Earth Should've Beat the Combine

[Brabbit1987]

The combine have a massive army. The earth was messed up as it is by the resonance cascade and portal storms. This isn't a 300 scenario either.

I mean really think about it, with how much of the human population was left, do you really think they could have won? Those F-18s need pilots. They do not fly themselves.

Half-Life 2 was originally supposed to have an opening that detailed what happened in the years since Black Mesa.

First off the portal storms get worse and worse, random aliens from xen start appearing all over the earth's surface. Populated areas are able to deal with this but rural areas are overun with bullsquid, antlions and headcrabs. Gradually society starts to collapse and starving people flee to the safety of the largest cities. The world's millitary is largely focussed on defending these urban centers and many bases are abandoned or cut off.

Then one day the centers of all the major cities collapse into giant sinkholes, they are replaced with mile-high towers of blue metal, seemingly appearing from nowhere. From the citadels issue forth a swarm of insectoid bio-mechanical machines. Clouds of gunships blot out the sun, columns of striders march into the cities. Earth attempts to resist but they are completely unprepared and can't match the firepower of the killing machines. Most millitary units are overwhelmed by gunships and hunters before they even realise what's happening.

As the onslaught unfolds a certain Dr. Wallace Breen (a prominant figure in the defense against the portal storms) claims to be in contact with the invaders. He says the Combine offer peace if humanity will only lay down their weapons and allow them to assume control. Civilization was on the brink even before the invasion, now, utterly blindsided, Earth surrenders.

The Combine appoint Dr. Breen as their representative, he starts recruiting troops to form a security force. The Combine begins integrating humans into their millitary and harvesting earth's resources. They conquered earth with sheer firepower, giving the people and choice between submission and annihilation. However they don't want to destroy humanity, we're useful to them. Instead they plan to hold on to earth with a combination of mass surveillance, strict pollicing and brutal terror (Ravenholm).

Awesome read. I was never aware of that. Thanks for the info =^.^=

[NASAFanboy]

"You know about this F-18s and crap you were talking about? Gunship cannons could easily take one of those out from a huge distance."

EDIT:

http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Crab_Synth

That probably could be easily taken out by a good hit with a air-land missile.

@Brabbit. I'm sure we still had full-staffed militaries. You WANT more humans to defend from the Xen, not less. Also, I'm quite sure hat if Earth invaded the Xen overworld, we could have conquered it. Otherwise, I'm highly surprised no one even bothered to shutdown these portals. I mean, you had a bloody eight years! Shut them down! What the heck are you doing before then?

[ZothTek]

what about the whole seven day war and how the combines numbers just destroyed us. sort of like the russians fought the germans. 10 men for 1 german.

[AndrewBCrisp]

I believe Brabbit's point was that we didn't *have* the manpower, even though we would have wanted it. As for stopping the portal storms, I don't think we could have. Consider:

1. Inter-dimensional teleportation is largely unknown to humanity. While the Lambda project allowed for exploration of Xen, we didn't venture any further into the Combine's territory before they took note of us and tried to invade Black Mesa. I expect that further research into inter-dimensional portals may have resumed after the Black Mesa incident, but any project that started to halt the portal storms would have had to start from scratch because:

2. Most of the scientists involved with the Lambda project did not survive. Yes, Issac Kleiner and Eli Vance got out of there, but a lot of scientists did not - either they were killed by the aliens, or by the US military. Furthermore:

3. Black Mesa itself was destroyed. At the end of Half Life: Opposing Force, the mysterious G-Man detonates a nuclear bomb, destroying the facility. It's a safe bet all notes and equipment were lost in the explosion. If the G-Man - or whoever he's really working for - had further knowledge and technology, he withheld it for his own reasons.

As for the concept that Earth's militaries could have defeated the Combine during the initial invasion, let me be extremely skeptical of that assertion. Yes, our best weapons could probably stand up to the Combine tech. However:

1. Our soldiers and generals would not have known this beforehand. Even assuming the Vortigaunts were completely candid about their knowledge of Combine technology (and given the way they speak, that's questionable), we would need to perform tests against Combine materials and train against Combine tactics in order to be effective. That all takes time.

2. The Combine attacked all regions simultaneously. Given the account above on how the Seven Hour War went down, our military forces went from having to defend against headcrabs and bullsquids to fighting overwhelming forces and weapons pouring from within our city centers. Even if some areas managed to respond fast enough to get a few hits in, other areas would have folded with soldiers dying before they even knew they were at war.

3. The Combine attack caught us by surprise. It's one thing to deal with the occasional random portal spitting out a bunch of antlions. Having multiple portals popping open and spewing out intelligent, armoured, trained forces is quite another.

3. It's likely the Combine had help from the inside. Dr. Breen was in contact with the Combine during the war, but how long was he in contact with them before the war? Chances are he would have fed them intelligence on where our military command centers would be, as well as locations of major population centers and national capitals. With such information, the first shots from the Combine invasion would likely have beheaded most military forces, so that even if one tank or fighter squadron learned how "easy" a gunship or strider could be taken down, that unit might never have been able to inform the others.

4. Our collected military forces were probably not on speaking terms with each other before the invasion. Even assuming the world recognized the portal storms as a global problem, chances are most nations would not cooperate with each other to the extent needed to present a united front against the Combine. Militaries within NATO as well as other international alliances would certainly have some ways cooperate, but how easily would, say, American forces accept orders from Chinese commanders? Or South African generals to advise Swedish troops?

In the Half-Life world, the cards were stacked against us from the word go. We could certainly fight back, given time to organize a resistance and make preparations, but against the initial invasion? Not possible.

[NovaSilisko]

...

Yep. And I think that really forms their modus operandi, militarily - jump in unexpectedly in as many locations as possible, cause as much havoc as possible in as little time, generally overwhelm and destroy the opposition before it has a chance to react. The attack on Pearl Harbor comes to mind, except in this case the entire planet was the harbor, and there was no big angry country behind it to retaliate.

[m4v]

I find funny that you're trying to rationalize "why Earth should have beat the Combine" when is much more logical to think that an alien civilization that lives on conquering worlds will wipe out whatever resistance we might try to muster. What you should be questioning is "Why is the Combine so weak during the events of the game?"

But all of this is moot, the premise of the story is that the Combine conquered Earth, end of discussion. Whatever fault you might find is of no relevance, if needed the authors can talk more about the Combine and explain why the events occurred the way they occurred in order to justify the premise of the story.

Edited July 14, 2013 by m4v

[9911MU51C]

Snip

Agreed. It'd take atleast an hour to coordinate and plan a mission to retaliate against the combine, and that is hard to do when you already have losses from fighting the Xen, and half your army is in rural towns to protect them from the xen, by the time a mission is planned your army base has been destroyed and your army shredded.

On another note, does nobody remember the strength of the portal collapsing over the citadel? The combine could easily destroy earth if need be.

[Monkthespy]

BTW. Gunships can shoot down missiles. I doubt air-air missiles fly around in random directions.

Also, since you are SO ADDICTED TO MISSILES. How about this. Millions of gunships. Millions of Crab Synths. Millions of striders, thousands of citadels, releasing a constant stream of mass destruction. I'm not exaggerating. Do we really have that many missiles?

[billybobsatan]

Why has no one brought nukes and EMP missiles into question yet?

[MGUARN]

well there about 2,000 nuclear missles... also i think EMP missiles are still in development ,but you could set of a nuke above earth in orbit ,but that might be a bad idea.there are plans though to fight of an alien invader.It is basically doing small attacks like damage cargo ,or other small things that i think you all know what im trying to say.

[Wallace]

Nukes aren't much use when the enemy is emerging from portals inside your own cities. You can't nuke them without nuking your own city, plus who's to say the combine don't have the tech to intercept nuclear missiles from the citadel. That would explain why they never did anything with the rocket at White Forest until after the citadel was wrecked.

Also, someone said that the oceans did not appear drained in Portal 2, however the draining process had not progressed far in HL2, the waterline only seemed to have receded about 500m or so down the beech when you are at the coast, not really noticeable from the moon.

[manskal]

The scope and strength of the Combine cannot be actually be potrayed as the massive, planet conquering empire they are described as in the game because Half Life is a game. And thus they have to make concessions for the gameplay, as somebody mentioned earlier (beeping mines, open radio chatter).

Besides, assuming that resources are a limiting factor, I think that the Combine tries to cut costs by using as much Earth tech as possible. That and the fact that they seem to be really confident humans are a defeated species. Even the metrocops are just human volunteers; would you really do that until you have reason to believe that a percentage of the human race has been utterly subverted to your command? Why even use humans? If the Combine had unlimited resources, they could have just dropped in, took human DNA to clone and blow us into smithereens.

And the 7-hour war was the before the Combine occupation, if so, who knows what tech they used if they had no access to Earth beforehand? Keep in mind that the Combine are a (mix? empire? I dunno) of alien species who have a different sense of scale compared to humans; they might have come to Earth with a Death Star and threaten to blow us all up, we surrender and they develop tech more suited to Earth and use that to keep humans in line.

Tl;dr I am rambling, please read with a large dose of skepticism. I wrote 3 paragraphs - half life 3 confirmed

[SuperWeegee4000]

As possibly previously stated in various forms, we are not seeing the forces of the Combine. We are seeing the forces of a small arm of the Combine that have used their existing technology to build vehicles and weapons based on Earth devices of similar nature. Hunter Choppers didn't exist until after the Seven Hour War, nor did the AR2 or any other technology based on human machinery. The forces that took on Earth in the initial conflict were massively more powerful and had nothing like our technology.

[Brabbit1987]

*Snip*

Yes, you are correct, that is exactly what I meant.

I also do have to mention Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift are not actually official to the story.

Also, the aliens from Zen are different then the combine. The portal storms spread through the entire planet. Many people on the planet turned into zombies. Half-Life was pretty much a zombie apocalypse scenario through alien control. The military tried to cover it up, but failed. So automatically there is no way in hell we would have the forces even required to go to war with an entire military like alien race. They hit us while we where weak.

Anyway, we also need to keep in mind, the amount of forces and power the combine have are not even shown in the game. If anyone remembers, in Half-Life 2, while going through the citadel you see armies of striders and ships. Humans are already under their control, their is no need to have their elite forces out and about.

Also, one last thing we need to remember is, there is so much we do not know. Such as the age old question in the Half-Life series "Who is the gman?" I think everyone can agree, he probably is not human. He also seems to have some interesting ... powers. Also, who are the benefactors he mentions?

In other words, Valve played out this story very well and left out just enough information to keep you guessing over and over again.

[Monkeh]

As a self confessed uber nerd who loves sci-fi, gaming, documentaries on space and many other nerdy past times and interests I have to say...

NERDIEST THREAD EVER!

Gratz.

[Legendary Emu]

I think the real question here is why the heck did Gordons hazard suit not have a helmet?

[Mercy]

So you for real think that there's enough military equipment and people trained to use it, on 1 planet, do defeat a MULTI-DIMENSIONAL empire?

Haha. No. You forget that the world is hugely divided anyway, and the only real competitor would be NATO forces and such and even they would be completely obliterated. Even then, bullets and missiles don't just appear. They need to be made and sent to troops, which would be impossible. We'd run out of them without even making a dent on the Combine.

Also, shut up about the F-18s and such. There's no where near enough of them to match the Combine airforce, and your understanding of air combat is completely flawed.