Casey Hudson returns to BioWare

This requires extraordinary stupidity on the part of the Reapers. They could enter the Galaxy anyplace and build up energy reserves at their leisure. How long do they need? Weeks? Months? The military balance won't significantly change. But let's ignore that. If the Reapers are really desperate, they don't need to worry about ground forces to crush resistance. They can obliterate worlds from space with minimal risk. They could do this even if their combined fleet strength was substantially less than the strength of the Citadel forces. Simply don't engage in fleet combat; burn any world you can reach, maneuver around any Citadel doomstack with their superior FTL drives, and wait for the galactic economy to collapse. (Master of Orion players may be familiar with this sort of situation.)

 ME1 set up technologies which combine to make defending planets just about impossible even with equal tech levels, and then gave the Reapers serious advantages in logistics and maneuverability on top of that. Whatever the writers were thinking of for an ending, it wasn't winning a war with them. My bet is that they always expected to wrap stuff up with some sort of space magic superweapon, so the PC could push the magic button.

The Reapers don't want to obliterate everything. That isn't their MO. Their goal is a harvest so that they can replenish their dwindling numbers. If the Reapers go scorched-earth on the galaxy and gain no new forces, then the next cycle will be far more difficult to eliminate. Especially considering the efforts made by the Prothean Empire in the last cycle as well as individuals in the current cycle to leave hints and materials for successors to wipe out the Reaper threat once and for all. What's a victory in the present if it all but guarantees a defeat next time?

Thus the Reaper program is unyielding: harvest the galaxy's population approximately every 50,000 years. That is how they ensure the cycle. No harvest = no new ground forces, no new ships, no new Reaper. Their greatest strength (the ability to create an army of husks and a fleet of lesser ships) is also their greatest weakness, since they do not manufacture or train forces and therefore must harvest to stay at full strength.


With what I described, this is why hitting Khar'shan early on would be of paramount importance. Their energy reserves are low, and they know that their enemies are somewhat prepared for their assault. A gigantic fleet burning vast amounts of energy would be picked up on sensors all over the galaxy. It could tip off their location and cause a rapid counterattack which would exploit their weakened position until they've regained their reserves. By hitting Khar'shan first, they cut off Batarian communication networks, acquire additional forces and replenish their reserves somewhat, but since time is of the essence to defeat a prepared galaxy, they move quickly - maybe more quickly than they should. By this point some Reaper ships are probably 100% combat-ready, but others likely are not, and these are the ones which patrol Reaper space and split off to lesser worlds.

The allied forces are organized but largely split up. This isn't really to their disadvantage as they mount staunch defenses, launch counterattacks and harass Reaper troop movements. At whatever point the Reapers recognize that they are losing (say for example, the unexpected Geth/Quarian reinforcements from Rannoch turn the tide and allow the allies to win at Thessia), this is when they form their own doomstack and immediately move everything to Earth. They want to force the allies collective hand and make them throw everything at a defensive formation of Reaper capital ships, otherwise billions of lives will quickly be extinguished.


I'm not saying the narrative had to be this way, but I'm just offering an alternative plotline that wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility. Is it any worse than "No matter what, you lose until you pull out a deus ex machina" like what we got in ME3?

I'd say that I don't check your math here, except that I don't want to imply that I think you actually did any.

A failed harvest in one cycle would reduce the Reaper forces available for the next cycle by only a tiny fraction (Exactly how tiny is a matter of debate; the minimum number of Reapers, all classes, is something like 230 according to the ME2 final cutscene, with an upper bound in the tens of thousands.)

Furthermore, running risks in the current cycle in order to reduce risks in the next cycle is irrational. The timing of the next cycle will be determined by the Reapers, since the Conduit trick won't work twice. If there are a handful less Reapers, they just harvest a bit earlier.

At this point you're demonstrating such a basic unfamiliarity with ME lore that it's not worth taking your arguments seriously. No FTL sensors exist in the MEU; or at least, the Citadel races don't have them. (The FTL telescope introduced in MEA doesn't have a large enough field of vision to be used for this purpose.) Even if the Reaper fleet did put out enough emissions to be noticed -- lore doesn't support that in the first place -- the Citadel races wouldn't see that radiation for millennia.

Ok. At least now they have someone that actually knows what Mass Effect is over there.

The Prothean Empire was arguably the most successful enemy the Reapers went up against prior to the current cycle. The current cycle, which has foiled numerous Reaper plans, is an even nastier enemy. The next cycle is likely going to be even worse, especially if the Yahg beat the odds and create an interstellar empire. What happens if the Reapers take heavy losses? [/quote]

If they take heavy losses, then they simply start the next cycle earlier, while the organics are less of a threat. The yahg won't be a threat if they've only built five dreadnoughts when the Reapers return.

In any case, it's not obvious what problem you're trying to solve by having the Reapers launch an immediate war and attempt to complete the harvest in the face of an unusually competent cycle. If the cycle is competent enough to inflict serious damage on the Reaper fleet then worrying about the harvest is stupid. They don't get enough Reapers from a single harvest to make up for taking serious additional losses. And, again, the Reapers don't have to attack while their energy reserves are depleted.



This is more workable. Like I said upthread, you're assuming that the Reaoers are very stupid. If you want to play that the Reapers are too stupid to change plans even in the face of convenient reality, you can.



This is just confused. Stealth is meant to protect against being detected within a system. Detection from outside the system is impossible in the first place. Comm buoys are point-to-point and so can't be used to scan for anything, and don't cover 90% of the galaxy even if they could be used for that. And the geth are controlling their territory; not sure what your point is. Sure, a ship could get into empty space in the Perseus Veil. It just couldn't do anything without approaching a system



It's not about want. You don't understand the lore well enough to propose a workable theory, and your ideas are half-baked on their own terms.

As for the dark energy plot, it had its own logic problems, and built up to using something like the Crucible anyway, so it's no solution to the ending problem If you're trying to get away from that.

Really, Drew K.'s to blame for this. He was smart to get out and leave Mac and Casey to sort out his mess.

You'll hear no arguments from me against that one. Moving away from Harbinger as primary antagonist was a mistake.

I just don't feel like getting into a long discussion or a debate about it. My point isn't "this is where ME3 should have gone," it's instead "this is one direction ME3 could have gone in." ME3's writing was lackadaisical and it was detrimental to making the final chapter feel climactic. The conventional victory side of things appeals to me because it shows that the galaxy doesn't need a McGuffin or a deux ex machina to win - through Shepard's efforts and the accomplishments of a lot of incredible individuals, the impossible happens and the Reapers lose.

Mass Effect is fantasy sci-fi and its lore is not very dense or consistent. Its plot isn't, either. The Catalyst for example came across as a massive retcon of Harbinger as the leader of the Reapers. I don't think it hurts having some wiggle room for the sake of the narrative.[/quote]

But nothing Shepard does before docking the Crucible is anything more than a tactical reverse for the Reapers anyway. The krogan can't challenge the real Reaper power base, and there aren't enough geth and quarian ships to make the war winnable. As it should be; if the Citadel forces were that close to equaling Reaper strength, then the Reapers shouldn't have been proceeding with a normal harvest in the first place..

Terrible Reaper tactics at Earth are a separate matter.

The reapers should win all the time. They have the numbers. It didn't matter if the galaxy has plans to build the crucible. The reapers still win.

The reapers were made stupid for this cycle to have a chance to defeat them. I'm sure previous cycles would like the reapers to be as stupid in their cycle for them to have a chance to stop the reapers.

Well, Shepard never should have gotten off Earth at the start of the game anyway, so that much is true...

But the Reapers, who usually go through entire harvests without losing a single ship, manage to lose at least three to Commander Shepard alone.  They fail to take the Citadel off the bat when that was key to their strategy for countless cycles (and don't say "but the Keepers!" because the Reapers do take the Citadel and stash it on Earth when they learn, "Oh crap, the meatbags managed to build  the MacGuffin!" so they still could have taken the Citadel whenever they wanted, shut down teh relay, and destroy the galaxy piecemeal like they have thousands of times before.

That was more than just writing.  The presentation was awful.  It was like they hired some amateur off the street to do the editing.

Great, now we should get more gay romance options.


Seriously though it's a step in the right direction.

The greatest tragedy of that sequence is that we didn't have Avina pop up and call out "PLEASE, DO NOT DISTURB THE KEEPERS" in the background.