...the Quarian ark have docked had the Natanus not been destroyed?

They launched five arks (one delayed), but the Nexus seems to only have four docking ports. Been bugging me since I thought about it.

@freedom4556: Spoiler alert: I'm pretty sure the writers didn't think about that.

If I had to take an in universe guess, I would assume that, given the total lack of even the most basic foresight that seems to have been put into the project planning, it would have been logical to assume that at least one ark would not have made it. But the again, that assumption would itself have required some degree of foresight.

So the answer is "because videogames."

@lawgamer: It just hadn't occurred to me until I noticed that they do in fact update the Nexus' loading screen as you locate the missing arks. I've got a close friend who's still working his way through the game, and talking plot with him had me thinking about it.

Maybe the Quarian ship would have been its own little flotilla around the Nexus? With the Quarian's compromised immune system I can't image the terror of going to a different galaxy full of germs ready to kill you.

So rather than mingle with the Nexus, which would be bringing in germs from all over the galaxy, they would have kept the Natanus a quarantine for Quarians?

I have one for you: why would The Nexus and all the arks lack even the most basic self defense mechanisms? Clearly they didn't care about Council space legalities since they all have advanced A.I. onboard that would warrant life sentences, if not the death penalty. As such, why not attach some space cannons or lasers? Maybe retrofit each ark into a dreadnought-equivalent over the 600 YEAR LONG VOYAGE? As is, their only choices upon facing a hostile enemy vessel are to run away until damage and low power leaves them doomed or out-in-out surrender and hope for mercy that likely won't be given...

... which are exactly what the Asari ark and Salarian ark do, respectively. This game has terrible writing and tortured logic. A single Kett cruiser could have knocked out the Nexus by just sitting there and plinking away at it.

I recommend doing what my friends advised me and focus on combat and jump boost hopping. You'll save yourself a lot of hand-wringing. :-P

Edit addition: oh, and to pre-empt two common counterpoints. Yes, spaceship weapons in Mass Effect have to vent built-up heat via gas giants... but that didn't stop even the Normandy from having guns. It just had to use them judiciously. An ark could use its self defense tools, vent at a gas giant, and be right as rain. Another argument is that the ships aren't designed to support guns, as evidenced by Cora saying something to the effect of "if The Tempest had a main cannon, the recoil and reverberations from it would shatter all our viewports and damage the hull." Her words indicated to me that Kallo is a moron for designing a ship unable to host even a single defensive countermeasure outside of "running away." If such is the case with the arks and The Nexus as well, then all the people in The Initiative are absolute idiots for designing ships too structurally weak to be able to defend themselves! That's an absurd amount of incompetence.

@lazyimperial: I always assumed the lack of defences was a 33-minutes BSG type scenario. They mention in ME1 somewhere that space battles are extremely short because the minute someone starts losing they jump away. The only way to make someone stand and fight is to threaten something stationary that they care about. Hence the siege of Shanxi. I can only assume that the Initiative knew they'd be outnumbered by a galaxy's worth of natives were the crap to hit the fan, so the only recourse would be running or diplomacy, regardless of their weaponry.

That all assumes you can't be tracked through your jumps, which was the case in OT, but I can't remember if they say either way in Andromeda.

@freedom4556: In Andromeda, the Asari ark is literally tracked across the entire Heleus cluster, jump after jump, with pin-point precision.

Also, the entire goal of The Initiative is to build colonies on stationary "Golden Worlds" that they care about and want to hold onto as central pillars of their nascent nation-state. I'm not sure how a battle plan of "run away" would work for defending one's planets against alien spaceships that could easily glass a colony from orbit. I'm sticking with my "bad writing" interpretation. :-P

Maybe the Quarians wouldn't pay for the "Extended Docking Port" DLC?

http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Ark

@lazyimperial: I assume the writers de-militarized the Initiative to make them appear less like space imperialists. But I could be wrong, because the script has everyone talk about "colonizing" Heleus as if it's not the most historically loaded word ever.

@lazyimperial: Ehh, the writing is certainly poor, you'll get no argument from me there. However, it makes sense that if the writers wanted to avoid the colonial imperialist look they'd say that the Initiative would hop around for a bit after arrival looking for uninhabited/uncontested garden planets. Potentially meeting, angering, and fleeing from their new neighbors along the way. Granted, that's not how the final plot reads. They're pretty explicit about how "we knew exactly where we were going before we left" and "these planets are our last hope." It's too bad, too, because the Scourge would make you think the pathfinders should search out plan-B planets and go exploring, not go poking at ancient alien maguffins while trying to "fix" the plan-A planets. You're definitely left with the impression the original plot outline and the final shipping game diverged quite significantly. Makes since in the light of knowing Andromeda had a procedurally generated galaxy for a year of development.

Haha, yep. :-D I'm glad to know that other people tilted their heads at the mixed messages as well. "Oh no, we're not imperialists. We have an almost comical lack of military assets save assault rifles and jump jets. We're just an utterly harmless, civilian-oriented, toothless tiger of an organization. Anyways, great chatting. If you'll excuse us, we have 100,000 people to wake up for our colonization efforts. We've handpicked seven of your best worlds to take over, terraform, and convert into our own personal colonies. Our breeding coordinators are very enthused about our future prospects and our infrastructure engineers are already planning for future colonial expansions. Utterly harmless, by the way. Our slogan? 'We've got this.'"

Truthfully, I think things would have been more fun if they'd gone full-on, "failure isn't an option" imperialistic. The Milky Way is dead and we're the last members of our civilization. We have to get a foothold and rebuild. We'll aim for minimal casualties and damage, but we need planets and resources. They can work with us, or we'll take it. Tough times call for tough choices that will have... massive effects. *mic drop* Then again, that involves a lot of shades of grey in a franchise rooted in binary morality (paragon / renegade).

@freedom4556: Hm, wow. I had no idea they had looked at procedural generation. Frankly, a Diablo 3 rift-equivalent system could've worked. Maybe some kind of bulletin board that would give you a procedurally generated combat mission. "Ruff Ryder, *FACTION* needs you to go to *PULLS NAME FROM HAT* and kill *ENEMY FACTION TYPE* / collect *INTEL TYPE* / activate *BEACON TYPE*." Then the game's algorithm could construct the level design from a collection of set pieces and planetary types. It'd certainly play to Mass Effect Andromeda's strengths (the combat and art design). A procedural galaxy, though... that's a bit much. I imagine there would be a lot of dull repetition and blandness, kind of like No Man's Sky. Probably why they axed the idea. *shrug*

This premise is so much more interesting than what we actually got that it kinda bums me out.

@odinsmana said:

In a perfect world, I think they would have done the following:

1) Make the Kett less comically evil and more nuanced, which would make them more compelling than the Saturday morning cartoon villains they are right now.

2) Make the Angara stronger, which would have also made them more interesting and also made their interactions with the Initiative have less of a "Mighty Whitey" overtone.

3) Have the Angara and Kett locked in a long-term war that has kind of stalemated.

4) Have the war be over something that isn't necessarily trivial, but also doesn't have a clearly moral right/wrong. Something like a religious conflict where it's understandable that the races would hate each other and fight so bitterly but nothing that an incoming race would have any basis for picking a side on. It would also make the conflict wide-spread enough that the Initiative's answer can't just be "we'll go hide over here."

5) Have the central plot of the game revolve around the Initiative having to navigate the Kett-Anagara conflict in order to get worlds/resources the Initiative needs to survive. Make it clear that neither the Kett or Angara are real thrilled about having the Initiative around, but are also willing to deal in order to get the Initiative on their side and break the stalemate.

In other words, each side would say "hey, blow up the other guys and we'll give you these planets." That gives a player a goal - survive - but also makes the choices harder than "The Kett are evil. Shoot the Kett."

6) I like what @lazyimperial said about making the Initiative pretty much the last survivors of the Milky Way so they would be militantly committed to their survival. That would provide a reason for the Initiative to actually, you know, arm their ships. And having the people be the surviving veterans of the Reaper War would make it plausible that even a small force would be pretty battle-tested and bad-ass to a level that the Andromeda races would be interested in making nice.

@lawgamer: Fleshing out the kett would have really helped Andromeda. The crazy thing is, the kett -- and the Archon in particular -- suck in the same way that Corypheus' venatori sucked in Inquisition: blustery cartoon mooks with no apparent ideology, and is evil simply because the game needs an opposing force to bind all the world's warring factions together. Yet the leader also takes the time to specifically designate the protagonist as their "rival" after meeting them like once, which I interpret as the writers' bid to make me, the gamer, feel important.

That Bioware's two most recent antagonist factions suck in precisely the same way is more than a little disheartening, and makes me wonder if the Sarens and Loghains are behind us forever.

@encephalon: I think even if they can't flesh them out as a species for whatever reason, it's important that the villain get a couple of "wins" in during the plot. The problem with both Cory and the Archon is that from the time you meet them until the end of the game, the player is foiling ever single one of their plans. It's hard to take them seriously if they are so incompetent. They need to beat you occasionally in order to feel like a legitimate threat.

@lawgamer: Yeah... For some reason, I got that sense more in Inquisition than here (even though objectively speaking, Corypheus is the more competent guy). Corypheus fucks up Haven, which is in the ballpark of a good "down-but-not-out" moment for the good guys, it just comes way too early, at the end of Act 1 when it's really more of an Act 2-3 transition moment; the Archon's kidnapping other-Ryder falls entirely flat because who gives a shit about other-Ryder.

You two are reminding me of an image someone linked from Reddit on a previous Andromeda thread:

Andromeda has the Ruff Ryder going from success to success. Well, until the ridiculous Hyperion abduction segment that somehow leads to us reclaiming an entire deus ex machina Remnant Fleet to make up for not having any space-navy of our own. After all, it's not imperialism if all your military ships are local-made by long-dead natives.

Edit Addition: Good point, @encephalon. Considering the uselessness of the other Ryder and the incredible usefulness of an actual space fleet, I guess the greatest moment of defeat in Mass Effect: Andromeda is arguably Ruff Ryder's greatest moment of triumph. :-/ Yay?

It's more like, what if all the milky way races were relegated to a Quarian flotilla like status? The Nexus and the arks are all capable of moving, and in fact the Initiative is much like the flotilla in that they're attempting to harbor the remains of (several) species and scrounging up enough resources to keep going while searching for a new home.

One thing I was always wondering is why there's this assumption that the planets the Milky Way races want would even be important to Andromeda races. There are a few flavor text references in OT to races trading systems or planets with the Volus or Elcor because they have such different requirements for habitability.

The gun thing is touched upon, as very early on in the game (maybe the first mission?) there are fighter ships for escort. I imagine the flagships (Arks/Nexus) were left w/o weapons as a show of peace, with the smaller armed ships meant to do any fighting. Then they hit the "space anomaly" and they all blow up? All 10 of them or so? It definitely isn't the most well-conceived thing, but at least there's something.

Edit: The description of things is here, although it never *really* explains why they don't have some giant ass guns:

Honestly it was probably just overlooked, although they do go way out of their way (at least if you read/see everything) to point out that it's a civilian fleet, exploration/scientific/peacekeeping focus, the grand engineer of the Arks was a pacifist, etc. I remember thinking to myself "Eh, they probably had to leave earlier than they thought & just didn't get the GOD CANNON done in time." It hurts to say, but this Bioware game shouldn't be played for the story anyway (IMO) :( What pulled me through was the gunplay and huge differences in weapon & ability sets, and the handful of missions that very obviously got the most time & care put into them (sooo good!)

@ethanielrain: The Salarians had one, too.

Yeah I was just reading up on it & thought I took it out before anyone saw ;)

Again, really it was probably bad communication between different teams or it just wasn't caught or something, but it isn't much of a stretch to think that one of the 5 ships would have a different purpose. Do they say why it was delayed? I don't remember them doing so...maybe it converts into one giant weapon that orbits the Nexus, or aside from the bare minimum of space for cryo passengers it's just one big battery that gets "plugged in" somewhere else, or the Quarians negotiated to keep it their private living space since they can't breathe the same air as the other species, or any other such thing.

The gun thing seems far worse to me, even with a partial explanation given. If you ever see a great fan theory, @ me please ^_^