Dovahkiin
Well-known member
Then that turns most of Halo and most of almost every other visual sci-fi/fantasy franchise into varying degrees of inept laughing stocks that function solely on authorial fiat and rule of cool... since that's actually what most of them are in reality, if we abandon suspension of disbelief about what they're supposed to be in-universe.You can pretend what happened on screen happened differently all you like, but the fact of the matter remains that Chief and Locke fought like drunken sailors, and Atriox laughed off every hit Red Team threw at him. That is what we have to analyze and deal with, regardless of how things should have played out, so I suggest you engage with the text as it is if you're going to debate about it.
Which is a completely valid lens of analysis, just one that necessarily connotes an absurd cripple fight I have no interest in debating myself.
The situations you're speaking of usually involve Covenant capital ships and/or big boi space fighters like Seraphs. I would not bet on mere Banshees managing the task of crippling a capital ship with the same level of ease.You're missing the crux of my argument being it should have been that easy. The Spirit of Fire was fifty years out of date thirty years ago, and the Enduring Conviction should have the ability to put out hundreds of small craft (to be fair, it did not, but I'm already pointing out how incompetent the Banished are, so point in my favor). We've seen before how long it takes for a Covenant naval force properly pressing its advantages against a UNSC ship to board/down it. It is not long, but for some reason it was here. In the absence of a technological advantage on the Spirit's part, and her complete lack of single fighter response to the Banshee harassment, the only reason it could have lasted as long it did was, once again, incompetence.
Hadn't considered this before, but now that I think about it, I'm not sure if the EC physically pushing the SoF down is something that can be done without tearing the latter apart.My point is that it would have been successful, and in a much shorter timeframe and with fewer losses because none of the Spirit of Fire's armaments could have penetrated its shields, and there wouldn't have been any Banshees to be shot down by her point defense. Done and done.
Indeed, and since the EC used that exact weaponry as orbital support for Decimus, clearly it deliberately refrained from doing so. Probably because of a combination of them trying to claim the SoF as intact as possible (which even your proposal complicates when there could quite easily be an abundance of useful shit on the bridge), the EC being busy with some sort of supply ferrying business when it went down IIRC, and the Banshees clearly being on the verge of doing the job themselves just before the EC went down and that assault dried up. An approach that, wasteful or not, still would have worked out fine if not for Isabel and Jerome downing the EC out of nowhere, which itself wouldn't have been plausible if not for the Spartans and Smart AI we both agree they fatally underestimated.But if you want less of a setpiece example, the Enduring Conviction could have fired a plasma torpedo or one of its ten separate energy projectors through the exposed bridge of the Spirit of Fire, killing the bridge crew and rendering the ship dead in the water. Now the ship is his, no harm no foul.
Now, in response to saying the Banished weren't taking every possible precaution, or being very conservative or efficient with their soldiers' lives, I have no argument there. But on top of that not being new for Covenant forces by any means, there's a difference between fucking up in a few crucial (and to an extent, understandable) regards, and being the complete bumbling oafs you seem to be saying they are.
My point, which you can't separate from the next part of the snippet you're quoting here, is that the fools* still would have done a good job at the tasks they were assigned, if not for A) the double whammy of a non-token garrison UNSC force falling out of the sky on them, and B) Spartans being among that force.Of course it's reasonable, he's the one who put them in charge. A fool who trusts a fool to do a good job is also a fool.
* And while I'd agree that's a good label for Decimus, who definitely seems to have been valued for his loyalty and battle prowess more than his smarts, I can't actually recall any egregious failures by Let. Aside from perhaps being needlessly callous with his Banshee pilots' lives (which is admittedly not very efficient, but again, certainly nothing new for the Covenant).
It's assuredly more substantial than whatever token garrison the UNSC had deployed to the Ark previously, and what he went there prepared to deal with.Substantial?
The Spirit of Fire's original compliment was 11,350 personnel. 3500 sailors running the ship, 6000 marines, and 2000 army grunts. After the events of Halo Wars 1, they had just over 5500 total crew members. If I'm being charitable and assuming that the majority of those 5500 aren't all shipboard management, and instead saying every compliment was cut in half, that leaves 3000 marines and 1000 army. The Enduring Conviction would be capable of holding 40,000 troops, a not insignificant number of which would be Brutes and Elites, and would thus severely outgun and outclass any force Cutter could possibly field. The only thing saving Cutter now is that Atriox's troops are spread across the Ark and cut off without the portals, but that just means this isn't actually a stalemate. It's a war of attrition that Cutter will lose, but also one that he shouldn't have been able to force in the first place.
As for Banished numbers, the EC being capable of holding 40,000 troops doesn't mean it actually did, especially when it's owned by a resource-hungry raider/mercenary faction that went there rightly expecting only a token garrison to mop up, which also had much more challenging battles to fight back in the Milky Way.
In the sense that those plays would have generally sufficed in similar circumstances, sure. In the sense that he went all out in the competence and caution departments by draining half his fleet onto the ring to prevent any meaningful installation from being seen by Human eyes, and personally micromanaging the Humans' destruction from Day 1 just in case they pull something out of a hat, as they did? No.At every turn at the start of the conflict on the ring, Thel was making the right plays.
And to be clear, I'm not holding that against Thel, for most of the same reasons I don't against Atriox. Never mind Thel's specific issue in spending much of this time playing politics with a wayward Prophet in his fleet.
And aside from those losses not being as substantial because Thel had more far more resources to work with, how is that different from Atriox? Whose losses over the course of HW2's main campaign occur, without exception, with at least one S-II spearheading the opposition in every level?Every single substantial loss he suffered was at the Chief's hands (which weren't that substantial, because there wasn't anything the UNSC could do to stop him taking the Cartographer and control room back after the Chief left)
I genuinely can't recall any examples of the UNSC playing offense against the Covenant minus the Chief or the Flood, with Alpha Base as the closest exception that comes to mind. In which they still didn't play offense, but definitely held them off in defense.In every engagement where the UNSC regulars played offense against his forces when they weren't fighting a two front war against the Flood, Thel made a laughing stock of them.
Information on how they mysteriously appeared at the Ark out of the blue (not that they knew either, but he didn't know that), information on the Spartans he clearly wasn't very familiar with, potentially valuable personnel like a data-laden Smart AI, an unscrupulous ONI goon/Insurrectionist sympathizer who might actually be willing to work with the Banished, some Halsey-esque figure who could do for him what she sporadically did for Jul, Forerunner tech they recovered from elsewhere... any number of things really.What exactly does Atriox get out of the Spirit of Fire that wouldn't pale in comparison to the literal treasure trove he's been standing on for four months? The answer is not a god damn thing.
Sure, I wasn't commenting on his degree of choice in it.By my understanding, he only had the one ship at the Ark, so it's less a matter of him staying to fight and more that he has no other option but to do so.
Then as you're describing it, it's effectively no different from the Banshee attack on the SoF, in that if not for an unforeseen hindrance (significantly less unforeseeable in this case), it would have worked eventually despite not remotely being the most efficient usage of those troops. As any sort of Ghost charge most assuredly isn't, relative to any number of other things the Covenant could do.Frankly, this example only serves to work to your detriment. Alpha Base at the time of the attack was a hastily constructed set of trenches full of ODSTs against a hundred Ghosts, where they used the terrain advantage to compensate for their smaller force. And had it not been for the ODST snipers killing the Zealot leading the charge, they would have soon been overwhelmed regardless.
Besides the question of how this meaningfully differs from I04 apart from the larger scale of combat, considering that they had no reason to expect anyone showing up at the Ark to fight them (with the portal on Earth closed, and them either reaching the Ark conventionally or having an apparently very secure/secluded means of getting there), the apparent lack* of Banished fortification on the Ark isn't that incomprehensible.In every conflict between Cutter's armies and Atriox's, Cutter was the smaller force attacking Atriox's bases that he has had four months to fortify and fill with troops, and every time Cutter got through,
* Which, aside from there simply being no real Banished strongholds in HW2 aside from the EC's ground base, sorta, we also know weren't there because Atriox specifically mentions spending months fortifying various positions against the SoF, only to have to abandon them because of the Flood. Which obviously wouldn't be necessary if he had significant fortification before they got there.
I believe those were its pulse lasers, not its energy projector.despite the willingness of the Banished to use the Conviction's energy projector on Cutter's bases and forces (which for some reason does negligible damage to them or the terrain, which makes no sense whatsoever).