Mass Effect Mass Effect general thread
- Thread starter Tyzuris
- Start date
Comrade Clod
Gay Space Communist
Personally I wish they'd taken ME Andromeda in a different direction.
How so? If you don't mind sharing. I have a lot of...questions as to why they designed the game the way they did.
The Kotaku article on MEA's development has a lot of those answers. They typically involve Frostbite being shit and/or limited work done in pre-production.
Comrade Clod
Gay Space Communist
Well rather than rehashing the old Giant space squid from nowhere, a natural disaster akin to the Quarian sun dying in ME2 combined with infighting amongst colonists, natives and space pirates and the Player Character being crucial in determining who wins is an idea that could have worked.
40thousandninjas
Active member
Honestly the concept really doesn't work with the mass effect canon. The Reapers explicitly do not have FTL sensors. If species can travel extra galactic distances they should be able to hide.
The entire point of the reaper trap is that the relays softly bound the species to it. You can travel off the network but only within a relatively finite area and only as long as your resources last. That means the Reapers only have a comparitively small search space to exterminate the species on the network. Otherwise we should see survivors all the time, yet we don't.
Navarro
Well-known member
Isn't the point of it also that the Reapers control the network, and can turn it on or off at will? Making every cycle until the current one a complete curbstomp. And also that it more subtly binds the affected species to a certain paradigm of tech progression ... one that ensures they don't meet with any nasty surprises.
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Tyzuris
Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
Yeah.
Even if a cycle had tens of thousands of dreadnoughts and millions of more in smaller ships, the Reapers could shut down the Relay and then attack a cluster after cluster with overwhelming strength as let's say a cluster had a hundred dreadnoughts, they could just invade with 2000 Reapers and take no losses.
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Navarro
Well-known member
Yep. With control over the Relay network and their foes being locked into the mass effect field tech paradigm, every enemy the Reapers fought before the current cycle could be casually defeated in detail.
Which makes me wonder why no one stole a page from the Reaper's play book and sent sleeper ships to hide off in dark space or off in cubby holes that the Reapers wouldn't look. I mean the Protheans almost survived by hiding out in stasis.
I want to say that the in-universe reason was "Pff, everyone knows Reapers aren't real", but then I remembered the Council actively suppressing knowledge of reapers existing and taking no steps whatsoever to prepare for their eventual attack.
Although even with that ability, the Reapers were never all that realistic in their extermination. It is simply too easy to set up hidden colonies and populations to rebuild.
Pick some random system and build a colony inside of a hollowed out asteroid (actually you would probably build your own) and then fling it out system heading for the next star system over at a nice slow speed (.1c or so). Making something that could sustain a viable population for a thousand plus years really isn't that hard with ME tech. The Reapers would never be able to find it, and once they are back in dark space just rebuild and continue.
D
Deleted member 1
Guest
Andromeda should be filled with thousands of species that came from the Milky Way in sleeper ships to escape the Reapers.
Navarro
Well-known member
Especially given the vast number of star systems with no habitable planets and the endless reaches of interstellar space.
That was just pure stupidity, I thought at the beginning they were covering it up so they could prepare without the public going crazy and without any possible leaks.
We have technology to prevent such things already, they are called cyanide pills.
I just choose to believe that the Citadel indoctrinated them to a very low degree that they do stupid things like that.
That requires the snitch to actually bite on the pill, and not just, y'know, take them out before squealing to the reapers.
Tyzuris
Primarch to your glory& the glory of him on Earth!
One thing I am going to have to note about Mass Effect militaries is that they don't seem to fit the scale of the series.
Considering the millions upon millions of star systems, I find the turian high end of a few tens of thousands way too small, considering only a fraction of it can be deployed at once, and considering travel times, an individual group of ships is able to patrol a couple of systems per day.
And the amounts of population stated to be in the militaries of Council species is too big for numbers given to us.
Assuming turians have 41 dresdnoughts and 2 carriers(with crew count of 10000 each) 4500 cruisers (with crew count of 2000 each), 13500 destroyers (crew count of a few hundred), 27000 frigates (crew count of 100), the totals would be roughly 18 million serving in the ships themselves. And I was pointed out in War Room that roughly 60% of US Navy personnell are ship crew, so that's thirty million for Turian Navy.
Now adding in the Army (and using Soviet ratio of Army members / Navy members which is close to twenty to one), we get 600 million in the Army. Now putting in ten million Marines, and an Air Force whose mission is support of the Army operations by fire support, recon, etc... with 200 million, we get a total military of less than a billion.
Meanwhile turian population is in the hundreds of billions to trillions. And given that more than three percent of the population serve in the military at any given time, you would need many times that with even just 200 billion.
So the solution writing wise, would've been to make the numbers much higher. Maybe millions of ships (tens of thousands of dreadnoughts, hundreds of thousands of cruisers and millions of frigstes and destroyers plus carriers and "amphibs" and specialized ships) in the navy alone crewed by billions.
And an army in tens of billions and maybe a billion Marines a couple of dozen billion for the Air Force.
Or alternatively keep the ship numbers as they are and just increase the ship size considerably (think of dreadnoughts in the size range of SW dreadnoughts like Mandators) with crew counts of hundreds of thousands and similar increases to all other ship classes.
Considering the millions upon millions of star systems, I find the turian high end of a few tens of thousands way too small, considering only a fraction of it can be deployed at once, and considering travel times, an individual group of ships is able to patrol a couple of systems per day.
And the amounts of population stated to be in the militaries of Council species is too big for numbers given to us.
Assuming turians have 41 dresdnoughts and 2 carriers(with crew count of 10000 each) 4500 cruisers (with crew count of 2000 each), 13500 destroyers (crew count of a few hundred), 27000 frigates (crew count of 100), the totals would be roughly 18 million serving in the ships themselves. And I was pointed out in War Room that roughly 60% of US Navy personnell are ship crew, so that's thirty million for Turian Navy.
Now adding in the Army (and using Soviet ratio of Army members / Navy members which is close to twenty to one), we get 600 million in the Army. Now putting in ten million Marines, and an Air Force whose mission is support of the Army operations by fire support, recon, etc... with 200 million, we get a total military of less than a billion.
Meanwhile turian population is in the hundreds of billions to trillions. And given that more than three percent of the population serve in the military at any given time, you would need many times that with even just 200 billion.
So the solution writing wise, would've been to make the numbers much higher. Maybe millions of ships (tens of thousands of dreadnoughts, hundreds of thousands of cruisers and millions of frigstes and destroyers plus carriers and "amphibs" and specialized ships) in the navy alone crewed by billions.
And an army in tens of billions and maybe a billion Marines a couple of dozen billion for the Air Force.
Or alternatively keep the ship numbers as they are and just increase the ship size considerably (think of dreadnoughts in the size range of SW dreadnoughts like Mandators) with crew counts of hundreds of thousands and similar increases to all other ship classes.
40thousandninjas
Active member
Dreadnoughts are hinted at to be extraordinarily expensive and equally powerful due to how the mass effect scaling works.
They have far more cruisers and frigates. A dread is far more powerful than an equivalent dry mass of cruisers.
That would explain why they have so few dreads without violating canon.
Not really.
It is one of those Sci-Fi authors have no sense of scale things.
Given the size of the ME population, economy, and territory the Council should have a collective fleet at least hundreds of times larger than what they have in canon; and it would still cost less than rounding error in the budget.
The turians are supposed to be a heavily militaristic society with a population in the tens to hundreds of billions and more than a thousand years to build up. Even at 1% of GDP they should have a navy dozens of times the size of their canon one.