Mass Effect General Discussion (spoilers)

That's the other problem. A revival needs a company skilled enough to make it, with enough money to buy the property, and nothing else on their plates. That's why I think it will be in twenty years or so. Long enough for people who grew up on the game to gain positions of influence in the industry, and for nostalgia to be a major selling point, and long enough for the price of the property to drop.

Maybe technology to advance enough that making the aliens more distinct from members of their own species is an easier process.

Finally revved it up again between reading Animorphs with waifu. Played through the one where you meet Jack and liberate Grissom Academy.

Man, how did I get so much shittier at shooters compared to back when I was in college? I totally remember routinely headshotting Covenant Elites with sniper rifles and now I'm like spending half a mag on basic Cerberus assault troopers.

Is it just me or do adepts kind of suck at fighting things that have shields?

That post reminded me of my own wonderings of what a Mass Effect x Animorphs crossover would look like. Though I was mostly wondering what would happen if the Yeerks ran into the Reapers, and then concluding the Reapers would probably turn Yeerks into the type of husks that can husk-ify any poor sap they crawl into.

That's actually the reason I was partial to the engineer class, you may not be able to deal as much raw damage with powers or weapons but stripping shields with overload was just WAY too valuable, and the combat drone was great as a diversion as well as a damage dealer.

One thing I really wonder, or rather I'm reminded of again while replaying ME 3, is just why the hell the Reaper even bother with all these footsoldiers.

Like during Sanctuary. Why send an army of cannon fodder to deal with a potential security risk? Why not send a Sovereign Class ship that just blows the fuck outta that facility?

The Reapers are afraid of Shepard. That's what it boils down to in the end. They'll send cannon fodder first rather than risk themselves against the anomaly that has confounded them all this time.

I wasn't talking about engaging Shepard in this case.

Cerberus was studying a method to control the Reapers and they were succesful.

Why the hell did they bother sending mooks there to engage in a pointless ground battle?

Why not just blow the hell out of that dangerous place with a capital ship?

Because it's not actually a risk to the Reapers. It's an asset to them. Every time someone like Cerberus tries to study their tech to get an edge against them or for their own ends, it always backfires on them. It always leads to them being indoctrinated eventually.

That's one of the major reasons why the Protheans lost — their own Cerberus analogue sabotaged their efforts when they got indoctrinated.

Edited by M84 on Sep 8th 2019 at 7:26:20 PM

The Reapers are not a directionless Hive Mind with only one goal in mind, they assimilate every species they have harvested to add to their own numbers. If the goal of any conflict was annihilation there would be little need for the footsoldiers, at best scouts to check out the craters they left behind. So if someone like Cerberus had developed a countermeasure or override to indoctrination, THEY want to know everything about it so it can't be used elsewhere. No project that big will have their data exclusively at one location.

Edited by KJMackley on Sep 8th 2019 at 4:49:18 AM

They do have one ultimate goal: the preservation of organic life. It's just that they think "resetting" civilization every 50,000 years while harvesting the most advanced races to create Reapers is the best way to do it.

And that liquifying people alive and turning them into giant, mechanical monstrosoties is 'preserving' them.

Btw I still think its really stupid how each entire race supposedly only creates ONE Reaper at the end of each cycle. I mean yeah, I get it, they are supposed to be crazy-old and have been at it for millions of years, but that's stretching the suspension of disbelief a bit too much. I mean, humanity alone should have enough material to build at least hundred Reapers, especially considering that there are many smaller ones too.

It's probably deliberate — they think it's enough to have one Reaper for each race.

Yeah maybe, but like I said, that stretches the suspension of disbelief a little.

I mean, there have to be at least tens of thousands of Reaper Capital Ships, at least 100X more of the smaller ones.

If really only just ONE race makes up ONE ship at a time.....thats just too much.

(Also, I wonder, without any Reapers at the beginning, how did the Catalyst manage to slaughter all those Leviathans?)

It does highlight just how long this cycle has persisted.

As for how the Catalyst turned against its masters...presumably the Leviathans gave the Catalyst access to drone making facilities or something to aid it in its directive.

Edited by M84 on Sep 8th 2019 at 8:57:03 PM

Given the oddity of the baby Reaper in design, I think the original intention was that Reapers design a new Reaper based on every species they harvest. That's their vision of preserving the race. By 3, the need for design symmetry meant that the giant Reapers needed to be more homogeneous, and the logistics of trying to show a different Reaper for each species becomes complicated beyond reason.

Of course, the point was that despite being an overwhelmingly powerful force the Reapers are capable of strategy, tactics and adjusting based on their comprehension of enemy behavior. If they weren't they would actually be even more dangerous, because then diversionary tactics would not work against them.

They try to justify the uniformity by claiming that while each Reaper shares the same outer shell based on the Leviathans, the core of each Reaper resembles the race it was created from.

Edited by M84 on Sep 8th 2019 at 9:05:04 PM

I remember the different reapers in the armada at the end of two each had a unique appearance.

Just some quick napkin math here; if we guess that the cycle has been going on for 500 million years, and each cycle is on average 50,000 years, that's 10,000 Reapers, even if every cycle only produces one Reaper. That's certainly a large enough fleet to have the military might we see in 3, and it would still be only a fraction of the estimated lifespan of our galaxy (which Google says is 13.7 billion years old).

Didn't the leviathan dlc state that the cycle started around one billion years ago?

Also, this cycle has like a dozen species to cull, not just one.

I think it's also stated that many cycles had multiple races, the dominate one is made into a Sovereign class reaper while the others are made into the smaller but more common Destroyer types

1 billion years means 20000 capital ships, and I'd wager over 100000 destroyers.

Plus whatever thrall races they kept around similar to the Collectors, with ships of their own (Unless they have a weird policy of only having one at a time) but I imagine we didn't hear much on that due to art budget and production. Watsonian versus Doylist!

Not sure what the combined fleets of all the races were, but doubt it was THAT huge - especially as there's a limit on Dreadnought numbers. But probably a good few thousand frigates in the galaxy.

This cycle the reapers didn't split the systems though, so they had to fight on multiple fronts - probably still takes a good hundred Reapers to pacify smaller worlds, or an Ilium. But once they remove orbital problems, they can either just bomb from orbit or land a few thousand Husks to clear up resistance while the Indoc fields take effect.

And if they focus on a few key systems they are still fielding a good 100+ Dreadnoughts against primarily Frigate and cruiser fleets. Space is big, though, so you may be able to hit and run them a little... easier if they haven't locked down the relay. But Then as the Reapers, I'd station a good hundred Destroyers and a few Sovereign class ships at each Relay to major systems to hold the line and knock out reinforcements as they arrived.

Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale on full display.