crapeaucrapeau:dr-jekyl:This is something I’ve been working on for a bit: a high-level map tha

crapeaucrapeau:

dr-jekyl:

This is something I’ve been working on for a bit: a high-level map that charts the progress of the Reaper war. It’s a bit confusing seeing it all jumbled together like that so, if you’re interested, you can see it broken down by wave here. I was going to do it as a gif but, well, to get the necessary level of detail the gif has to be truly enormous.

There are some major caveats/issues with it:

• It’s based primarily on when a cluster gains a reaper icon, signifying it (or at least its mass relay) is under Reaper control. This is not going to be 100% accurate to when a system actually fell because the game gates largely by the completion of Priority Missions. Hence it’s broken into waves according to priority mission.
  
• We’re missing huge tracts of information about what happens to non-human colony worlds, and don’t have the locations of almost all of them. We don’t even know the location of Khaje, the hanar homeworld.
• The base map appears to have been drawn directly from the game maps. I’ve added Taetrus to it and a couple of missing relay links, but I’ve left off a number of other places, like Khaje or Tiptree, because there isn’t enough information about where they’re actually located.
  
• The map uses known relays whenever possible, but w don’t have details for massive sections of the relay network.
  
• There are going to be things I’ve missed because, like the initial failed invasion of Illium, they’re only known to us through ambient dialogue and I’m not yet ready for another replay to find them.
• Some events, like retaking Omega or the Cerberus invasion of the Grissom Academy, are determined by the player.

My most interesting takeaways so far:

• The overall strategy for the Reapers seems to have been to encircle the major civilizations and push them up against the galactic core while maintaining just enough presence in frontier and contested systems to catch people trying to flee.
  
• The invasion of Earth was one part of a set of four coordinated strikes against human, turian, asari and terminus space. Indeed, all waves see the opening of new fronts across the galaxy.
  
• The war for control of human space was essentially completely over by the time the Citadel Coup happened, so much so that the Reapers can afford to leave a major colony world like Benning (in the Arcturus cluster) alone until quite late in the war without fear of counter-attack.
• Cerberus and the Reapers were coordinating in such a blatant fashion from the outset that it would be obvious to any intelligence analyst who cared to look.
  
• Despite fandom perception that most asari worlds were quick to fall, the opposite is true: Thessia is the outlier (and there may also be an explanation for its quick fall). Named asari worlds almost invariably either held out for lengthy periods under sustained pressure or required orbital bombardment to subdue. Illium, notably, was hit in the first wave and held out to the bitter end.
  
• The salarian’s gamble to stay out of the war as much as possible and concentrate on defending their own territory actually paid off, big time.
• The galaxy is going to have a truly massive pirate/antisocial element problem straight after the war given how lightly the Reapers touched frontier space.

This is absolutely amazing ! Wow ! Your attention to detail, down to showing which attacks failed, is wonderful.

A quick question : what’s that little purple arrow next to Hawking Eta ? Is it significant, or is it a placeholder ?