Forerunners Vs. the Galactic Empire

[Marcus Aurelius]

There's a nebulous criterion for being killed by the Halo effect, which is generally described as 'sentience'. The idea appears to be killing anything an infection form can actually use to develop tool usage and technological know-how, while actually preserving enough simple life in the galaxy to ensure the rise of life in the future. This is extremely arbitrary.

To me it appears that they took the idea from the Hyperion cantos and the deathwands, later developed into deathbeams. The work through disrupting the "Void Which Binds", which is basically a kind of ether that binds all sentient organic life (a bit like SW Force but not quite). By disrupting that the EVIL AIs could instantly kill people at long ranges with fairly minimal energy use. The TechnoCore also had omnidirectional deathwand bombs, and although they were never detonated in realspace, it was strongly implied later that unlike the AIs claimed, the underground labyrinths on certain planets probably would not have protected against them at all.

[aaaaa0]

There is canon that says the Halo effect also killed the Flood with sufficient sentience to pilot starships.

From the game:

[00:H 00:M 00:S] The [Halo effect] strikes our combined fleets. All ships piloted by biologicals are now [adrift].

That probably means the only Flood that would survive the firing of the Halo rings would be sub-sentient, which would eventually starve, being unable to use technology or absorb enough sentient biomass to do so.

Which answers the question why the Flood didn't just use their hijacked Forerunner technology to make some sentient life and eat that.

[Imperial528]

Why would it need a giant ring for that, though?

The rings, IIRC, were also meant to be research installations which studied life in addition to the flood (hence the terraformed surface), and the weapon is supposed to be the last resort containment protocol and the war-ending blow to the flood.

Why go to such lengths to make a containment protocol which does not kill the target and instead attempts to starve it when a thermonuclear explosion of 1kt or more would suffice, is beyond me. Hell, a neutron bomb would eradicate the flood easily.

[aaaaa0]

Why go to such lengths to make a containment protocol which does not kill the target and instead attempts to starve it when a thermonuclear explosion of 1kt or more would suffice, is beyond me. Hell, a neutron bomb would eradicate the flood easily.

At the point in the war when the Forerunners were contemplating building the rings, the Flood had already progressed to the point where they had infected millions of planets, had a fleet of millions of ships, and a hive mind guiding their strategy.

At that point a few nukes would have done exactly zip to them.

This is all canon from the terminals in the Halo 3 game.

[Darksider]

He's talking about protocol for a breach of containment ON THAT SPECIFIC RING. Obviously "containment" protocol wouldn't be designed to deal with an external threat.

[aaaaa0]

He's talking about protocol for a breach of containment ON THAT SPECIFIC RING. Obviously "containment" protocol wouldn't be designed to deal with an external threat.

Sorry, my fault, I misread.

The first response would be to use Sentinels to try to bring the local infestation under control. And they DO zap the flood directly, after all they were designed to keep the non-sentient Flood under control.

Unfortunately with the idiot humans and Covenant stumbling around giving the Flood free sentient biomass to absorb and ships to hijack, that just wasn't going to cut it.

By the time the Monitor contemplated firing the ring, a couple nukes probably weren't going to stop the Flood (and it's the Monitor that wanted to fire the ring, it's probably incapable of entertaining the idea of damaging its own installation).

[Imperial528]

Containment would have likely failed anyway. It happened on Delta Halo, to the point where a gravemind was able to form (And the Covenant or UNSC hadn't known about it when containment had failed epically). And the sentinels were obviously not good at fighting flood, given that the very flimsy combat forms could jump, tackle, knock out shielding, and destroy them in one or two tries.

Not to mention that a neutron bomb wouldn't damage the ring in the slightest, it would just kill everything in range, flood or not, sentient or not. If the flood are so easily starved, why couldn't the main control portions of the ring simply be sealed off via force field and starship-proof heavy blast doors? Modern containment abilities could deal with the flood en-mass, especially given their vulnerability to shrapnel, explosives, metal weapons in general, fire, doors, physical impact, etc.

Also, you say the Humans and Covenant were acting stupidly. I'd say they outperformed the Forerunners by orders of magnitude in the battle on the ring, especially since when they encountered space zombies they shot them dead instead of going "hmm i w0dn3r h0w teh w0rk".

And if each ring supposedly has enough sentinels to bring an infestation under control, the addition of the Covenant and UNSC forces should've done jack and shit, since it is the sentinels' own installation, and only a few containment areas where actually breached.

Flood are weak ass pussies and the Forerunners are idiots for losing to them. It's no wonder their main combat AI betrayed them.

[aaaaa0]

Containment would have likely failed anyway. It happened on Delta Halo, to the point where a gravemind was able to form (And the Covenant or UNSC hadn't known about it when containment had failed epically). And the sentinels were obviously not good at fighting flood, given that the very flimsy combat forms could jump, tackle, knock out shielding, and destroy them in one or two tries.

Yup you're totally right about the poor strength of the Sentinels in-game. I totally concede that point.

That said, Halo wouldn't have been very much fun to play if the Sentinels defeated the Flood all on their own.

Also, you say the Humans and Covenant were acting stupidly. I'd say they outperformed the Forerunners by orders of magnitude in the battle on the ring, especially since when they encountered space zombies they shot them dead instead of going "hmm i w0dn3r h0w teh w0rk".

The point is, even if the Flood had gotten out of containment, without the juicy human and Covenant forces running around the Halo to eat, they would have never gotten past the non-sentient infection forms and therefore would have been easy pickings for the Sentinels.

Note that pretty much all the Flood you fight in the games are fallen Covenant or human soldiers, which indicates to me the epic fail of the human and Convenant forces against the flood.

Every sentient eaten increases the collective intelligence of the Flood, and each newly transformed Flood unit goes on to spread the infection and add yet more sentient biomass to the Flood -- it's the geometric growth curve of a disease spreading through a vulnerable population.

Supply the Flood with a big enough pile of tasty easy to eat Covenant and human soldiers, and it quickly learns how to use weapons, explosives, then eventually it will learn how to use the Halo's teleport systems, override its containment doors, and turn off its defense systems.

Look, the *only* reason the humans and Covenant were able to pull this one out of the fire was the presence of the Master Chief and his buddies, with their plot shield.

[Stark]

It would have been pretty trivial to write a story that explained why the sentinels suck; indeed I believe the Halo1 sentinels are caretakers are not front-line units.

If the flood was anywhere near as virulent or powerful as is often claimed, it would have overrun the entire Halo ring by the end of Halo1 instead of basically chasing MC around and getting raped over and over again. Are you saying MC is that much better than anything the forerunners could field?

[Vendetta]

If the flood was anywhere near as virulent or powerful as is often claimed, it would have overrun the entire Halo ring by the end of Halo1 instead of basically chasing MC around and getting raped over and over again. Are you saying MC is that much better than anything the forerunners could field?

Lack of available hosts. Flood spores need host bodies with significant biomass and a CNS to make useful bodies, everything else they can only turn into either poppers/carriers or that brown goo they cover everything with, that's why there are no Flood Grunts or Jackals. So on the original Halo they only had the humans and elites to work with.

Which, of course, makes it even stupider that the Forerunners weren't able to contain them in the first place, because the Flood are actually a bit of a rubbish Swarm Army Of Doom compared to something like Zerg or Tyranids.

[Stark]

Weren't there animals on the rings? How woudl they prevent animals evolving? How could the biosystem work without them?

But yeah, if they can only spread or multiply in presence of life like that, it makes it pretty daft they can't be stopped.

[Ford Prefect]

Weren't there animals on the rings? How woudl they prevent animals evolving? How could the biosystem work without them?

It's not really clear exactly how long ago it was that the Halos fired. Guilty Spark says '100,000 local years', meaning he's probably talking about a hundred thousand Threshold years, as opposed to Earth years. On the other hand, two hundred years before Halo 2 the Flood on Delta Halo were able to get enough brain mass together to make a Gravemind, so maybe there really was enough time for intelligent life to evolve on the Halos.

[Arachnidus]

Weren't there animals on the rings? How woudl they prevent animals evolving? How could the biosystem work without them?

But yeah, if they can only spread or multiply in presence of life like that, it makes it pretty daft they can't be stopped.

As I understand, and this is a small leap of logic here, the Flood can grow by absorbing any animal life(possibly plant as well), but complex forms can only be created via infection of a sapient host.

[aaaaa0]

If the flood was anywhere near as virulent or powerful as is often claimed, it would have overrun the entire Halo ring by the end of Halo1 instead of basically chasing MC around and getting raped over and over again.

They basically did overrun the ring towards the end of Halo 1.

The only thing that stopped them was the Master Chief blowing up the Halo before any of them managed to hijack a ship.

In fact the final few levels showed Flood literally everywhere, and the Covenant, Humans, and Sentinels fighting each other and the Flood in multi-way battles. (Which was actually a pretty excellent gameplay innovation at the time -- one of the interesting AI features of Halo 1 were the large scale multi-way AI battles between dissimilar non-player factions that the MC could just sit back and observe and either interfere or not.)

Are you saying MC is that much better than anything the forerunners could field?

MC gets the benefit of a magic "player character" shield, which automatically makes him better than anything else in the Halo-universe.

The MC represents the player, who is supposed to win, so the plot will invariably do whatever is necessary to make the MC win, and the gamplay will have whatever contrivances necessary to make the game fun. It's the same thing that gives the player character in say, Call of Duty 4, regenerating health and the ability to mow down an army of thousands, despite the gaming being set in a "realistic" world of today.

In any case, he had not been there, the Flood would have almost certainly have managed to hijack a Convenant ship and eventually end the other known Halo-universe civilizations.

That said, there was some Monitor dialogue in the game where it thought the Master Chief was suprisingly primitive.

Puzzling. You brought such ineffective weapons to combat the Flood, despite the containment protocols.

These Sentinels will supplement your combat system. But, I suggest you upgrade to at least a Class Twelve combat skin. Your current model only scans as a Class Two, which is ill suited for this kind of work.

We have no idea what the classes mean, other than that the Monitor thought "class two" was too low, and a "class twelve" was the lowest recommended.

So if you substitued "a generic SPARTAN" for the Master Chief, I'm certain the Flood would have won.

[aaaaa0]

Weren't there animals on the rings? How woudl they prevent animals evolving? How could the biosystem work without them?

It's not really clear exactly how long ago it was that the Halos fired. Guilty Spark says '100,000 local years', meaning he's probably talking about a hundred thousand Threshold years, as opposed to Earth years. On the other hand, two hundred years before Halo 2 the Flood on Delta Halo were able to get enough brain mass together to make a Gravemind, so maybe there really was enough time for intelligent life to evolve on the Halos.

Or possibly that Gravemind was the result of a prior encounter between the Covenant and the Flood on Delta Halo. Or maybe some unknown race that landed/crashed on Delta Halo and got eaten after containment failed.

[Vendetta]

In fact the final few levels showed Flood literally everywhere, and the Covenant, Humans, and Sentinels fighting each other and the Flood in multi-way battles. (Which was actually a pretty excellent gameplay innovation at the time -- one of the interesting AI features of Halo 1 were the large scale multi-way AI battles between dissimilar non-player factions that the MC could just sit back and observe and either interfere or not.)

It was innovative when Half-Life did it three and a bit years earlier. I'm not even going to address your nonsense bringing in gameplay concerns.

[aaaaa0]

It was innovative when Half-Life did it three and a bit years earlier.

Pretty sure Half-Life 1 didn't do it on the same scale and with vehicles, but whatever.

I'm not even going to address your nonsense bringing in gameplay concerns.

Look, MC has plot on his side, just like the protagonists of any movie or novel or any work of drama.

The writers arrange that our heroes escape certain doom by the skin of their teeth. How many unlikely events had to happen all at once for Luke Skywalker to defeat the Death Star?

So the MC is going to be capable of stupidly unlikely things. So what. Replace him with "generic SPARTAN" and things are going to turn out differently.

And to answer Stark more explicitly, no, I do not think Master Chief is better than anything the Forerunners could field. The game even tells us this explicitly. The fact that he then goes on to win, is an artifact of him having plot on his side and this being a video game.

This is nothing new to discussion of fiction.

[Vendetta]

Look, MC has plot on his side, just like the protagonists of any movie or novel or any work of drama.

However, this vs. scenario does not take place within the plot of either series, so these concerns are irrelevant. If you're going to try and have an actual discussion you have to treat the events of the fiction as "real" for the purposes of an analysis, otherwise you might as well just say that the Empire lose because they're the bad guys, and bad guys lose in fiction more often than not.

[aaaaa0]

Look, MC has plot on his side, just like the protagonists of any movie or novel or any work of drama.

However, this vs. scenario does not take place within the plot of either series, so these concerns are irrelevant. If you're going to try and have an actual discussion you have to treat the events of the fiction as "real" for the purposes of an analysis, otherwise you might as well just say that the Empire lose because they're the bad guys, and bad guys lose in fiction more often than not.

In which case we need to be discussing "generic SPARTAN" not Master Chief.

I thought there was a rule for versus that you generally can't use named characters unless explictly allowed because of the whole plot shielding problem. For example, you can't use Data in a Trek vs Empire, because then you introduce random Trek plot-babble.

We're discussing Forerunner vs Empire here, not "is the MC more powerful than anything the Forerunners can field".

[Vendetta]

In which case we need to be discussing "generic SPARTAN" not Master Chief.

For practical purposes there's little difference, unless you want to claim that John-117 is super special awesomesauce even compared to the rest of the SPARTANs.

I thought there was a rule for versus that you generally can't use named characters unless explictly allowed because of the whole plot shielding problem. For example, you can't use Data in a Trek vs Empire, because then you introduce random Trek plot-babble.

No, the rule is that you work by observed evidence not random made up "because of plot" nonsense.

We're discussing Forerunner vs Empire here, not "is the MC more powerful than anything the Forerunners can field".

And a significant part of any scenario involving the Forerunners is going to involve examination of the Flood and how things other than the Forerunners have interacted with them, because the Flood were what fucked the Forerunners over. In this specific case the capabilities of the Forerunner to build containment systems worth a damn. They couldn't, and the sentinels were hopelessly outclassed by even the most basic combat forms (especially since Flood were resistant to energy weapons, yet the Forerunners were dim enough to build containment systems based on energy weapons rather than something useful against the one thing they were designed to contain)

If it turns out, as it appears from most examinations, that the Flood should have been relatively easily contained, even at a significantly lower tech level than the Forerunners had available, then their gobsmacking stupidity is what allowed the Flood to overrun the galaxy, and their ridiculous counter to the Flood (a device which magically killed everything else but not the actual Flood) is another example of that.

They could certainly build impressive shit, but they were still a bunch of gomping interplanetary retards, and that's why they'll lose to even a nearly equiv-tech foe.

[aaaaa0]

In which case we need to be discussing "generic SPARTAN" not Master Chief.

For practical purposes there's little difference, unless you want to claim that John-117 is super special awesomesauce even compared to the rest of the SPARTANs.

He's super special awesomesauce in the same way the Luke Skywalker is super special awesomesauce compared with a nameless Jedi.

I thought there was a rule for versus that you generally can't use named characters unless explictly allowed because of the whole plot shielding problem. For example, you can't use Data in a Trek vs Empire, because then you introduce random Trek plot-babble.

No, the rule is that you work by observed evidence not random made up "because of plot" nonsense.

Well you don't want to let in plot nonsense then.

For example, the MC just happened to be able to defeat the Flood in Halo 1 because he was able to destroy the ring before the Flood escaped.

Does this mean a generic SPARTAN will always be able to defeat a Flood infestation? Of course not.

The MC won because the writers deemed it so. The Pillar of Autumn just happened to safely crash land on Halo. It's engines just happened to still be functional. The MC just happened to be able to cause them to overload. The resulting explosion just happened to be enough to damage the ring enough to cause it to tear itself apart. Etc.

A whole sequence of events that you cannot generalize and apply to any other situation.

And a significant part of any scenario involving the Forerunners is going to involve examination of the Flood and how things other than the Forerunners have interacted with them, because the Flood were what fucked the Forerunners over. In this specific case the capabilities of the Forerunner to build containment systems worth a damn. They couldn't, and the sentinels were hopelessly outclassed by even the most basic combat forms (especially since Flood were resistant to energy weapons, yet the Forerunners were dim enough to build containment systems based on energy weapons rather than something useful against the one thing they were designed to contain)

Their containment systems worked perfectly for around 100,000 and 99,800 years respectively. Alpha Halo probably would have contined to work indefinitely before the Covenant and humans decided to open the containment chambers and start feeding themselves to the Flood.

How long has the Galactic Empire even been in existance? 25,000 years or so?

Yes the Sentinels were weak. No there is no in-universe explanation of why other than Forerunner stupidity. There is plenty of out-of-universe explanation, but I suppose that doesn't really matter.

If it turns out, as it appears from most examinations, that the Flood should have been relatively easily contained, even at a significantly lower tech level than the Forerunners had available, then their gobsmacking stupidity is what allowed the Flood to overrun the galaxy,

In Halo 1 the Covenant and humans failed miserably in direct combat with the Flood (witness all the infected soldiers), with the only saving grace being the Master Chief getting lucky in the same way Skywalker & Co. got lucky, and blowing up the Halo ring.

The Covenant failed completely to contain the Flood in their mobile capital, High Charity. It fell within hours of the first infestation.

Even after its main power source was removed (the Forerunner keyship), the Flood were able to repair High Charity, get past the Covenant ships blockading it, and fly it to Earth in time for it to transit through the Ark slipgate.

The humans failed to contain just the start of a Flood infestation on Earth (and the Covenant had to sterilize a large chunk of land using their shipboard weapons to stop that).

It took the firing of a Halo ring to put down the Flood infestation on the Ark. A ring that was not finished, but luckily, finished enough to be fired once.

The whole saga of the Flood in the Halo games is that of luck, our heroes constantly surviving by the skin of their teeth because the Master Chief just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

In a straight up fight, all of the current Halo-universe races showed no serious ability to defeat or contain the Flood in any battle in the games.

Except for Master Chief, who is protected from on high by the writers constantly putting him in just the right place at just the right time.

and their ridiculous counter to the Flood (a device which magically killed everything else but not the actual Flood) is another example of that.

To be fair, I already pointed out canon that says the Halo effect kills everything sentient, including any sentient Flood.

[Vendetta]

And yet you've given two examples, the destruction of the original Halo and the sterilisation of Mombasa by the Covenant of a successful containment of the Flood with tech much lower than the Forerunners by forces largely unprepared for their arrival. The chain of events leading up to those events are far less important than you believe, because the Forerunners should have been able to far more easily arrange for the kind of localised high energy events that did the job if they were even slightly competent at not dying.

That makes the Forerunners' inability to do so even more stupid. No wonder Mendicant Bias thought they were so dim.

Seriously, your argument essentially boils down to "Flood are invincible short of narrative convenience", which is a non-argument.

He's super special awesomesauce in the same way the Luke Skywalker is super special awesomesauce compared with a nameless Jedi.

You mean "actually quite rubbish" then? Most of the stuff we see from Jedi in other parts of Star Wars outstrips most of what Luke does.

A whole sequence of events that you cannot generalize and apply to any other situation.

Actually, yes you can. Because you can generalise them to "A high energy event and a willing and able finger on the trigger thereof". It shows that all you need to do to stop the flood is blow them up real good, and yet the Forerunners failed to do so.

The Covenant failed completely to contain the Flood in their mobile capital, High Charity. It fell within hours of the first infestation.

They were distracted by a mild case of civil war, if you recall. And the only thing that stopped them containing the outbreak was an unwillingness to simply destroy High Charity outright.

[Jake]

The sentinels were most likely designed to contain the relatively easy to kill infection forms that were stored on the Halos. The forerunners simply didn't expect an ultra religious alien race that worships them as gods to arrive on Halo 100,000 years later, inadvertently release the infection forms, then provide sustenance for them to change into combat forms. Considering how unlikely this scenario is, I don't think its fair to attribute it to forerunner stupidity. I also don't think its fair to make judgments on the forerunners performance in the forerunner flood war when we know almost nothing about it. Considering the flood are extra galactic, they could have arrived in forerunner space with a massive fleet for all we know. Until the actual novels come out I don't think we can generalize and call them stupid for losing a war we know almost nothing about.

[Stark]

Even in Halo1 the Cov were poorly led and the humans were scattered and refugees - but they still won. Counting all the infected humans is stupid because humans were killed by covenant and crashes as well.

Do you ever see a big map of Halo showing infection? Is there any reason to believe they weren't all in the area around the autumn and library?

[Vendetta]

Considering the flood are extra galactic, they could have arrived in forerunner space with a massive fleet for all we know.

If they had a massive doomfleet, why was their chosen means of propagation hijacking civilian and commercial light vessels and simply throwing them at planets knowing that some would crashland and release spores? They didn't even start to use any form of identifiable strategy beyond throwing FTL ships in random directions until they formed a Gravemind, and that was three hundred years into the conflict.

Also, the terminals in Halo 3 seem to indicate that the Flood is not extragalactic, they evolved within our galaxy.