Why do you oppose the Indoctrination Theory, and how would you fix the ending without using IT?

Why: It's a cop-out ALSO. It basically boils down to "the stuff we wrote is a crappy cop-out out of resolving the plot normally, so here's another cop-out instead, brighter and better and slightly less esoteric".

How: Three ways.

Numero Uno. Rewrite the game from the ground up. Make the Crucible optional. This is the crux, actually.
Separate War Assets and Construction Assets into separate meters. You can try to juggle both building the Megaweapon of Doom and assembling an Army of Awesome Armageddonism, or focus on one over the other. Make other options for Megaweapon of Doom BESIDES the Crucible available if you bother to look for them.
Maybe you will decide to build a Death Star with Thanix Cannons and Quarian/Geth Hypershields in the hope it can withstand Reaper fire to at least serve as a reliable decoy that can put holes through them while they cannot through it.
Get rid of linear story progression. The Crises pop up as they did, f.e. at a certain date the Migrant Fleet WILL strike the Geth Dyson Sphere and the Geth will call on the Reapers the day after. But what if Shepard recruits the geth a month earlier and the Dyson Sphere isn't at Rannoch when the Quarians arrive? While they're busy planting trees, you and your new robo-buddies deal with picking out a new colony world for them to get resources for the Sphere from, but one where the Quarians will not find them before construction is complete. You will have to fight the Blue Suns for the world, of course, as it's a staging base, but what's war without sacrifice? You secure a hypervaluable race to your Alliance, do you not?
Add similar plotline-specific missions to other situations (f.e. defending a freighter fleet that transports Krogans to Palaven from pirates! hunting those oft-mentioned but never-seen Reaper-driven Geth Platforms!) and we're golden.
Make not all races recruitable. The vanilla game toys with it, but you can through metagaming or blind luck recruit EVERYBODY. That don't cut it. While you derp around doing Tuchanka and Sur'Kesh, Dekuuna is being subjugated, remember? You can go help the Elcor, but that will mean you will arrive at Rannoch maybe too late and the Quarians will be all but gone under the upgraded Geth attacks (remember, the only thing that saves them from this fate in the vanilla game is Shepard sabotaging the dreadnaught's Reaper control).
Alternate storyline: you can skip Tuchanka, recruit the Salarians and convince them to use Yahg as deployable shock troops. Crush the geth on Rannoch with the Yahg, recruit the Quarians, develop those computer viruses Daro'Xen is so hot under the helmet about. While you're doing that, Tuchanka's atmosphere is frelled up and the Krogans die as a species forever, falling below reproducible levels. With the Quarians, however, you liberate Palaven, test-drive the viruses and Daro'Xen perfects them, finally using them at the Battle For Urth to turn Reapers against one another. Crucible? We don't need one when we can poison their minds!

And those are just two outcomes in a multi-storyline-megamesh of plot directions which are actually very simple to implement, just would require OODLES of voiceover work for all the permutations of what you did in which order and who died in ME2. Alpha Protocol did it despite three full plot rewrites. I'm sure BioWare can manage SOMETHING similar.

Numero Duo. Fix nothing. PUSH THROUGH. Expand Priority Earth. Make it a long battle of attrition, doing smaller chunked-up missions behind the frontline, preparing for a coordinated strike on the Conduit. Whichever races you recruited aid you, making certain approaches and options easier or closing others down altogether (f.e. you can choose to push through a Conversion Factory that makes husks, but you need the Krogan, Kakliosaurs and Rachni to even attempt it; or you can choose to use the No Man's Land using asari and salarian recon squads, or you can choose to use the subway lines with Turian spec ops dudes, ecksetra, ecksetra). See Freedom Fighters for examples. That game should be taught in game design schools, I swears.

Maybe even keep Harbinger's current appearance, but change up the Citadel. Shepard, bleeding and all, navigates the Citadel, gets medigelled by whatever is left of C-Sec and the Citadel Defense Force, which are reduced to guerilla warfare in the humongous arms of the station which the Reapers didn't have the time to police yet. See System Shock for examples. That game should also be taught in game design schools, btw. Harbinger on the PA, taunting us and the resistance, Shepard having to make do with crappy unupgraded guns and crappy unupgraded armour until he/she reaches the Presidium and ransacks the stores and has to pick whatever items he/she DID NOT YET BUY and which are still in stock to outfit him/herself.

And push on towards the Council Chambers and their Citadel Control Panel and do the whole Anderson/TIM shebang there, and no Starchild, but argue with Harbinger, who is the First Among Equals, The One That Awoke, The Bringer Of Perfection, The Harbinger Of Doom, The Grand Poobah, M.D., Esq. Convince him? He and his will leave, never to return. Fail? He shoots out the Council Chambers, Shepard unconscious. Stall for time? Your Quarian and/or Geth friends that have also reached the Conduit by now are finished interfacing with the Reaper Collective and throw Shepard into VR, a grand-scale "this is not a drill" upgrade of the Geth Consensus mission, but with actual enemies - Reaper Code, which the VR represents as Collectors due to Shepard's memories being a template again, with Harby-Narby serving his old ME2 role of roaming administrator that brings out the banhammer and Shepard's companions being whichever fitting NPCs are still alive - the candidates being Tali, Xen, Geth Prime Prime, EDI and Garrus (so whichever way you spin this, you have two to pick from). Finally, Shepard-Commander reaches the central node - the representation of Harbinger himself, a giant, half-machine half-organic cuttlefish, and you re-do a semblance of the Rannoch Reaper battle, except you can run around him and you only have the Geth VR Gun to your name. You re-enact Shadow of the Colossus as you ascend, tearing down firewall armour and disrupting neural connections, until you finally discharge the gun into his CPU equivalent and reprogram it (making a colour choice without knowing what the colours do) jack out, watching Harby shut down and then power back up, eyes glowing <insert colour here>, as he turns to his brethren, doing whatever the colour you picked corresponds to.
<insert $1 to continue>

Numero Tres. Add a conventional warfare option. Barebones is: Shepard can walk away from the Very Final Choice, take the elevator so he's back where his radio works, tell Hackett the Citadel is a house for the Reaper Leader and it has to go die in a fire, shoulders Anderson's body and takes the Conduit to the surface before crap happens. If you had 7K EMS, the Allied Fleet wins with heavy losses. 6K, wins but there's no fleet left to speak of. 5K loses, but the Reapers are so un-numerous, they retreat back into Dark Space, below - the Fleet loses and the Galaxy loses and the cycles resume, but the Yahg rule the next cycle and obliterate the Reapers when they come calling. Building a religion around Liara and Glyph and their time capsule optional.
The existing endings get lengthy diversified per-decision consequence cutscenes, INCLUDING WHATEVER PROTHEAN ARTEFACTS YOU COLLECTED THROUGHOUT THE THREE GAMES AFFECTING WHAT THE CRUCIBLE DOES WHEN TURNED ON. This is also the crux, really, providing mega-extra incentive for ME1 players that accepted Sha'ira's gift.

Yes, this is the one in my ending-fixing thread. I like to toot my own horn.

We've been over this on the BSN up the wazoo in a series of threads about conventional warfare against the Reapers. I've convinced the author to sign up for HTL yesterday, she promised to port some of them here today or tomorrow.

Basically, it boils down to "they could've done a lot of things, but BioWare was insistent the Reapers should not be defeatable conventionally, so they passed the Idiot Ball around and retconned away virtually every single Reaper-effective weapon, of which there were truckloads in ME2".

For evacuating civilians when the push comes to shove. Don't you read Twitter? (I kid you not) They announced OVER TWITTER that the civilians were either hidden in shelters on the Citadel or evacuated. Harhar, so they weren't eaten by the Cannibals, they were blown up when Shepard activates the Crucible, big difference.

And that is why there HAS to be a peer-review process in writing, and underscores how much ME3's ending needed that. Good call.

Yeah, that one boggles the mind. Say one guy builds a cocking mechanism, another builds a revolving mechanism, the third builds a cylinder with six holes that perfectly fit the items the fourth builds. Then the fifth puts it together and THEY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT DOES, EXCEPT THEY DO. It's a revolver. Same stuff here. Couldn't they infer anything? More bad writing for everybody!

A full retcon of the final mission is necessary. This is last position and I won't budge from it in all honesty. Via Indoc theory or not I don't care but a full retcon is necessary for the game to end on a some what decent note.

What I would Like to see (Not what I ever expect to see) :-

Now if you are asking what things I would like to see apart from that last position. Then I'd like a complete re-do of the whole game. A trial from the beginning and the start of divergent story lines. You convince the trial what you did was necessary, you start the game four months earlier with more choice on how things go down, Things like arranging for more money to be put into the fleets, Secret dreadnaught ship building in between systems, Training troops for reaper tactics, Sharing technology and a few missions which show the reapers as less of a Tidal wave and more a gradual and implacable bolder moving towards you with things like unrest in the colonies and earth with reaper cults (A few people who are indoced and lead a group of un indoced people causing havoc) and eventually culminating in a 3 part mission that sees shepard attempting to fight against reaper forces on earth (After smashing the batarians) and in space (In space stations and on the moon) eventually leading to him in consultation with Admiral Anderson and Admiral hacket calling for a retreat from earth.

I'd keep the other stuff generally the same baring a few parts (Namely you can convince the Illusive man Early on to kill himself and gain control of the cerberus network) and give the shadow broker network a larger role with more missions and the Rachni wouldn't have been nutered. I have more side quests in general with the less prominent council species like the Hanar or the Elcor being Recruit-able via these side missions. I'd also have the Three main story arks occur at the same time so you are forced to juggle the missions around (Make's it more challenging but the pay off should be greater) and finally I would make the crucible be optional and have other options beside it such as ripping apart the crucible plans for new tech to upgrade your ships and Mass Producing Dreadnaughts and other options as well.

Finally for the final mission I'd have it change around so it's less like wave after wave very similar to the Multiplayer but instead comprised of a series of missions, Again what ones you do are up to you, Ranging from taking a small taskforce of resistance members to disable anti-Air guns on the ground to help allow more forces to land to being able to destroy a reaper factory to being able to reactivate Space borne defense satellites orbiting around the earth and stationed on the ground to help even the odds against the reaper fleet.

You personally would not be able to do every mission your self , at most three, you would instead have to assign team members , both present and former, to the job and depending on their loyalty to you, weather or not you helped them in me3 and if you picked the right mission for them as well they would either: - Succeed and live, Succeed and die,Fail and live and fail and die.

You would also be able to assign various different leaders to help forces, People such as Wrex to lead the Krogan forces and Tali (Or kal Regar) to lead the quarians. Again each race would have their own set of missions they could do (Such as the krogan (And if you did the dinosaur mission on their mounts) leading the ground charge or the Salarians doing scouting) and each again would impact the survival of the species and their leaders which would all culminate in the retaking of the Citadel.

Finally, with everything done right, you end up on the citadel where you have to fight your way to the Control console. Once you reached it (again after another two, three missions, no big choices here though) you have the final choice. Do you take what remains of your fleet (Even done everything well you'll still be looking at 50% casuallties with the reaper forces down about 30% to 70% effectiveness) and send them to the Reaper outpost in Dark space where they must then decide on what to do with the reaper outpost (weather to destroy it or use it against the reapers) bare in mind you couldn't send your whole fleet through the citadel relay.

If you chose to destroy it, and your EMS was high after gaining all of the war assists (Mp reliance would be disabled) then you would manage to weaken the reapers even more by destroying what was essentially their command and control center and by extension the governance it gave them, The organic species captured in the reapers would be fully in control and now if you want you could continue pressing the attack (in their heavily weakened state) or offer them the chance to surrender. (Neither one would effect the outcome now, It's just a choice between offering them freedom if they leave or destroying them completely).

The other choice to control the Reaper outpost would be different. It would be more dependent on who you kept alive. If the quarians and the Geth were alive and as many tech people as possible were alive then you'd gain full control for one order. If you wanted you could destroy them, free the reapers from the control of the reaper outpost or use them to ensure galactic dominance for humanity/ what ever other combination of people you want to keep safe.

So what do you think?

Correction. It's established you need sustained fire from 4 human or equivalent dreadnoughts to kill one Sovereign-class Reaper. Destroyers are one-quarter of a Sovereign-class, they can capsize from one human dreadnought hit.

BUT. Those are pre-Thanix numbers. A frigate with a Thanix outfit packs about as much punch as a cruiser. A cruiser - as a dreadnought. The games never give a definite answer on the exact number of Sovereign-class Reapers. And Thanix is but one of many options to upscale our military capabilities. Etc, etc.

It would be shorter if I just link the appropriate threads on the BSN where smarter and more eloquent people than me crunched the numbers and logicked the logic:
Aeon-long thread on conventional warfare against Reapers and why it's plausible to win with ultra-high EMS.
How many Reapers are there, exactly? Why, then, do they fight like they FEAR we can defeat them?
FTL suicide attacks as a viable anti-Reaper weapon.

No worries. I understand where you're coming from, and it's certainly justified, unlike most of the "we can't beat the Reapers just because. period." replies I usually get =) If there WAS internal consistency, I would've gladly accepted that we cannot beat the Reapers without a Superweapon of Doomy Doom, but would still complain that we have to settle for this Aperture-Science-We-Don't-Know-What-It-Does Device instead of reverse-engineering the Klendagon Cannon or letting Daro'Xen perfect her killer viruses. Newer bad writing does not excuse older bad writing, it only attenuates the effect.

And that's kinda sad, as those inconsistencies did not add up to enjoyment-shattering levels prior to ME3.

I also have to keep adding the disclaimer that:
BEING ABLE TO ATTEMPT CONVENTIONAL WARFARE DOES NOT MEAN WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO WIN IT AT ALL, LET ALONE "WIN IT FOR A DISNEY ENDING" EVERYBODY THINKS I WANT
It only means being able to remain "the only person that CAN protect the galaxy" by making the hard choices. Keeping our freedom of decision-making.

This is a mistake that has been repeated all over ME3. You have oodles of situations with life-or-death decisions to be made by Shepard, but out of ALL OF THEM, there is but one (1) which you can attempt that does not lead you to a victory of some sort. Yes, the interrupt if you chose the Geth over the Quarians.

EVERY SINGLE OTHER IN-ME3 DECISION IS ULTIMATELY BENEFICIAL TO SHEPARD IN SOME WAY. AND THAT IS BAD WRITING. BAAAAD WRITING.

Remember Tali's Trial? Your options are:

* Do nothing. Tali is exiled, she hates you. Always available.
* Reveal her father's research. He is posthumously exiled, she is exonerated, she hates you. MADE ALWAYS AVAILABLE BY RETCON, original script found in the game reveals you could actually FAIL the conditions to achieve this!
* Paragon Interrupt. Defend Tali. She is exonerated, she loves you. Available with high Para to show you are eloquent and respected.
* Renegade Interupt. Assail the Admiralty. She is exonerated, she loves you. Available with high Rene to show you are impressively scary and intimidating and badass.
* RALLY THE CROWD. Others defend Tali, she is exonerated, everyone is happy. Available if you meet an esoteric set of conditions.

This is good writing.

Compare and contrast, the Rannoch Peace:

* Let Legion finish upload. Geth live, Quarians die. You gain Geth WAs. Always available.
* Kill Legion. Quarians live, Geth die. You gain Quarian WAs. Always available.
* Paragon. Convince Gerrel to stand down. Available if high Para score AND esoteric conditions met which have NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING ABLE TO CONVINCE GERREL TO STAND DOWN.
* Renegade. Frighten Shala'Raan and Gerrel into standing down. Available if high Rene score AND esoteric conditions met WHICH HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING ABLE TO SCARE PEOPLE ABOUT THEIR IMMINENT DEATHS.

Wait, what? Why did I save Zaal'Koris? So he could say "yes, yes, Shepard is right" when I say "You will definitely die, you bosh'tets"? Why did I go to the geth server? So that I could see the Geth let the Quarians go? Where exactly do I USE THIS in my Para/Rene dialogue?

This is bad writing.

Bottom line? I would very much enjoy it if there was a legitimate way to LOSE the game. Remember Silent Hill 1? It had five endings. Joke ending aside, out of the other four, in two of them, you lose. It feels like you've won, yes, but you ultimately lose. Silent Hill Shattered Memories, its bizarro re-imagining? YOU LOSE IN ALL OF THEM. And it's awesomely handled. It's so awesome, you don't feel bad about losing.

Mass Effect 3? You're told you've won, but you lose. Destroy? Civilization is ruined, possibly destroyed. Hurray. Control? Sorry, Reapers still live AND civilization is ruined. It's an impasse, not a victory. Synthesis? All organics are now cybernetic. Congratulations, the Reapers just won. Whatever colour you pick, you lose.

And thus endeth my attempt at derailing the thread. I will now go invent a new alternate ending =P

Allow me to reply with my earlier post in this thread:

The only appearance of Thanix weapons that actually FIRE at something are "Thanix Missiles" (how you make a stream weapon into a missile is beyond my understanding) which is what we fire from the trucks in London.

You can try to refer to the conventional-warfare threads I linked earlier, they got a list of all the ways we could mop the floor with the Reapers if there were no retcons.