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Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity
Posted By: scarab	Date: 8/27/09 6:46 p.m.
In Response To: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity!? (RyanTheHeretic) : Ok, I tried doing a search on this, but I couldn't find anything (though I'm : sure Wu will drop by and link to about 30 threads discussing these exact : issues, heh) so here goes... : I know a few of you think Halo Wars takes a dump on the story and should be : excluded from serious debate, but I think 343 Industries is probably going : to consider it fully canon, and it might even work its way into Legends : (who knows?) so I'm interested in discussing it. : That said, a few things in Halo Wars do not seem stack up with my : understanding of the Halo universe. Maybe I've got things all wrong? Let's : find out. : Firstly, in the "Walk in the Park" cutscene, the Prophet of Regret : says that "the war with the humans will require a great deal many : more machines than we can currently muster". I didn't understand that either but the early parts of the war had human ships outnumber Covenant ships, even in Bungie's version of events. In RTS terms maybe the Covenant spent their resources on research and not on unit production. Maybe their ships take a long time to build. The Brutes who dragged the, soon to be, Arbiter past the Jackal cells complained about being hungry. Was this just bad dialogue or was the Covenant economy really stretched by the war? The galaxy is pretty big and we weren't making things easy for them. They would need a lot of ships to search the galaxy. There was some mention of humans using decoy broadcasts to hide the obvious radio signals that human worlds would have sent out over the centuries. Those signals would be found in spheres that were hundreds of light years in radius. The decoys wouldn't work but at least Ensemble had thought about it. We have to pretend that human worlds were hard to find. : Every Halo novel basically tells us that the Covenant have big armadas. Are : Ensemble saying that when the war started, the Covenant only had a small : fleet? Not entirely implausible, I guess; I'm sure they did build many : ships during the course of the war... but the idea that they needed : "many more" than the Covenant manufacturing lines "can : currently muster" is a bit strange. How unprepared are the Covenant? : They can't be that lacking in ships- High Charity is considerably older : than the Human-Covenant War, and I'd imagine that even before first : contact, Covenant religious doctrine would demand it be protected and : guarded... well... religiously. They would surely have had fleets. BIG haystack, tiny pins... : Secondly, the Timeline says that in 2524, the Kig-Yar ship Pitliless : "brought forth an Unclean Being's corpse. Hear now all Kig-Yar : vessels are to be searched." As a side point guys, when did this : happen? I don't remember a Jackal ship bringing human corpses home? Is : this is Contact Harvest? I can't remember it. But anyway, why would the : Prophet of Restraint be so worried about "unclean beings"? Flood infection? Religious issues? Are only true seekers kosher? Does the corpse of a non-believer somehow defile the beliefs of weak believers? The covenant belief is that none are left behind. What about non-believers? How do the covenant account for the fact that they were not invited on the GJ? Do they have an inferiority complex that they over compensate for? Do they worry that their faith is weak? We really know next to nothing about Covenant religious beliefs. : Isn't it basically said that Truth/Mercy/Regret are only worried about humans : because of their link to the Forerunners, which threatened to break up the : Covenant? Restraint would have no such qualms (at least, not until he : discovered the link himself, perhaps, but that's for another debate) with : humanity, which he might even see as a potential new species to absorb : into the Covenant, so why the fear, why the hostility towards us? I can't remember the incident so I can only speculate as I have above. : I always : assumed from Contact Harvest and Conversations From The Universe that the : Covenant aren't instinctively hostile to new races, but that perhaps they : seek to absorb more and inform others of the importance of the Great : Journey. The Elites' conversation in the h2 booklet suggests that this is usually the case. : Thirdly, yes, the Flood. Specifically, on a Shield World. Please don't tell : me the Forerunners kept them for study there. This is getting ridiculous. : If they turn up in ODST I'm going to cry. Me too, I hope ODST is Flood free. And Reach too! : I dunno, I'm not a fan of semi-retcons that Halo Wars seems to enjoy; I've : long felt that the whole "purpose" of Halo: Combat Evolved : (other than to make Bungie some money and help launch the Xbox) was to : depict the first ever human contact with the Flood (and the Halo Array). : Similarly, I thought that Ghosts of Onyx was telling us the story of the : first ever non-Forerunner contact with a Shield World installation. Maybe : I'm wrong on both those counts, but I can't help but feel Halo Wars : undermines both H1 and GoO by throwing both the Flood and Shield Worlds : into the mix, purely to artificially boost how important it is. I mean, : Ensemble couldn't have just had the Spirit flying around shooting Covies, : right? They wanted to tell a story that MATTERS, and I guess they felt the : Flood and Shield Worlds were the best way of giving their story some : weight. The Halo story is becoming more and more of a joke as it repeats the same story over and over again. Almost every Forerunner installation has Flood. The Flood always escapes. The Covenant knows about the Flood but they always release it. And until the events in the first game, the Flood never seems to have been a threat even though its rampant on almost every Forerunner planet. I would have prefered if Halo Wars had taken place over decades. We could have fought through important episodes in the conflict. We could have followed Keyes' career or Jonsons campaigns. This would have given some plausibility to the idea of researching technologies. Maybe Ensemble was told hands off the Bungie characters. : Whew! All that negativity, and I actually like Halo Wars a lot. Its a bit meh for me. Why did the Covenant go to Arcadia? Was it just a red herring for them? Why couldn't we just MAC the half built Scarab as we MACed the shield in the level before? How was Anders transponder tracked when it was travelling at FTL? Was the ship in slip space or did the author actually think that this was the star trek universe? How did the Covenant manage to avoid detecting a transponder that was powerful enough to transmit over millions or billions of kilometers? How big was that transponder? Where did she hide it? Why did the proto-GM fake her signal? If it hadn't bothered then it wouldn't have been killed. It could have stopped the attack by switching off the fake signal. : Sorry for the : long post folks. Oh, and sorry too for taking Halo so seriously. If you want to apologise for taking Halo too seriously then you have come to the wrong place. :-)

Message Index

The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity!?	RyanTheHeretic	8/27/09 4:49 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	Ragashingo	8/27/09 5:25 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	RyanTheHeretic	8/27/09 6:06 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	Ragashingo	8/27/09 6:30 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	scarab	8/27/09 6:46 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	J23	8/27/09 11:12 p.m.
Re: The Covenant need more ships to fight humanity	Bry	8/28/09 12:43 a.m.
Damn sneaky Prophets..	J23	8/28/09 2:34 p.m.