User blog comment:JordanaBrewsterFAN/Mass Effect 3 4th DLC./@comment-2250460-20130122003748/@comment-4967682-20130122022831

I'd just like to point out that a single geth fleet is 5,000-10,000 vessels, and the turians are stated to have a larger fleet than the geth. They have somewhere over 32 fleets. I'd also like to point out that during the First Contact War, humanity had two fleets, whereas now we have eight or more, plus several unattached flotillas.

The number of turian ships is somewhere in between 10,000 vessels (the size of a single large geth fleet) and 50,000 vessels (the size of the Migrant Fleet, the "largest fleet in the galaxy"). I'd say that the asari and salarians each have half as much as the turians, since everyone doesn't shit their pants as soon as a 5,000-10,000 vessel geth fleet becomes common knowledge, and the humans have less than 10% of the vessels the turians do, around 1000 (the humans are the weakest Council race and that's made clear). Combine with the remnants of the batarian fleet, the elcor/hanar/volus fleets, the massive quarian fleet, the Terminus fleets (organizations like the Blue Suns are basically empires that own several worlds) and the geth fleet (comparable to the turians) and they could put up a decent fight against the Reapers, even take out a few thousand capital ships if they exploit dirty tricks (and, the turians at least, do).

On the Reapers: If we factor in failed harvests and the century long war with the advanced and numerous Protheans, as well as other minor resistances as indicated by the Derelict Reaper, then the turians have around 18,000 capital ships and 200,000 Destroyers.

This actually fits perfectly into the plot. The humans, asari, and batarians were all defeated in less than a day by a tiny part of the Reaper fleet (remember, they have a galaxy with thousands of inhabited planets to cover, they would only send a fraction of their forces to a single planet if they occupied the entire galaxy by the end). Especially bad since these Reapers would be put at a disadvantage by the extensive ground-to-space batteries on important worlds. Only the turians put up any meaningful resistance, and they're still curbstomped in a little over a month. And remember, this is AFTER thanix cannons became standard issue, multiplying the average ships's hitting power by a lot.