NPC wrote:

15. Why does the Eclipse Sunfires (the failed warpriestess) have the same name as the Sunfire plasma compression pistol.

They named themselves after it, of course, as a terrifying weapon. They’re about the strongest troops Eclipse has on hand — even a failed priestess can ruin the day of anything short of a four-man N7 team.

NPC wrote:

16. The chase was awesome. I believe I’m in the minority here but I enjoyed Shift and Kiss dying in random and impersonal manners. Sometimes reality is a bitch.

NPC wrote:

17. Really excited to see what Aria’s got going on. It seems like the various outcasts are developing their own subculture.

Aria’s ultimate goal is to establish a domain powerful enough to resist the crap the Thirty are pulling, criminal enough to take advantage of corporate greed and ruthlesness while avoiding being a place for refugees who can’t fight or work, and dangerous enough that the Council leaves them to their own devices.

NPC wrote:

How do the Green Shirts interact with the batarian security boys? Are they the same team or different vassals of Aria? So many questions. Sigh, world building why you so addictive.

The Batarian servitor families and the greensuits are subtly at each other’s throats, but both generally work together since open conflict will draw Aria’s wrath.

Bray’s ancestor saved Aria’s life more than once (for a batarian he was pretty badass) and his descendants are loyal to Aria because she is the strongest. They handle most of the low level security and are more like bullyboys than anything else. The greens are mostly failed commandos or outcasts, who work for Aria using their skills since it beats dancing, whoring, or working for the gangs, but with the exception of the leaders and veterans are much less willing to die in Aria’s name.

Have you SEEN the goddamned way they turned Cerberus into a pack of clowns who couldn’t run a taco stand?

You could literally adapt an MLP fic into ME and have a better product than that. What you’ve written maintains Cerberus as antagonist while removing the derp and fail from the equasion — I think it would go very well.

“The only thing, I might have an issue over is TIM’ motive in AU!ME3.”

I can’t see Harper making a play himself for dominance by Cerberus — he’s a guy that sticks to the shadows. The more openly he operates the more vulnerable he is, the second sounds more like his style, TBH.

NPC wrote:

1. The fact the Hanar are actually an elder race goes a long way to explaining any advantages they have, though it makes me question what the Protheans were doing with the Asari and Humans if they had a colony and species that the Reapers apparently never managed to get to.

I’ll put it to you like this. There are two things you need to know.

First, the last ‘changes’ to the hanar DNA occurred 6,000 years ago. Second, when the Protheans were there, it was a food-world.

NPC wrote:

2. The Drell bits were very interesting, can’t wait to see more on them. I like that one of the biggest advantages of the Rememberance Dancers is that they have access to Prothean biotic teaching, hell of a tech up. Also explains how they have any chance over Asari commandos/priestesses who live a lot longer, thus have more time to train, and the Turian hordes. But one wonders how long such advantages will last.

Remembrance Dancers are powerful because they use stealth and biotics most people aren’t familiar with, and because they are very highly trained assassins. A War Priestess is a biotic nightmare and a master with a sword…but is not a soldier. A turian biotic would be a much tougher matchup.

NPC wrote:

3. How do the Thirty rationalize that they are the chosen of their ‘Goddess’ while the Hanar clearly got a better uplift package?

Why do you think Trellani went fucking crazy?

NPC wrote:

5. The First Refusal War was interesting and felt right. Hanar fall back sacrificing Drell colonies until the Council over extended and got their noise bloodied. Sounded like once the Council got serious and the Turians went to war footing after the attack on their homeworld, the Hanar threw everything they had at making the Council back off.

They did. The big difference is that the Hanar were not any more ready in some ways for the first skirmish or the First Refusal War than the Council. After that they expanded their fleets, started making REAL warships, and vastly increased the depth of their defenses.

NPC wrote:

6. The Second Refusal War really threw me. The STG was fooled by the Drell loyalists among the Valkhana. The Asari with 1000 year life spans couldn’t remember the last war. The Turians, what, screwed up their logistics?

Turian logistics have ALWAYS been terrible (Pel talks about this in the military turian section). The bigger issue is that the Troubles didn’t just fuck up ‘logistics’ on a planetary level but Hierarchy wide. It created more separatists than ever, and plenty of those encourageed the war while sabotaging it, hoping the Hierarchy would collapse if they were defeated by the hanar again.

The STG missed loyalists among the Valkhana because they were primarily probing for information and tech. The STG was convinced — after seeing the hanar not colonize anything for centuries and NOT followup on their crushing victory in the First Refusal War — that the hanar weren’t interested in expansion or the outside world at all.

The STG cannot read minds, and they tend to fuckup sometimes because they DON’T think other races are anywhere near as smart as them.

Also keep in mind that the asari knew full well what had gone down in the First Refusal. But they had a much better idea what they were facing — and the rise of Aria was intolerable in their eyes.

NPC wrote:

Then the Hanar fight all the way to Palaven and bomb the capital tower, have better guns, shields, hacking, make a mockery of all other races special forces, and captured the Citadel. The Hanar literally beat everyone at their own game. While not impossible to explain, it kind of breaks with the Mass Effect feel when the Council isn’t top dog among the known races.

The hanar managed to do that pretty much because no one expected it and had stripped the defenses to throw more ships at the Hanar (which seemed to be the only way to win battles against them).

However, the suddenly increased level of technology and competence is a hint. They shouldn’t be able to do what they did…and yet they did so.

NPC wrote:

7. Invading the Hanar colonies was always a bloody slog so why didn’t the Council, or at-least the Turians, bomb them from orbit? Any Prothean artifacts are surely in secure vaults and will survive.

Because some weren’t in secure vaults, they were in the middle of said colonies. More importantly they DID try this in the First one, and the hanar destroyed everything when it became apparent they were going for this.

It’s impossible to simply infiltrate a hanar colony. They’re all underwater, all drell live topside and have ZERO reason to be underwater, and you can’t dress up in a hanar costume.

NPC wrote:

8. Did the Council actually make a well throughout reasoned decision about the Terminus? Did they learn the lesson that the USA and the great powers of old never learned? Yeah turns out just because you can roll over someone’s military doesn’t mean you can successfully hold the territory without bleeding manpower, money, and political will.

They did the modeling and came to that conclusion, yes.

NPC wrote:

9. So Hanar are servitors? Maybe a Prothean project the Leviathans took over? Interesting the Hanar are weak to Asari melds. Perhaps the Thirty aren’t the only ones with a crisis of faith in the future.

The hanar are … complicated. I’ll explain it all at the end of the hanar section in the OOC.

There’s not one or two factions of Leviathans, there’s three. Add one of them is working with an unexpected party.

NPC wrote:

10. While I’m ambivalent about changing the timeframe of the Batarian File, I still would like to hear what the Hegemony, a staple of galactic civilization for a long time, was like. I’m just asking telling us what changed. Like, “The SIU unit used to spend most of their time hunting STG spys and crushing slave revolts but with the rise of the Empire (new information here)”. You get the idea.

This was the idea, with the compare and contrast used to highlight how fucked up the Emperor is.

Feedback here will generally get more indepth commentary and stuff that may or may not go into the story in question.

The story framing the tech guide is actually very important in revealing some warp-level fuckery on the part of the Black Leviathans that I can’t figure out how to really get into the main story. It’s not critical to understanding what happens later … more like putting that ‘Oh fucking shit no he didn’t’ aspect into things down the line.

Himura wrote:

Maybe if the asari stopped dragging their heels and got to work, the Aria situation could be resolved a long time ago. As it is the longer she lives the more dangerous and competent she becomes. I wonder if anyone will ever call Tevos on that or just blows the news that Aria is Thana’s child to the media and let the circus spiral out and see what happens. Maybe Hades could do it?

There are a number of reasons the Asari are hesitant to move on Aria…the most important of which is that Thana cannot find the nerve or will to kill her own daughter, and that Uressa T’Shora still holds out hope she can somehow reach Aria and make her reconcile.

A second reason, of almost as much importance as the first, is that Aria holds a number of extremely damaging secrets that the asari cannot allow to become public knowledge and has threatened to release them.

A third reason is the number of asari who have flocked to Aria’s banner. There is a very, very high taboo against asari-on-asari violence, and those of the Council of Matriarchs who want Aria dead have been forced to use catspaws and other aliens against her, which has been less than effective. Up until the point Omega became a valuable asset in his plans, the Broker generally supported Aria and kept more than one scheme from affecting her.

As an aside: Saren is gone. The Primarch pissed on him and they launched his defiled corpse into the sun.

“Alive” and “active” are two very different terms. If the corpse ever wakes up, it won’t be Benezia inside.

You can determine the … disturbing implications of that as you will.

A lot of heavy questions.

1) How hasn’t most of the races’ militaries athropied in 1,000 years?

There have been multiple smaller wars and conflicts. The turian separatists are a lot stronger in the Premiseverse, and control fifteen colonies, scattered around the poorly explored edges of the FTL envelope. That’s always a big source of conflict.

Likewise, the Hanar Ascendency has fought at least two Wars of Refusal over Protehan technology and their resistance to sharing what they know with the asari and salarians.

The were the Second Krogan Rebellions, of course, but also the Uprisings at Tharn, where a krogan PMC made an attempt at seizing an STG facility to find a cure for the genophage rumored to be there, turning into a running fight.

Agents (like Spectres) often do find buildups, but increasingly Aria and the Terminus systems are making money by accepting raw resources to build ships for separtists, terrorists, independant types who want to found wildcats, etc. It’s not so easy to shut the docks down at Omega.

1a) The Terminus systems are EXTREMELY dangerous…if unified.

In weight of ships, Aria is getting close to being on par with the salarians. She has no dreadnaughts yet, but her people captured a geth dreadnaught and are slowly refitting it (and advancing their technology level by a LOT). The bigger problem is that engaging the Terminus is impossible.

The primary lanes to reach the other warlord systems and their mining systems all pass through Omega, which has already (about three hundred years back) stood off one invading Citadel TAsk force, costing them three dreadnaughts.

For now there simply isn’t the political will to take the losses involved in shutting Aria down.

2) How big is the Terminus?

It’s roughly the size of the territory of the turians and asari combined, but so far has a lot fewer colonized worlds. That still gives them two hundred plus worlds and mining camps.

It’s big enough that they have a galactic level GDP. It’s big enough that if it was just the Terminus and the Alliance in a war, the Alliance would be conquered and beaten like a dead horse.

3) Would the Council be stronger if they stopped drinking idiotball tea?

You aren’t asking the right question. I touched on this in an article.

You have three groups of highly cunning behind the scenes leaders operating through three extremely skilled political operators. Do you REALLY think the council is ineffective because it can’t do any better?

There are reasons for it, and the majority of them have to do with conflicting goals on the part of the people BEHIND the Council — that is, the SIX, the Palavanus, and the House of Storms.

4) Would Javik want to airlock ALL THE THINGS?

Surprisingly no. Towards the end of the war Javik became convinced that the centralized control and cultural uniformity (and suppression of other races) is what lead to the Prothean downfall, just as Vigil warned it would.

Javik found the races of the canon ME to be worthless because they could not even unify when they had nothing to fight over and were completely naive as to the costs. Even canon Javik would be impressed by the hardness and willingness to do anything to achieve goals.

More importantly, the Premiseverse council is not ignorant of the Reaper threat — they just think they have more time than they do, and with good reason (the Reapers really are more busy in the Sculptor galaxy, where a race with basic Godpower abilities and tech several times more advanced than the Inusannon just wiped the Reaper vanguard of sixty-five reapers like it was a snack.)

The descriptor of ‘broken man’ can have many appliques. Delacor is broken in that he’s paranoid, functionally and operationally. He has a persecution complex and lets that color his beliefs and how he interacts with command. I know common depictions of broken people are what Ahern would call emo crying asshats, but there are more ways than that to be broken and Delacor fits that.

He refuses to have much of a social life because he’s convinced Fate is out to ruin him. He disconnects from people on a personal level because he doesn’t trust anyone. He has no hobbies and no real life outside of his military command because everything else (family, fiance, political options) has been taken from him.

Delacor is called a disaster because he is infamous for having extremely bad luck, that tends to blow up on people around him.

However, with the exception of Jiong, no one on the Kazan has any real knowledge of Delacor’s background or history with Shepard except rumors and stories about his bad luck.

As far as Shepard goes, Delacor saw Shepard (with some justification) as being both inappropriate for command and wasteful of her men’s lives. In addition, due to his paranoia, Delacor felt Shepard had been foisted off on him as some sort of punishment or even plot to get him killed.

The reality of the situation was that Delacor fundamentally disliked Shepard, and provoking her was the best way to get her out of his unit. The fact that he had orders from Florez to make her unstable and miserable segued nicely with what he felt anyway.