No precursors (3Op) Who would emerge victorious? Edit: IMO it's a draw, about equal ways for Halo to beat ME as there is ME to beat Halo. Edit: have changed my opinion, after reading some more mass effect lore I fully believe Mass Effect would win, key point being MEs adaptability, strategy, and most importantly, the leviathans. Leviathans can control anything that's organic and sentient, and they don't have to infect like the flood and no it's not indoctrination and yes they can do it from across the galaxy. Leaving pretty much everyone to jump the forerunners which the through strategy and adaptability and being highly capable to clone forerunner tech, mass effect would prevail. And I'm cutting Halo a lot of slack implying that the ancilla could be able to protect themselves from leviathans. And Seeker swarms are really OP also, don't forget the unlimited supply of collectors and Geth. Protheans make Suns go supernova also and destroy solar systems. Forerunners would hold out for a while, but eventually they'd get beat by sheer numbers and tactics. Flood gets Rekt by Geth, they couldn't control Geth even in Keymind stage. Once ME gets their hands on Forerunner tech, it's just over for Halo, they'd be able to backwards engineer it in days. In regards to the Halos, ME would have to 1) Destroy them 2) Hack them 3) leviathans mind kill whoever tries to use them I highly doubt the forerunners would consider that option anyway based on their arrogance and how much they'd be winning by in the beginning Geth/Collectors/Reapers could take over any AI Especially reapers, reapers would take them over better than the logic plague could sine they'd be unaware they were compromised. Excerpt: [quote]The Reapers have one very concrete tactical advantage in their favor that is unavoidable in any confrontation with them. The Indoctrination Field. This effect makes sleeper agents out of enemies and can win a war of attrition where firepower fails. Reapers are also functionally immortal and can hibernate for millenia without ill effects. Unlike the Flood, one cannot light the Halo Rings to deprive the Reapers of their fuel. They will simply collect the now-dead biomass, liquify it and turn the Forerunners into a new Reaper post mortum, and they being artificial constructs, are immune to the effects of the Halo ring radiative effects. While the Forerunners have devistating technology on their side, the Reapers long ago perfected what the Didact attempted to use on Earth. A weapon that digitizes the consciousness of humans into AI format at the cost of the body. This is, in fact HOW Reapers reproduce. The biomass of an entire species is broken down into a sort of organic metal compound that is sprayed onto a basic Reaper frame that is constructed ahead of time. This organic metal compound also contains the accumulated digitized consciousness of every individual of the species thus harvested, turning the Reapers into a compound AI system, much like the Geth are a consensus of Virtual Intelligences. Reaper weapon systems are intensely powerful, easily on par with anything the UNSC or Covenant ever produced, without being an energy weapon system as they accelerate chunks of metal to significant percentages of the speed of light in powerful directed beams of shredding metal directed by extremely powerful Mass Effect fields. Therefor, a Reaper the size of Harbinger or Sovereign (names given to them by conquered races, not names they keep for themselves, though they do answer to them) is roughly equivalent in combat power to a Forerunner Dreadnaught or Keyship. Given enough time and enough planetary victories, the Reapers would inevitably win against the Forerunners and Harvest their species into a new Reaper. Reapers are, in a way, WORSE than the Flood. Still, I'm pretty sure that Mendicant Bias all by itself could likely have taken control of at least a good number of the Reapers, so the Forerunners' AIs could likely have countered that. Mendicant Bias was a weak point in the Forerunner lines of defense, as it was convinced by Gravemind to go Rampant. A superior Gestalt AI like a Reaper would be able to convince Mendicant Bias to turn even faster. Offensive Bias was constructed differently from Mendicant for that very reason, and it was less intelligent than Mendicant, more focused and driven... much more like a VI than a full "Ancillia" like Mendicant Bias or Cortana. Additionally, Mendicant Bias was designed for naval combat, not infiltration. You'd need a Cortana class AI to do wetwork like that, and even she wouldn't be up to the task without some major reworking, since the Reapers aren't just one AI per ship, but literally MILLIONS of AI's working as one gestalt mind. Well, Mendicant was able to single handedly cripple the entire Forerunner Capital planet, at least temporarily, that was said to be protected and maintained by trillions of AIs of varying complexity, so it is far from helpless in the art of hacking and infiltration, and he too is a gestalt mind. And by the way, it wasn't the Gravemind that made Mendicant Bias turn on the Forerunners, it was the Primordial, supposedly one of the last living Precursors, who may or may not have been a gravemind - the books leave it deliberately ambiguous as to whether the Precursors actually are the Flood or not. Mendicant Bias was able to cripple most of the Forerunner fleet (Which I should note that until Didact was given the edict to contain the Flood, consisted of very FEW dedicated combat ships, as the Human/Forerunner war was over by then). And yes, the Forerunners utilized trillions of Ancillia, all made from the corpses of people, the same way 343 Guilty Spark was made from the human Chakas. Mendicant Bias was.. what... six? Seven separate minds in gestalt form? But that was only AFTER he'd been captured by Offensive Bias and ripped apart by Didact, intentionally fragmented in an effort to understand what went wrong, most of his personalities shoved into the Ark for safe keeping, the final one stowed aboard the only Keyship to survive the Forerunner/Flood War, which until its use by Truth in the Human/Covenant War to open up the portal to the Ark, was safely sequestered aboard the Covenant capital city of High Charity. Might I also remind you that, much like the Reapers, Gravemind is millions of minds combined into one. Mendicant Bias would be overwhelmed by the number of AI's to combat if he faced a Reaper fleet, which at that level would be TRILLIONS of AI's to face, all at once, in a combined and coordinated effort, with a thinking capacity that is millions of years old, spread out over a massive area of space to combat. Like I said, Mendicant Bias was designed for naval combat, to kill the Flood in space, before they could reach planetside, often by utilizing Maginot line tactics and, if a ship got through the line, a scorched earth policy by glassing any planet unlucky enough to be infected. Offensive Bias had been designed with the specific function of defeating Mendicant Bias, and had the advantage because Mendicant was unaware of OB's existence prior to its launch. Mendicant was, I remind you, defeated by an INFERIOR AI that was NOT Gestalted. The Reapers posess many of the combat attributes of the Flood. The ability to rapidly overwhelm any populated worlds they attack via rapid processing of the populace into either Husks for combat, or Organic Metal Paste for the construction of a new Reaper. Those not killed outright by being Husked or turned into goo would be rapidly and forcefully indoctrinated by the sheer presence of the Reapers and intentionally let free into the galaxy at large so that they could take down the defenses of other planets in the Reapers paths as sleeper agents, thus quickening the pace of Harvesting. Remember that Reapers are also very patient. The death of the Protheans was long and drawn out, taking at least five centuries to fully complete even WITH the use of the Mass Relays, and it would take longer without them at standard FLT speeds that the Reapers are capable of. The Forerunners too, would not have time on their side, and would likely gamble their future, as the Librarian did, on their former enemies, the Humans, to put an end to the Reaper menace once and for all. Well either way, we are still talking about a situation wherein we have a massive galaxy-spanning civilization with millions upon millions of ships, a significant percentage of which dwarf the Reaper capital ships, versus a relatively small number (by comparison) of Reapers who rely on surprise more than anything else and use kinetic weaponry, and the Forerunners would see them coming long before they ever re-entered the galaxy. Even the turians managed to take out a couple dozen Reaper capital ships over Palaven, and the turians are to the Forerunners what lemurs are to us in terms of the difference in technological capability. While this is true for the most part, I again draw your attention to the Indoctrination ability of the Reapers. ANY prolonged contact with Reapers will result in brainwashing and sleeper agents. Reapers can act through various hidden agents and weaken the Forerunners LONG before they head into the galaxy from their hibernation in Dark Space. In fact, that's how they NORMALLY operate. Large scale invasions only happen AFTER the galaxy has been sufficiently compromised from within by sleeper agents. Them Reapers ain't dumb. [/quote]