javik’s plan never could have worked right?

MASS EFFECT 3

the whole thing about the coming empire. sovereign would be around, monitoring the galaxy from time to time, and see an intergalactic empire with a 50k year mission to prepare for the next invasion. and javik’s people would have known about this, because vigil knew what sovereign does between invasions and told us so.

unintentional plot f up? vigil learned about sovereign’s monitoring after the extinction? javik and co just didn’t know what vigil/ilos knew, and would have found out the hard way a few hundred or thousand years into their plan? something else?

in masseffectby ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

130

94%

20d

Joyful_Damnation1

191

20d

Javik doesn't have the same information Vigil has. It's also fair to assume Vigil only discovered that Sovereign remained behind POST Prothean Extinction as he monitored the galaxy.

samuraipanda85

135

20d

He didn't know that. Hundreds of years of Reaper conquest later, the Protheans were desperate for any plan to save their Empire. Even an impossible long shot like going into stasis until the Reapers left.

Maybe they didn't know that Sovereign would be monitoring them. Maybe they thought they could hide from him long enough to get their strength back. Kill this one Reaper and then have 10s of thousands of years to rebuild their empire.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

that was kind of my best guess too, though i can’t imagine how they’d destroy sovereign unless they had at least some hundreds of years to prepare—long shot as you say. but, i guess reaper nigh-invincibility does vary across the series.

samuraipanda85

20d

Maybe they planned to pull a Palpatine and had a planet full of battleships ready to launch at a moments notice.

No, but how does the Reapers monitor organic life? Does it just sense how much eezo is being used in the galaxy and compare that to Galactic civilization at its peak? Would one Mass Effect field 10,000 years after the harvest be enough to get its attention? Maybe they could hide long enough to build up a fleet large enough to kill one lone Reaper.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

pretty much everyone (reapers included) has figured out ftl communication, so sovereign could have ‘listening’ devices and monitor pretty much all radio communication where it matters

and where matters? well wasn’t part of the conceit here that: - reapers know who the upcoming heavyweights of each cycle will be - civilizations have to appear near mass relays, kind of a self-selection bias

samuraipanda85

20d

What irks me about the plan is that the stasis pods couldn't stay on for more than a few hundred years. They knew the cycles lasted 50,000 years, so why didn't they build the pods to last 20,000 years?

BlaineTog

20d

I mean, they did. Javik survived because of it. But their resources weren't infinite and designing any system to last that long under completely autonomous control is very difficult, so they had to make compromises.

samuraipanda85

20d

I can't shake the feeling that its just a matter of supplying a steady stream of power. The most advanced alien species and they can't build a nuclear reactor that can run itself for 20,000 years?

BlaineTog

20d

And self-repair for when parts inevitably wear out or some kind of natural disaster happens, not to mention coding errors that might present themselves over the millennia.

Effective_Ad1413

20d

Vigil said he had to shut pods off because of dwindling power stores. The implication is all the power for the pods has already been generated and stored, maybe because an active power source couldn't be concealed from the Reapers?

A much bigger plot hole IMO is how Javik was able to survive even when we saw Reaper ships swarming Eden Prime in the last cycle. There Prothean husk swarmng the doors Javik's pod was in, but then his pod was just found in the dirt or something? lol

ZipRush

20d

A much bigger plot hole IMO is how Javik was able to survive even when we saw Reaper ships swarming Eden Prime in the last cycle. There Prothean husk swarmng the doors Javik's pod was in

As I recall, one of the last things Javik gets told before he gets frozen is that the compound he's in has been saturation-bombed, which also (for unclear reasons) knocked out the compound's reactor. Everything not in a stasis pod at that point is dead.

ArcherA1aya

20d

I like assume the pods where Sabotaged in some way. Like maybe someone who wasn’t fully indoctrinated was on the creation of the power supply and unknowingly wired something wrong resulting in its short lifespan

Who_am_I_____

20d

Well the original plan was to have an auto wakeup and immediately start rebuilding their empire to prepare the galaxy. No sense in wasting 20k years. In fact they needed every second if they were ever to defeat the reapers. Not to mention they wanted to be the overlords. If they came back after 20k years they may already have had to conted with these cycle's upstarts. Of course the facility was compromised, so the whole plan didn't work out.

samuraipanda85

20d

They couldn't have woken low level grunts up to have them repair the generator?

Who_am_I_____

20d

They could've originally sure. Though if the plan hadn't failed they wouldn't have needed to. At the end it was clearly said there is no way to reanimate them by the system anymore, all it could do was shut off more to save power. There was no way to wake up anyone anymore.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

same with the ilos pods

AgitatedAd1397

15d

I know this is an old thread, but even if they did that, it doesn’t take the reapers that long to just fly back the “slow” way, isn’t that what they do after Arrival?

Arrynek

They jump into the system, and then they are going slow to the next one because the relay has been destroyed.

Though, I don't recall how they are able to jump to the system.

Soltronus

20d

I agree, it was a plan that could only be forged in desperation and Protean Imperial arrogance.

I imagine it's schemes like this that made it necessary for the Reapers to always leave a vanguard behind.

I think a better question would be: assuming there was no vanguard or the vanguard was defeated, somehow, is 50,000 years enough time for a society to stop the harvest from happening?

Indoctrination would be a hidden bitch, I think, as even dead Reapers put out the signal. Any new government that formed would want to study their enemy, after all. Organic agents of the reapers could work to bring about their return, as we saw with Saren.

Time might not be an ally, either. How long could a society hold together the doctrine of reaper harvesting before it became legend or superstition?

There's also the issue of synthetic life being a threat to any organic civilization that endures for that long. I may hate the star child, but I think it was right on the money about that.

Jammer_Jim

20d

Javik's crew almost certainly had no contact with Ilos and did not know what they knew. Also I think Vigil *eventually* understood what Sovereign was doing. This was not known while there was still a Prothean Empire.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

yeah vigil only eventually learning certain things seems probable

ShyrokaHimaa

20d

Exactly. Javik even says so that there was no communication with the rest of the empire and vice versa. And Vigil especially says they isolated themselves from everything and everyone to remain hidden.

ItsResetti

20d

Javik specifically says that his people thought Ilos was a myth.

User deleted comment

20d

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

would have been neat if javik had a throwaway line somewhere in me3 of this realization that his plan was doomed

Paradox31426

20d

The Reapers’ biggest advantage, aside from the obvious ones, is that they can stop the flow of information, so every world is alone in the dark with no idea what’s happening, beyond their worst nightmares raining from the sky. Javik even says that the Reapers went out of their way to destroy every Beacon they could get ahold of, so the Protheans couldn’t use their long range communications.

The Prothean scientists on Ilos figured out a bunch about the Reapers, the Cycle, and their own demise, and they both recorded what they learned, and used it to fuck around.

The Protheans on Mars somehow learned about the plans for the Crucible, and according to the stories Javik had heard, were part of the effort to build it. Probably unsuccessfully in part because the refugees from other planets knew about it, meaning the Reapers had enough breadcrumbs to track it down.

Javik’s Protheans on Eden Prime knew fuck all about Sovereign, the Cycle, any of the meta information the modern cycle takes for granted, all they knew was word of mouth about the war and enemy tactics from refugees and retreating forces, and that robots the size of mountains wanted them to die horribly for some reason. So as far as they knew, if they could hide, outlast their neighbours’ extermination, and survive, they would be able to rebuild one day.

Death_Fairy

20d

Probably not no, Sovereign would have found out sooner or later and shut it down. It's not a plot hole or anything though. Javik had a plan to restart the empire, it's just he didn't know that the Reapers would still be watching.

Vigil likely only found this out after studying the galaxy for tens of thousands of years after the Reapers destroyed the Protheans, and even so Ilos knowing something doesn't mean anywhere else does. Ilos was top secret, officially it didn't even exist which is why the Reapers never found it, and Vigil tells you the Prothean scientists didn't send out any messages until AFTER the Reapers had retreated back into dark space satisfied that the Protheans all gone so it very explicitely wasn't in communication with any of the other remnants of the Prothean Empire. You can even talk to Javik about Ilos and he'll say Ilos was nothing more than a rumour, if anything is a plot hole it's that Ilos was even so much as a rumour for Javik to have heard the name at all.

LGBT-Barbie-Cookout

20d

What's most wild is that Javik was even aware of the crucible at all.

The Protheans like countless before them, had the one punch knock out. Severing everyone from galactic governments and communications.

When Shep does rhe crucible she is very loud about gathering the resources, and because the citadel relay is still available cam be gathered from the entire galaxy,

Because the relays are linked, in those transit lines, where you may need to make some hops to get somewhere, many clusters are cut off completely.

The Prothean method of conquest, lends itself to siloing everything, I don't see how different projects would interact much at all.

VictoryForCake

20d

The Protheans were noted to be a particularly unusual cycle as they both had superior technology, and had expanded much more than previous cycles, as a result it took centuries for the Reapers to complete their harvest, as compared to the Century estimated for one in ME3. While the relay network had shut down, you probably still had lots of densely populated clusters within conventional FTL range that could support building the crucible, alongside Quantum Entanglement communications in the beginning to spread the Crucible plans at the start of the harvest. In ME3 thanks to the both holding the Citadel until the end, and the Reaper IFF from ME2 the relay network is probably still available for use post capture.

ExpletiveDeletedYou

20d

Is that really the case though? We don't really have much view of the previous cycles to know how unusual any specific cycle is. And furthermore all the existent lore in the current games is massively occluded by many cases of equating prothean tech with reaper tech (an understandable mistake for council races to make).

ShyrokaHimaa

20d

To be honest, I think in their arrogance the Reapers wouldn't care much. Maybe it'd be a somewhat shorter cycle as the civilizations reached the technological point at which the Harvest begins sooner.

I think the more likely reason the plan wouldn't work is because Krogan and humans (among others) in their nature don't like being subjugated and would rebel every other century weakening said new empire.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

seems plausible

MildyAnnoyedPanda

20d

Worked for the leviathans

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

well the leviathans didn’t rebuild an empire to figjt them, they’ve been hiding out

MildyAnnoyedPanda

20d

They survived for millions of years against a species whose main aim was to eradicate them. They played the long game and outlasted them the reapers. That’s the same in my book.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

well javik’s plan, as he explains it in me3, wasn’t just to survive in secret—he was to rebuild the empire after the extinction, incorporating the new species like humans/asari/turians, and defeat the reapers on their next appearance

zerostar83

20d

I assumed that the Reapers had a territory and that Javik's race was created by another powerful race that had territory in that part of the universe. Or maybe the Reapers cycle of every 50k years was part of their neverending tour through the universe.

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

oh i thought all of this was local to the milky way

zerostar83

20d

Andromeda Galaxy for MEA. Milky Way for ME1-3.

I feel like it's very much a copy of how Stargate Atlantis chose the Pegasus Galaxy as their destination. It's super far away.

cheffrey_dahmer1991

20d

Javik's plan seems to have a few holes. In one conversation he tells you how their plan was to come out of stasis and take over the galaxy to create a super empire to fight the Reapers, but in the next sentence says how the Reapers defeated them before because they were one giant galactic empire

ZPC3zdg3acx9nbtkxc

20d

yeah i noticed that too lol

well he says being monocultural made them unable to adapt, but they were also surprise attacked and caught flat footed. maybe he thinks adaptability won’t matter if they know what’s coming, have the data, and have 10’s of thousands of years to prepare.

vaustin89

19d

Reapers could be knocking on the door sooner, but they would still be decimated. They would be uplifting most of the current species in quick succession and end up with the same prothean ideology which was the down fall of their civilization. I love how the Primarch admires the reapers strategy but saddened that he is seeing the destruction of 15000 years of civilization, and that what gave the current cycle an edge, if they were fast tracked those species wouldn't have the grit and heart to survive such an onslaught.