#is it because they weren't culled from your community?? is that why?

[darkwood-sleddog]

i do thing it's mighty rich of that recent documentary on joe henderson to call him the "last arctic explorer" in relation to how he works his dogs when there are plenty of indigenous arctic mushers working their dogs in the traditional way without peddling inaccurate and often harmful breed mythology but that's just me.

[sindri42]

I think, in Mass Effect 1 at least, the writers set up some ways out of the trap of making the Reapers undefeatable without a deus-ex-machina by implying that the Reapers would have reasons to avoid facing the a united galaxy. I mean, why go to all the effort of guiding the development of galactic civilization and setting up a trap at the center of their government if you could just roll in and kick their ass anyway?

Every reaper capital ship represents the dominant race of an entire cycle. Without getting into their actual motives or values and looking on a purely practical level, that means one of the big 2km vessels like Nazara is only produced once every 50,000 years, which means that losing a single one of them in the course of harvesting a new cycle worth of the young races means a net loss to the Reapers overall.

Sure, they're powerful individually, enough to solo any two dreadnoughts that the younger races can bring to bear or have a decent chance against three, on top of massive advantages in engagement range, speed, and logistics... but if four dreadnoughts get within effective weapon range, the Reaper loses. During the invasion of Palaven alone they lose several capital ships, making this cycle already the biggest setback the Reapers have had in millions, maybe billions of years.

And if, as Nazara implied, each one of them is essentially an entire nation of living souls, watching one of their ships destroyed is like watching an entire ethnic group, an entire culture, become the victim of genocide in front of your eyes while you can do nothing to stop it. If their mission is some variation on preserving the life of the galaxy against some apocalyptic threat, any strategy used in the Harvest which allows for a single loss like that is utterly contrary to the Reapers' purpose.

That's why they use absolutely everything they can to give themselves an edge. They leave a single observer in the galaxy, to monitor the development of the young races and ensure that they don't wait too long and allow technological development to go far enough to present too much of a threat. They guide civilization to develop in such a way that the central seat of government is most likely on the Citadel, and all major colonies will be built in or near systems with mass relays in them, rather than scattered across the black in places that are difficult to find. They cut off communication immediately, take control of the relay network so that every base and every fleet is operating alone and blind. They bring their entire force through simultaneously all the way from dark space to the central hub of galactic infrastructure, so that they can spread from there with utterly overwhelming force before anybody has a chance to figure out what's going on, let alone mount any kind of defense. Because the goal isn't victory, the goal is zero losses. A single dead Reaper is a failure condition.

But the Protheans fucked that up when they sabotaged the Keepers. Without any way to take remote control of the Citadel, Plan B needed Nazara to fly in and do it manually. And they weren't powerful enough to do that, not with the Citadel Fleet in the way, so they spent the next twenty years preparing carefully for an assault, building up their army of heretic geth and indoctrinated servants, hunting rumors until they found the back door through Ilos, sending a boarding party into the Presidium before they even approached the Serpent Nebula...

And Shepherd came along and fucked that up so badly that Nazara was dead (making this cycle already a tragic loss, but it's only going to get worse if they don't finish the job) and any hope of taking the Citadel in their opening move was destroyed. Now the young races know what is coming, their tech level is 20 years higher than it should be for an ideal culling (which might seem small compared to the roughly 50,000 year cycle, but represents a massive change in ability to fight a war), and aside from a handful of leftover Collectors they have no assets within the Milky Way. So they move on to Plan C, the Alpha Relay. It's going to take another two years flying in the slow way, but once they can take that one system they can use the modified mass relay there to strike simultaneously across the entire network and still get through this debacle with minimal losses...

Until Shepherd shows up again, literally minutes from their already pyrrhic victory, and murders an entire star system to slow them down. Plan D means they're taking months to get to the next relay over, and without the modifications the Alpha Relay had even that will only let them move across the galaxy the "conventional" way, allowing hours, days, even weeks of warning to their targets before they can strike.

They sweep through Batarian space with little difficulty, due to a combination of indoctrinated agents and proximity. They strike at Earth, source of the dreaded Shepherd, with surprising ease though they lose track of the majority of the human fleets along the way. Then when they hit the Turians, who control the majority of the galaxy's naval might, they start to stall. An organized fleet of multiple dreadnoughts, using tactics specifically devised for countering Reaper forces, armed with weapons reverse engineered from Nazara's corpse? Unthinkable casualty rates. Slower progress than probably any cycle before. A population which is damn near impossible to pacify.

The issue then is a matter of numbers. The Council races have dozens of dreadnoughts. In 2183, the Turians had 37, the Asari 21, the Salarians 16, and Humanity 6. Two years later the Turians were up to 39, and Humanity up to 8 (the asari haven't built more, and may or may not have lost the Destiny Ascension). It's not clear if the Hanar/Drell or the Elcor added any to those numbers, but the Volus definitely build one (legally they could have had up to seven each, but they mostly relied on the Turians for defense). The Batarians probably had the legal maximum of seven before they closed their embassy and left Citadel Space, and then would almost certainly have started building more as quickly as they could, but they were hit first and it's unlikely any dreadnoughts survived the initial invasion. The Geth never give us an exact number, but the Codex says that with a huge industrial base and no reason to follow the Treaty of Farixen, they built "nearly as many" as the Turians. None of the Terminus powers seem to be able to field anything bigger than a heavy Cruiser, the Quarians focus on living quarters and food production on anything bigger than a frigate, and the Krogan are forbidden from having warships. So that's a total of maybe 123 dreadnoughts in the control of all the non-batarian young races right before the invasion starts, and we have to assume that as many as half of those were destroyed in the initial invasion before they could be rallied for a real counterattack.

So, assume about 60 combat-ready dreadnoughts when the war truly gets underway. Enough to kill fifteen Reapers in a single volley, or fight on even terms against twenty at a time. Meanwhile the Reapers have produced one of those ships every 50,000 years for, at a minimum, one billion years (because that's when the Leviathan of Dis died). Meaning that at least 20,000 Reapers have been produced. The remains of a total of two of those have been found, before this latest cycle. One of those bodies sat around for a full billion years, the other for 37 million, so it's unlikely that anything has been going around cleaning up a bunch of reaper corpses and we have to assume the vast majority of Cycles went off without a hitch and the young races got harvested without inflicting any significant direct damage, like the Protheans. But even if you were to assume that the Leviathan was one of the first ever built and that half of the Reapers have died along the way and been hidden or cleaned up somehow, that's still 10,000 capital ships. In an open, direct war, they would outgun the combined fleets of the young races by a factor of at least five hundred.

There are potential force multipliers that can start to close that gap. I've talked before about the Interferometric Array, and how as written it would be a complete game changer, allowing wolf packs of dreadnoughts to hunt down and eliminate any Reaper caught alone for more than a few minutes with minimal risks. That kind of thing would at a minimum slow the harvest down by an order of magnitude, because a job that a single Reaper could have done requires at least fifteen escorts to be completed safely. It's the kind of thing that could force the Reapers to actually negotiate with you, because you have the ability to inflict unimaginable losses upon them almost at will and therefore cannot be ignored. It might even be enough to force them to retreat. Other options range from developing ways to lay traps or ambushes through trickery to blowing up entire star systems to destroy the Reapers inside.

But none of that would allow you to actually overpower them, or wipe them out if they have a modicum of sense, which means that we come back around again to needing to figure the Reapers out. You can make harvesting this galaxy incomprehensibly expensive and potentially tragic for them, but that only helps you make them stop if you can figure out why they are harvesting you, or at the least what it is that they value more than the continued harvest. If you know what they love then you can threaten that. If you know what they fear you can summon it. If you know what they want, you can present an alternate path to get it, one which they have probably considered and rejected in the past for being too expensive or too slow or too risky, but which you can make more attractive all the time by making their current course too expensive and too painful to continue.