This particular entry is pissing me off so much. Because it displays just how completely the people in charge of Mass Effect 3 refused to think about how war works.
If you had access to real-time locations for every Reaper in the galaxy, you just won the war. Hell, if this was the sole purpose of the big super-tech macguffin you were building all game, that would be a plot that made sense.
It’s established that one of the Reaper capital ships, the 2km long Nazara-class ones that are only produced once every 50,000 years out of an entire dominant species, can easily hold off the combined firepower of two of the Council races’ dreadnoughts, against three both sides would take significant damage and the outcome would be uncertain, and against four dreadnoughts the Reaper would simply die. Which is why Nazara needed the heretic Geth fleet before he was willing to move on the Citadel, why in every previous cycle the Reapers made sure to take control of all communications and the entire Relay network before they started harvesting.
During the invasion of Palaven, the Turians killed several Reapers by sending scouting drones ahead to confirm enemy positions and test capabilities, then dropping their main force out of FTL in amongst and behind their targets, and firing before the Reapers could turn around. Then of course they had to retreat, because they were terribly outnumbered and outgunned by an entire invasion force.
If you had real-time position data, you could do that everywhere, every time. Never engage when they’re present in force, but every single time one of them is alone, you send in four dreadnoughts, and it dies while you take no losses. As of 2185 the codex says that Council races had a combined 84 dreadnoughts (39 Turian, 20 Asari [though I think the codex writer was presuming the Destiny Ascension was lost; they had 21 in 2183], 16 Salarian, 8 Human, and one Volus; it’s not clear if the Elcor or Hanar ever built one). Even if you assume half of those were destroyed in the initial invasion, you could kill ten Reapers at a time in a single coordinated attack. That’s 500,000 years worth of their development, with no losses to the young races. Add in the Geth, who built “nearly as many” dreadnoughts as the turians and then lost very few, and you nearly double that.
[the Krogan can’t contribute to the space war much since they were forbidden from having warships, and most of the Terminus nations don’t seem to have the power to field dreadnaughts; even Aria was only using huge numbers of frigates and cruisers. The Batarians probably had the legal maximum for an “associate race” of seven before they cut ties with the Council, and as many more as they could manufacture after that, but they were probably all destroyed early in the war. The Quarians don’t have any real dreadnaughts, just a trio of liveships that should really not be used for this purpose. But combining Qurian transport capabilities with Krogan ground troops means you can massively reinforce every ground location that the enemy is about to invade, often before they even get there.]
They will of course learn and adapt, but if they pair up they halve the speed of the invasion, and you can still just send ten dreadnoughts to kill them both without any real risk. Pretty soon they won’t be able to go anywhere or do anything in a group of less than 20, making all their operations grind to a near-standstill, and meanwhile you have days of warning before they get there every time they try to make a move, allowing you to evacuate or ambush as you please. And since you never have any reason to engage in a fight you don’t expect to win, and have advance knowledge of the numbers and positioning of every enemy vessel every time, you never lose another dreadnought and can maintain this level of pressure indefinitely.
Meanwhile you can start blind-firing FTL torpedos from an entirely different system with perfect accuracy any time they cluster up enough to be worth the price of materials. Continue bullying until the entire Reaper force surrenders or retreats.
This makes some really good points. But it’s worth also pointing out that there are about TWENTY THOUSAND capital ships, because the reapers have been around for nearly a billion years. Even if you assume losses during harvests– hell, even if you assume a 50% loss rate which seems high for their usual tactics– this is a lot to pick off a few at a time with limited resources.