User blog comment:James12708/Reapers VS. Forerunners VS. Angels from Darksiders VS. Humanity from Halo VS. Council and humanity from Mass Effect VS. Imperium of Man/@comment-4967682-20130116065115/@comment-4967682-20130123034853


 * So? That would give them an advantage but it's still inefficient compared to just using mass relays.
 * Who says they have 30 something fleets? They probably have way more, the 32nd fleet is just the highest one we know of. Them having between 10,000 and 50,000 vessels isn't speculation on my part, it's canon. They have more than the geth and less than the quarians.
 * It's shown that Archer missiles are almost comically ineffective compared to actual MACs; hundreds of them failed to bring down the shields on a Covenant ship, something three MAC rounds could do. Since all ME weapons are essentially weaker but much faster (both in speed and firing rate) the vast majority of UNSC ships wouldn't survive a single shot from a cruiser or thanix frigate.
 * The Council let the krogan use WMDs in the Rachni Wars. And they weren't above trying to use WMDs against the Reapers, like relativistic kill vehicles (see codex) and asteroids (see dialogue between those two Alliance guards on the Normandy). Neither worked; the latter because the Reapers don't have planets to destroy, the former because the jump could only be plotted from very far away because non-Reaper FTL had a built in "safety system", and it's hard to accurately line up a jump on a Reaper moving at near relativistic speeds all the time.
 * It's no secret that the Reapers and all of their ships travel at over 10,000 times the speed of light. There's a built-in safety system mentioned in the codex that prevents a ship from colliding with an object at FTL speeds at anything but extreme ranges (rendering it impractical for destroying anything other than a planet), but since said codex entry implies the Reapers made the technology to be this way as a further way of handicapping the cycles, the Reapers themselves don't have these restrictions. The solar system destroying bombs things comes from the mass relays; the Reapers easily built thousands of the things, and they specifically designed them to be as stable and non-explodey as possible. And yet they can still destroy solar systems. They could easily build solar system destroying weapons if they wanted to, yet they don't, because destroying solar systems isn't their MO. And since they can move a space station the size of a city across the galaxy in less than an hour, I doubt they'd have trouble moving said bombs.
 * Because nothing suggests that anything you just said is true. That's all speculation. They got stronger, because they're shown fighting on even ground with the Covenant ships that stomped them out easily a few years ago, but nothing suggests that their power leap was THAT large.

And remember, this is without the Reapers exploiting their "I win" buttons. If they wanted to they could just leave a few artifacts around to indoctrinate everyone (remember, ME3 was their Plan E, the Reapers prefer to operate subtly) or just RKV into every UNSC planet.