234 réponses à ce sujet

[Reorte]

They are holding back, because they need a lot of live specimens of each race to fulfill their harvesting quota. It is completely in their power to blow every inhabited planet to hell an back, eradicating every living thing on them, and then the military fleets of the alliance/turians/asari/and others would have nowhere to get supplies from, nowhere to regroup and would basically be even more helpless than they already are. And even they are already loosing pretty hard even with their supply lines still being somewhat intact.

The real fighting is the fighting in space though. They've got no reason to hold back from curbstomping the Council forces (and everyone else's) so that they can get on with the harvesting unmolested. It doesn't make much sense for them to start anything else until that's out of the way.

[Esthlos]

Let's say it is a desperate move (Even though he doesn't seem desperate at all and is kicking plenty ass even after he pulled that move). A desperate move to accomplish what exactly? If he really was in the process of loosing against Heckkets fleet, how could he possibly change that by personally killing Shepard? It's just a pointless move he makes so the good guys can win.

Well, the whole point of its plan in ME1 was to open the Citadel Relay, so probably it possessed Saren in order to do so manually, after disposing of Shepard (who surely would have tried to stop it).
 

So you'd just pour all your ressources into some sort of vague Reaper-controlling Signal super weapon, of which you have no idea if it can actually work instead of the vague Reaper destroying crubcicle weapon, of which you have no idea if it actually works but you at least have it almost finished  already? Doesn't seem that bright a idea.

"Almost finished"? In ME3 at the start of the invasion we don't even have the full blueprints of the Crucible, nor a single wire or plate of it...
 
(P.S. And we actually get the whole galaxy to focus on that.
Without full plans, without even knowing what it would do.
Would have been hilarious if the ending was:
Shepard: "Fire the crucible!".
Hackett: "Ehm..."
S: "What"
H: "It's a vacuum cleaner. It's a f***ing inusannon vacuum cleaner.")

And we also have ingame dialogue from Samantha Traynor where she says that the Reaper on  Rannoch was firing at the Noramdy, which was in space while he was down on the planet. That sounds like they do have long range weapons to me.

Low orbit is closer to the ground than London is to New York; even just the distance from the Moon is hundreds of times higher.

Sure, you could call that "long range" if you used the modern-day-weapons scale; but with the same reasoning you could just as well use the medieval scale and call a sling "long range artillery".
 

Is there any hint in the actual lore of Mass Effect that does as much as hint that there is a way to build miniaturized, disposable, mass-produced Mass Relays. Because I don't think there is. And if there was the Reapers would be the ones to have it first, because you know they are the ones who invented that technology.

Judjing from how high they hold themselves, I highly doubt that the Reapers would place anything "disposable" as part of their own body.
Also, they have no need of it: this cycle is the first one, as far as we know, where they didn't bother to take full control of the Mass Relays' system from the get go.
 

But then you'd still have to blow up most of your planets along with the Reapers, because they aren't all crowding together next to a single Mass Relay but are all over the galaxy.

No, wait, now you're confusing yourself: I introduced the miniaturized relays as an escape tool to maybe rig to explode after use, not as a weapon.
 

They are holding back, because they need a lot of live specimens of each race to fulfill their harvesting quota. It is completely in their power to blow every inhabited planet to hell an back, eradicating every living thing on them, and then the military fleets of the alliance/turians/asari/and others would have nowhere to get supplies from, nowhere to regroup and would basically be even more helpless than they already are. And even they are already loosing pretty hard even with their supply lines still being somewhat intact.

There's no reason to hold back or even to resort to cut supply lines if they're so much powerful: they could just shut the relays down, curbstomp every fleet, and harvest unopposed just as they did in the other cycles.
 
(Just for curiosity: are you reading the other posts in this thread?)
 

As for the Reapers not taking the citadel immediately? You answered it yourself. It's pretty much just bad writing that they don't. Because as they during the endgame of ME3 show they can apparently just capture it quite easily. But Bioware made them clutch the villain ball really, really really hard in order for you to somehow a*spull some sort of victory instead of going for a logical ending that consists of every single squadmate/NPc and friend being killed one after another, galactic civilization being anihilated and ultimately Shepard dying alone only for her/his corpse to be dissected by Harbinger for mad science afterwards.

While I do agree that most of the plot devices in ME3 could be classified as "bad writing", bad writing is not an acceptable device for fan speculation I fear.

I mean, I could say "in the end Joker farts and scares Harbringer who, being an idiot, runs confused into a black hole", but that's not exactly something worth discussing...

[fhs33721]

The real fighting is the fighting in space though. They've got no reason to hold back from curbstomping the Council forces (and everyone else's) so that they can get on with the harvesting unmolested. It doesn't make much sense for them to start anything else until that's out of the way.

What are you even getting at? They undisputably win every single space battle. They are toroughly curbstomping the council forces.  If Shepard doesn't do anything with the crubcile during the final battle they win that one also and kick the comined forces of everyone in the galaxy in their collective asses and then get drunk on organic slushies afterwards.

 

 

1.Well, the whole point of its plan in ME1 was to open the Citadel Relay, so probably it possessed Saren in order to do so manually, after disposing of Shepard (who surely would have tried to stop it).
 
2."Almost finished"? In ME3 at the start of the invasion we don't even have the full blueprints of the Crucible, nor a single wire or plate of it...

 
3.Judjing from how high they hold themselves, I highly doubt that the Reapers would place anything "disposable" as part of their own body.
Also, they have no need of it: this cycle is the first one, as far as we know, where they didn't bother to take full control of the Mass Relays' system from the get go.
 
4.No, wait, now you're confusing yourself: I introduced the miniaturized relays as an escape tool to maybe rig to explode after use, not as a weapon.
 
5.There's no reason to hold back or even to resort to cut supply lines if they're so much powerful: they could just shut the relays down, curbstomp every fleet, and harvest unopposed just as they did in the other cycles.
 
 
6.While I do agree that most of the plot devices in ME3 could be classified as "bad writing", bad writing is not an acceptable device for fan speculation I fear.
I mean, I could say "in the end Joker farts and scares Harbringer who, being an idiot, runs confused into a black hole", but that's not exactly something worth discussing...

1. The entire point of ME1 was for Saren to allow Soereign to dock on the citadel in order to open the relay. If the relay could be opened by pressing a button where Shepard stands around during the climax of ME1, docking Sovereign wouldn't even have been necessary in the first place and Saren could just have gone there and opened it without the whole convoluted Ilios-plan to take over the citadel and allowing Sovereign to enter it.

 

2. By the time you first ind out about TIMs Reaper-contolling-signal the crubcicle is already almost finished. That's what I meant. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

 

3. I still see no piece of lore that even vaguely supports your idea. And the current ycle doesn't really have too much time left to come up with completely new and groundbreaking technology with the current apocalypse going on.

 

4. Same as 3.

 

5. What game were you playing? They already do curbstomp every fleet.

 

6. Even Joker farting and Harbinger flying in a black hole as a result would still be marginally better writing than conventional victory as far as I'm concerned.

[themikefest]

(P.S. And we actually get the whole galaxy to focus on that.
Without full plans, without even knowing what it would do.
Would have been hilarious if the ending was:
Shepard: "Fire the crucible!".
Hackett: "Ehm..."
S: "What"
H: "It's a vacuum cleaner. It's a f***ing inusannon vacuum cleaner.")

Or have it where there's still a missing piece needed for the crucible to work and not just the Citadel.

[Reorte]

What are you even getting at? They undisputably win every single space battle. They are toroughly curbstomping the council forces.  If Shepard doesn't do anything with the crubcile during the final battle they win that one also and kick the comined forces of everyone in the galaxy in their collective asses and then get drunk on organic slushies afterwards.

If they were really making more than a token effort there shouldn't have been anything left for them to fight in space by the end of the game.

[Esthlos]

1. The entire point of ME1 was for Saren to allow Soereign to dock on the citadel in order to open the relay. If the relay could be opened by pressing a button where Shepard stands around during the climax of ME1, docking Sovereign wouldn't even have been necessary in the first place and Saren could just have gone there and opened it without the whole convoluted Ilios-plan to take over the citadel and allowing Sovereign to enter it.

Then what was Saren doing there? Why wasn't he sitting around waiting for Sovereign to do its thing?
And how were the Keepers supposed to open the relay if it couldn't be done manually?

As for why would Saren search for the Conduit instead of going there immediately, maybe Sovereign wondered if the Protheans had left other surprises besides altering the Keepers' signal, and wanted to make sure that the Conduit wasn't a trap that was going to ruin its day again.

When it became clear what the conduit actually was, probably after they got the cypher from the Thorian, Saren had already been exposed and banned from the Citadel, which meant he now had to find the newly uncovered Conduit to get back in.
 

2. By the time you first ind out about TIMs Reaper-contolling-signal the crubcicle is already almost finished. That's what I meant. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

The idea is likely much older than that (it must have taken quite some time to reach the knowledge in the recordings we can hear at Sanctuary), we know at least since Mars that TIM was looking for a way to control the Reapers, and having research ideas isn't a Cerberus exclusive anyway.
 

3. I still see no piece of lore that even vaguely supports your idea. And the current ycle doesn't really have too much time left to come up with completely new and groundbreaking technology with the current apocalypse going on.
 
4. Same as 3.

Putting the infiltration specialists on research duty still beats having them twiddling their thumbs with the civilians while the war rages on.
 

5. What game were you playing? They already do curbstomp every fleet.

Exactly. No reason to hold back, no reason to not do as they always had done, taking the Citadel immediately and shutting down the Mass Relays.

If they can't adapt to something as simple as the Protheans delaying their surprise attack, how can we suppose they would be able to adapt to a strategy that exploits their most glaring flaws?

Anyways, this only concerns whether the long-range-bombers strategy would work; part of the question of the thread is also why nobody even thought about exploiting the Reapers' most glaring weaknesses.
Why did everybody go "yay crucible" instead of "let's try this and this instead, less risky and more logical than committing everything in a prject of which the only thing we know for sure is that it never worked before"?
They knew about their range problem. They've been fighting a war of attrition since day 1, so they must have noticed that pretty soon.
 

6. Even Joker farting and Harbinger flying in a black hole as a result would still be marginally better writing than conventional victory as far as I'm concerned.

It would also beat the ending we actually got, by the way.

[ImaginaryMatter]

 

5. What game were you playing? They already do curbstomp every fleet.

 

Is this communicated well though? Remember there is a number that literally measures something called 'effective military strength'. Once Shepard gets a war asset it usually doesn't go down. Are all these fleets not losing ships? The number goes up if the player finds some random ship during the planet scanning sections, shouldn't the number go down if they lose a squadron or two? This all seems to imply that, despite Hackett's words of inevitable disaster, a good number of fleets seem to be remaining perfectly intact. It's not even like the war assets are in a box hiding some where safe until Priority: Earth, they're supposedly still engaging the Reapers the entire time.

 

Wait a moment, if I open up the main menu it has the following message: "Allied forces are holding steady and winning in key locations". That doesn't sound to me like the fleets are getting curb stomped.

 

This game has some dissonance between what happens in the text and what happens during the gameplay. Since ME3 is a video game the later matters -- a lot. Everyone here is playing the same game, however, that gameplay stuff tends to leave a stronger impact that flat exposition scenes and text messages.

[AlanC9]

Having EMS numbers drop probably wouldn't be too popular with RPG players, who don't generally take well to feeling like they have to race through content. Even if this couldn't actually happen because the EMS drops would follow the completion of Priority missions (the same way all the other timed stuff in the game measures time), I don't think this would have worked.
 
I concur with your general point, though. There's only one outright failure in the game, and that's Thessia -- unless you count Prologue: Earth. Everything else is some sort of triumph.

[AlanC9]

Anyways, this only concerns whether the long-range-bombers strategy would work; part of the question of the thread is also why nobody even thought about exploiting the Reapers' most glaring weaknesses.
Why did everybody go "yay crucible" instead of "let's try this and this instead, less risky and more logical than committing everything in a prject of which the only thing we know for sure is that it never worked before"?

How would this have actually played out in-game? A bunch of reports from Hackett about how they're going to try some new weapon or tactic, followed up by reports about how it failed and the Reapers are still winning? I suppose they could have done a bunch of big space battle fail cutscenes too, but that would get real expensive real fast.

[Whitering]

Bioware shot themselves in the foot basically with the Arrival DLC. Once they showed so many Reapers they needed to introduce a deus ex  element to defeat them. Also, basically the trilogy set us up to expect different shaped Reapers that represented the dominant species at the time of the extinction, but they all looked like squid.

 

If there were one Reaper per extinction, they maybe should have had 20-30 Reapers; that's still 1 to 1.5 million years. Heck, they could have even had 100 and still allow for us to win if we got the Terminus systems on board.  That's what they needed, the right number to be able to win if you get your EMS high enough, but fail if you do not.

[themikefest]

Until Bioware mentions how long the 50 000 year cycle has been happening, the reapers will not be beaten conventionally. They win just by numbers alone.

[AlanC9]

Bioware shot themselves in the foot basically with the Arrival DLC. Once they showed so many Reapers they needed to introduce a deus ex  element to defeat them.

Did Arrival show more Reapers than the victory cutscene in ME2?

Anyway, it's only shooting themselves in the foot if they ever had any intention of implementing a conventional victory. They never did. The victory was always going to come from Shepard pushing a win button, just like ME1 and ME2. Just like Wing Commander 3. Just like..... I don't need to do the whole list, do I?

[fraggle]

Also, basically the trilogy set us up to expect different shaped Reapers that represented the dominant species at the time of the extinction, but they all looked like squid.

 

What looks like the species it was built after is only the core, the outer shell is always the same.

[dorktainian]

I don't know why peeps get worked up about the ending, make one up in your head and go with it.  It is just as valid as the literal ending we got.  Hell Destiny (yes.... Destiny on it's initial release) had a better ending.  I'm sure it was designed to still have us discussing it 3 1/2 years later.

 

Conventional Victory is possible if you imagine it.

[ImaginaryMatter]

I don't know why peeps get worked up about the ending, make one up in your head and go with it.  It is just as valid as the literal ending we got.  Hell Destiny (yes.... Destiny on it's initial release) had a better ending.  I'm sure it was designed to still have us discussing it 3 1/2 years later.

 

Conventional Victory is possible if you imagine it.

 

I think I'm more flustered by the game's art direction.

 

Unfortunately, that topic comes up waaaaayyyyyy less.

[Whitering]

Well, maybe the 37 million year old Reaper you run across in the IFF mission is amongst the first group, that's why someone was able to shoot it down. That's a problem then because that's still around 740 Repears - 1 hah. Too many to defeat. I'd have preferred some plans for a powerful laser system capable of penetrating their shields or something, no offense to Garrus, but your upgrades don't help too much, instead of the crucible.

[fhs33721]

Wait a moment, if I open up the main menu it has the following message: "Allied forces are holding steady and winning in key locations". That doesn't sound to me like the fleets are getting curb stomped.

Agreed, that message is weirdly contradicting actual canon events right there. To be correct lorewise Bioware should have written something along the lines of :

"Allied forces are still being used as doormat by the Reapers but marginally less so than they could be."

[fhs33721]

What looks like the species it was built after is only the core, the outer shell is always the same.

You sure that squids aren't just the ultimate lifeform and have conquered the galaxy for thousands of cycles over and over again each time starting from zero?

I for once welcome our cephalopod overlords.

 

[themikefest]

Well, maybe the 37 million year old Reaper you run across in the IFF mission is amongst the first group, that's why someone was able to shoot it down. That's a problem then because that's still around 740 Repears - 1 hah. Too many to defeat. I'd have preferred some plans for a powerful laser system capable of penetrating their shields or something, no offense to Garrus, but your upgrades don't help too much, instead of the crucible.

That weapon had to of been massive. It caused the Great Rift on the planet Klendagon. I believe the reaper was hit by a glancing blow, enough to disable it. Had it been a direct hit on the reaper, I'm sure it would be in pieces.

 

Its unfortunate there wasn't a mission to investigate the weapon. It could've been mass produced to help stop the reapers. Or have Ashley/Kaidan join Shepard for the mission where they fight wildlife while investigating the weapon. In a bunker close by, are plans for the weapon or at least believed to be plans. Its possible that it could've been an early version of the crucible. The only thing wrong with that is the crucible is intended to be used when attached to the Citadel.

 

If the 50 000 year cycle started at that time, there would be about 740 capital ships as you mentioned. Would the galaxy have a chance at a conventional victory? Doubtful. The number 740 would be added to the number of capiltal ships that were built before the 50 000 year cycle started. It would be hard to figure out since we have no idea how long the cycles were before the relays were built. That number does not include the number of destroyers, troop transport ships and the processing ships.

 

 I'll still support the reapers defeating this cycle without us having a conventional victory

[Reorte]

 

Its unfortunate there wasn't a mission to investigate the weapon.

TIM says that they found it but that there wasn't anything much left of it.

 

The simplest solution all round would probably just to have vastly reduced the number of cycles. Say half a dozen and the Reapers being beatable (by whatever means) suddenly looks a lot more plausible, and not just because of fewer numbers. Simply that something that's been that succesful for that long should've ironed out all its weaknesses long ago or already be dead.

[themikefest]

TIM says that they found it but that there wasn't anything much left of it.

TIM says the weapon was defunct. I would still investigate the area. No idea if Cerberus did nothing more than confirm the weapon was inoperable
 

The simplest solution all round would probably just to have vastly reduced the number of cycles. Say half a dozen and the Reapers being beatable (by whatever means) suddenly looks a lot more plausible, and not just because of fewer numbers. Simply that something that's been that succesful for that long should've ironed out all its weaknesses long ago or already be dead.

If the cycles were reduced to half a dozen, that would mean each cycle would be about 180 000 000 years

[Reorte]

If the cycles were reduced to half a dozen, that would mean each cycle would be about 180 000 000 years

Which might make sense but overall I'm thinking (i.e. it would need more than just reworking ME3).

[SwobyJ]

I tend to think that 'generally conventional victory' against the Reapers is possible, but the Reapers do way too many things that keep it from happening. Thus the most successful outcome we see is a result where we are temporarily toe-to-toe with the Reapers, even still as a rather short-term stalling plan.

 

I think the Reapers are knowledgeable and manipulative and coordinate enough, and organics are ignorant and violent and self-serving enough, that the Reapers were convinced that there was no way that they could be defeated in any conventional sense.

 

One can consider this untrue if you view the Crucible as only a big gun and just a new evolution of weaponry in war. I mean that in terms of galactic-scale 'conventional', since most big weapons used 'conventionally' in Mass Effect would actually quality as non-conventional WMDs IRL. If the Crucible in this form could provide the tech for the future of mini-Crucibles that engage in future wars extra and intra galactic, I can stretch my imagination and consider Destroy to be an at least semi-conventional victory. (I'd have to add other stuff like using the Reaper Heart instead of Brain, etc; things that provide tech that still seems relatively understandable and typical next to what the galaxy has understood so far.)

 

But anyway, Crucible aside, I don't think things were set up so the Milky Way galaxy were capable of a conventional victory in the Reaper War. But they were at least set up to be capable of engaging in a temporary level of successful warfare in pushing back the Reapers at times (as opposed to how it seemed like the Prothians would more slowly lose planet after planet, expansive as their empire previously was), and devise and complete a plan that could actually stop the Reapers. 

 

So what I mean is that a sort of conventional victory in engagements and large battles were made possible (if 'victory' = push back temporarily), but definitely not victory in the war (again, as long as you push aside Full Destroy Crucible path of things, sorta).

 

Stuff like 'move all the relays to Sol' doesn't work. The Reapers would know and intervene and wreck anyone trying stuff. While we may theorize that the Reapers hang back a little to experiment with our cycle's 'progress' in the grander schemes, they still don't want the lab experiment to break out of the cage. Anything that seems like it would completely end the Reapers, would have been stopped. The Crucible only wasn't because on the top level of the Catalyst, its full outcome was not understood. Whereas any attempt to, I dunno, blow up Sol or something, would very likely have been stopped.

 

In any case, while Sol has the most Reapers in one place, I don't think most of them are there. They're actually spread out.

 

They even don't attack the Citadel because any of the 'war' may actually be a focus on Shepard. Sovereign found Shepard impressive. Harbinger is obsessed with him. I don't see it as improbable that much of this war is a charade in order to obtain Shepard in an as-intact form as possible, in an ideal position. But this gets kinda into IT territory so I'll stop.

 

 

 

TLDR; Conventional victory is really impossible unless you take a desperate and dedicated approach to it. And clearly, some do. Some insist that the impossible can be achieved. And I say let them, since so much of the trilogy had various levels of acknowledgement of the 'impossible' being possible. But in the plot we got, it clearly carried the point that even if full conventional victory was hypothetically possible, it was not to be the case in the war we got. Thus the Crucible must be used, whatever you may regard it (a solution, a tool, a weapon), in order to save this cycle.

 

The Mass Effect universe is beyond this trilogy and I hope we enjoy the next game, but in the specific context of ME3, no, the Reapers could not have been just defeated by the resources and tactics going into the Crucible, instead going into a more direct war effort. To some extent, this higher technology (whereever it came from; other cycles, Leviathans? Reapers themselves? Dunno!) is necessary if we want to survive.

Shepard learns that victory may be impossible in even ME1. He is coming to accept it in ME2. And he understands how this is the case in ME3. But the point is that even the greatest Paragon, right til the end, is ready to fight regardless. I know people hate this quote, but this isn't about strategy or tactics, this is about survival and the will to succeed at it even when it seems otherwise logically impossible. Strategy and tactics are USEFUL. They are NECESSARY. But that's not what this conflict is ABOUT. Without strongly believing that we can survive the supposedly impossible strength of the Reapers, nothing will be achieved, since the Reapers have us cornered on strategy and tactics alone, even if these things become increasingly important to success.

[AlanC9]

Even if you could assemble an organic fleet that was superior to the Reaper fleet, how could you compel the Reapers to fight it? They're faster and have no supply lines or bases to defend; the initiative will always belong to the Reapers. They can simply outrun the organic armada and bomb industrial worlds until the galactic economy collapses and the organic fleet runs out of spare parts and fuel.

[von uber]

The issue with all of this is that as the reapers are written, it should be over in 5 minutes.
However that is not what the game shows or describes, leading to posts like this.

There is a contradiction between what should happen and the fact me3 is a game featuring a foot soldier.
Alliance HQ should have been a lump of glass within the first minute. The citadel should have been taken within the first few days.

Mass effect 3 should be a tale of futile resistance and survival where you witness the extinction of your species, the death of everyone you cared for and ultimately end up dying alone and unmourned.

And it would have been amazing.