Gizen said:
If by 'a handful of human ships', you mean the entirety of the Alliance's fleets, as well as the Turian/Asari fleets assigned to defend the Citadel, then yes. And even then, they still only won the battle because Sovereign made the mistake of possessing Saren's corpse to try and kill you, which backfired and overloaded his shields when you destroyed Saren for good. And even after all that, the Alliance's fleets still took heavy losses. And that was for one Reaper. One that wasn't even the biggest or the strongest. No, the reapers were quite thoroughly built up as an insurmountable threat right from the beginning, and ME3 is what happens when you have thousands upon thousands of them all coming at once.
If by handful of human ships I mean a single unprepared fleet(with no dreadnoughts), engaged with geth forces, supporting what's left of the defence forces (who also had no dreadnoughts, and were also surprise attacked), yes, those are who I'm talking about. And It was a single fleet, you can check it out in your war assets (Not to mention, the weapons on the old normandy, not even the upgraded thanix cannons, could pierce directly through a reaper. I'd say the extra ships were overkill).
If the turian dreadnoughts were there and prepared for battle, sovereign would have fell long before he even got close to the citadel, as evidenced in me3 when a single dreadnought during the siege of palaven Short warped right into the middle of the reapers, and managed to kill several before succumbing to fire. it's either in the codex or the war assets I don't remember. And if you watch the cutscene when the victory fleet arrives, they get the first few volleys off, that tactical advantage alone should have annihilated a good chunk of the reaper ships, based only on prior engagements.
the reapers were not as built up in the previous games or hell, even in early ME3, as much as they were in the last 4-5 hours of gameplay. All other evidence points to them being able to be defeated.
They did give explanation during the course of the assault on Cerberus HQ. EDI describes during the mission how Civilians lured to Sanctuary by promises of safety are rounded up, indoctrinated to be loyal to Cerberus and given reaper tech surgical implants that make them individually tougher than any Alliance soldier, and are then turned into new shocktroops for Cerberus's forces. Also, for many (though certainly not all) of the places where you fight Cerberus, they literally WERE unopposed. Everyone was so focused on the Reapers that there weren't enough forces left to defend areas from Cerberus. The only major exception to this is when they attacked the Citadel, but even then they had a member of the Citadel council help them sneak on-board to launch a surprise attack.
That is not sufficient. Cerberus Should not be able to support such a large force, they don't make that kind of money. Assault gear for literally thousands of troops, those implants for all those troops, dozens of cruisers, equipped with light interceptors, whole new space stations. They didn't have those before. It went from 150 people, divided into three cells, one of which was Miranda's, to a full military force in less than 6 months, as I understand it. I doubt they had more spaceships then they could staff just lying around for no reason, so they all had to be bought/built recently. That's a lot of up front cash, and I'm only willing to accept so much "well the illusive man is rich" BS, he just magically comes up with the funds.
It wasn't Miranda's dad either, he spent his money on rigging the aforementioned refuge colony, which also makes little sense as there wasn't many refuges before the reapers attacked, so I fail to see how sanctuary could have possible supplied his troops Pre-Invasion, which he did have during his coup on Mars.
Also, how the hell did all those Cerberus troops fit in two makos, as your squad member so elegantly put it, there were at least 50 in that base alone, no way 1 shuttle and 2 tanks carried them in.
Like I said, it just reeks of classic power creep nonsense.
Also, why the HELL is earth Alliance space so DAMN huge! The asari/turians/salarians only have one system each, but earth gets this massive chunk of the galaxy? Nonsense.
