Mazder wrote:Well I'd say the crucible would equal, what, 200 cruisers?
So half that number we have 100 mobile guns able to fire it's entire load into one shot at a time to hit a Reaper. Halve that to fifty if you want them to be really movable/nimble in terms of ships speeds, or reloadable at high speeds.
I'd say you could easily get a fleet of smaller ships out of the Crucible. Maybe enough for two.
Mind you combat in Mass Effect is terrible. They don't co-ordinate at all.
You could definitely get a few big fleets out of the resources pooled into the Cruicible. The ezzo alone could probably fuel numerous cruisers and more.
I don't think a swarm of cruisers would do much against a reaper fleet. Against some of the smaller reapers, like destroyers, they might be able to do more damage. Maybe against a few capital ships they'd do well, but not against any fleet of any real numbers. The Reaper's confidence might come to fault them here, as they seem to be willing to split themselves up quite a bit, with the exception of certain points of interest, like home planets and Earth. It won't do a dent trying to retake a significant position though.
One thing I didn't think of until recently is ewar. Neuts and scrams. One thing that EDI enables that makes the Normandy unique is that she can allow for, in close combat, hacking and control of the internal systems of enemy ships. Once hacked, she'd just have to send the core into meltdown, or turn off the inertia stabalizers and accelerate, or open all the doors and airlocks and it would win. However, the Normandy is just one ship, and as good as EDI is, I doubt she can reliably hack a fully-functional Reaper.
And then consider that the Reapers can do all of that to us. But ofc we don't see it because cinematics show cool stuff, and certain lore capabilities are often forgotten in them. Like how Jack can go toe-to-toe with three YIMR mechs in a cinematic, but will get easily killed by one in actual gameplay.
ME1 was really one of the few places we got to see a lot of lore in place for space combat, and even then, only in limited doses, specifically around the Normandy. I would've loved to see more.
TTTX wrote:well if we had found a way to take out their shields it wouldn't be a problem.
and as far as we know the Reapers did that through surprise attacks through the Citadel, which controls the Relays, it's very easy to conquer a galaxy that is fractured into many small pieces (which was ignored in ME3, because you know writers didn't care).
Although their shields are incredibly powerful, I'm not sure if that's enough. Again, if the numbers are against you to such an absurd extent, no specialized weapon or ace in the hole will help unless you can take out a huge number of them, simultaneously, at both close and long range, and do so repeatedly.
Taking the relays via the Citadel is more of an efficiency thing. Ask a machine to exterminate the galaxy, and they'll find the way to do so with the least number of losses, even if they have the capability to do otherwise. The logical and efficient method is to divide and conquer, hence the Citadel and Relays. But it's not necessary to defeat the galaxy. Maybe if they were at a strength disadvantage preventing the Citadel from being taken would be significant in the grand scheme, or maybe if the balance of power between them and us were more even, but it's not.
Though, why, once they took the Citadel, they didn't shut the Relays down, I don't know. I mean, our victory relied on the combined fleets jumping in together to buy enough time for the Crucible to work. Well, they could have stopped them from getting in system in the first place. And given the strategic advantage, it's a wonder they didn't hit the Citadel first rather than Earth.
Actually, speaking of the Citadel and the Relays, one thing I wish was done in ME3 was the use of the Citadel control over the Relays to slow and split the Reapers up in ME3. We might've been able to split them into small enough groups that concentrated fire might be able to do more significant damage to their numbers. It wouldn't be enough to win the war, and the Reapers would eventually be able to hack an individual Relay to regain control and spread out, or simply move out conventionally, but it would have made them hurt for it, and would have made the stressed "pressed for time" environment of ME3 a little more manageable in my eyes, and given us the time to find a solution other than the Cruicible, or at least build a Cruicible that doesn't completely invalidate the character storylines and themes created throughout ME2/3. Though, the control that Vigil gave us over the Citadel was only a temporary solution anyway, so we would've had to have developed some way of regaining control.
The stress of the war is one thing that I only realized recently that bothered me in ME3. Sure, there was a race to victory in ME1 and ME2, but for the most part, you were still searching for a solution at your own pace. You could breathe, and really settle into the world. In ME3, that simply wasn't the case.
Someone With Mass wrote:It's going to feel odd, running into Engineering and not seeing Tali working at a console there.
I hear you. Replaying ME1/2/3 has reignited a fire of obsession over her and the Quarians. I find myself drifting down to the core after missions almost on instinct now, and I wish we could've spent more time at the fleet.
Croatsky wrote:PC has great optimization, no issues across many different systems.
A friend of mine has a review code and has been playing it on PC. She has a single GTX 1080, and it runs, on ultra, at 120fps at 1080p, and a solid 60 at 4k. I dunno how that translates down, but it seems pretty good.
I misposted this in the main thread rather than here, but here's a limited view of M'Ryder and Fryder flirting with squadpeeps.
► Show Spoiler
