.  The problem is relays only seem susceptible to asteroids and/or contrived plots with slash and burn policies for endings.

Even that kind of conventional victory isn't possible. The only way anybody ever wins a war with hit-and-run tactics against a superior force is the superior force gives up. There is no such thing with the Reapers. They don't have a civilian public that will get tired of the war and start protesting. They don't have a government that will decide the war costs too much and demand an end. Their only purpose is to harvest all advanced life, and they will continue it until they are annihilated. If you have to annihilate an enemy to beat them, you need superior numbers or superior weaponry to have a reasonable chance at it. In this case the Reapers, not us, have both on their side. What slim chance remains is negated by the fact that the Reapers are systematically harvesting the entire galactic population. Soldiers and fleets need civilians to produce food and war materials. Once the civilian populations are sufficiently reduced, the galactic military cannot be sustained. At that point resistance is local, which the Reapers can easily crush. In the end the galaxy can't kill every single one of them before they break the back of the resistance.

[Blueprotoss]

IanPolaris wrote...

That's not true.  The rage agaist ME3's ending far overshadowed any amount of dissastisfaction against ME or ME2.  This wasn't a small group of people.  The loathing expressed towards ME3's ending was both deep and broad, and in a recent podcast Bioware even (grudgingly) admitted this and admitted this was obvious early.  You don't "rework" your ending to satisfy a few complainers.

-Polaris

The only differences between the small rages throughout the ME series is that ME3 is the last game to focus on Shepard's story arc, which is why some people had way too high expectations or they thought it was the last ME game.

dreman9999 wrote...

Since they did rework there ending...Why are people still complaining?

The few still won't be satisfied until they get what they specifically want. 

Miphious wrote...

Because they added salt to their crap sandwich and said 'there, now shut up'. 

Haters gonna hate. 

IanPolaris wrote...

Simple.  It amounts to the fact that de-Nial isn't just a river in Egypt.  For whatever reason Bioware either won't accept or can't accept why people genuininely hated the ending, and as such they nibbled and improved things along the edges but weren't actually able or willing to fix what was really wrong (starting with catalyst kid).

-Polaris

Using a straw-mann won't help you just like how ME is designesd around millions of people not a handful of people and Bioware owns/created ME anyways. 

Modifié par Blueprotoss, 27 août 2012 - 04:02 .

[lynch108]

dreman9999 wrote...

3DandBeyond wrote...

LanceSolous13 wrote...

I would say its an issue of how the PTSD was handeled. They could have had some really great nightmares of friends and characters the player cares for dying in Shepard's dreams and had the player freaking out. But, with this random child that there's no emotional connection to, They're painfully bad.

Like, replace the child with your LI and they'd be so much better. Don't have an LI? Person with the highest relationship score.

Exactly.  The kid was inserted as a generic character to care about, clearly directed at new players.  They showed the kid at the beginning, then in the dreams.  If it was Kaidan or Liara or Mordin, franchise fans would "get it", but new ones wouldn't.  It's part of the huge mistake of the whole game.  They catered to new players and just didn't care if they dropped current fans.  They needed to create a decision tree "comic" like they did for PS3 players and Genesis.  That worked fairly well.  Only now are they doing that with the WiiU version.  Too late because it won't fix the game for ME1 and 2 players.  It would have been easy enough to do-offer the Genesis one that exists along with the new pre-ME3 one.  They could have made a better, bigger ME3 that took into account previous content.  And dreams with characters in them that we had cared about would have just worked, even if they had flashbacks that were like the beacon visions in ME1, along with the oily shadows.

The kid was there to question the intent of the dreams. Was it ptsd or indoctriantion? We will never know.

False, bioware said they are both valid endings. The ending is whatever we want it to be. They don't want to commit.

[Blueprotoss]

Stornskar wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...
No...They fixed it. You just don't like how they fixed it. Before it was unclear to what was going on. They made it clear what going on now.  It can be better but it is fixed.

You are arguing about something that's subjective as if it's a point of fact. It's fixed in your opinion, not in mine. Before, the endings were stupid; now the endings have been retconned somewhat and explained in more detail, but they're still stupid - I would argue even moreso. That's my opinion

Yet you're causing a contradiction based on how the EC did a lot of hand holding, which "fixed" the endings for a lot of people.  Opinion is opinion and trying to turn opinions into facts won't help you.

Reptilian Rob wrote...

No, it failed because they promoted wingus and dingus as lead writers when the both of them combined have about as much experience with a lead writing position as I have flying a C-5 all by myself. 

It's easy to write a dark, depressing story. It takes skill to do both dark and light at the same time.

Thats a straw-mann here based on the roles that Casey and Walters had in ME3 were the same in ME1 and ME2 just like the tone in the ME series. 

Modifié par Blueprotoss, 27 août 2012 - 03:58 .

[Blueprotoss]

lynch108 wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

3DandBeyond wrote...

LanceSolous13 wrote...

I would say its an issue of how the PTSD was handeled. They could have had some really great nightmares of friends and characters the player cares for dying in Shepard's dreams and had the player freaking out. But, with this random child that there's no emotional connection to, They're painfully bad.

Like, replace the child with your LI and they'd be so much better. Don't have an LI? Person with the highest relationship score.

Exactly.  The kid was inserted as a generic character to care about, clearly directed at new players.  They showed the kid at the beginning, then in the dreams.  If it was Kaidan or Liara or Mordin, franchise fans would "get it", but new ones wouldn't.  It's part of the huge mistake of the whole game.  They catered to new players and just didn't care if they dropped current fans.  They needed to create a decision tree "comic" like they did for PS3 players and Genesis.  That worked fairly well.  Only now are they doing that with the WiiU version.  Too late because it won't fix the game for ME1 and 2 players.  It would have been easy enough to do-offer the Genesis one that exists along with the new pre-ME3 one.  They could have made a better, bigger ME3 that took into account previous content.  And dreams with characters in them that we had cared about would have just worked, even if they had flashbacks that were like the beacon visions in ME1, along with the oily shadows.

The kid was there to question the intent of the dreams. Was it ptsd or indoctriantion? We will never know.

False, bioware said they are both valid endings. The ending is whatever we want it to be. They don't want to commit.

How is that when Bioware neither confirmed nor denied the IT.  It sounds like you can't commit on what to stick with.

[Blueprotoss]

Putok wrote...

IMHO, rather than the silly Crucible deus ex machina, we should have been devoting resources and scientists to retrofitting the entire fleet with the Normandy's tech. Those Thanix Cannons cut a Collector ship in half, effortlessly. A Cain can drop a reaper with a giant cannon on its back. Thanix missiles can apparently kill a reaper too.

The war effort should have beeen about upgrading everyone with the technology needed to beat the Reapers, not a poorly implemented "I Win" button whose instruction manual is delivered by a Reaper that's been fishing in our heads for the most sympathetic avatar possible. Most of the missions in the middle of the game are great. Gathering allies is fun, there are some intersting choices, and it's really very well done. Final mission could have been about disabling some sort of Reaper command and control center, or breaking in to a reaper to plant a virus, something along those lines. Maybe uploading EDI into a Reaper so that she could sacrifice herself to destroy their collective AI. If they really want to kill Shepard, he/she can die in a blaze of glory Virmire style while holding off the badguys long enough that EDI can finish the job.

One of the biggest problems is that the climactic final battle turned out to be less than climactic. It involved us limping through some sort of weird dream-like sequence on the Citadel, and having the boss Reaper try to convince us that the indoctrinated Illusive Man was right, not every sane person you've spoken too and not your gut instinct.

This is all opinion even when the Conduit in ME1 would be an example of a Deus Ex Machine before the Crucible in ME3.  The Conduit was exmpled halfway through ME1 while the Crucible was explained at the beginning of ME3.

[Ice Cold J]

DecCylonus wrote...

Ice Cold J wrote...

IMO, OP hit the nail on the freakin' head.

Why CAN'T we beat the Reapers? We had advanced warning, unlike previous cycles. We're (presumably) more advanced than previous cyles, as Sovereign was attempting to work around the machinations of the Protheans' development of the Conduit. We are likely greater in number than previous cycles.

We may have never seen anything like the Reapers, but THEY have never seen anything like US.

It's all explained in ME1 and 2. The Council decided to stick its head in the sand and disbelieve the Reapers. Only Cerberus believed the evidence. The Protheans are universally said to be more advanced than us in all three games, and they were wiped out. The Reapers outnumber us, and have superior technology. Some kind of superweapon is necessary to win.

I believe the premise implies that we HAD prepared (i.e. The Council had listened).

But the Protheans were tactically weak, as Javik impled, compared to our cycle.

And The Reapers only outnumber us as they make their casualties into their troops. Ship-wise, we were not outnumbered.

[Ice Cold J]

o Ventus wrote...

dreman9999 wrote...

Pheonix57 wrote...

You know, I think the other problem is that they tried to make our enemy "nicer" at the end.
"We aren't killing you! We're harvesting you so we can preserve you eternally in synthetic form!"

I liked my bad guys when they were actually bad.

When in ME have the bad guys been inheritly evil? Saren was a puppet who thought helping the reapers was the right thing to do, the collectors were puppets, TIM beleive he was logically and ethicly right. Having the reapers be antagonist that beleive they are do ing right is hard persed in the rest of the series.

Saren, not inherently evil?

You don't know anything about Saren, do you?

I would say Saren isn't inherently evil. He's racist against humans, but he's fine with the rest of the galaxy (it seems).

Saren attpemted to ally with the Reapers to save as many lives as he could. He believed the war was impossible to win, so he attempted to surrender to make the losses as minimal as possible. During this process, he became indoctrinated.

That's MY take on it anyway.

[Blueprotoss]

Ice Cold J wrote...

DecCylonus wrote...

Ice Cold J wrote...

IMO, OP hit the nail on the freakin' head.

Why CAN'T we beat the Reapers? We had advanced warning, unlike previous cycles. We're (presumably) more advanced than previous cyles, as Sovereign was attempting to work around the machinations of the Protheans' development of the Conduit. We are likely greater in number than previous cycles.

We may have never seen anything like the Reapers, but THEY have never seen anything like US.

It's all explained in ME1 and 2. The Council decided to stick its head in the sand and disbelieve the Reapers. Only Cerberus believed the evidence. The Protheans are universally said to be more advanced than us in all three games, and they were wiped out. The Reapers outnumber us, and have superior technology. Some kind of superweapon is necessary to win.

I believe the premise implies that we HAD prepared (i.e. The Council had listened).

But the Protheans were tactically weak, as Javik impled, compared to our cycle.

And The Reapers only outnumber us as they make their casualties into their troops. Ship-wise, we were not outnumbered.

Millions to billions of Reaper ships would outnumber the thousands in the Crucible fleet.

[DecCylonus]

Ice Cold J wrote...

DecCylonus wrote...

Ice Cold J wrote...

IMO, OP hit the nail on the freakin' head.

Why CAN'T we beat the Reapers? We had advanced warning, unlike previous cycles. We're (presumably) more advanced than previous cyles, as Sovereign was attempting to work around the machinations of the Protheans' development of the Conduit. We are likely greater in number than previous cycles.

We may have never seen anything like the Reapers, but THEY have never seen anything like US.

It's all explained in ME1 and 2. The Council decided to stick its head in the sand and disbelieve the Reapers. Only Cerberus believed the evidence. The Protheans are universally said to be more advanced than us in all three games, and they were wiped out. The Reapers outnumber us, and have superior technology. Some kind of superweapon is necessary to win.

I believe the premise implies that we HAD prepared (i.e. The Council had listened).

But the Protheans were tactically weak, as Javik impled, compared to our cycle.

And The Reapers only outnumber us as they make their casualties into their troops. Ship-wise, we were not outnumbered.

A premise is meaningless if contradicted by reality. We had advanced warning, but everyone ignored it. We never built more ships, tried to understand and control the relays, or made any other preparations. The only advantage we had is that the Protheans broke the link with the Keepers so that the Citadel trap could not be used again. 

I do not accept that we have superior numbers of ships. Everything we are told in-game and in the codex says that Reapers have more ships than we do.

[Tronar]

liggy002 wrote...

They just tried too hard with the ending and it simply didn't work.

They didn't try hard. They probably thought they would be smart by having to design only one end, then color it in Red, Blue and Green and then sell it as the different results of the many choices we all have made during ME1, ME2 and ME3.

The only problem: the fan base wasn't THAT stupid. 

And instead of taking into account the HUGE disappointment they've apparently created and acknowledging it as an asset created by the great ME1 and ME2, they start dissing their fan base (stop complaining, get a life).

I have no problem, if someone or a company tries to be an artist. The only problem with trying to be an artist is, if nobody likes what you create you are going to have to learn how to live without money. I am not sure if companies are good at that stuff. 

I find it disappointingly arrogant how they treat their fanbase. But since we live in a world of competition, they will either have to learn and make amends or the market will sort it out in the long run.

[palician]

Putok wrote...

CmdrStJean wrote...

Now that I've had some time to think about all this, I'm not at all certain why conventional victory was impossible - other than because everybody said it was.  The only real information we have regarding fighting the Reapers comes from the Prothean experience, which was a war fought under a very particular set of circumstances.  If I remember correctly, the Protheans never fought a pitched battle against the Reapers.  As the Relays were shut down, the entire affair took place on, at best, a cluster to cluster basis; at no time were the full forces of the Protheans available to take on the Reaper threat in a single consolidated effort.  This is a far cry from what's going on in ME3; in which there is a concerted effort to pool all available resources into one final make or break engagement.  It seems to me that the whole "no conventional victory" thing was an asumption based upon a misunderstanding of the available facts.  We just don't know if the Reapers could be defeated by the full might of existing galactic civilization, as such a battle has never taken place (that we know of).

All that said, and again in hindsight, I really wish there had been a "vanilla" conventional victory option and I can say, with some certainty, that I would have been okay with something like that.  I didn't need a fancy, innovative or "cutting edge" conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy.  I just wanted to win and to save the galaxy, as it is.  That's all I was looking for; and prior to the various retcons inserted into the EC, such an ending was not possible.  I agree that at times it's a good thing to try something different, I simply don't think the last ten minutes of a multi-million dollar game franchise is the right time for that sort of thing.  There's no reason at all, that I can see, why Bioware couldn't have played it safe here and decided to change course later on.  Other than of course the confluence of massive egos, time constraints, and EA's meddling.  Of course none of this matters now, what's done is done, but I'll always wonder about what might have been.  I actually had something invested in the outcome of this trilogy; that's a mistake I intend to never make again.

IMHO, rather than the silly Crucible deus ex machina, we should have been devoting resources and scientists to retrofitting the entire fleet with the Normandy's tech. Those Thanix Cannons cut a Collector ship in half, effortlessly. A Cain can drop a reaper with a giant cannon on its back. Thanix missiles can apparently kill a reaper too.

The war effort should have beeen about upgrading everyone with the technology needed to beat the Reapers, not a poorly implemented "I Win" button whose instruction manual is delivered by a Reaper that's been fishing in our heads for the most sympathetic avatar possible. Most of the missions in the middle of the game are great. Gathering allies is fun, there are some intersting choices, and it's really very well done. Final mission could have been about disabling some sort of Reaper command and control center, or breaking in to a reaper to plant a virus, something along those lines. Maybe uploading EDI into a Reaper so that she could sacrifice herself to destroy their collective AI. If they really want to kill Shepard, he/she can die in a blaze of glory Virmire style while holding off the badguys long enough that EDI can finish the job.

One of the biggest problems is that the climactic final battle turned out to be less than climactic. It involved us limping through some sort of weird dream-like sequence on the Citadel, and having the boss Reaper try to convince us that the indoctrinated Illusive Man was right, not every sane person you've spoken too and not your gut instinct.

I agree with this one

[M920CAIN]

Well, if the kind in the dreams was a sea shell... at least dead Mordin would run tests on it & everybody'd be happyface.

[Ice Cold J]

Blueprotoss wrote...

Ice Cold J wrote...

DecCylonus wrote...

Ice Cold J wrote...

IMO, OP hit the nail on the freakin' head.

Why CAN'T we beat the Reapers? We had advanced warning, unlike previous cycles. We're (presumably) more advanced than previous cyles, as Sovereign was attempting to work around the machinations of the Protheans' development of the Conduit. We are likely greater in number than previous cycles.

We may have never seen anything like the Reapers, but THEY have never seen anything like US.

It's all explained in ME1 and 2. The Council decided to stick its head in the sand and disbelieve the Reapers. Only Cerberus believed the evidence. The Protheans are universally said to be more advanced than us in all three games, and they were wiped out. The Reapers outnumber us, and have superior technology. Some kind of superweapon is necessary to win.

I believe the premise implies that we HAD prepared (i.e. The Council had listened).

But the Protheans were tactically weak, as Javik impled, compared to our cycle.

And The Reapers only outnumber us as they make their casualties into their troops. Ship-wise, we were not outnumbered.

Millions to billions of Reaper ships would outnumber the thousands in the Crucible fleet.

How the heck do you figure millions-billions of Reaper ships?

Not trying to sound like a DB, but that sounds as made up a number as you can get with nothign to back it up.

DecCylonus wrote...

A premise is meaningless if contradicted by reality. We had advanced warning, but everyone ignored it. We never built more ships, tried to understand and control the relays, or made any other preparations. The only advantage we had is that the Protheans broke the link with the Keepers so that the Citadel trap could not be used again. 

I do not accept that we have superior numbers of ships. Everything we are told in-game and in the codex says that Reapers have more ships than we do.

1. What reality? And why ignore the original poster's premise and still post in the thread?
2. Granted, I have not closely examine the codex from ME3. But I don't see much evidence of our being labelled "outnumbered" until a good way through the Batle of Earth, when I'm assuming we sustained heavy casualties.

[Blueprotoss]

Ice Cold J wrote...

How the heck do you figure millions-billions of Reaper ships?

Not trying to sound like a DB, but that sounds as made up a number as you can get with nothign to back it up.

The Reapers alone are billions of years old and we also know that the Levianthans are older then them.

Ice Cold J wrote... 

1. What reality? And why ignore the original poster's premise and still post in the thread?

Its ironic when Bioware is getting ignored here.

Ice Cold J wrote... 

2. Granted, I have not closely examine the codex from ME3. But I don't see much evidence of our being labelled "outnumbered" until a good way through the Batle of Earth, when I'm assuming we sustained heavy casualties.

Then you clearly didn't pay attention to Sovreign and Harbinger.