[Kestrellius]

"Destroyers" was the Ancient term for the Shivans. It doesn't refer to big capital ships. Of course, their surprise that the Shivans can be harmed is a bit weird, as it implies that they were never able to do any damage at all.

Of course there are plenty of ways in which the Shivans could possess massive advantages. I'm not discounting those. I'm talking about how people in-universe, and people simply talking about the Shivans as presented in-game, seem to see the Shivans as horribly powerful, when the Shivans as presented in-game...aren't.

[The E]

As for the GTVA, that is never explained.  But one possibility is that they extrapolated from the knowledge that beams could penetrate fighter shields.

My guess is that they analyzed all the data they gathered on the Lucy during its attacks and figured out a theoretical ceiling for the amount of energy its shields can absorb or disperse, and then tried to build weapons systems capable of delivering enough firepower to exceed that capacity.

Whether or not the GTVA was right in assuming that they could break the Lucy's shields now is something we obviously do not know.

[Luis Dias]

Matching their strength and beating them with similar weapons will inevitably be more wasteful than applying overwhelming force. You're arguing nothing is really being lost, but waste is still waste even if it's somehow "negligible" (which is something we don't know for sure). You're positing a scenario in which it prevents certain threats, but the scenario you describe would mean those threats are meaningless. If the Shivans could have buried the GTA underneath 80+ Sathanas then there is no winning scenario. There's no surviving scenario. No strategy, no matter how unconventional, could have coped with that disparity of force. No guerrilla resistance would be possible as everything would have been overrun in weeks, if not days. (That's kind of the point of FS2's ending, in fact.)

The argument you're making is circularly defeating. To have the resources to engage in this strategy means that the Shivans have more than enough resources to obviate any need for it.

(As to what it's cost the Shivans they can't get back, the answer is obvious; it's cost them time. Decades worth. No matter how supposedly godlike, that's still significant; it changed conditions on the ground significantly between FS1 and FS2 and it almost inevitably would for any spacefaring race, including the Shivans themselves unless they've run up against some kind of hard technical limit.)

This is all classically true, but I risk a different mode of thought. Consider the Shivans as a multi-eon, galaxy-spanning species that has either annihilated or contained thousands, millions of other species. In such a scale of management, certain things we take for granted that are important, cease to be, and other issues that are more to the scale of their existence, become important. For instance, imagine that they would always annihilate every species they encounter with the best of the best tech they got. In 99% of these situations, it would run mostly well. The problem comes with the last 1%. All of these species would immediately recognize the sheer superiority of the shivans and then try to come up with weird tactics and long-term strategies. Their planets would be lost, but deep-space orbitals and hidden vessels could become a new nest of infection throughout the eons.

Think on Blue Planet. In this particular detail, they were correct. When Earth was almost lost to an incredibly powerful Lucifer, they spawned a very different attitude in many places. In some of these places, they invented this deep space strategy combined with genetic alterations and so on. When Capella happened, the GTVA itself changed enormously in terms of tactics and strategies. They no longer think on system domination strategies, they think of guerrilla tactics. If just a tenth of that 1% can come up with a solution that is able to *survive* the shivans, they might pass on the infection to other species, they might grow into a powerful shadow force on some blind spot of the shivan solution space.

Think, if you will, about the very problems we are having regarding antibiotics. The analogy isn't perfect, but I hope you get the sense of what I'm talking about here.

If the shivans are not only concerned with these subspecies, but also that ghastly 1% scenario, then they would choose a strategy to deal with all of these species with some semblage of what I meant. They could, for instance, choose some kind of weaponry that was merely just slightly above their capabilities. This would mostly never inflict on these species some kind of completely out-of-the-box thinking about multi-eon spanning strategies on their own. Capella was different. It clearly is some kind of an exception, the shivans were concerned with the star, not with the GTVA. By doing so, they gave the GTVA an incredible information, now they know how superior the shivans are (and thus, according to some mods, new guerrilla strategies were invented). Clearly, they had their reasons to sacrifice this leak of information for superior reasons of their own.

Oh, and you speak of "time"? These species have been here for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and some would say a lot more than that! Time is on their side, not against them. A species that managed to survive and beat the odds for that long is a species that isn't really concerned with a few decades. Their ply calculations are over eons, not centuries.

[General Battuta]

"Destroyers" was the Ancient term for the Shivans. It doesn't refer to big capital ships. Of course, their surprise that the Shivans can be harmed is a bit weird, as it implies that they were never able to do any damage at all.

Of course there are plenty of ways in which the Shivans could possess massive advantages. I'm not discounting those. I'm talking about how people in-universe, and people simply talking about the Shivans as presented in-game, seem to see the Shivans as horribly powerful, when the Shivans as presented in-game...aren't.

Locally mortal, globally divine.

[Kestrellius]

Again, I do get that. It's a brilliant line of thought, and it's very likely correct. But people talk about the Shivans that we see as though they were far more powerful than the GTVA. That's all.

[Luis Dias]

Oh I don't think that's entirely correct. The "shivans that we see" seem quite tasty to GTVA's guns and I think everyone wouldn't disagree with this fact. Apart from the Lucifer in FS1 and the 80 Sathanas in FS2, we seem to be on par with them, except for numbers who are constantly on the "unknown" bracket. And we do know that at the end of FS2, our entire fleet has been deployed, which is to say, there's practically nothing left.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, what's cool about that line of thought is that it lets Shivans be interesting (not godlike) antagonists in the gameplay space, while opening up a lot of cool future design space too.

[Luis Dias]

A game with only unbeatable enemy NPCs would be a very ridiculous game! It would only be "fun" in a JAD-like Douglas Adams-like satire kind of way.

[Valrog]

Another theory could be that the Shivans were running from a species (or multiple species) even more terrifying on the other side of the galaxy.

They don't bother to kill us off with their 80 Sathanas and supporting craft but instead destabilize a star. Doing this does two things. First, it opens up a node to another system where they quickly send their fleet. Second, it also prevents someone hunting them from entering the system for a short time. If that's not terrifying, I don't know what is 

This isn't a "serious" theory, though. I just thought I'd throw in something different. I still think they're the dominant power in our galaxy (but definitely not the universe).

[NGTM-1R]

This is all classically true, but I risk a different mode of thought. Consider the Shivans as a multi-eon, galaxy-spanning species that has either annihilated or contained thousands, millions of other species. In such a scale of management, certain things we take for granted that are important, cease to be, and other issues that are more to the scale of their existence, become important. For instance, imagine that they would always annihilate every species they encounter with the best of the best tech they got. In 99% of these situations, it would run mostly well. The problem comes with the last 1%. All of these species would immediately recognize the sheer superiority of the shivans and then try to come up with weird tactics and long-term strategies. Their planets would be lost, but deep-space orbitals and hidden vessels could become a new nest of infection throughout the eons.

You're arguing an outcome that doesn't follow from your premise. The Shivans operate on infinitely long timescales with massive resources against far lesser beings. They can afford to somehow recon their opponents, assess their tech level, build a new fleet tailored just to fight them, deploy that fleet in conventional war with the real possibility they will lose...

And the entire analogy falls apart right there, because the guerrilla war approach they are trying to avoid is something that is far more likely to happen this way. The losing side of a roughly matched war has a much greater ability (in terms of time and of resources) to consider and initiate exactly the sort of backup plans you are arguing the Shivans intend to avoid by this approach. By scattering enemy combat forces across dozens of systems you substantially increase the possibility some of them will be able to escape when the tide has turned decisively. This methodology is the worst of all worlds. The Shivan scouting attempt could be detected providing time to prepare and possibly leading to a discovery of what they are; their victory could be insufficiently rapid or decisive providing time for their opponents to escape; they could just straight lose.

An instant death scenario in which juggernauts appear over enemy capital worlds only a few days after first contact is still preferable in terms of preventing an escape and guerrilla conflict. There will always be the 1% with their last-ditch colony ship ready to go the moment they encounter a hostile species, but you're saying the Shivans profit by giving them weeks or months to decide to use it, rather than days. That's ridiculous.

Think on Blue Planet.

Indeed. Think on the Sanctuary harder, because it sits in refutation of this argument.

Oh, and you speak of "time"? These species have been here for at least hundreds of thousands of years, and some would say a lot more than that! Time is on their side, not against them. A species that managed to survive and beat the odds for that long is a species that isn't really concerned with a few decades. Their ply calculations are over eons, not centuries.

It's not the Shivan timescale you're arguing matters in this post or indeed previous posts; you have been consistent on the point that the Shivans are effectively dumbing down themselves. Their timescale is not relevant to ground conditions as such. The Terran and Vasudan ones, though, are. And on that timescale major changes have occurred.

[General Battuta]

Optimizing the use of force to accurately target your enemy's weaknesses is a clear, good first-order strategy.

Which is exactly why you might want to avoid it.

[NGTM-1R]

It's a good thing we're discussing the unoptimized use of force then, though in different ways.

[GhylTarvoke]

I would've replied to specific posts, but you all have said everything I wanted to say (and much more). Instead, here's a shameless plug for my theory. It cheats by claiming that Shivan tactics are inferior, but the Shivans were just made that way.

[Luis Dias]

And the entire analogy falls apart right there, because the guerrilla war approach they are trying to avoid is something that is far more likely to happen this way. The losing side of a roughly matched war has a much greater ability (in terms of time and of resources) to consider and initiate exactly the sort of backup plans you are arguing the Shivans intend to avoid by this approach. By scattering enemy combat forces across dozens of systems you substantially increase the possibility some of them will be able to escape when the tide has turned decisively. This methodology is the worst of all worlds. The Shivan scouting attempt could be detected providing time to prepare and possibly leading to a discovery of what they are; their victory could be insufficiently rapid or decisive providing time for their opponents to escape; they could just straight lose.

Losing a battle or two is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. What is important is that the technological and strategic paths that these lesser beings operate in are never within a landscape of ideas where they have to think of outmaneuvering a godlike species, just a slightly better species than their own. Those two scenarios are strikingly different. Consider FreeSpace 2 and what has happened until then. In FreeSpace 1, the shivans launch an attack that I can describe as "genocidal" but with merely one technological level higher than they showcase. They risked losing, but if you think about it, in all odds they would have won. The Sanctuary that you bring to the table is proof enough of this. So, against all odds we "save the day" at the eleventh hour. "But this is madness", you'll say, "They could have scorched the entire alliance with two or three Sathanas, why didn't they and why wouldn't they?"

The difference of the approach is that in the small odds that the subspecies survived a Lucifer attack (level 1), they can scatter all they want and develop new technologies all they want, they still think their enemy is a Lucifer-building species, and they work with that in mind. Which means that in this (already assumed very rare) case, the threat is totally contained. They can waste their decades building a Collossus at will, it's just no biggie. There's no "Guerrilla tactics" in there because they fervently believe they have created an anti-shivan solution, a Big Kickass Ship. IOW, this "lost time" is not lost at all.

In the other approach, the survival rate is probably worse. Instead of 1%, perhaps just 0.1%. But consider the consequences. If such a species survives that encounter, they will immediately switch to a mindset of deep space shadow tactic, become invisible through the eons. They will think brainstorming crazy strategies are the only solutions left. Some will inevitably come close to an efficient and deadly answer.

If you have to battle tens of thousands of such species, if you use the first strategy, you'll get hundreds of these species surviving the first strike, but all they can think of next is to build a Collossus or something to that effect. If you use the second, you'll just get a few dozen that survive the first strike, but what follows might be much deadlier solutions in the long run than if you used the first strategy.

An instant death scenario in which juggernauts appear over enemy capital worlds only a few days after first contact is still preferable in terms of preventing an escape and guerrilla conflict. There will always be the 1% with their last-ditch colony ship ready to go the moment they encounter a hostile species, but you're saying the Shivans profit by giving them weeks or months to decide to use it, rather than days. That's ridiculous.

It's only ridiculous if you think on one instance only. It can become (it doesn't necessarily, but it *can*) quite efficient in the long run.

It's not the Shivan timescale you're arguing matters in this post or indeed previous posts; you have been consistent on the point that the Shivans are effectively dumbing down themselves. Their timescale is not relevant to ground conditions as such. The Terran and Vasudan ones, though, are. And on that timescale major changes have occurred.

Only after Capella we see people trying to figure out guerrilla tactics. And I argue that Capella can be seen as an exception. The point of the second shivan incursion wasn't to destroy GTVA systems, but to do something else entirely. They KNOW that to give the information about how bigger the shivans are is a tactical mistake, but they still do it because of untold reasons. Presumably, they have bigger goals and can sacrifice this leak of information to this species. But this is an important leak. It tells us that we *should* brainstorm about crazy solutions to this shivan menace, which would, in turn, create a landscape of solutions quite different in their nature from the ones that gave us the Collossus. IOW, post-FS2 shows the downside of your "Shock and Awe" solution.

[Snarks]

Just in case, BP Spoilers in this post (even though we're kinda far past that at this point).

On the note of the Sanctuary, we should keep in mind that it wasn't exactly an outstanding success. If anything, it was at least speculated by the in-universe characters that the old ship was going to eventually going to fall apart eventually. There wasn't any ongoing effort to build anything new either. In short, the Sanctuary was not anywhere near a credible threat.

Now if we hold Capella as the exception to the Shivan rule for destroying a species, does that then imply that Blue Planet's GTVA have begun adopting the more "guerilla" style of war? The use of Meson bombs to destroy jump nodes in FS2 was definitely a tactic that may not have been utilized if the Sathanas fleet had not shown up.

Obviously the GTVA haven't gone spaceborne, and the focus still seems primarily on fighting the Shivans head on. We see these features in the form of stronger beam cannons, the Raynor, and the strategic decision to retake Sol (a very static position) in order to boast their fleet.

However, we should also note that this is the first time we see fleet logistics vessels, the Titan, and the intervention of the Vishnan. Logistics vessels are essential to any species that plan to survive in deep space without planetary support. The Titan demonstrated its superb ability to fight while fleeing in AoA. And finally, the Vishnan's interest in the GTVA might be a result of the post-Capella effects, in which the Shivan's destruction of the Capella star forced the GTVA to change its doctrines in a manner that the Shivans had not intended. This kind of change in strategic development would make the GTVA interesting to the Vishnan, who may have otherwise viewed the GTVA as another to be eliminated soon species.

[Luis Dias]

Yes, I agree with all those insights, I just see now that NGTM was addressing the Sanctuary as the surviving boat that would generate a shivan resistance in the long term, while I was seeing it the way you do, as the last remnant of human civilization that was going to eventually die out.

[Adderbane]

The Sanctuary barely has functioning fighters.  A single Lilith could probably wipe the floor with them if its beam cannons are enabled (and if I remember right, in Forced Entry one will if you're not paying attention).  Humanity is less of a weed growing in the Shivan garden, and more like a spot of lichen under a rock.

I'd say it was a pretty definite Shivan victory.