Quote Originally Posted by sandwich eater View Post
I think that from the Reapers perspective ME1 was the beginning of the war. So when they tried a direct assault on the Citadel and failed, they changed their strategy. Since the Reapers operate on a scale of centuries taking a couple years off to strategize is no big deal for them. I think that ME1 convinced them that humans were the biggest threat because of Shepard, so they spent ME2 capturing and analyzing humans covertly, and then they attacked Earth (and the Batarian homeworld) first in ME3. However, I find that the more I think about ME3 the less it makes sense and the more disjointed it feels with the other 2 games. In ME1 they explain that the Reapers built the Citadel and the Mass Relay network to guide organic evolution and the Citadel is the always the natural location for the seat of galactic governance (I think every Mass Relay connects to the Citadel's relay). So the Reapers have every reason to attack the Citadel first to throw galactic civilization into disarray and make the harvesting easier (even if they couldn't turn off the mass relays), but in ME3 they didn't do this. If they had attacked the Citadel first in ME3 it would have made coordinating the various races much harder because the Council would be dead and every species would have focused only on their own defense and the Reapers probably would have won.
Thats what I'm talking about. Taking the Citadel first and disconnecting the Mass Relays makes strategic sense. Even if it means they cannot use the Mass Relays either, they can just spend the hundreds of years travelling from system to system. This is completely in line with how the Reapers were portrayed, being eternally patient.
The only reason I can think of them not doing that is the loss of the Keepers from their control, and the firewall that Vigil gave Shepard that prevented them from directly accessing the Citadel controls. If Bioware said that, I wouldn't be questioning their strategy. Since they didn't, its all I have to explain why they would ignore such a glaring strategic opening.