If conventional victory were possible, how would you do it?

To win a conventional victory you need superior numbers, superior weapons, or both.

Together, the entire galaxy probably has significantly more ships than the Reapers, but those ships and their weapons are severely outclasses by the Reapers.

If X number of ships are required to take out one Reaper, and there are Y number of Reapers, then you need a minimum of X times Y ships. But does the galaxy actually have that number of ships? Probably not. You would need better weapons (and defenses/ships) to reduce the value X required to beat a Reaper.

That was a bit of preamble, but really what is required at this point is between the time that the Reapers are proved to exist and the time they actually arrive, the entire galaxy needed shift a lot of production into making ships and weapons that fight a war with the Reapers. The issue of course is that:
1. Too many governments rejected the idea of Reapers and maintained the status quo.
2. No one knew the Reapers were actually coming until the end of Mass Effect 2, roughly 6 months before the Reaper invasion.

So let's say that at the end of Mass Effect 1, 'everyone' believed that the Reapers were real and that they would arrive in the galaxy at a later date. Is 2.5 - 3 years enough time to build research, develop, and produce enough ships and weapons to successfully defeat the Reapers?

I already explained this recently in another thread.

Did the "birth" of a reaper really mean a dreadnought reaper or could it be a destroyer. If the galaxy had spent the last two and a half years doing an incredible amount of ship building and the geth had realized the threat and started to do make ships by the hundreds like they are capable of then maybe they would have had enough. Instead they sat and did nothing for two and a half years wasting the time the protheans gave the galaxy.

That might not have been enough but another thrity dreadnoughts and thousands of more ships (a focused effort could have done this) might have been enough. And if the quarians hadn't picked the WORST time to fight the geth.

The problems is how many capital ships are created in a cycle? One? Three? A gajillion?

I will go with what the game shows me and the offical information from the devs.

For taking down Sovereign, the alliance losted 1/3 of the fifth fleet and there are eight fleets if I recall correctly (ME3 changed this info, but I will use the information provided by past games).
The turian, asari and salarian fleets were uterlly obliterated.
I even will not take into consideration Saren and the short-circuit Sovereign suffered, let's assume the fleet alone took down a reaper by simply firing at Sovereign.

So, each fleet is capable of taking down 24 capital ships.
The Treaty of Farixen states that the construction rates of dreadnoughts are 5:3:1
So humans can have 8, asari and salarian have 24 and turians have 40.
This means the asari and salarians have 24 fleets and the turians 40? I don't know, there isn't information regarding this, but let's assume this is the case.

Let's also not taking into account the losses of the asari, salarians and turians during the Battle of the Citadel, because we don't have numbers to back it up.
So the asari can take 72 capital ships, the salarians another 72 and the turians 120.
So the coalition forces can put down 288 capital ships.
I will go further and assume that we have the firpower to double this rate of destroyer ships.

288 capital ships and 576 destroyers.

But what about the other 19148 reapers vessels? I'm not even taken into account if they are capital ships or destroyers.
Heck, for taking down one single destroyer in Rannoch we had to use the entire quarian fleet.

I don't think with only numbers we could face the reapers conventionally, their ships are way too much stronger than ours.
We could do this if we, for instance, construct dreadnoughts and frigates with size, firepower and the resiliance of a reaper, but we simply don't have the necessary materials do this.
The geth construted a dreadnought 3 times bigger than our own dreadnoughts and they were only capable of making a single one.

I'm just using the number you provided, 20.000 as an hypotetical figure.
We can kill some reapers, but they would destroy our fleets and defenses much faster than we can do damage and not only because of their numbers, but because of their superior technology.

Doing the math, Organic Races will never outlast Reaper Capital Ships if they only destroy 1 Capital Ship every "few" cycles. However, depending how how many Destroyer Reapers the Organics can destroy, Organics may eventually outlast Reaper Destroyer Ships.

Now assuming the premise that the Organics can destroy more Destroyer Ships than Reapers produce in each cycle, eventually sheer attrition will reduce the Reapers to ZERO Destroyer Ships. I would then speculate that without any Reaper Destroyer Ships, Reaper Capital Ships would be destroyed more often. If the loss of all Destroyer Ships weakens the Reapers to the point where Organics can destroy 2 (TWO) Capital Ships in each cycle, then Reapers will eventually lose in the long run due to attrition.

TL;DR

Premise 1: Assume Organics destroy more Reaper Destroyers than Reapers produce in each cycle
Conclusion 1: Organics will eventually destroy all Reaper Destroyers
Premise 2: Assume Reapers Capital Ships are more vulnerable b/c of no Destroyers
Conclusion 2: Reapers will suffer more frequent Capital Ship losses
Premise 3: Assume that Reapers will suffer at least 2 Capital Ship losses in each cycle without their Destroyers
Conclusion 3: Organics will eventually prevail

Wait the Reapers out in bunkers on planets with nothing but primitive life, using local solar activity (or whatever the games invoke every time something hasn't been detected ever before because space magic) to hide the energy signatures while the militaries slow the things down for as long as they can.

The scientists who programmed Vigil had the right idea. They just needed better circumstances, and for their empire not to last quite as long as it did against the invasion. The current cycle potentially provides both of those factors, for better or worse.

99% would still die, obviously, but with sense and good planning the rest would survive and be able to kickstart the next cycle of technological advancement in the hopes of beating the Reapers conventionally next time around.



Do we know for a fact that they only create one new Reaper per cycle, or per advanced sentient species? Because if it's the latter, it's just as likely for the galaxy to go through strings of several but scattered technological revolutions that allow Reapers to harvest far more than they lose, eventually leaving every subsequent cycle so outgunned that it's impossible for them to make enough of a dent to compensate for how many ships are added on average.

In fact, this kind of has to have happened for the Reapers to still have any numbers at all, making it more likely that we'll reach a point where resistance is utterly futile than that they're so compromised by previous cycles that we have a real chance against them.

There are a lot of things to consider, and some good points were already made.

First off I never really liked the idea that only a couple capital ships are created in a single cycle because then that opens questions about how they were able to win early cycles, or at the least how long a time span it took for them to conquer them. Not that these questions are completely new anyway.

It is hard to determine just how much firepower is required to destroy a Reaper or destroyer from in game evidence, since player (or worm) intervention and conceits to gameplay are intimately involved. The Rannoch scene also involves the problem of orbital bombardment with kinetic energy weapons through an atmosphere. This was never clarified in lore, but the short version of it is that it the kinetic energy at impact should be drastically lower compared to ship to ship in vacuum. And that's being generous since the most likely outcome is that one of these 20kg ferrous slugs would just blow up in the upper atmosphere. Maybe this should just be handwaved like with mass effect small arms, or maybe starship weapons fire at different velocities for hitting targets on planet. Either way, lot of uncertainty from this scene.

That has some bearing on the numbers game as the uncertainty from the firepower needed to punch through Reaper kinetic barriers and armor combines with uncertainty regarding the number of actual ships. As such there can't really be a specific recipe for winning conventionally.

So all that said, you either need overwhelming numbers, technological superiority, or superior strategy and tactics. None of them are a particularly likely advantage for the Milky Way races to gain, but perhaps there is a path to at least one of them.

Starting in reverse order, the Reapers have been going about their business for countless cycles and so it would seem that there probably are not supposed to be exploitable holes in their strategy or tactics. Using the persuasive power of Shepard and heroic deeds you sometimes get the upper hand in scattered battles, but you are barely stemming the tide of the invasion. The biggest strategic win for the organics was the Protheans doing as sabotaging the Citadel, as that somewhat disrupted the Reaper plans. The relay network remained open, and depending on how long the cycle was delayed, it allowed other races to become space faring and able to mount a defense. I don't want to get bogged down figuring out how fallible Reapers are, but in general I am going to assume that generally speaking there is not a way to simply outmaneuver them in the field so to speak.

Likewise, it seems unlikely that the organics are going to develop superior barriers or weapons in any practical time scale. The races largely fell into the trap of Reapers which was to simply copy their technology, and as such they have only somewhat managed to approach their technological level in a few ways. The Thanix is still much weaker than a Reaper weapons, for instance.

That leaves numbers. There are several problems here. The first is simple biology, it takes a long time to produce more Humans, Asari, Turians, or especially Krogan. Additionally, through indoctrination any of these numbers may be shifted to the Reaper side. In any case, the number of dreadnoughts, destroyers, frigates, or you can produce using the advanced manufacturing of the future does not matter if you cannot provide a crew. Is that really the case though? Maybe not, but I will get to that after I mention one other thing.

Something missing from the discussion of fleet strength earlier was the small footnote about the composition of the Alliance Navy, and that is that they are the only fleet to employ the carrier. I thought there are three during the events of ME1, but don't hold me to that. Where am I going with this, and how does it relate to the previous idea left hanging?

Since it is not going to be practical to outnumber the Reapers with crewed ships, the answer may very well be to outnumber them with ships that do not require crews. There are two means to that end, and both need to be pursued. The first is to recruit the Geth, and the second is a VI drone program coupled with potentially shackled AI (a la EDI), with small human crew for supervision.

Obviously "Bioware Bias" rubbed off on me, because I always felt the Geth would need to be a key to "conventional" victory. A tireless force that can build ships and replicate much faster than any organic race could hope to do. It is unclear how much of their vast fleet remains after the Quarian sneak attack, but they started with a number of dreadnoughts near the Turians. You can recruit them in game, so there isn't much new to add here except a reminder that they do not feel fear, and they will never stop.

The other path is for the organics to give up on the strictures of the Butlerian Jihad, and either develop one or more new shackled AIs to run ships and weapons, as well as improved VIs to either directly run ships, fighters, vehicles or mechs, and make wholesale changes to the design philosophy of warships.

In the new paradigm the principle warship that should be constructed is a carrier, with a complement of drone fighters with either no or a minimal organic crew. The ship itself would have minimal armor, and would largely be a frame with a mass effect drive and places to dock many drone ships on the hull. The idea is rapid production at relatively low cost. Not entirely different from escort carriers.


A problem may be hacking, but that could be an issue with "dumb" systems and in reality AI like upgraded Geth and EDI are more resistant to cyber attack than the dumb systems anyway. Nevermind that Reapers hack organics with indoctrination, so it isn't as if this problem is exclusive to inorganics.

Of course there would be the possibility that scenarios exist where the Geth or automated forces of the organics eventually beat the Reapers after all of the organics have already been rendered extinct. Which would not feel like much of a victory to the dead races, but is amusing to think about.

^ In the codex there is a bit about space combat the mentions that engagements are often over simply when one side withdraws via FTL since they can't be followed (no FTL sensors).



Quoting for relation to hit and run tactics. Really still comes down to whether or not you can inflict enough losses on the Reapers to offset your inevitable losses. I am not sure that surprise is necessarily an element that would apply when you attack the Reapers.

Sticking with the discussion on space fleet engagements, the really the more I think about it the less and less anything seems like it should end up as romanticized version of a "big gun navy." The last hurrah for that in real life was in 1944 (Surigao Strait). All the more reason the council navies have to rapidly evolve away from their convention.

Maybe I was wrong to suggest that the navies needed cheaper, more easily built limited crew or crewless ships. Perhaps it would be smarter to mass produce a "fleet" of FTL capable, interstellar torpedoes. I almost typed high yield, but if they had FTL drives they don't need any warhead if they can get around the whole navigation lock thing. If it is impractical or too expensive for that many FTL drives, then you are back to a cheap "torpedo carrier" that is just a massive torpedo rack with an FTL drive slapped to it.

The difficulty with hit and run versus the Reapers with a conventional fleet is the allied vessels surviving long enough to even run. If a smaller number of cheap assets are risked, that are nearly disposable in the first place, it would drastically alter the calculus for the loss exchange ratio.

I suppose the other desperation measures would still be on the table as well. Blowing relays probably won't be an effective method of destroying Reapers for a couple reasons, nevermind that you are reducing the number of systems to which allied vessels can travel.

There's still the option of jumping down the rabbit hole of the tech singularity with AI. I welcome our new overlord EDI who drastically increased the development of allied technology and tactics...