How many reapers are there

By emp6 - Mon Apr 02, am. Edited by emp6, 01 April - PM. By jstme - Mon Apr 02, am. Me and that Leviathan.. A heavy price to pay for getting ME1 long after ME2. Is there a way to get that DLC now? By Tom Lehrer - Mon Apr 02, am. A fleet of at least , ships easy. Tom Lehrer Status: Offline. By Simpfan - Mon Apr 02, am. Simpfan Status: Offline.

By PhotonMaze - Mon Apr 02, am. PhotonMaze Status: Offline. By sth - Mon Apr 02, am. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. According to the game however the Reapers only produce one additonal Reaper per cycle and this is confirmed by the wiki which is not really a good source. So I see a problem with the math here. Our cycle alone has killed at least 3 Reapers and other cycles have managed to kill two at least as well.

I imagine that, though our cycle has been the only one that we know of to mount a large, unified full scale war on the Reapers, other cycles would have had an approximately equally strong military.

If we were able to kill so many Reapers I predict that other cycles should have been able to kill at least one per cycle through whatever means. I am aware by the way that other cycles had their government and communications immediately destroyed by the Reapers, but they still should have been able to mount at least 1 solid stand despite this. So the problem is that the Reapers reproduce at the rate of 1 per cycle, but could be being killed at a rate equal to or greater than 1 per cycle.

This is not sustainable if my assumptions are correct. Available information suggests that a single race is harvested during each cycle to produce Reaper Capital Ships; it appears that other space-faring races harvested during the cycle are used to produce Destroyer-class Reapers. Exactly how or why this distinction is made is unknown. This means that only a single race during a harvest is chosen to create new capital ships - note the plural.

Which means that they pick a race like Proteans in previous cycle and it seems that Humans in current and process it into a Sovereign-class capital ships, each containing billions of processed minds. Also probably a few of mentioned above reapers were only Destroyer class ones, which are in fact the bulk of the Reaper's fleet. While I can't find anywhere official statement saying that "during a harvest Reapers create X new capital ships using Y beings per ship", it is safer to assume that more than one but probably no more than few is made during harvest simply using Occam's razor :.

The Reapers already made partially functional Human Reapaer using barely hundreds or thousands of humans ergo not as many minds are required to create working ship. As you mentioned in the original post, if only one capital ship was created, their fleet would be unsustainable, since single lucky shot although very powerful one would made whole previous harvest invalid and they don't kill for the killing sake but to preserve the harvested specie.

Now on the other hand the derelict Reaper is 37,, years old, which means that there should be at least Sovereign-class ships have been created since then assuming indeed there was new harvest every 50k years and yet we somehow don't see so many capital ships.

This might be due to the fact that they just barely started to appear in the Milky Way and their bulk forces are still on their way or that so many of those ships have been destroyed.

Consider the reaper the collectors were trying to build, apparently to use for opening the Citadel relay to deep space. That would only have worked if the collectors were actually able to collect a number large enough; we can probably disregard what the crew said about "targeting Earth" as exaggeration - they could possible hope to take out a poorly defended colony, but not anything protected by a full fleet.

The baby-reaper is nevertheless well along the path to independent status after being fuelled by a number of humans in the low millions Horizon and Freeedom's progress had a combined population of about 1. While Reapers are undoubtedly beings of terrible power and ferocity, a single Reaper would not be able to survive the combined might of the assembled Citadel races in a direct assault.

At some point Sovereign became aware of the Conduit and swayed a significant number of geth into worshiping it. It used Saren to comprehend the Conduit's location from Prothean Beacons while putting its geth in a supporting military capacity.

Successful in both regards, in CE the Reaper marshals its forces and launches an all-out assault on the Citadel while Saren infiltrates the Citadel through the Conduit. Fortunately, Saren is stopped by Commander Shepard and company, and Sovereign is destroyed by the Alliance Fleet, though this would only forestall the Reaper invasion for a few years.

Shepard knows the Reaper fleet, though dormant and hibernating, is still out in dark space and vows to find some way to stop them. After Commander Shepard's defeat of Saren and Sovereign, the Collectors begin attacking human colonies and abducting their populations.

Cerberus determines that the Reapers are behind this and plans to have Shepard thwart this latest Reaper threat to humanity. Over time, Shepard uncovers disturbing facts regarding the nature of the Reaper connection to the Collectors. Apparently, because humanity is a race of great genetic diversity and is the race that defeated Sovereign, it is enough to gather the Reapers' attention.

It is also revealed that the Collectors were originally Protheans who were captured by the Reapers and genetically repurposed to suit their needs. The Collectors are working under the direct supervision of the Reaper Harbinger , who ordered the Collectors to abduct humans in the Terminus Systems.

The captured humans are taken to the Collector Base and processed into organic matter to construct a new Reaper modeled on the human form.

EDI speculates that this is the Reaper equivalent of reproduction. The incomplete Human-Reaper is composed of facsimiles of the skull, arms and ribcage of a human with its lower spine and torso still under construction by the time of its discovery in CE. EDI concludes that tens of thousands of humans had already been processed. Shepard is able to stop the process and destroy the Human-Reaper.

With the Human-Reaper destroyed and the Collectors defeated, the Reapers lose powerful allies. Harbinger and the rest of the Reapers, who have already been on the move since the destruction of Sovereign, are shown approaching the Milky Way , setting the stage for the Reaper War.

As the Reaper fleet draws closer towards the galaxy, Dr. Amanda Kenson and her team of Alliance researchers discover a Reaper artifact showing them visions of the Reapers' plan: to rapidly invade throughout the entire Milky Way by using a special mass relay with access to the entire network.

This "Alpha Relay" was located in the Bahak System within batarian space near the galaxy's edge. In order to delay the Reapers' arrival, Kenson decides to destroy the relay by ramming an asteroid into it. However, before the plan can go to effect, Kenson and her team are indoctrinated by the artifact.

Kenson is then captured and held for interrogation by the batarians. Word of Dr. Kenson's capture prompts Admiral Hackett to send Commander Shepard or Aliiance Assets to rescue her and investigate what she was up to.

With the arrival of the Reapers imminent, Dr. Kenson's initial project to destroy the Alpha Relay is eventually accomplished successfully by either Shepard or Alliance forces with little time to spare.

This results in the destruction of the Bahak System and a further delay of the Reaper invasion, but at the cost of three hundred thousand batarians living on the planet Aratoht. Not everyone dismissed Shepard's warning, it seems.

An individual or group known only as the " Benefactor " appears to have taken the Commander seriously. With their theory of an impending threat now proven by Shepard's claims, the benefactor then shifted their focus towards a single agenda: saving Milky Way's civilization from the Reapers' destruction.

The benefactor found the perfect front to do so by funding Jien Garson 's near bankrupt project, the Andromeda Initiative - an intergalactic journey to colonise Andromeda. Despite the constraints in time and a vastly expanded scope, the project successfully launched with about , colonists in tow, just ahead of the Reapers' imminent arrival in the galaxy. Six months after the destruction of the Alpha Relay, the Reapers finally return from dark space sometime in CE and begin their next galaxy-wide harvest of advanced organic civilizations.

Their invasion starts in the Vular system in batarian space and rapidly spreads along the mass relay network. Within days, the Batarian Hegemony is destroyed, Earth falls, the Systems Alliance Navy is in full retreat, and a massive offensive is launched against the Turian Hierarchy. Over the following weeks, the galaxy's population centers are conquered or annihilated one by one as the Reapers inexorably advance.

On Earth, the Reapers destroy satellites and defunct nuclear missile silos. They soon begin broadcasting orders, inviting human leaders into their superstructures to "negotiate peace. Commander Shepard, who had escaped Earth in the Normandy SR-2 , begins to actively work to unify the galaxy against the Reapers.

The first step is attempting to secure a krogan - turian alliance by curing the genophage. Shepard manages to destroy a Reaper Destroyer attempting to use the Shroud tower on Tuchanka to poison its atmosphere by luring Kalros , the mother of all thresher maws , to it.

Further into the war, the Reapers become involved in the geth - quarian conflict. After the quarians began assaulting the geth in a bid to reclaim their homeworld, the geth sought the aid of the Reapers, receiving upgrades and greater fighting ability at the cost of their free will.

Shepard manages to defeat the Destroyer broadcasting the control signal via heavy bombardment from the Migrant Fleet , freeing the geth from Reaper control. As it lay dying, the Reaper addresses Shepard and states that the cycle of extinction must continue, although it does not clarify further before deactivating. Isolated pockets of geth mobile platforms still continue to serve the Reapers, however, their programs having been replaced entirely with Reaper codes instead, though only making up a small fragment of the overall geth forces no longer under their command.

Despite the victory on Rannoch , the Reapers invade the asari homeworld, Thessia. The asari, who had been performing hit-and-run attacks against the Reapers, are forced on the defensive as the machines gradually overwhelmed them.

The Reapers also become aware of Cerberus ' attempts to find a way to control them. Henry Lawson runs a refugee camp called Sanctuary on Horizon to study indoctrination. Eventually, he learns that the Reapers use a signal to control their husks and finds a way to co-opt it.

However, while trying to find a way to apply this technique to the Reapers themselves, he underestimates the signal's strength, alerting the Reapers to his activities. In response, the Reapers assault Sanctuary. While the Reapers carry out their latest harvest, they also pursue an old foe: the Leviathans. Although most Leviathans had been harvested to create Harbinger , some had survived and gone into hiding.

The Reapers follow Dr. Garret Bryson 's search for the entity that killed the Leviathan of Dis and send forces after Bryson's researchers. Commander Shepard tracks the Leviathans to Despoina , discovering the Reapers' beginnings from them.

The Reapers also learn their forebears' location and a Sovereign-class ship shows up to investigate. Unfortunately for the Reapers, Shepard convinces the Leviathans to aid in the galaxy's fight. The Leviathans disable the capital ship above their planet and permits the galaxy's militaries to deploy their "artifacts" among Reaper troops, allowing the Leviathans to turn some Reapers against each other. During the war, the united forces are focused on constructing a massive superweapon, dubbed the Crucible , that could theoretically destroy the Reapers.

The Protheans had attempted to build the weapon 50, years prior, but had failed. It is discovered by the scientists building the Crucible that, like the Protheans before them, they are missing a critical component called the Catalyst. They respond accordingly by seizing the station and placing it in orbit of Earth. With little choice, the allied fleet engages the Reapers while ground teams attempt to reach a conduit beam the Reapers use to transport living and dead humans to the Citadel in London.

Unfortunately, the Reapers realize their intentions: Harbinger personally descends to Earth and sends the resistance forces into retreat. Only Shepard and David Anderson make it through to the beam. The Reapers had anticipated this eventuality.