I hope this answers your question and I'm sorry I can't link things more precisely (I do everything through mobile). It could be that the OT's cycle had only one race (humans) that could be adequately processed, but previous cycles could've produced more than one Capital Ship. Whether or not only one Capital Ship is made per cycle is also unknown. Whether or not the other races in the OT's cycle could've been made into Destroyer-class ships is unknown, but humans were the most suitable race for a Reaper Capital Ship. The quotes for that are here: (Collector)/Battle_Quotes#Quotes_about_the_Squad This is because every other race is deemed unsuitable for Reaper processing. In the Original Trilogy's cycle, it appears that only one Reaper is being made. So more than one Reaper is made per cycle. Any other races deemed suitable for processing are made into Destroyer-class Reapers. To paraphrase that paragraph, as far as we know, one race is harvested to create a Reaper Capital Ship. It's the third paragraph under the Harvesting section. I'll be referencing under the section called Harvesting. Even accounting for the occasional loss, that's still an overwhelmingly large number when you consider that it takes 3 or 4 dreadnoughts to be able to take one down and the total number of dreadnoughts in the galaxy is less than 100. The ships themselves would have been fine, with probably only a Destroyer or two lost every now and then.Īnd on top of that if we assume one Sovereign class per Harvest, and that the Cylce has been going for a billion years, with an average Harvest of 50,000 years, that still leaves 20,000 Sovereign class Reapers and several times that in Destroyers. The only major Reaper losses would have been ground troops which they don't care about. They'd have just picked a target, shut off all other relays, and then go there in overwhelming force. Ordinarily they would never have had to worry about facing large fleets or enemy reinforcements. So that left them with no choice but to take the brute force approach. And then their backup plan (Collectors) and their backup-backup plan (Alpha relay) get wrecked, all by the same individual no less. Then their vanguard was destroyed, leaving lots of fancy Reaper tech lying around to be reverse engineered. It started thousands of years later than it was supposed to thanks to the Protheans disabling the Keeper signal, preventing them from arriving in from Dark Space. One thing you need to remember is that this particular Harvest was an abberation. shouldn't each and every one be able to take down a reaper or two? How are they not exterminated by the time the games take place, besides the obvious "big bad evil" status thats required for a RPG to work? The point I'm trying to make is:Įven if there are species that surrendered or weren't as military structured as the races we know in the Mass Effect universe. From the first game we know that not a lot of actual firepower is needed to take a reaper down. I read somewhere, not sure if it was the codex or not, that all harvests are around the "apex" of the race thats about to get reaped and roughly equal in technological advancements.
Quite a few get blown up in the battle for Earth
Tuchanka Shroud guard / Destroyer (more or less an indirect kill) How the fuck are the reapers even a threat by the time mass effect takes place? Over the course of the trilogy you destroy quite a few reapers, including but not limited to: Now let's assume that most harvested civilizations didn't surrender immediately to the reapers, which doesn't sound like an abstract concept when we look at Javik and the protheans. Naturally I went back and played through it and came to a huge plothole, if I don't get something completely wrong here, so please hear me out:Īs far as I know, and I would consider myself proficient in the Mass Effect lore, only one reaper gets created per cycle. So after finishing Andromeda I had a scratch that only the original trilogy could fix.