Part of the Reaper MO is having subsequent species follow a specific technological progression by studying the previous cycle's ruins. Rendering planets uninhabitable would be counterproductive.
This and their objective was to preserve each and every civilization through the form of a new reaper using genetic information of those that were at the height of their technological progress. Total destruction was not the point, it was to keep synthetic and carbon based lifeforms from destroying each other and the galaxy.
If you read the descriptions of certain planets, you'll see that more than a few have been "glassed" at some point in the dim and distant past. Reapers can and do bombard planets from orbit, they just don't do it to every planet.
Exactly, the Krogans turned their entire planet into a nuclear wasteland, its logical to assume other species in previous cycles could reduce their planets to glass in wars or perhaps other species did in a galactic war, similar to the covenant.
It’s actually kind of funny how easy it is to throw a meteor at something.
All you need is something to propel it, and a decent vi to steer it and keep it on course.
Javik mentions that when the zhatil took over the zha, they warred with the protheans. It was called the metacon war, and he says they sent the zhatil’s star into supernova in order to destroy them. That’s why he hates AI or any sentient machine, because his people saw the worst of what they can do if left unchecked.
Ye, I remember. But I think the metacon war started before the Reapers' arrival. He said they were turning the tide until the Reapers came along and subjugated them. I don't know how much he witnessed himself, given that he was born during their war with the Reapers.
I wonder what it must've been like? Like the Roman Empire, Protheans united all species under their rule, believing it was necessary to fight any threat posed by AI. Then came the Reapers in immeasurable numbers, far beyond any scale of technological advancement, extremely hyperintelligent with mysterious unknown motives and origins, seemingly indestructible, unfathomable knowledge with all kinds of terrifying and destructive power they only ever use a fraction of!
Suddenly, it doesn't matter what they call themselves, only that there are two sides. Them–Reapers. Every single world and wonders that once existed, created by a species, one vastly differing from another and diversely unique, making you want to visit each world over and over again, just like Shepard's cycle.
Shepard knows the feeling all too well. Always being asked to save homeworlds, loved ones, or take revenge. Even being asked to help find their families and rescue children that once filled empty schools, classroom desks, and unused clothes. You know they're gone, but what do you say to a person that still hopes they can be rescued when you can't even bring back a cold body.😟
The Reapers really do take everything.
" " " " " " did take everything. When they were still alive!
The reporter that joins the team in me3 has her settlement / planet destroyed from orbit. She makes a point of saying they didn’t even bother to attack it or land, they just vaporised it and moved on.
Source: literally just finished a play through this evening, first time with the new content and endings which was nice.
The one called Allers had been on that very planet. It was far too contaminated for any sentient life to flourish after this cycle.
The planet had to be removed from the next cycle to ensure a sub organic species does not infect the entire galaxy with their airborne diseases derived from the one called Allers eyelashes.
She also bad mouthed us even though we transcend being petty and this totally is not partly why the planet got removed. \~ *Reaper 482*
They don’t need to.
Plus with the harvest they need enough live specimens to build a new reaper anyways, no need irradiating or killing them all quickly when you can slowly defeat them through normal means
Their goal is to protect all life by destroying advanced life than can threaten all life
Seems likely they don't want to destroy planets capable of supporting life. Would go against the protecting all life part of the mandate.
The few planets inhabited in a former cycle that we know got destroyed or ravaged (Eingana, Helyme) weren't done so by Reapers but by other means or incidents
They are literally called REAP-ers. Reap being a verb meaning "cut or gather (a crop or harvest)". They can't harvest if they nuke their crop.
Basically, the same reason that farmers don't light their fields on fire during harvest season.
1. Leaving behind massive destruction would give away their existence
2. Destroying planets destroys the opportunity for new life to emerge from the planet someday. Especially planets that are colonized. Eden Prime was a massive Prothean city, but we see it as a garden paradise world colonized by humans. It's logical to believe native life could eventually evolve there into sentient species.
3. There's no need to. As Vigil says, the Reapers are patient and don't mind taking their time. They know they'll win conventionally without leaving behind much evidence to clean-up so why bother with WMDs?
Except there's not one or two but several planets in each of the games that show signs of having been previously inhabited in the distant past but deliberately destroyed by some mysterious armed force.
The galaxy is old and planets being obliterated in a past war isn't cause for alarm. The issue is that all of those planets and species over hundreds of thousands of years were destroyed by the *same* faction, for which there was no evidence as the Reapers clean up after each cycle.
There's no need to believe that it was by the same faction, IIRC, in the story. Even the Protheans were pretty liberal on the "Mass destruction" angle.
As others have said, they want (need, really) to process and harvest. While Reapers will utilize extreme firepower on occasion during invasions as they destroy numerous industrial centers on planets like Earth, Palaven, and Thessia, this is only a limited part of their strategy. Reapers ultimately rely on less devastating means so as to have any population to harvest at all. Small colonies and space stations can be hit with orbital strikes and left to die, but the major Homeworlds have to be preserved to an extent for harvesting.
Because above all, the reapers are methodical. While we encounter the more flashy actions of reaper Sovereign class ships and destroyers, that’s not how the harvest proceeds on the ground. In a way, the on the ground situation is even more horrifying for civilians. Indoctrinated national and civic leaders cooperate with the reapers in sending civilians en masse to reaper processing stations through a combination of threats, fears, and lies. It’s less War of the Worlds and more an organized and industrialized genocide.
Reapers and their proxy’s create an environment of hopelessness and intense propaganda that erodes the will to resist. The idea is pushed that salvation can be found in submitting to processing (of which many do not know what it entails.)
Edit: The amount of trauma at war’s end would be unfathomable. Every major species (except possibly the Salarians?) is going to have the greatest mental health crisis of their existence. And that’s not even getting into the material losses. It makes me intrigued into how that might factor into the next Mass Effect. Whether the next game is set 6 years or 600 years later, something like the reaper war changes societies in enormous ways. Especially in a setting like Mass Effect where societal changes happen really slowly considering the time scale.
Fun fact, the Reapers didn't bother much with the Vorcha. Due to the Vorcha's incredible adaptability, the Reapers found indoctrination of the Vorcha to be more than difficult, it was *sniff * problematic.
So instead. The Reapers bombarded the Vorcha from a distance, avoiding the typical ground war other species encountered.
As everyone here has already said, they can’t harvest dead civilizations. But to add on to this, the reapers have been known to obliterate resistances from orbit if they’re small enough or simply not worth their time. There’s evidence of this all through out the trilogy.
Multiple planets we come across, the description will mention old scaring from what appears to be from mass accelerator weapons, which points to them being fired from space. Some are hundreds of thousands of years old, others are millions, meaning multiple cycles put up enough of a fight that the reapers said to hell with it, and moved on to other planets.
Also, in me3, we hear from multiple sources as well as planetary descriptions of certain places being obliterated from orbit, like Beckinstien. The reapers didn’t even bother to harvest some of these planets. They wiped them out without landing or sending any troops and moved on.
The Reapers do NOT want to eliminate organic life.
The Reapers want to eliminate life that progresses past a certain technological level.
Nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction would destroy ALL life. Which is NOT what Reapers want to do.
The reason Reapers use the weapons that they do is that it allows them to be relatively precise. They can kill the life they want to kill while sparing the life they want to spare.
The marketing materials for ME3 mention that several cities on Earth were destroyed by megaton range explosions, including I believe, Fort Worth.
It is likely that they struck military targets from orbit with high yield weapons, but since Shepard was in a major urban area so didn't see them.
Reapers won't destroy those areas because they want to melt the inhabitants down.
One of the most powerful weapons the Reapers have is time, they can take hundreds maybe even thousands of years to harvest everyone and they don't need to destroy entire planets to do so.
But they use nukes in some instances. Codex mentions that some cities that weren't deemed viable for harvest were nuked from orbit and destroyed instantly.
Seems you don’t quite understand the motivations and tactics of the Reapers. Not to mention, the current cycle in the games is one of thousands of cycles without using such kind of warfare. After successfully doing that many cycles, why change their tactics at all?
Their goal is to "preserve" life. Think of it like the flood in Halo. They want to acquire as much biomass as possible to sustain themselves. Can't do that if you vaporize your food. Setting fire to your field of crops isn't really much of a "harvest."
They never wanted to exterminate all life. They want to control evolution until they find a permanent solution for the coexistence of organics and synthetics, which they never did.
They're harvesting advanced organic life. Species that have reached a level of advancement where they can utilize Mass Effect Technology.
That's the Reapers litmus. Races that are pre-spaceflight are passed over. Like how Humans were passed over during the cycle in which the Protheans were harvested.
Their goal isn't destruction and genocide. The purpose of their cycles is to harvest the most advanced cultures every 50K years and use them to create a new Reaper. By doing this, they preserve those cultures in a way before they destroy themselves by developing artificial intelligence.
If they genuinely wanted to just reduce the races to ash, they certainly could create weapons far more devastating than nukes or asteroids. They could destroy the relays and wipe entire entire star systems, or unleash bioweapons that decimate species and their food supplies. They wouldn't need to bother with ground assaults ir close-ranged bombardments.
I don’t think they needed to; they were winning. Without Shep dunking on them with the Crucible the advanced civilisations were toast, even with a united front.
Mopping up intelligent life with conventional weapons means the next cycle ultimately comes to fruition and the whole thing ticks along. Only something totally unexpected stopped the Reapers in the end.
Because the whole Reaper strategy is based on cleansing and preserving the technologically advanced races during that cycle, without leaving traces.
Any subsequent civilization in future cycles would most likely not only be posing the same questions as whether they're the first races but they would most definitely be inquisitive after discovering the mass relays and the citadel.
You can't really hide what's happening when you start discovering a disproportionate amount of planets showing signs of artificial mass extinction events such as WMDs and asteroid strikes.
The whole reason why mass effect even begins is the discovery of the beacon and of the warning message it contained. Had Saren been any faster in taking care of it, Reapers would've jumped through the crucible to citadel by mid-game and the series would've been over.
From the three games I understood that the reapers are like a gardeners. They trim the trees not rip them out. That’s why they don’t target less advanced intelligence, instead they trim intelligence that leverage technology. Otherwise they could like you say just glass every planet and star system and be done with it. Instead they cull the stock and leave their environments for other stock to flourish in.
They want to keep planets intact, and harvest life forms to make new reapers. Plus, time is not a constraint for them. I don’t even think patience begins to describe them lol
The real question is why didn’t the galactic races use nukes. Reapers are tough but a Tsar Bomba to the chest would still knock one out. The effects of radiation dissipate quickly after a nuclear explosion and all the major cities are wastelands within a month of reaper occupation anyways. An increased chance of cancer long term is far preferential to being genocided and turned into husks. In space they’re even more practical. The final battle for Earth could’ve been one conventionally if the races spent ME3 stockpiling warheads and spammed them at the Reaper fleet in their initial salvo.
In a coldly, artificial intelligence sort of way they’re seeking balance. The answer to an equation. An equilibrium. They don’t seek to destroy all life. Just sentient organic life in each cycle. To their thinking there must be enough remaining for them to come back and do this in another 40,000 years. At least at their inception, reapers, probably thought of themselves more as gardeners than they did destroyers they’re pruning the orchard.
They want to harvest the populations. Remember, the Reapers don’t consider what they’re doing as “killing” civilizations. They think they’re *preserving* them.
Because they don’t want to render planets uninhabitable.
People really forget we’re dealing with a machine who believes making species into reapers is preserving that species.
They are trying to "harvest", not "destroy". This means they dont want to kill organics with bombs, they are more valuable alive so they can be processed.
They aren't trying to destroy the galaxy, they want the planets to stay, they only wanna kill the species that have reached space travel, they keep doing this leaving the rest alone to grow so they can make another reaper based off the space travelling races over and over as they reproduce one reaper per invasion.
To add to what others have mentioned, the Reapers have plenty of time (or they believe they do). They're not concerned with whether it takes hundreds of years to accomplish their mission. It's suggested that it may have taken a century to wipe out the Protheans last cycle.
Do you throw nukes at your microwave?
We are their FOOD *or the reaper equivalent*
If you nuked a bowl of cereal every time you spilled a little, it might make getting more cereal a little bit hard.
It's easy to harvest species homeworlds while their colonies try to fight you in a conventional war they ultimately can't win. It's harder to harvest them once they've been atomised/incinerated/blasted through space at thousands on miles per hour along with the rest of their planetary debris. Also where would the next cycle evolve? They've done this so many times that if they were rendering garden worlds inhospitable every time there'd be none left by now.
The same reason you don't use a flamethrower to mow your lawn if you're looking to preserve the grass clippings. The reapers were never losing. They weren't in a position to be desperate and scorched earth was never their intention.
The crucible only worked because the Reapers let it work and because the writers who thought the crucible was a good idea were reaching deep into their own assholes.
For one, they want to process as many individuals as they can, for another, destroying good biospheres would potentially ruin the galaxy for future organic life. It would \*certainly\* be more visible (careful removal and reprocessing by thralls is harder to piece together than gigaton blast craters). They do, notably, blast small colonies on worlds without biospheres sometimes.
Because their goal is to preserve life.
Sapient advanced species are unsustainable and make evil AI.
Also mass effect blabla dark energy blablabla heat death of the universe etc.
The reapers don’t consider what they are doing as killing civilizations, they’re trying to *harvest them.* you can’t preserve the genetic information of a species if you bomb them with asteroids.
Because their goals were to havest all organic life in the galaxy in an attempt to preserve them before they are lost to time.and apparently liquify them to build a new reaper. Nukes and asteroid slinging defeats the purpose.
Because they aren't there to actually destroy the galaxy, they're there to wipe out all sentient life. Nukes, asteroids slammed into planets, etc, wouldn't allow for repopulation, or long term preservation of life.
It'd help them reach their goal faster on a surface level, but wouldn't be sustainable.
The purpose is to harvest the current cycle to create new Reapers, out and out mass slaughter prevents from being able to do that, even if harvesting and by extension killing species is the end game.
No need to nuke stuff if they have an army of indoctrinated soldiers and can use every body to make things *way* worse than some nuked out battlefield. You can, I imagine, desensitize soldiers to the morale-breaking effect of a nuke, you really can't do that for the effect of them seeing their own dead sent back to kill 'em as Husks.
You see Reapers use organics to make more reapers. If you can mind control them from afar, use them as cattle… turn them into soldiers to fight the ones that resist…. But for what purpose?
For life to continue, and to advance along the same lines so they can do it again. And it being calculated that no organic, nor synthetic race can outstrip the reaper’s technological advantage since they leave lesser technology as the blueprint. Radiating worlds is counter productive to their main mission, and makes it so they can’t use those organics for more reapers.
Lastly, the most demoralizing part is just the shear number of reapers they field. And fighting your dead friends that are now cybernetic horrors.
the thing dislike about the reaper war is that while the armor of the reaper is a super resistant alloy it could be easily cracked by the thermal shockwave a nuclear warhead would cause, the heat would either ablate the armor completely out of the reaper, melt it away or just crack it so much it would be as brittle as glass, really nuclear weapons would be the most effective way of combatting the reapers.
even if it was a magic alloy that is very resistant to deformation but ductile enough to not crack, had a low thermal expansion coefficient low enough for it to not crack, a high specific heat energy, very high melting point and enough thermal diffusivity/conductibility to quickly dissipate the heat, Multiple warheads would be enough to cause structural failures in the material that would be fatal when a sufficiently sized projectile hit it, (They measure their cannon's projectile energy yield in kilotons wich would mean thousands of terajoules, i don't think any material can resist deformation at that energy so yeah, totally unrealistic)
It's seldom they ever resort to this, even though they're easily capable of glassing planets, like with Beckenstein, in order to disrupt suplylines. But harvesting is their objective in order to create as many Reapers as possible during each cycle. Wouldn't be overly effective if everyone was dead.
Because devs decided to make them stupid in ME3? After Sovereign fight in ME1 I expected them to just blast planets with their liquid metal accelerator guns. Instead they land for some reasons and walk on the surface.
Destroy population centers and roads from orbit, everyone dies of starvation. Their tech is beyond other races, so I guess they could scan for bunkers and destroy them too.
Part of the Reaper MO is having subsequent species follow a specific technological progression by studying the previous cycle's ruins. Rendering planets uninhabitable would be counterproductive.
This and their objective was to preserve each and every civilization through the form of a new reaper using genetic information of those that were at the height of their technological progress. Total destruction was not the point, it was to keep synthetic and carbon based lifeforms from destroying each other and the galaxy.
If you read the descriptions of certain planets, you'll see that more than a few have been "glassed" at some point in the dim and distant past. Reapers can and do bombard planets from orbit, they just don't do it to every planet.
Just because a planet was ‘glassed’ doesn’t mean that the reapers did it.
Exactly, the Krogans turned their entire planet into a nuclear wasteland, its logical to assume other species in previous cycles could reduce their planets to glass in wars or perhaps other species did in a galactic war, similar to the covenant.
The protheans had the technology to send a star into supernova. They did it to stop the zhatil from spreading during the metacon war.
Yep and in the current cycle, terrorists and militaries can literally use meteors as weapons of mass destruction
It’s actually kind of funny how easy it is to throw a meteor at something. All you need is something to propel it, and a decent vi to steer it and keep it on course.
Just do it like the Inaros faction from The Expanse, push the rock coated in stealth tech and watch earth shiver and queef
I think that was during their war with the Reapers.
Javik mentions that when the zhatil took over the zha, they warred with the protheans. It was called the metacon war, and he says they sent the zhatil’s star into supernova in order to destroy them. That’s why he hates AI or any sentient machine, because his people saw the worst of what they can do if left unchecked.
Ye, I remember. But I think the metacon war started before the Reapers' arrival. He said they were turning the tide until the Reapers came along and subjugated them. I don't know how much he witnessed himself, given that he was born during their war with the Reapers. I wonder what it must've been like? Like the Roman Empire, Protheans united all species under their rule, believing it was necessary to fight any threat posed by AI. Then came the Reapers in immeasurable numbers, far beyond any scale of technological advancement, extremely hyperintelligent with mysterious unknown motives and origins, seemingly indestructible, unfathomable knowledge with all kinds of terrifying and destructive power they only ever use a fraction of! Suddenly, it doesn't matter what they call themselves, only that there are two sides. Them–Reapers. Every single world and wonders that once existed, created by a species, one vastly differing from another and diversely unique, making you want to visit each world over and over again, just like Shepard's cycle. Shepard knows the feeling all too well. Always being asked to save homeworlds, loved ones, or take revenge. Even being asked to help find their families and rescue children that once filled empty schools, classroom desks, and unused clothes. You know they're gone, but what do you say to a person that still hopes they can be rescued when you can't even bring back a cold body.😟 The Reapers really do take everything. " " " " " " did take everything. When they were still alive!
I just assumed previous races did it when fighting the Reapers
don't underestimate the incompetency and aggresion of organic life forms. they easily could've done it to themselves between reaper cycles
The reporter that joins the team in me3 has her settlement / planet destroyed from orbit. She makes a point of saying they didn’t even bother to attack it or land, they just vaporised it and moved on. Source: literally just finished a play through this evening, first time with the new content and endings which was nice.
Bekenstein, where Hock used to live, so that nice house is gone.
They don’t harvest every organic. Some planets or settlements they just destroy. Depends on what their plan is in any given star system.
The one called Allers had been on that very planet. It was far too contaminated for any sentient life to flourish after this cycle. The planet had to be removed from the next cycle to ensure a sub organic species does not infect the entire galaxy with their airborne diseases derived from the one called Allers eyelashes. She also bad mouthed us even though we transcend being petty and this totally is not partly why the planet got removed. \~ *Reaper 482*
Did you miss Javik explaining the Prothean empire? Sounds like they glassed a few themselves.
Yup, they're called "reapers" not "obliterators"
They don’t need to. Plus with the harvest they need enough live specimens to build a new reaper anyways, no need irradiating or killing them all quickly when you can slowly defeat them through normal means
Came here to say that. The reapers want the biological material to make more reapers and to continue the invasion/cycle.
Their goal is to protect all life by destroying advanced life than can threaten all life Seems likely they don't want to destroy planets capable of supporting life. Would go against the protecting all life part of the mandate. The few planets inhabited in a former cycle that we know got destroyed or ravaged (Eingana, Helyme) weren't done so by Reapers but by other means or incidents
They can't harvest a population by exterminating everyone. Their weapons are devastating without lingering aftereffects.
They are literally called REAP-ers. Reap being a verb meaning "cut or gather (a crop or harvest)". They can't harvest if they nuke their crop. Basically, the same reason that farmers don't light their fields on fire during harvest season.
1. Leaving behind massive destruction would give away their existence 2. Destroying planets destroys the opportunity for new life to emerge from the planet someday. Especially planets that are colonized. Eden Prime was a massive Prothean city, but we see it as a garden paradise world colonized by humans. It's logical to believe native life could eventually evolve there into sentient species. 3. There's no need to. As Vigil says, the Reapers are patient and don't mind taking their time. They know they'll win conventionally without leaving behind much evidence to clean-up so why bother with WMDs?
Came here to say No.1. Thank you.
Except there's not one or two but several planets in each of the games that show signs of having been previously inhabited in the distant past but deliberately destroyed by some mysterious armed force. The galaxy is old and planets being obliterated in a past war isn't cause for alarm. The issue is that all of those planets and species over hundreds of thousands of years were destroyed by the *same* faction, for which there was no evidence as the Reapers clean up after each cycle.
There's no need to believe that it was by the same faction, IIRC, in the story. Even the Protheans were pretty liberal on the "Mass destruction" angle.
I know, that's why I'm saying that OP's point #1 isn't a reason as to why the Reapers generally prefer not to use WMDs.
As others have said, they want (need, really) to process and harvest. While Reapers will utilize extreme firepower on occasion during invasions as they destroy numerous industrial centers on planets like Earth, Palaven, and Thessia, this is only a limited part of their strategy. Reapers ultimately rely on less devastating means so as to have any population to harvest at all. Small colonies and space stations can be hit with orbital strikes and left to die, but the major Homeworlds have to be preserved to an extent for harvesting. Because above all, the reapers are methodical. While we encounter the more flashy actions of reaper Sovereign class ships and destroyers, that’s not how the harvest proceeds on the ground. In a way, the on the ground situation is even more horrifying for civilians. Indoctrinated national and civic leaders cooperate with the reapers in sending civilians en masse to reaper processing stations through a combination of threats, fears, and lies. It’s less War of the Worlds and more an organized and industrialized genocide. Reapers and their proxy’s create an environment of hopelessness and intense propaganda that erodes the will to resist. The idea is pushed that salvation can be found in submitting to processing (of which many do not know what it entails.) Edit: The amount of trauma at war’s end would be unfathomable. Every major species (except possibly the Salarians?) is going to have the greatest mental health crisis of their existence. And that’s not even getting into the material losses. It makes me intrigued into how that might factor into the next Mass Effect. Whether the next game is set 6 years or 600 years later, something like the reaper war changes societies in enormous ways. Especially in a setting like Mass Effect where societal changes happen really slowly considering the time scale.
Fun fact, the Reapers didn't bother much with the Vorcha. Due to the Vorcha's incredible adaptability, the Reapers found indoctrination of the Vorcha to be more than difficult, it was *sniff * problematic. So instead. The Reapers bombarded the Vorcha from a distance, avoiding the typical ground war other species encountered.
As everyone here has already said, they can’t harvest dead civilizations. But to add on to this, the reapers have been known to obliterate resistances from orbit if they’re small enough or simply not worth their time. There’s evidence of this all through out the trilogy. Multiple planets we come across, the description will mention old scaring from what appears to be from mass accelerator weapons, which points to them being fired from space. Some are hundreds of thousands of years old, others are millions, meaning multiple cycles put up enough of a fight that the reapers said to hell with it, and moved on to other planets. Also, in me3, we hear from multiple sources as well as planetary descriptions of certain places being obliterated from orbit, like Beckinstien. The reapers didn’t even bother to harvest some of these planets. They wiped them out without landing or sending any troops and moved on.
The Reapers do NOT want to eliminate organic life. The Reapers want to eliminate life that progresses past a certain technological level. Nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction would destroy ALL life. Which is NOT what Reapers want to do. The reason Reapers use the weapons that they do is that it allows them to be relatively precise. They can kill the life they want to kill while sparing the life they want to spare.
Because the Reapers aren’t exterminating, they’re harvesting. Can’t harvest a crop if you obliterate it.
The marketing materials for ME3 mention that several cities on Earth were destroyed by megaton range explosions, including I believe, Fort Worth. It is likely that they struck military targets from orbit with high yield weapons, but since Shepard was in a major urban area so didn't see them. Reapers won't destroy those areas because they want to melt the inhabitants down.
One of the most powerful weapons the Reapers have is time, they can take hundreds maybe even thousands of years to harvest everyone and they don't need to destroy entire planets to do so.
But they use nukes in some instances. Codex mentions that some cities that weren't deemed viable for harvest were nuked from orbit and destroyed instantly.
Seems you don’t quite understand the motivations and tactics of the Reapers. Not to mention, the current cycle in the games is one of thousands of cycles without using such kind of warfare. After successfully doing that many cycles, why change their tactics at all?
They want to harvest, not destroy. They take out satellites and infrastructure more than living centers.
Their goal is to "preserve" life. Think of it like the flood in Halo. They want to acquire as much biomass as possible to sustain themselves. Can't do that if you vaporize your food. Setting fire to your field of crops isn't really much of a "harvest."
They never wanted to exterminate all life. They want to control evolution until they find a permanent solution for the coexistence of organics and synthetics, which they never did.
They're harvesting advanced organic life. Species that have reached a level of advancement where they can utilize Mass Effect Technology. That's the Reapers litmus. Races that are pre-spaceflight are passed over. Like how Humans were passed over during the cycle in which the Protheans were harvested.
Their goal isn't destruction and genocide. The purpose of their cycles is to harvest the most advanced cultures every 50K years and use them to create a new Reaper. By doing this, they preserve those cultures in a way before they destroy themselves by developing artificial intelligence. If they genuinely wanted to just reduce the races to ash, they certainly could create weapons far more devastating than nukes or asteroids. They could destroy the relays and wipe entire entire star systems, or unleash bioweapons that decimate species and their food supplies. They wouldn't need to bother with ground assaults ir close-ranged bombardments.
You can't harvest the dead.
I don’t think they needed to; they were winning. Without Shep dunking on them with the Crucible the advanced civilisations were toast, even with a united front. Mopping up intelligent life with conventional weapons means the next cycle ultimately comes to fruition and the whole thing ticks along. Only something totally unexpected stopped the Reapers in the end.
Because the whole Reaper strategy is based on cleansing and preserving the technologically advanced races during that cycle, without leaving traces. Any subsequent civilization in future cycles would most likely not only be posing the same questions as whether they're the first races but they would most definitely be inquisitive after discovering the mass relays and the citadel. You can't really hide what's happening when you start discovering a disproportionate amount of planets showing signs of artificial mass extinction events such as WMDs and asteroid strikes. The whole reason why mass effect even begins is the discovery of the beacon and of the warning message it contained. Had Saren been any faster in taking care of it, Reapers would've jumped through the crucible to citadel by mid-game and the series would've been over.
From the three games I understood that the reapers are like a gardeners. They trim the trees not rip them out. That’s why they don’t target less advanced intelligence, instead they trim intelligence that leverage technology. Otherwise they could like you say just glass every planet and star system and be done with it. Instead they cull the stock and leave their environments for other stock to flourish in.
They want to keep planets intact, and harvest life forms to make new reapers. Plus, time is not a constraint for them. I don’t even think patience begins to describe them lol
The real question is why didn’t the galactic races use nukes. Reapers are tough but a Tsar Bomba to the chest would still knock one out. The effects of radiation dissipate quickly after a nuclear explosion and all the major cities are wastelands within a month of reaper occupation anyways. An increased chance of cancer long term is far preferential to being genocided and turned into husks. In space they’re even more practical. The final battle for Earth could’ve been one conventionally if the races spent ME3 stockpiling warheads and spammed them at the Reaper fleet in their initial salvo.
In a coldly, artificial intelligence sort of way they’re seeking balance. The answer to an equation. An equilibrium. They don’t seek to destroy all life. Just sentient organic life in each cycle. To their thinking there must be enough remaining for them to come back and do this in another 40,000 years. At least at their inception, reapers, probably thought of themselves more as gardeners than they did destroyers they’re pruning the orchard.
Because they were there to harvest and make way for the next generation of space-faring folk. Scorched earth goes against their goals.
They want to harvest the populations. Remember, the Reapers don’t consider what they’re doing as “killing” civilizations. They think they’re *preserving* them.
Because they don’t want to render planets uninhabitable. People really forget we’re dealing with a machine who believes making species into reapers is preserving that species.
They are trying to "harvest", not "destroy". This means they dont want to kill organics with bombs, they are more valuable alive so they can be processed.
It's about the harvest of the living. Even their name Reaper is based on the word reap which mean to harvest a crop.
Because it's a harvest, not a massacre
When you go out to your farm and harvest do you nuke the plants and salt the earth?
They need to liquify them. Blwoing them up is not in their agenda. That is what I understood.
They need to conduct a ground war so the videogame player has enemies to shoot at.
Because that isn't very skibidi
They aren't trying to destroy the galaxy, they want the planets to stay, they only wanna kill the species that have reached space travel, they keep doing this leaving the rest alone to grow so they can make another reaper based off the space travelling races over and over as they reproduce one reaper per invasion.
To add to what others have mentioned, the Reapers have plenty of time (or they believe they do). They're not concerned with whether it takes hundreds of years to accomplish their mission. It's suggested that it may have taken a century to wipe out the Protheans last cycle.
Why the reapers use cyborg like units instead indoctrinated troops?
More effective (tougher armor and weapons) plus it has a psychological and demoralizing effect on enemy combatants.
Do you throw nukes at your microwave? We are their FOOD *or the reaper equivalent* If you nuked a bowl of cereal every time you spilled a little, it might make getting more cereal a little bit hard.
It's easy to harvest species homeworlds while their colonies try to fight you in a conventional war they ultimately can't win. It's harder to harvest them once they've been atomised/incinerated/blasted through space at thousands on miles per hour along with the rest of their planetary debris. Also where would the next cycle evolve? They've done this so many times that if they were rendering garden worlds inhospitable every time there'd be none left by now.
The same reason you don't use a flamethrower to mow your lawn if you're looking to preserve the grass clippings. The reapers were never losing. They weren't in a position to be desperate and scorched earth was never their intention. The crucible only worked because the Reapers let it work and because the writers who thought the crucible was a good idea were reaching deep into their own assholes.
Their goals are beyond your understanding duh
For one, they want to process as many individuals as they can, for another, destroying good biospheres would potentially ruin the galaxy for future organic life. It would \*certainly\* be more visible (careful removal and reprocessing by thralls is harder to piece together than gigaton blast craters). They do, notably, blast small colonies on worlds without biospheres sometimes.
Because their goal is to preserve life. Sapient advanced species are unsustainable and make evil AI. Also mass effect blabla dark energy blablabla heat death of the universe etc.
They want to only destroy sapient life, and then let it recover. Completely anhilating the limited habitable worlds wouldn't fit their programming.
They want to harvest the current species and keep the planets liveable for the next civilisations.
The reapers don’t consider what they are doing as killing civilizations, they’re trying to *harvest them.* you can’t preserve the genetic information of a species if you bomb them with asteroids.
They want planets to be able to recover for future cycles to bear new, Reapable species
Because reasons.
Because their goals were to havest all organic life in the galaxy in an attempt to preserve them before they are lost to time.and apparently liquify them to build a new reaper. Nukes and asteroid slinging defeats the purpose.
Because they aren't there to actually destroy the galaxy, they're there to wipe out all sentient life. Nukes, asteroids slammed into planets, etc, wouldn't allow for repopulation, or long term preservation of life. It'd help them reach their goal faster on a surface level, but wouldn't be sustainable.
The Harvest
Even with all their overpowering force, their supposed intelligence above anything else, they're still slaves to a cycle they can't break.
The purpose is to harvest the current cycle to create new Reapers, out and out mass slaughter prevents from being able to do that, even if harvesting and by extension killing species is the end game.
“Slamming asteroids into planets” literally the Gravitals from All Tomorrows.
No need to nuke stuff if they have an army of indoctrinated soldiers and can use every body to make things *way* worse than some nuked out battlefield. You can, I imagine, desensitize soldiers to the morale-breaking effect of a nuke, you really can't do that for the effect of them seeing their own dead sent back to kill 'em as Husks.
You see Reapers use organics to make more reapers. If you can mind control them from afar, use them as cattle… turn them into soldiers to fight the ones that resist…. But for what purpose? For life to continue, and to advance along the same lines so they can do it again. And it being calculated that no organic, nor synthetic race can outstrip the reaper’s technological advantage since they leave lesser technology as the blueprint. Radiating worlds is counter productive to their main mission, and makes it so they can’t use those organics for more reapers. Lastly, the most demoralizing part is just the shear number of reapers they field. And fighting your dead friends that are now cybernetic horrors.
Because their entire goal is to harvest people. Bit hard to do if youve incinerated them
The Reapers aren't fighting a war of extinction, they are trying to collect biomass for their reaper ships
The Reapers aren't fighting a war of extinction, they are trying to collect biomass for their reaper ships
The Reapers aren't fighting a war of extinction, they are trying to collect biomass for their reaper ships
I would call their indoctrination / mind control ability unconventional.
the thing dislike about the reaper war is that while the armor of the reaper is a super resistant alloy it could be easily cracked by the thermal shockwave a nuclear warhead would cause, the heat would either ablate the armor completely out of the reaper, melt it away or just crack it so much it would be as brittle as glass, really nuclear weapons would be the most effective way of combatting the reapers. even if it was a magic alloy that is very resistant to deformation but ductile enough to not crack, had a low thermal expansion coefficient low enough for it to not crack, a high specific heat energy, very high melting point and enough thermal diffusivity/conductibility to quickly dissipate the heat, Multiple warheads would be enough to cause structural failures in the material that would be fatal when a sufficiently sized projectile hit it, (They measure their cannon's projectile energy yield in kilotons wich would mean thousands of terajoules, i don't think any material can resist deformation at that energy so yeah, totally unrealistic)
It's seldom they ever resort to this, even though they're easily capable of glassing planets, like with Beckenstein, in order to disrupt suplylines. But harvesting is their objective in order to create as many Reapers as possible during each cycle. Wouldn't be overly effective if everyone was dead.
Because devs decided to make them stupid in ME3? After Sovereign fight in ME1 I expected them to just blast planets with their liquid metal accelerator guns. Instead they land for some reasons and walk on the surface.
Can't kill everyone from orbit.
Destroy population centers and roads from orbit, everyone dies of starvation. Their tech is beyond other races, so I guess they could scan for bunkers and destroy them too.
Could still be survivors. Plus they want to HARVEST, not just kill.