Mass Effect Story Ideas: Round 14

Pushing for Spectres is good, it shows SA is not just sitting back and taking advantage of Citadel but want to do their part. (As long as they offer people like Anderson or Shepard instead of the corrupt C-Sec guy Udina kept covering for, especially as most of C-Sec appears to be Turians who consider failures of a subordinate to reflect on the superior who promoted them to the post.)
Canon SA is not only the newest member but relatively small and weak, yet they want to rule over other races. They also have bruised egos for being weaker than Turians and act like North Korea, except without aid from China expy to justify that.
The Council is right to think SA is unready for the job and SA is foolish for not understanding that.

Centuries of more time to advance and grow is not a minimal change. And isn't Tomorrow's War one of those ultratech verses far more advanced than Mass Effect?

This brings to mind an old fic I wrote, a NGE Sue parody where the new pilot is a Peacekeeper Major from the Peaceful Free Democratic Republican Peoples Free Democratic Peoples Republic of Finland.
If you didn't realize that PFDRPFDPRoF is a totalitarian military dictatorship, you need to read more TVTropes.


Idea: Instead of trying to force Citadel under human rule, SA concentrates on developing their colonies and fleets with the aim of pacifying and colonising the Terminus systems. As that hinders Batarian and pirate raids, Citadel gives SA as muich help as they can without actually admitting they are using SA as a mercenary force. Humans still lack numbers and experience and know pushhing into Terminus will bring them into conflict with many enemies, so they start to offer good contracts to mercenaries both to bolster their own forces and to keep those mercs from working to the other side. This gives plausible reason why many aliens can be found working on human colonies, which can lead to either better relations or "aliens are only good for serving us" and "they are taking our jobs" memes.

By the time the Systems Alliance had gotten the Council seat there was no way out of it, you either plow forward to the future or abandon your abitions and that is not likely to happen, it would have been a serious blow to the SA's prestige and political influence if they had declined the Council Seat, the Seat demonstrates power and readyness, even if it is a lie you can still use it to bluff, declining the Council Seat shows that the SA are not ready and are therefore weak, it's a trap. The perfect trap, one which the SA has no choice but to fall in and at least try and reap the benefits. Had the Reapers not been such an immediate threat then the Systems Alliance would have, in time, maybe 30-50, 100 years at most with hard labor and smart thinking would have grown into their possition and become a major power, maybe even rivaling the Asari in military might. The Collectors attacked though and Udina sold out to Cerberus, trying to push Human interests.

That's hard to pull off due to the Skyllian Verge, so that means that either the Salarian, Turians OR Batarians have already heavily colonised the Verge leaving the Humans one option avaidable - the Terminus. And hiring mercenaries in numbers big enough to cause distrust or disgust amongs the human population would be a segnificant monetary drain. We know how bad Kar'Shan is and Earth is the shitiest Homeworld of the Citadel, if the SA start spending even more money on military and agressive expansion into the Terminus they will be forced to fight wars with pirates and local Warlords who may start to band togheter to fight off Human Expansion, Earth will suffer the brunt of the War Effort to colonise the Terminus and then you have the Batarians which may declare war against the Humans and rally other Terminus Warlords against them.

The War to Conquer the Terminus cannot be won by Humanity alone so at best they'll be able to grab several dozen worlds, maybe make some raids on Warlords Worlds and beat off Pirate fleets, Citadel support may keep Humanity going for some time but humanity as a whole will suffer for it, the venture to take Terminus worlds as their new Colonies may very well fail because of discent back on the Homeworld and on Colonies which are taxed into poverty and their populations overworked in order to provide more material for the war effort.

Well, that is...hmmm, if we're talking about an all out war which I think is what will happen, limited war - taking one world at a time and building it up will take years to properly accomplish and it will likely be too slow for many politicians and military commanders who are out for the Glory and the Money, if the Citadel is supporting humans to make war and take the Terminus they will be supporting them with far more than simple intel.

Actually I forgot the Verge, of course humans colonise that first and Batarian agression would encourage them to enlarge their military. If SA abandons the nodal fleet idea or rather strenghtens it with much larger local defences, they would have held off larger raids than in canon. However while military spending makes their economy grow, they also need more resources because of that. Need for more ships to protect the colonies would likely encourage concentrating on larger fleets of smaller ships, so SA fleet would be larger than in canon but nobody would be bothered much about restrictions on Dreadnoughts.

Dunno, military spending is usually pointed out to be only a few percent of GNP but people only hear the number of bilions wasted on some useless war. Few companies training locals on each world may be enough to bolster their defences as those same companies could othervise be used to raid that underdefended world. But you'd still have humans grumbling how the mercs are paid better, yet humans have to fight themselves instead of sitting home watching the war on TV.
What did they hire those aliens for if not to die for their human masters? Logic and facts are not necessary for Terra Firma style propaganda.

OTOH, pirates banding together may cause them to get concentrated so they can be taken out more easily, they may show themselves to be much less powerful than feared so Citadel dares to send some Turian fleets out for "live-fire excercises", or they will turn out to be so numerous the Council can no longer assume they will be harmless as long as they are not provoked and will have to assume they will come into Citadel space after the humans are dead.

Easy on paper but did it ever occur to you that the reason the SA chose the nodal style of defence program was BECAUSE they couldn't build enough ships to begin with? Shipyards aren't built over night and I imagine that building them in space adds another dimension of dificulty due to having the workers operate in vaccuum, we know that there are good build speeds overall in the ME verse but the SA isn't just the military arm of Humanity, it IS humanity and that includes it's civilian fleets and colonies. And as you might know building things more slowly over longer periods of time decreases spending, this could also be a factor, a factor which I have observed first hand as a 50 meter by 20 or so meter six story building was built in two years by a crew of no more then a dozen when similiar buildings were being built in months by a work crew that was double or tripple that number. Money is what it comes down to it.

And bigger fleets of smaller ships does not make it perfect, there is a difference when you said a Cruiser and half a dozen frigates against a dozen pirate frigates(dedicated frigates) than when you send an additional six frigates, the numbers are equal yes but you loose the tanking effect of the Cruiser as well as it's larger armament that could take out individual enemy ships more easily. Smaller and in larger numbers is not always better but it could mean that Pirates would be discouraged to attack worlds that HAVE ships orbiting them so this might actually work, but this is neither here not there and I must say that I dislike stories which fix problems that the authors sees because he doesn't like them.

That is indeed a possibility which could mean that either the Citadel will have no buisness with humanity as a whole or it will stop them from entering the Terminus. The Terminus Systems are not populated exclusively by pirates with shitty ships, you have Warlors with their own plantets and rogue species like the Batarians, and there is also the fear of the Geth, no strategist would be stupid enough to not include them into a Terminus War Scenario. If the only thing that happens after the humans move into the Terminus is that a couple of pirate lords are knocked down then as we saw with Torfan not much will change, in fact after Torfan raids from the Terminus nearly stopped so that would tell us that the Pirates and Slavers got spooked and the Citadel called it a day. And with Garvug we saw that none of the Terminus Warlords came to help, only some help from Thuchanka was sent out so what IS really happening? Is the Terminus actually a threat to the Citadel? Or was it because the actions on Garvug and Torfan were individual ones that no-one cared? If Citadel Fleets start rolling in then would the Warlords unite? And what about Aria T'Loak who can order the Asari Councilor around like her little bitch?(God I fucking hate Aria) What is happening there? Is she an agent sent by the Matriarchs to keep everything quiet in the Terminus or is it the Matriarchs who fear her?

I'm starting to re-examine my possition on a Citadel/Terminus war, the conclusion that I've come up with so far is that BioWare completely fucked everything up with the backstory to such a degree that you have no idea what is going on anymore and are forced to ask yourself - Is this the Wild Wild West or something? Because this is what the wider ME Galaxy looks like - the Wild Wild West, the untamed frontier...literally!

Note to self: Don't write while sleep deprived.

Anyway, in response to comments that that the Hanar are horribly unsuited for Warfare- that's kind of the point. Besides, except for the initial war, they have other species to do the nasty bits of fighting for them.

Mostly, I just find the idea of Hanar Overlords hilarious.

You know, I just realized that the Reaper's origin doesn't have to be in the Milky Way. In Schlock Mercenary, Dark Matter Entities from the Andromeda galaxy were responsible for the portal network since they were hurt by Teraports. The Reapers might have been a control mechanism for the milky way galaxy to prevent the widespread use of Dark Matters in levels which can hurt them, a pressure safety valve, so to speak. The reason the Catalyst gave you such bullshit answers? I think it's like the Monoliths from the 2001 Series: After running in autonomous mode for so long, they might have had their programming corrupted.

THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE!

I like. Do continue.

so the dark matter meters turned into count down timers? the designers must have not had TV tropes.

Okay, now I'm wondering what the other specie's versions of TvTropes are like. Or was Humanity the only ones crazy enough to define Tropes?

All we need now is for EDI to take over a lot of ships and then attack Andromeda.

that brings up an old idea of mine: in a need for another galaxy worth of resources Andromeda can't interfere with the Toughs get dumped in Mass Effect (your choice of when).

Actually, that's pretty much it. I just saw a strange convergence of ideas in this. I'm sticking with the Tomorrow's War cross.

Yes, knew that.

Rephrasing: SA does a slower but more complete colonisation, including more defence fleets so they are closer at hand. That would probably mean no resources to colonise the Terminus at all, like I said I forgot Verge was right next door. The games gave the image that SA has been sending small groups everywhere so they have many colonies that have only one settlement, great idea if you have a century of peace to grow but not when you lack the troops to defend them from raiders. Instead of thousands of golddiggers wandering around in hopes of striking rich they should build a big mine; then again between adventurous humans and possible fear of having single point of vulnerability, maybe they don't want to.

I didn't mean they would stop using the nodal plan completely(it does work, as has been noted on this thread), but frigates and a cruiser plus reinforcements from nearby systems plus the main fleets should give better deterrent than no ships but the threat of fleet with Dreads hours or days away. Of course a real enemy will adapt to them and gather a sufficient force to defeat them and both plans can also be defeated by simply attacking two places at once.

Not enough, Analyst Prime, just not not enough. A slower expanding humanity looses the Skyllian Verge to the Batarians and thus gives the Batarians a chance to recover their strenght as they exploit the empty Skyllian Verge, I imagine that Humanity knew that very well, like the Council as well and that is why the Verge was denied to the Batarians and instead Huamnity colonised it, the reason the Batarians have a hate-on for the Humanity to begin with. Slower expansion is a good idea on paper but with more mineral sites discovered you can bring in foreign investment and take larger credit sums from the banks because they can gain a lot of money, it's a space grab and if you don't claim it now it'll be harder for you to find readiliy avaidable resources-rish systems within the Mass Relay network, that is the reason, I believe, that there was such a rapid expansion in the first place, because the Relay's give you speed. Don't forget what sort of an impact the private sector has on SA economy as well, the SA do not control everything, private megacorporations, HUMAN megacorporations have their own fleets and armies, those things did not come out of thin air but with spendings in the billions, if not hundreds of billions of credits. I imagine that not all of the human colonies in the Verge were founded by the Systems Alliance, Feros for isntance.

"Assuming Direct Control."

"Haha EDI. Seriously back the controls."


"This is not a joke, Shepard."

The Batarians have a hate on for humanity because humanity grabbed the Verge so thoroughly with tiny, undefended colonization efforts. A slower, more centralized colonization, that the allows the Batarians to continue their own slow, centralized colonization, would result in tensions not appearing to the degree they do, and possible batarian assistance in protecting the verge from pirate raiders, as well as an SA military with a smaller space to defend.

It would also result in less kneejerk reactions from both species, more likely cultural understanding, and a possible Colonist Shepard whose background is 'Batarian Soldiers saved her colony from Terminus Raiders', which would be hilarious, and kinda fun to write.

...That WOULD be Hilarious indeed though I just cannot move around the Batarian Hegemony still using slaves and don't even get me started on the head implants, those things are a crime against existance! Still there IS a case of a Batarian being raised from a boy by a human couple, and he was speaking about difficulties about growing up in a human enviourment...oh, oh my I started thinking about the Mass Effect expanded universe again, my head is not feeling well...

Well, just going to point this out here, but the Jannissaries and Mamelukes were both entire castes of slaves. Who also happened to be well respected, successful, and tended towards becoming extremely rich and/or influential. Just because they're slaves, doesn't mean they're the slaves we in the west are familiar with. Slavery =/= Slavery, basically.

The chips are fucked up, but, well, it's not hard to mitigate them. Say, in OTL, they're a result of the Hegemony being economically and politically cut off from C-Space, and a violent reaction towards what they view as an assault on the core of the Hegemony. Here, chips may very well be, say, capital punishment, with Out of Caste slavery (as, if I remember correctly, batarians use a caste system), being a serious social issue within the hegemony itself, with abolitionist movements and the like beginning to spring up.

Certainly more interesting than 'RAAGH, BATARIANS BAD! SA IS WESTERN EUROPE+US IN SPACE! HUMANITY, FUCK YEAH!'

DO NOT!!!...*sigh* I'm sorry, do not speak to me of Jannissaries, I know that they were respected and feared due to their possition, they did end up like the Pretorian Guard in the end and were disbanded.

It could be possible but slavery is the only reason the Hegemony is still standing - free labour, mitigate it to capital punishment and the numbers of slaves will likely decrease drastically, in order to make your idea work you'd have to turn the Batarians completely around and have them be a Citadel Race that is on the frontlines against the Terminus Pirates and Warlords, the reason that there are so many slaves is because the war is so intense and large that prisoners of war return to the Hegemony by their thousands. D'oh! If the Batarians are made into a Citadel Race they wouldn't need so many slaves because their economy wouldn't be fucked up in the first place!

It's certainly an interesting AU but of course with Mass Effect we always hit the problem right here - What happens next? Or for that matter, will it change anything at all? The big threat is the Reaper Invasion, a meriad of stories can be made about the wider galaxy but once you get to the Reapers and all of this AU is just pointless because in the end it would still be a ME Game Walkthrough. This is what I always see as the biggest hurdle to overcome...do you have any ideas?

Makes sense mostly, though slower advance might still have stopped Batarians as they wanted all the Verge for themselves but Council refused and that's the point of conflict. If Council rules those planets belong to SA, current occupants can be evicted with mass drivers if needed.

Batarians had been Citadel members since Before Christian Era, if the Council was interested in allowing them more colonies they likely wouldn't have ruled against them in canon TL either. If SA took too long to grow and Citadel only looked at the number of planets instead of population, GNP or fleet sizes, they might not give SA the embassy until later, but I don't really believe this as both Asari and Turians should apprecialte humans taking the long view and they still don't like Batarians. OTOH, Batarians seemed to take disproportionate offense, so either humans aren't the only reason they left or Council allowing the human idea of claiming worlds they have barely surveyed and not developed at all was indeed terribly against established customs; maybe the Batarian economy was based on colonising those worlds over the next century and current problems are because the debts cannot be paid.

Then again, considering how slowly Citadel species have spread(with 300 years of war against Rachini and limits on opening Mass Relays holding them back), they may actually are scared of humans and willing to allow them colonise many worlds just like Krogans. Now is the Council as stupid as fanon thinks or are they readying some plan to curb humanity? Maybe a simple plan of letting them reach farther than they can hold, establishing all those colonies took a lot of money SA will not get back anytime soon.


My intent was to increase immigration and development of the colonies they have just so SA can have the bigger economy it needs. Seems weird that nobody is in a hurry to improve things, a land grab is useless if you don't develop that estate. Bigger colonies have more to trade and more people with vested interest in defending those colonies will be willing to join the military. Also note that Terminus systems have been scouted centuries ago yet Shepard could still find minerals rather easily, while planets near to Earth were supposedly a new frontier. Wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate on your core systems for the first few years?

Now I've looked at the codexes on those colonies and the numbers given really do not make sense unless you live in BattleTech and raiders come to stomp your colony flat every few years.
Eden Prime is mentioned to be one of the first and most advanced colonies beyond Charon relay, yet their population in 2183 is 3,7 million.
Query: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
Isn't Earth a polluted hellhole people want away from? Turians were said to think Shanxi was the human homeworld but even Terra Nova only had 4,4 million people in 2183 and the planet was receiving a rush of colonists due to large deposits of platinum being found in 2170. Are all races under harsher birth control laws than China? If a private group can set up their own colony in Terminus Systems, why is SA incapable of hauling sufficient numbers of people to set up and develop the real colonies?

Humans are obviously advancing ridiculously fast: 2148 Protean cache found, 2150 first extrasolar surveys&Terra Nova found, 2151 SA begins building warships, 2157 FCW, early 2160s colonisation of Verge, 2165 embassy on Citadel(most species waited for a century or more for theirs), 2183 Eden Prime attacked.
IMHO the timeline would make more sense if Mars ruins were found a century earlier and FCW was still in 2157 because if they could scout and colonise so many worlds just a few years then those worlds should have been much larger 30 years later. And while fleet sizes are dependent on amount of E0 available, they are using the stuff so freely for everything else there is no plausible reason why military would suffer shortages.

I suspect the real reason the Council didn't side with the Batarians on the Skyllian Verge issue is they wanted to screw with them. Remember the Batarians have something of a superiority complex and from the codex you get the impression that the Batarian Hegemony was often in political trouble with the rest of the Citadel races due to their attitudes and practice of slavery - which led to many a sanction by the Council.

Its also possible that the Council was planning to play the Alliance and the Batarian Hegemony off against one another. Keep Humans and Batarians focused on competing with one another in the Skyllian Verge so they don't cause to many more waves elsewhere in Citadel Space. Of course they didn't anticipate that whole temper tantrum the Batarians threw when they couldn't get their way.

Some general issues:

- The timeline reads as if intelligence combined with reverse engineering do not exist, the Hanar reverse engineer Covenant tech, but why isn't the Citadel doing the same with Hanar tech? ONce a Cure for the Krogan is developed by the Citadel, why aren't cured Krogans captured by the Hanar and a cure based on the Citadel cure developed?

- Presumably you want 2160 CE Humanity and the other races relatively on par technologically, but the Citadel and the Hanar have a 2000 year arms race still going on, I don't see how this is possible unless you make the alien races actually much dumber than humans. (And I'll admit that the canon timeline suffers from the same issue).

Yes, but they were awesome while they existed. Seriously.

Gonna edit some stuff into this, sorry, but class just ended, don't have time to type.

Sure.

Three variants here:

Late Change: Things go as OTL in 1, but in 2, things change massively. The slower expansion results in the Collectors having fewer human colonies to attack, so attacks are more noticeable. Shepard is sent because they know that an unknown faction is attacking colonies. Things go standard for a bit, shep dies, Batarian statesec resurrects him instead, due to them becoming suspicious of their superiors (Who are becoming more affected by the Leviathan of Dis), and beginning to believe his Theory. With government funding, etc. Lazarus isn't quite as crippling, and Shepard is brought in as the 'local expert on Reapers'. The game is more two pronged, getting the old gang back together, going through the Terminus looking for collectors, and batarian/SA political intrigue as you defend your position as a Spectre and root out signs of the higher ups being indoctrinated. The game ends after the collector base, with you and some Batarians doing the entire 'Arrival' thing, and after Bahak, revealing the threat of Reapers to the galaxy.

In 3, we scrap the crucible (I wasn't fond of it), and the war is more, well, warlike. Khar'Shan and Earth are embattled, but with larger colonies, less isolation, etc. it's more of a fight. ME3 is more 'a proper war' than what we actually got, with Shepard travelling throughout the

Early Change: Everything changes in ME1. With the SA's buildup being less spread out, and each colony both having more defenses, as well as a less repressive, allied Hegemony, the entire plot warps. The author can control this, but you're basically saying 'fuck the rails' and going nuts early on, though the battle of the Citadel likely happens as is.

Who Cares About Shepard: You don't make Shepard and Co the main character, they go through modified versions of canon events, but that's in the background of a different story entirely. Fuck the games skeleton, you're writing your own story.

Part of it is AU story premise, part of it is that canon SA's colonization seemed to have been loads of tiny colonies everywhere, and a smaller, but larger scale, colonization effort probably would have been easier to negotiate around. Extrapolating from canon, basically.