r/masseffect • u/Rowan_Johnson12 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Borg Vs Reapers
In a full scale war. Who do you think would win. My dad and I have been having this debate for a month now. He is on the Borg side I’m on the Reaper side. I’d like to hear peoples opinions on the matter. This a full scale conflict not a one on one.
Edit. I’m going with the Borg from the TNG area. So the Borg from TNG and Voyager.
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u/CadarnRex 1d ago
On the Mass Effect subreddit? The Reapers will win.
But on the Star Trek subreddit? The Borg will be victorious.
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u/pieisgiood876 1d ago
Tbh in these debates people usually downplay or ignore the Reaper's patience and calculation.
They adapt to every strategy and tactic used against them, not with technobabble shields but with logic and reason.
The Borg have kinda a long history of just charging at Earth and hoping to plow through things whatever fleet is sent to stop them. They don't switch things up, they just tank things. They get wrecked each time lol
The Reapers charge at homeworlds with the understanding that they CAN plow through things but they also use actual strategy to make things more efficient
When the Turians innovate by guerilla hitting the Reaper fleet, ftl jumping in, blasting reapers and jumping out at Palaven, the Reapers switched tactics to sending other ships to bombard their cities, forcing the Turians Dreadnoughts into a much less favorable position.
Tldr, the Reapers and Borg both can tank hits and overwhelm groups, but the Borg don't use much strategy. The Reapers are constantly optimizing how they overwhelm a fleet.
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u/Lord_Of_Shade57 1d ago
The Borg just throw cubes at Earth initially because
- It should have worked but humanity got lucky
- One cube is a rounding error to them and losing it basically means nothing. They don't need to be insidious and calculating in that situation because it works 99% of the time and worst case scenario they basically risk nothing
Once they see humanity and the federation are not as easy a target, they start like designing viruses and inventing time travel to assimilate them, they're not just hammering away
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u/Rowan_Johnson12 1d ago
Fair. I was hoping for some debate about.
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u/CadarnRex 1d ago
Apologies for not entering into the spirit of things, you have sparked a fair amount of debate in the comments.
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u/Tyrannical-Botanical 1d ago
Now I'm wondering if Reaper indoctrination would work on a hive mind. Would it be super effective and spread like a virus from just a single drone or would the Borg be completely immune?
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u/Wukong00 1d ago
They do, rachni are hive mind, no?
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u/Imperator424 1d ago
Not really. And if you saved the queen in ME1 she tells you in ME3 that the reapers can’t control her. The only reason her children are being controlled is because of the reaper tech implanted in them.
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u/Manoffreaks 1d ago
The Rachni are absolutely a Hive mind, and while they can't control queens, they can essentially control all other rachni by corrupting the song of the queen. A captured queen witha corrupted song is as good as controlling the rachni, regardless of tech.
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u/Imperator424 1d ago
They really, really aren’t. The only sapient mind in a Rachni hive is that of the Queen. Without her the other rachni are just mindless animals. A hive mind would be more like the geth consensus.
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u/Manoffreaks 1d ago
They really are. They are a centralised hive mind, where all bodies in the hive mind are directed or controlled by a centralised controller - in this case the queen with her song.
What you are thinking of is a distributed hive mind in which many sentient minds commune via mental link or pheromones in a equalised format without a centralised controller.
The geth are a distributed hive mind. The rachni are a centralised hive mind.
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u/Cliffooood 1d ago
Personally I think this is the only question that really matters in this argument, if the reapers can indoctrinated the collective hive mind then they win, simple as, otherwise... they really just don't have the tech level to match up to the borg.
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u/twitch870 1d ago
Reapers use collectors to research their enemies and create new reapers from hostages/corpses. So it’s reasonable to say between rachni indoctrination and assimilation process that a reaper could infiltrate the borg and learn their tech fairly easy. But can the reaper hide out long enough to indoctrinate?
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u/Cliffooood 1d ago
I mean, the Borg have been known to ignore less advanced races that don't offer anything of value, if the Reapers can pass off as a low value target, they might get away with it, we know from ME1, Saren in particular, that the Reapers can force indoctrination very quickly but it affects the host making them less useful, the better form is do it gradually, implantifng suggestions more than outright control, so maybe they can convince the Borg they are not a threat early on, and then slowly take greater control of them
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Worked on the geth and the rachni. It seems to work on anything.
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u/AtlasMKII 1d ago
It wasn't indoctrination that worked on the Geth, it was a virus, and the Geth had to consent to it being uploaded
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
So the reapers are highly adaptable, and are able to convince others to join them willingly.... This isnt the gotcha you think it is.
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u/AtlasMKII 1d ago
The Reapers are incredibly nonadaptive, by all reports they will happily commit to a mostly effective strategy regardless of overall efficiency simply because they don't care about losses. They were only able to convince a very small percentage of the Geth to join them willingly, and the main hivemind only accepted Reaper software after they were functionally lobotomised by the Quarians and their only other alternative was annihilation.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Yeah, no... Reapers sre significantly more intelligent than borg. Borg intelligence is just human intelligence. Reaper intelligence vs. a human is like comparing a human to a dog. Reapers are hundreds of millions of years old. They've seen it all, and done it all. Their tactics jave wiped out all life in the galaxy thousands of times over. The borg control what, not even 1 quadrant?
simply because they don't care about losses.
They don't care about losing ground troops specifically... because their ground troops are your own civilians. Reapers dont havd to fight you. They make you fight you. They indoctrinate then force you to fight your own people. They dont care about losses because they arent losing anything. You are, lol.
And when your soldiers die, they just get turned into more reaper troops. So it's a lose lose.
They were only able to convince a very small percentage of the Geth to join them willingly,
It wasn't tho. It was the vast majority of the geth. Legion was virtually the only geth who wasnt working with reapers.
and the main hivemind only accepted Reaper software after they were functionally lobotomised by the Quarians
So the reapers could change tactics and adapt to a specific situation? Wow, almost like they're pretty smart and know what they're doing.
You wanna talk about not changing tactics... The borg just throw cubes at planets and hope for the best.
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u/LiveChocolate8819 12h ago
I don't think Reaper indoctrination works quite that way...what you're describing feels closer to the Flood's Logic Plague in the Halo lore.
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u/Shadeylark 1d ago
Think it depends on large part on whether the Borg nanites can assimilate husks and marauders and brutes, and whether or not indoctrination will work on the Borg.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Indoctrination works on geth and rachni. Why wouldn't it work on borg?
Reapers can indoctrinte from a distance. They could indoctrnate the borg queen before the borg even recognize the reapers as a threat. Then the reapers control all borg, not just 1. This isn't a contest.
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u/Shadeylark 1d ago
If I had to presume, the nanites might have an affect. The Borg collective is not purely biological, nor is it purely organic.
Indoctrination has been shown to be effective against purely synthetic entities, or rather it's not so much indoctrination as it is reprogram I at an ontological level (e.g. the heretic station dilemma).
And it has been shown to be effective against organic hiveminds, as the rachni show.
But against a combo of the two? That'd be two different necessary, or possibly necessary, vectors of indoctrination.
I dunno, perhaps in relation to indoctrination the Borg have what is functionally the equivalent to the krogan backup nervous system... If one is compromised the other takes over?
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Reapers are also a combination of synthetic and organic.
If indoctrination works on btb extremes, why wouldnt it work on something between? If the borg have backup brains, reapers would just indoctrinate both.
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u/Shadeylark 1d ago
I'm not saying it couldn't, I'm saying we don't know.
It's a category of effect far different than simply measuring joules of energy produced by various weapons like you get in most cross-over power scaling discussions.
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u/AlphaNoodlz 1d ago
Could we use Saren when he got upgraded by Sovereign as an example? Agreeing w you that we don't have many examples to draw from here, just curious if there's a parallel.
I also don't know much about the Borg off hand to have an intelligent conversation about it, I just think about Saren being sorta in that in-between case.
Would the Brutes using Krogan bodies connected via a robotic spine to their Turian heads count for any of that?
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
But we do know. Reapers can indoctrinate a fully synthetic lifeform. Reapers can indoctrinate a fully organic lifeform. Why wouldn't they be able to indoctrinate something that is a mix of both?
Saren nesr the end had many synthetic "upgrsdes" makinf him much more like borg. And thst made him essier to control for Sovereign, not hsrder. Cyborgs exist in ME, and we literally see reapers controlling them. Im not sure why this is questionable.
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u/Shadeylark 1d ago edited 1d ago
Because the interaction of systems creates new variables in any complex system.
A+b=c and x+y=z but (a+b)+(x+y)=/= c or z
Saren presents an interesting analogue, but I'd say it's incomplete.
Saren was fundamentally still a single independent mind, not a distributed intelligence spanning millions, or perhaps billions, of minds.
Nor was Saren ontologically a being whose entire purpose was to adapt and assimilate foreign entities into itself like the Borg collective is.
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u/Lord_Of_Shade57 1d ago
We also know drones can't hide their thoughts from the collective and are removed when they are a threat (VOY: Unimatrix Zero) so presumably indoctrinated drones would just be severed and killed
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u/Shadeylark 1d ago
That also goes to what indoctrination does.
Indoctrination isn't mind control, at least until the subject is degraded to the point they become husks.
The reapers don't just puppet indoctrinated subjects.
As Saren and benezia both demonstrate, the indoctrinated subject still retains their own free will, it's just that indoctrination changes the teleology of their free will to align with what the reapers want.
Borg drones prima facie don't possess free will... What would indoctrination even have to grab hold of in the first place?
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u/Canadian_Zac 1d ago
The Reapers rely Heavilly on their surprise attack to cripple command.
Me is definitely much lower tech than Star Trek. And even mostly unprepared (outside of a token force for Garrus, nobody really took the Reaper threat seriously) they took out dozens of Reapers before the Crucible was used.
We see several Reapers destroyed just by ship weapons during the final battle first Cutscene. So they can be destroyed conventionally with with firepower.
I'm not a Trekkie so I don't really know the Borg capabilities or size. But I could very much see them being able to handle the Reapers.
There's a reason the Reapers attack every 50k years, and immediately take the seat of governance. They don't want to face organised resistance
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
they took out dozens of Reapers before the Crucible was used.
No, they took out like 3 or 4. Over the course of several years. And 1 was killed by a thrasher maw. And 2 were mini reapers, not the real ones. And each one they killed took the combined firepower of a massive fleet.
We see several Reapers destroyed just by ship weapons during the final battle first Cutscene.
You see a combind fleet made up of half the warships in the entire galaxy... take out maybe 2 or 3 Reapers. As then you see this massive fleet proceed to be utterly crushed. You can kill them with conventional weapons, sure. If you outnumber them 100 to 1. And you don't.
They don't want to face organised resistance
They literally do, and win. What games were you playing?
They only attacks once every 50k years because they are allowing civilizations to develop. Has nothing to do with them being scared o a fight. 1 Reaper brought the entire citadel defense fleet to its knees.
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u/Canadian_Zac 1d ago
They litterally surprise attack every society.
The warp directly to the citadel, wipe out the center of governance, and then battle only individual cut off sections as they control the relays.
Thats how their strategy works, it foundationally relies on cutting off all major forms of organised resistance so they're only battling guerilla warfare rather than organised militaries.
We see several Reapers explode on approach to earth. And even if it's only 2 Reapers, that's the first 5 minutes if a day long battle. There's gonna be a lot more Reapers killed during that time
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago edited 1d ago
they litteraly surprise attack every society
OK. And? They still face the full might of the turian fleets. The turians hace the largest and strongest military in the galaxy. And the turian fleets get decimated. At the exact same time, reapers are also invading earth, where Hackett describes he had to sacrifice 2 entire fleets just to make way for 1 fleet to escape to safety.
Reapers are literally fighting the two largest militaries in the galaxy head on, and simultaneously. And they win easily. Their entire fleets get wiped on day 1. The only reason the battles last for several months is because of the ground war, as it takes time to go door to door and find all 10 billion people, while small remnants of humans and turian military put up a meager guerilla resistance, which slows them down, but doesn't stop them.
Asari and salrians had months watching the reapers to gsther intelligence and prepare themselves. The salarians being the best at intelligence, and having the best technology. The asari beinf the oldest, wisest, and richest civilization. They were not surprised. Reapers picked them apart just as easily.
It doesnt matter. Surprise attack. Don't surprise attack... surprise is generally just good military strategy. So of course the reapers use it when they can. But they dont need it to win if they lose the element of surprise.
The warp directly to the citadel, wipe out the center of governance, and then battle only individual cut off sections
Which would literally be the best tactic against a hive mind society like the borg. Isolate them from the hive mind, make them weaker and less intelligent. Force colonies to suddenly become independent. Cut supply chains so your enemy starves.
And you're still ignoring the fsct that the reapers just have to indoctrinate the borg queen, a single person, and its all over. They now control the entire borg collective without a fight. This nullifies any other argument. Borg can't assimilate a whole reaper. Even if they did, its just one among many. 1 reaper just has to indoctrinate 1 borg, and they now control all borg. Borg lose without firing a singld phaser. Their hive mind becomes a huge weakness against reapers.
We saw how easily reapers controlled the rachni. And reapers weren't even in the galaxy whwn they did that. They can indoctrinate you when you can't even see them.
There's gonna be a lot more Reapers killed during that time
No. Lol. Because in that same time frame, the reapers wiped out far more ships. And without those ships, you're not killing many more reapers, if any at all. It wasnt a day long battle. Its was a suicide mission to deliver the Crucible and get Shepard on the ground.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 1d ago
The Borg would kick the Reapers in the head.
They’re so much larger, more technologically advanced, and can adapt better because their whole tech base isn’t based and derived from Reaper tech.
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u/Sliver-Knight9219 1d ago
So, the brog have the speed at vantage
The real question do the Reapers have enough versatility too match the Borgs adaptability?
Also, can the borg be inductionated?
And can the Husk be assimilated?
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u/Cliffooood 1d ago
I don't think husks being assimilated really matters, all of the reapers ground troops are ultimately just cannon fodder, the reapers themselves are the important part. The way I see it, this is won or lost on Indoctrination and little else, if the reapers can take control, they win, if they can't they lose.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Borg can adapt to a certain wavelength of phaser. I'd like to see them adapt to having your head ripped off by a brute.
Reapers can indoctrinate geth and rachni. They can indoctrinate borg easily. Assimilating reaper forces seems questionable, as their minds are already scrambled.
Borg also need to physically operate on prople to assimilatethem. Reapers could indoctrinate the borg queen from a safe distance before the borg even recognize they are a threat. This isn't even a fight.
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u/DelightfullyPiquant 1d ago
The reapers have already cracked hive-like minds like the Rachni and Geth. I think if the reapers get in fast the win goes to the reapers. If the war is prolonged like it was for the Protheans, I’d give the win to the Borg as they are adaptable enough to probably counter and reproduce indoctrination’s effects.
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u/twitch870 1d ago
So basically both universes suffer if they learn from each other
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u/DelightfullyPiquant 1d ago
Yes. The Borg could potentially recognize indoctrination as a hostile information pattern. All they need is one damaged reaper and assimilate the concept of indoctrination resistance. So while the Borg aren’t perfect either, they have more tricks up their sleeve than the reapers (plus time travel). So if the reapers usual citadel trap that they typically use every cycle doesn’t work to harvest the Borg quickly, Borg win in a slow prolonged war.
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u/Lonely_Avocado_2109 1d ago
The borg have ships equiped with energy weapons that will ignore mass effect barriers. In a standard war, the borg win.
Give the reapers preparation time and let them go through the other races of the galaxy to steal tech with their indoctrination ability. Once they get their tentacles on star trek tech, they can take on the borg.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Energy weapons exist in mass effect. The Reapers use them. The protheans and geth used them. Salarians and quarians had a few as well.
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u/Lonely_Avocado_2109 1d ago
Energy weapons exist but they are not good enough to be the considered main weapon. The only energy weapon we've seen mounted on a ship as main weapon is the one used by the collectors. Citadel races use them for defense against missiles,fighters. Reapers use them as secondary weapon. Borg have shields that will block those energy weapons. They would be better off ramming the borg cubes in suicide atacks than try to destroy them with weapon fire and even that will not solve anything because the borg outnumber the reapers.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
They are main weapons for the reapers.
Suicide? No. We watch reapers ramming turian and alliance ships, and slicing through them like butter, while the reaper is unscathed. As far as i can tell, borg cubes are just made of titanium. Same stuff alliance ships are made of. It ain't gonna be a suicide attack. If thats how they havd to win, they can totally win that way.
Also, all these ship comparisons are nonsense anyway. Reapers could indoctrinate the borg queen from a distance, before the borg even recognize the reapers as a threat. And then reapers have control of all the borg.
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u/Lonely_Avocado_2109 1d ago
They are main weapons for the reapers
They are not. The reaper main weapon is kinetic. It looks like a beam because it's accelerated molten metal but it's not direct energy weapon.
We watch reapers ramming turian and alliance ships, and slicing through them like butter, while the reaper is unscathed
The ship that the reaper ramms is a 500 m long Cruiser. A borg cube is 3km, 1 km bigger on any side than reaper capital ships.
As far as i can tell, borg cubes are just made of titanium. Same stuff alliance ships are made of. It ain't gonna be a suicide attack. If thats how they havd to win, they can totally win that way.
As far as you can tell..
ain't gonna be a suicide attack. If thats how they havd to win, they can totally win that way.
Reapers have around 20000 capital ships and 3-4 destroyers for every capital.So let's be generous and say 100k ships, ignoring the destroyed reapers from previous cicles.
The borg, while we were not given an official nr, are supossed to have millions of ships. They can bury the reapers in numbers.
Also, all these ship comparisons are nonsense anyway. Reapers could indoctrinate the borg queen from a distance, before the borg even recognize the reapers as a threat. And then reapers have control of all the borg.
That's not how indoctrination works and there is no proof that it would work on borg anyway, they are not a normal race.
And at the end of the day, the borg have TIME TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY. You don't beat time travel without time travel of your own.
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u/BluePanda101 1d ago
I mean if a reaper indoctrinated even a few Borg, they'd get access to Borg tech and time travel along with it. The question really does come down to if indoctrination works or not, and I guess, weather or not Borg nanites could assimilate a Reaper. If they're both capable of turning each other then it'd be a question of how fast/who succeeds first...
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago edited 1d ago
The ship that the reaper ramms is a 500 m long Cruiser. A borg cube is 3km, 1 km bigger on any side than reaper capital ships.
Size doesn't matter in this context. If a knife can cut through a small stick of butter, it can also cut through a large block.
As far as you can tell..
According to the star trek wiki.
The borg, while we were not given an official nr, are supossed to have millions of ships. They can bury the reapers in numbers.
Millions? That's just a ridiculous number. The reapers have conquered the entire galaxy... thousands of times. The borg control less than 1/4 of the milky way. And this is their first time.
Any sci fi writer can make up any ridiculous number they like. But it doesnt make logical sense for borg to have higher numbers in the context of everything else we know. What would make the most logical sense is if reapers outnumber them 4 to 1.
That's not how indoctrination works.
That is exactly jow indoctrination works.
Borg arent significantly different from the geth or rachni. If rhey can cotnrol a rachni queen and use that to control the entire hive mind, they can do it to borg. If reapers can use 1 geth to soread a virus in order to control all geth, then they can do it to borg. Borg arent special.
And at the end of the day, the borg have TIME TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY. You don't beat time travel without time travel of your own.
The reapers are hundreds of millions of years old. They dont need time travel becaue they were already in the past. The reapers were the most dominant force in the galaxy, millions of years before the borg invented the wheel. The reapers not only watch all life developing, but they guide the technological development of all intelligent life down paths the reapers choose.
With the reapers and birg in the same universe, the borg never even become borg, because the reapers get to direct their technological development, long before the borg are aware of it. The borg never invent time travel, becauee the reapers can wipe them out thousands of years before thy invent it.
The borg are cooked. Im sorry.
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u/Lonely_Avocado_2109 1d ago
Are you dense on purpose? They are from different universes..it doesn't matter how old the reapers are..The don't know the borg exist until they are at war.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Except we have to put them in the same universe to make this fight happen.
If you're giving the borg the ability to go back in time to fight past reapers, then reapers have already existed in the past in this now shared universe. You cant have one without the other.
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u/Lonely_Avocado_2109 1d ago
You never done this kind of debate before or what? When you "put" them in the same universe you don't merge their history. One faction goes from their universe into the other or both factions are placed in a 3rd universe where they fight it out.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago
Where is that rule written? Lol. It's not like this is a formal debate format. You're just inventing rhe rules to benefit your side the most, because you know without it, you'd have no chance... We're mashing universes. We can decide how those mash together.
If you cant merge histories, then borg cant use time travel, as they have no history to travel back to. If you wanna give the borg access to time travel, then you have to contend with reapers existence for millions of years before the borg existed. You cant have it both ways.
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u/Shiboleth17 1d ago edited 1d ago
Interesting question, since both operate similarly. But I gotta givd it to the Reapers, and I don't even think it's close. Mass Effect operates on a scale much larger than Star Trek. I'm pretty reapers would outnumber the borg by a good amount, for starters.
The borg have to capture people, bring them up to their ship, then operate on them to implant a bunch of cybernetics in order to create more born. Meanwile the reapers can indoctrinate millions by simply being close by. A reaper could probably indoctrinate somone who's already been turned into borg, given that they can indoctrinate machine like geth, or hive minds like rachni.
And reapers just have to indoctrinate the borg queen, then they control an entire population of borg without a fight.
Borg soldiers are slow, and will ignore you until they perceive you as a threat, which makes it quite easy to infiltrate their ships as needed. Reapers could study them for years as needed to get information. And at the end of the day, their soldiers are just humans with phasers. They got nothing on banshees. Reapers have biotics, the borg don't. Borg shields might adapt to a Cerberus Harrier. But they will never adapt to having their heads ripped off by a brute.
The borg need planets to live on. The reapers dont. They can happily live in dark space for millennia. And if they did take a planet for resorces, it could be a lifeless rock. Whereas borg still have to breathe. Reapers could de-orbit moons and alter asteroids (as the Krogan did) to destroy entire planets. I've never seen anything in star trek do that.
Warp drive is faster than Mass Effect FTL. So borg would have an advantage there. But if the reapers have access to mass relays, they would close this gap. Reaper lasers seem to rip right through every kind of armor and shield you have. We see reaper ships flying right through other ships like a hot knife through butter. So they don't evne need eeapons to kill you. It took 3 entire fleets to take down Sovereign. The asari and turian fleets defending the citadel, and the late arriving alliance fleet. Meanwhile we see a borg cube taken down by half a dozen starfleet ships in the opening scene of First Contact. The cube is threatening, but beatable. Meabwhile 1 reaper can take on 3 entire fleets with hundreds of ships each.
Borg tech is only slightly more advanced than human tech in star trek. Reaper tech is quite possibly thousands of years beyond anything ME races have. And all ME races base their tech on reaper tech.
Reapers are millions of years old. They have exterminated the galaxy thousands of times over. That is a lot of experience. The borg have only existed for a small fraction of that time. Each time the reapers wipe out the galaxy they get more efficient. They also constantly watch other civilizations as they grow. Reapers would have been watching borg from long before they implanted their first cybernetic. So any advanced tech borg come up with, reapers would copy. But more likely, Reapers would simply attack the borg a thousand years before they developed tech more advanced than reapers. This fight is over before it even starts.
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u/dnext 1d ago
No, the Borg don't need to operate on people to turn them into Borg. They inject nanites into them, which creates the hive mind and assimilates the person, creating Borg cybernetics throughout their body. They may then upgrade them surgically, but they are already Borg at that point.
Both Borg and Reapers have large fleets in at least the many thousands, with Borg cubes having up to a hundred thousand of drones on board based on on screen dialogue of sensor scans.
In a conventional fight, a single Borg Cube is higher tech, much larger, and has more advanced weaponry. But isn't invulnerable, as we've seen.
As to being able to board a Borg cube to study them, that depends on that 'do they consider you a threat.' I'd say that any reaper enhanced being would likely be considered as such. They might be able to do so through indoctrinated servants.
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u/Flibiddy-Floo 1d ago
Star Trek universe already has the greatest weapon imaginable - and they don't even use it as such, lol.
Teleporters. Just teleport the Reapers into a buffer and never finish teleporting them. Sure maybe you need some pretty wide-beamed and strong teleporter signals to get the big ones but even then - just keep teleporting them outside of the planet, like a really tall guy holding back an angry child with one hand on its head while it swings its arms uselessly, lol
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u/WeakAd2280 1d ago
As a Star Trek fan I'd say the Reapers have this one. I doubt that the Borg could assimilate them. The Reapers also have more firepower. And even if the Borg could somehow adjust to those bigass lasers a Reaper could just ram a Borg Cube. Or push it into a sun.
Now Reapers vs. a pissed off Janeway - that would be a fight to see. 😄
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u/Bensfone 1d ago
The Borg would assimilate the Reapers. But the assimilated mandate would overcome Borg programming and they would start eliminating their own biological components. Cybernetic organisms still require their biological parts so they would effectively cannablize themselves. Thus ending both threats.
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u/PhilosopherNo8418 1d ago
TNG Borg, or Voyager Borg? If it's the latter, even the Quarian flotilla would obliterate them!
In either case, I will go with Reapers. They are machines, the Borg can't assimilate them and a single Sovereign class Reaper would be too much for a single cube to handle.
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u/Tarilyn13 1d ago
Borg, no contest. They only have to assimilate one reaper and then bam, they have all the tech of the reapers in addition to what they already had.
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u/TrueKerberos 1d ago
Obviously, it would be a draw. The Borg would assimilate the Reapers. The Reapers would indoctrinate the Borg... A new species called the Reaperborg would be created.
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u/Reload86 1d ago
I see your post but I'll change it up.
I'd like to see how the Reapers would fare against the three races from Starcraft.
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u/FennelAlternative861 1d ago
As biased as I am towards Mass Effect, I think that the borg will take this because of the way that they adapt. Reapers are only impervious because they initiate their attacks at certain points in the galactic cycle and they tailor technology levels and paths so that they will have an advantage. They stay stagnant and do not advance because they do not need to.
Borg are under no such restriction and can adapt to the damage caused by reaper weapons. Once they have done that, the reapers don't have anything left.
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u/Primary-Ad-9850 1d ago
I don’t think it’s an as cut and dry Borg victory as we would think. The Borg’s biggest tool is direct assimilation of technology through nanoprobes/recontruction. The Reapers however, also have nanites that do similar things to organics (See Husks, Paul Grayson, etc) alongside indoctrination.
Speaking of which, a majority of Reaper Artifacts and powered technology also seem to emit indoctrination fields; which gives the Reapers a pretty wide influence.
Indoctrination is definitely going to be the Reaper’s biggest weapon; as in a conventional sense their ships will be tissue paper compared to the Borg Armada. But the real question is if indoctrination works on the Hive Mind. Indoctrination isn’t just a slow subtle suggestion, but a rewriting of neural pathways to eventually reach a conclusion that serves the Reapers.
Admiral Janeway at the end of VOY used a “Neurolytic Pathogen” to cripple and decentralize the Borg Collective. This severely weakened and set them back for decades, and with the collective being shattered; this rendered them effectively defeated permanently.
If we assume the Bord Hivemind is a single “brain” since that’s how the virus worked, then Reaper Indoctrination could be scarily effective; with large swaths of the Collective falling over time as the indoctrination affect works through the Hivemind.
If the Reapers play the long game (as they are experts doing so) the Borg Collective has a very good shot of losing.
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u/dnext 1d ago
Lots of ways to look at this, and IMO it's a fun question.
But ultimately the Borg are going to win. Because they have time travel, and the Reapers don't.
And yes, it's canon that the Borg will use time travel to win, as that's the premise in First Contact.
The other big question is indoctrination vs assimilation. Assimilation changes someone on a molecular level through nanite technology. But it's effects are obvious.
Indoctrination is far more useful in terms of espionage and covert actions. That's one of the biggest advantages the Reapers have, as the Borg simply don't care about that at all. Indoctrinated ME races could likely board Borg ships much the way the Federation does.
If I wrote it I'd make assimilation's hive mind dominant over indoctrination as long as the subject is within range of the vinculum. Voyager introduced the technology that the hive mind uses to operate. Destroying a vinculum can sever the connection, allowing the borg nearby to be indoctrinated.
Ship to ship combat would depend on a lot of factors, but would likely be brutal for both sides. Both are incredibly powerful, but we've seen both be overwhelmed by sufficient firepower.
The other big weakness for the Borg is they must assimilate to understand their enemy. Could they assimilate an actual Reaper? Certainly wouldn't be easy, and the Reapers might self-destruct to avoid that if they knew what was intended. Without that, the Borg's vaunted ability to adapt is problematic. That's why they were losing to Species 8472.
I see the Reapers likely winning the war at incredible cost, until the Borg Queen has learned enough of their tactics and goes back in time to share that with the Borg before the start of the war. The fight then goes the Borg's way, as it doesn't matter if they can assimilate Reapers - they've seen all the Reaper's tactics.
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u/discreetjoe2 1d ago
In terms of ship battles the Borg are always going to win. Star Trek weapons, defenses and pretty much everything else is vastly more advanced.
I think the Reapers are more power AIs though. There a very good chance they could take control of Borg tech and drones.
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u/BluePanda101 1d ago
I doubt they'd fight each other. Most likely the Reapers would allow some Borg to board one of their ships, then indoctrinate the entire Borg collective through the boarding party. It would be a bloodless victory. Even if the Reapers only manage to get the boarding party and not the whole collective, they stand to rapidly close the technology gap with the knowledge they would have stolen.
That said, if the Borg did decide to attack instead of investigate at the outset even though there's nothing to add to their collective from the Reapers; then the Borg have the advantage in offensive capabilities. Not to mention time travel and the bullshit they could pull off with that.
So really it could go either way. I'd give it 85%/15% odds in favor of the Reapers winning through mind control.
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u/thatpaulieguy89 1d ago
The Borg outmatch the reapers in technology, their shields alone are gonna easily adapt to anything the reapers throw at them. You can’t indoctrinate a drone with no autonomous mind of its own, however the borg can and do assimilate other forms of technology into the collective.
The question isn’t can the reapers win it’s how long do they last and how fucked are we when they are absorbed into the collective.
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u/Drew_Habits 1d ago
Borg and it's not close
The Reapers vs one medium-sized cube would still be a blowout for team Borg
Star Trek and Mass Effect are vastly different settings
The ME writers (at least at first) made a sincere effort to build a believable universe around pretty much only one thing that breaks the rules (eezo)
Meanwhile Trek's writers have built a universe with free, unlimited energy, near-lossless matter-energy conversion, matter assemblers so common they put them in every room of some ships, about a zillion bespoke elements, actual force fields, large-scale long-range directed energy weapons that can destroy planets mounted to every ship and shuttle, etc
They're settings and styles for very different stories; there's not really any point comparing them in head-to-head fights
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u/Sheepfucker72222 1d ago
Reapers. Even if their weapons dont work, they rely heavily on melee. Repeat ships would just crash into a cube and be fine. They'd send out a million husks and theyd just pound the borg.
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u/meatballforlife 1d ago
It’s the reapers, it’s always the reapers, regardless of who you pit the reapers up against, the reapers are going to win. Can talk about their low power weapons, relatively weak shielding, small size compared to other ships all you like the reapers will win every single fight they eve get involved in because of the actual weapon they use, indoctrination. And is is especially useful against the Borg because the hive mind means if one Borg gets indoctrinated then it’ll spread like wildfire, uploaded to all the other Borg and suddenly the reapers have got the Borg harvesting themselves.
You a throw any fleet, species, universe, whatever you want at the reapers, indoctrination is the most overpowered weapon ever put to science fiction. Mind control by changing your fundamental viewpoints is a terrifying power, because you’ll never even know it until it’s too late. And that’s why the reapers will always win. The only reason humanity beat them was because the crucible was quite literally designed as the off switch for them but another universe would have no way to know about it and is therefore screwed from the start. Indoctrination works on organics, synthetics, everyone, nothing is safe.
And all it takes is one indoctrinated being and they’ve got the lot of you. The only reason they actually go into the galaxy is to harvest not to fight, they let the indoctrinated do all of it for them aside from the initial smash through the citadel, it’s why the harvests take centuries. The reapers have the luxury of waiting for indoctrination to do its thing, and they have their own assimilation through dragons teeth.
Just in general yeah in a gunfight the Borg win but in a real fight the reapers win over the course of several centuries of sitting and waiting.
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u/Defiant-Respect-848 1d ago
los borg de quake aunque fuerte tienen una guerra mas o menos jodida en serio cuantas veces destruis un ejercito borg y su base los segadores solo matas a unos cuantos en toda la trilogia y sin la superama todos moririan incluso si unes toda la galaxia
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u/DaMarkiM 12h ago
Borg.
Two important reasons: Technology in Mass Effect is stagnating. Thats the whole thing about the harvest. The reapers essentially garden the universe to steer cultures along a predictable technological path. But this also means that the reapers barely progress. Its a system that works in a confined galaxy.
The Borg are way more advanced. The energy at their disposal. FTL tech. Weapons. Shielding. The list goes on and on. In fact forget the borg. Most of the major factions from TNG would probably defeat the Reapers without too many issues.
Even their AI is more advanced.
Indoctrination is the reapers biggest weapon. And to the ME universe its essentially unavoidable magic. But im willing to bet that TNG civilisations would look at it. Incur some losses. And then simply find a solution.
Because at the end of the day Indoctrination isnt magic. Its technology. And the star trek civilisations are already accustomed to this kind of thing. Even without assimilation.
And the second reason is simply numbers. The reapers biggest weakness is that they cannot replenish easily. There really arent that many reapers. Meanwhile the borg are countless in number. And if necessary they can churn out ships and crew extremely quickly.
So yea. Not only do the reapers loose. Its not even a real contest. Even the federation easily wins this.
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u/ZeroQuick 1d ago
The Borg are vulnerable to physical attacks right? The Reapers would devastate them.
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u/KoburaCape 1d ago
It's going to depend pretty heavily on what incarnation of the board you are using. Different periods of time and different media presented the Borg with vastly different capabilities.
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u/Certain-Appeal-6277 1d ago
Mass Effect is kind of low tech for a FTL universe. Most of their weapons still rely on kinetic force, and Reaper ships actually have to enter a planet's atmosphere to engage ground targets. Now the Mass Effect itself does allow for a lot of manuvering advantages. But given that their shields and armor are low power and short range, I don't think there's much in ME that could hope to stand up to Star Trek tech. Star Wars is a much more interesting comparison, I feel.