Canon: How is invasion even possible?

[Badsearcher]

Something I've wondered a lot whenever I played the campaigns (remember them? ) is that if an ACU is supposed to be able to magic up an army with locally available materials then wouldn't an acu that is stationed at a point being defended for days, months, years, be able to cook up such an army that the one acu that gets gated in would be overwhelmed in seconds? It always struck me as plot armor in favor of the player that when you are playing an attack mission that the enemy acu doesn't have a huge army already prepared. Is a rationale for this ever supplied in the canon?

[Badsearcher]

Also, is there ever in the canon (official or unofficial) stats on how many acu's/acu commanders exist in the Supreme Commander universe? You'd think that since most of the military is comprised of semi-autonomous robots, that you could run a galaxy wide military with maybe a few thousand sentients at most, right?

The reason I care about the canon is because I am fascinated by how a person inside of an ACU is basically like a god so I am very curious at the implications and limitations of such a possibility.

[Nombringer]

If I remember correctly the cybrans had around 500 Acu's? I think it was around the same for other factions as well

[Veta]

no forged alliance is perfect there are no glaring plot holes

[Badsearcher]

no forged alliance is perfect there are no glaring plot holes

I wonder if Princess Burke is kind of like Elvis with impersonators and supposed sightings of her all over the galaxy.

[Plasma_Wolf]

There is no correct transition from SupCom to FA. You can be certain that it isn't the UEF ending as all planets still exist. The Cybran ending has a loophole in the actual destruction of quantum gates. The Aeon ending is the least shaky, but at any rate: read dotswarlock's books. He tied loose ends together. http://fiction-stories.com/word/?p=287

Follow the link in there and download the books. That's the canon you need.

On the point of defending: why do you think the whole war took over 1000 years? Defending is Easters, even with limited troops.

The Cybrans didn't have that much ACUs. They had no more than 100 and tried to keep the enemies think they had no more than four until they needed them all.

UEF started with more than 1000 but the numbers dropped over time with the avatar's aggressive action for over 20 years. The number dropped to Aeon levels of about 500.

Again: read the books!!!

[Ze_PilOt]

The timeline at the start of FA explains what happened. (None and all of the ending at the same time).

[Flynn]

Which books address the number of ACUs available to each faction? And surely in SupCom the ACUs can be built relatively easily, surely the real shortage is going to be training pilots for them. Look at the real military, how many people can pilot aircrafts and helicopters? Not many.

[Softly]

To answer op:

Planets are big and there clearly isn't enough ACUs to go around. If yo build 1k percies in some city, then the enemy gates in 200 kilometres away and builds strats to snipe you then percies aren't gonna help.

Although why they couldn't design some AI to just go around and spam pd and sam turrets on every square inch of every planet I have no idea. Even the supcom AI could manage that given enough time.

[Rocksteady]

Something I've wondered a lot whenever I played the campaigns (remember them? ) is that if an ACU is supposed to be able to magic up an army with locally available materials then wouldn't an acu that is stationed at a point being defended for days, months, years, be able to cook up such an army that the one acu that gets gated in would be overwhelmed in seconds? It always struck me as plot armor in favor of the player that when you are playing an attack mission that the enemy acu doesn't have a huge army already prepared. Is a rationale for this ever supplied in the canon?

In a real situation entire armies/defenses would likely be gated in a matter of hours while ACU and engineers quickly set up shields and forward bases.

Would be the same situation for the defenders of the planet, they would only need light defenses and could very quickly gate in reinforcements if needed. Setting up huge armies and defenses on every planet would be a huge waste of resources.

I don't understand why they would even bother gating in ACU's when they could just gate in crap tonnes of nukes and experimental's straight into enemy bases.

Why didn't the eagles just fly frodo to mordor and drop the ring straight into the lava. Most games and movies don't make any sense