User blog comment:JordanaBrewsterFAN/Mass Effect 3 4th DLC./@comment-2250460-20130122003748/@comment-3325589-20130122014809

Numbers that high strike me as extremely unlikely based on what we see in-game. In every actual space battle we see (as opposed to Thessia and the initial invasion of Earth, in which the good guys have already lost), the Reapers are significantly outnumbered. It's unlikely that the combined navies of all the sentient species have anywhere near eighteen to twenty thousand ships across all three classes (frigate, cruiser, dreadnought). The alliance as of the first contact war had about 200, and if we take the number of dreadnoughts as representative of overall fleet size, it's about doubled since then. While it's likely the salarian, asari, and especially turian fleets are larger, nothing suggests they're all that much larger: it's difficult to believe that humanity could acquire a reputation for throwing its weight around in political and military matters if it had a fleet that was only tenth of the strength of the turians'. If we again take dreadnoughts as representative of fleet size (which if anything is likely to lead to an overestimate, given the Treaty of Farixen), it's likely that the asari and salarians have 800-1000 vessels of frigate size or larger, and the turians have ~2000. That's around 4000 military vessels in the navies; at most, the combined forces of the geth, quarians, batarians, etc. might exceed that by a bit. (The Migrant Fleet has far more ships than that, but the great majority of them are civilian vessels.) 10,000 or thereabouts. So we're still looking at two Sovereign-class Reapers for every *frigate* in the coalition forces. And once again, that's using numbers that are much more likely to err on the side of overestimating rather than under. It's at least as likely that the combined strength of the galaxy is more in the range of three to five thousand ships.

That ratio isn't anything like what we see in cutscenes, and it doesn't make sense in the game's story, either. If the Reapers had tens of thousands of capital ships, why only send a single destroyer to strategically sensitive sites like Rannoch and Tuchanka? If they actually had hundreds of thousands of destroyers, they could easily have spared a few hundred to guard their investment in the geth. Why only send a hundred or so capital ships to the battle for Earth?