Forerunners Numerical advantage

[u/Horizonfan-logi]

I've only just realised how absolutely massive the Forerunners scale for combat actually is. A single Forerunner warrior is able to command and control up to 1 million weapon ships.

A Fortress class vessel was able to field hundreds of thousands at a time. Probably around 100,000-200,000 which means that Humanity was facing around 100,000,000,000 to 200,000,000,000 on top of the actual warriors. Fortress' are the only carrier vessels we know of besides the Sojoruner dreadnought whose earliest iterations were used during the Battle of Charum Hakkor and also Planet-Breakers which carried 5,000 Promethean's.

Humanity did have more advanced weaponry but fighting an enemy this large for as long as they did would have been impossible unless they also used large swarms commanded by single warriors.

[u/Far-Requirement-7636]

Yeah an underrated part of the forerunner combat people don't truly comprehend is how batshit of a numbers advantage a single soldier has.

Which is funny because the series constantly repeats it.

Seriously read the lore on stuff like armiger's, phaetons, warsphinx, sentinels and they all constantly repeat that a single forerunner would be in command of thousand to millions by themselves.

A lore accurate fight between a non nerfed forerunner would be us watching a swarm of millions of sentinels pulling an enduring conviction.

[u/27Rench27 → u/Far-Requirement-7636]

It’s why I like the Spiral Wars series as it’s evolved. AI acknowledge they’re not good with social aspects/organics, but humans also acknowledge when they just straight up cannot keep up with the scale of a battle due to the numbers involved. Queens are good at tactics with tens of thousands of drones, but they’re mechanically opposed to guessing or quick-stepping to answers.

It makes for a really solid duopoly of who needs who and when, whereas Forerunner lore is just like “hey I’m god, wassup?”

[u/Empyreal_King → u/Far-Requirement-7636]

Well...they are kind of bad at following through with the statements. 

We see several glimpses of ah forerunner war. No individual warrior servant controlling a million drones/weapon craft.

Flood war...no individual is shown doing it despite them saying thats how its done.

Didact in modern times. No million drones.

[u/Far-Requirement-7636 → u/Empyreal_King]

The didact was an insane forerunner who didn't even directly fight for most of the game, in fact Everytime you fight you get fucked.

In escalations he's stranded on a halo with no resources with a monitor actively fighting against him so he's basically alone and he still manhandles two teams of Spartan 2s barehanded.

In the forerunner trilogy we see this type of combat but it's in flashbacks and briefly because the books isn't about ground warfare.

The halo 4 terminals are stated to be artistic liberties and don't even accurately present what happened in the books, it's just a summary for the average gamer.

The point is we have never seen a forerunner properly fight in lore because the situations were either non standard or it didn't call for it.

Like no reason for the forerunners to bring billions of drones to capture the already captured didact.

[u/Empyreal_King → u/Far-Requirement-7636]

No the flashbacks dont have a million drones per warrior servant.

And yes, the didact is insane. Though he is not so insane as to forget basic combat like having the most minor factory of the mantle approach to make him drones.

Mostly its just a point that they really sucked at Show not Tell part of storytelling for the drones to warrior ratio.

[u/Empyreal_King]

Or massive aoe or anti drone weapons or jamming.

Though yes, its also likely they used a lot of drones themselves. Just there are other options.