@Hoyr Let's address the elephant.
What will the rest of the Citadel do? Why do you make it sound like it's an Alliance/Batarian war? Shouldn't big three jump to our side?
I get that they wouldn't want to be at the front lines, but shouldn't they at least declare their support? If they don't, then what is the reason behind the treaty of Farixen?
Plus Batarians opened a relay with full knowledge of the consequences. Humans got blitzed for doing much less.
To address this out of order:
I'm talking about it being SA vs BH because as of this exact moment that's all it is. I mean I haven't mentioned any of the Batarian puppet states or their "allies" that have declared (officially or other wise) on you as well or any of that stuff either.
The ban on opening relays only applies to Primary Relays you can open all the secondary ones you like. (Additionally if you can prove you know where the Primary Relay goes you can open it.) On top of that it's a Citadel law that applies in Citadel space, which the rest of the galaxy seems willing to roll with. Primary Relays only link to a single partner. Secondaries can target any secondary relay in range so this could have been done with a hidden secondary relay. Not illegal is a bit worrying that such a thing exists assuming that's what happened. (It's not what happened, the Alpha Relay has been in uses for years, it just has an extra mode.)
The Treaty of Farixen is a mutual agreement to not have an arms race with an agreed upon ratio of power. It's enforced by economic/political power namely if you don't follow it you don't get a Citadel embassy and thus don't get to add items to the agenda of the Council and get kick out of the Citadel system. If one was at war with a party that didn't follow it (either as a signatory or just as a polite nod to the Citadel) then a nation would have good cause to call on aid. (Also in case of an existential war it would probably be suspended) In addition the need for dreadnoughts is actually low enough that many don't build all the ones they can so frankly no one cares that much. The treaty is purely an arms control agreement made after the Krogan rebellions. Unless someone has to many dreadnoughts it probably won't come up unless something like the Rachni, or Krogans happens again (or the Reapers).
I point you to the Geth invasion of 2183 in canon. Which could be sum up as, "You can take them, you've been saying how ready you are for the galactic stage right? We don't want to piss of the Terminus powers and us moving a fleet in there would do that." (Personally I believe that this was quickly followed by back room panicking about the Geth invading enmass and later lots of sighs of relief that the Geth were only playing around) Of course there may have been a fair amount of political issues at home where politician feared calling on/receiving the aid of alien powers for fear of losing support (Yay politics).
Anyway based on may understanding, The actions of the big three:
To start of with none of the have any formal alliance with the SA, their trade partners and the rulers of (for lack of a better term) an economic zone the SA really likes being a member of. So they actually have zero obligation to get involved. The SA has NO ALLIES. Unless there's a canon source I missed?
The Salarians would avoid committing to any conflict in an major way for as long as they can. That doesn't mean they wouldn't have the STG support the side they liked more though. As well as the usual politician says we're cheering for you stuff and some sorts of aid.
The Asari are a direct democracy and like any stable democracy it's designed to be slow unless it's very important. There's going to be arguments, debates, votes. Some of the individual governments and huntress bands may make up their minds on the issue long before the collective Asari Republics do.
The Turians are the most unified and militaristic group their the most ready, willing and able of the big three to get into a war. However they don't really like humanity of the SA they think they're rash, impulsive, and really need to get knocked down a peg or two. Humanity has been expanding far more rapidly than anyone expected into the Terminus, sure you've got a better rep on the "humans are aggressive front" than canon*, but the inability to defend it's colonies makes the SA look like idiots to the Turians.
*Human these days rep is more extremely expansionist, ambitious and very aggressive when pissed off.
The biggest problem is the fact that the three of them hate and fear true war to a fault. They've seen the results. Ganging up on the Batarians is very likely to cause them to try to take everyone they can down with them. MAD doesn't work when the other guy is already being destroyed. Bad enough to begin with, but if they know where more "hidden" relays are... (or if whatever trick the Batarians used can reach them) then that could mean terrible things. Oh and there afraid of pissing of the Terminus powers which moving fleets into that area would apparently do (Number one reason I dislike ME2, they made the Terminus lame and made a lot of the plot of ME1 sound silly)
I'm going to address this stuff and the impact of your past actions on this in the next news section.
*I can't find the numbers on the RoF increase, although I think it was 10x normal speed, but here is the quote that says we have it:
I am 99% certain that is correct.
@Hoyr - Would there be any delays or cost increases to stacking Factory Is atop each other? I figure we could quite easily build stacks of 25 without issue.
*Does a lot of thinking, and uses a spread sheet* Okay so here's the thing... your main limit these days is time. Money is less of a thing it'll come with time. Dropping build time to much... is going to have an
overwhelming feedback effect. You can pull of something like Earthfall at least 3 more times (Thessia, Sur'Kesh, Palivan). Letting you get the benefit near instantly? Oh fucking hell no, doing this would basically give you what you want two quarters early and it's almost three! x4 cost/upkeep isn't a penalty when it doesn't hurt you in anyway and in fact helps. There will be no faster building of factories at least with out a lot of spreadsheet work. What was the profit you got on production to credits for citadel arc-reactors sales again? I mathed with the base exchange value... or the ship one that'd be good too.
On a side note you can have ~140,000 ground factories max galacticly until you create a few fully populated core planets (How you'd do that I do not know) or convince me to raise the limit some how.
Hmm... sad, this sort of thing might have been an interesting tech for a Research Hero.
Definitely plans to do that. The only question is if Factory IIIs can be used to pump out starship parts or if Shipyards are required. Depending upon the answer we might have to postpone Project Earthfall a quarter and instead go with Shipyards Everywhere and throw up a hundred small Shipyards scattered across Human space.
We've talked about this IIRC. The answer is yes, but some % should be shipyards IDK... lazy answer 10% (Or something, maybe 5%?)
Eh. I'm not too sure on that. Take one of our Factory IIIs for instance; it requires two hundred million in upkeep per year so if half of that went to personnel that's a hundred million. Even our Researchers only get 80k/yr, which on reflection seems low so they definitely deserve that pay rise, but if we say the average wage for Factory personnel is 100k/yr then we'd need a thousand employees to hit the 100mill mark, two thousand for the more reasonable 50k/yr, which seems like a lot considering all the advanced automation our factories are supposed to have.
Could you two debate it for me please?
Be fair; we don't know what the Council will say yet.
Neat fact the Council has no legal ability to tell their governments what to do. Generally their governments go along with whatever they say though.
See Council response to the Geth and Saren for some insight on the Council's response. Of course it maybe different because of the current circumstances.
even they can't ignore that the Batarians managed to use a secret Relay to hijack the Relay network
Uh the Batarians have literally done nothing wrong (that anyone can prove), other than stating a war. I'm very confused as to were this came from. In summary the laws are don't activate Primary Relays if you don't know where they go. Don't cause harm to the Relays we need them (no trying to break them, no experimenting with the control switches etc). Whatever happened didn't break those Relays and the Batarians could have found out how to do something odd without breaking the laws. If whatever the Batarians did can be used against more than the SA it's a threat sure... but it's not breaking a law. Not that the Batarians are members anymore so the laws don't count for them. The Citadel
isn't willing to enforce their laws in the Terminus by force most of the time, nor is it their job to protect the Alliance.
Unless I missed detail in canon about those laws... pretty sure I got everything.
if they manage to ignore that less than 20 years after the Turians attacked humanity in the First Contact War
The first contact war on the other had was the Turians directly responding to a Primary Relay in Citadel Space being activated. Even them though it was found that the Turians went to far an they agreed to pay reparations. I would have to wonder what would have happened if the Turians hadn't invaded.
Edit: Any updates have been delayed by math and reviewing ME's political situation. *Sigh*
