User talk:ProfessorStalhmanSaysHello

Glad to be welcomed thanks. --ProfessorStalhmanSaysHello 07:18, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Re: some gibberish
"[H]umans only win when outnumbered". The Covenant have a habit of using the overflow strategy akin to the Red Army. By your logic the UNSC only looses when fighting a handful of enemies.....strange.--  Fore  run  ner '' 10:25, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

LOL!!!! I meant humans only win when they outnumber the Elites (direct quote: "Just because your tactics are different from the UNSC's doesn't make them inferior - just look at all of those battles the UNSC lost. Hell, the Marines only won in battles where they outnumbered the Covenant")

another direct quote you said in favour of Elite tactics "The Sangheili-led siege on Alpha Base in an example of Sangheili tactics - they tricked the Marines into believing that they were a Pelican making its way in, when in actuality they were an armed force sent in to kill John-117. Going around killing people in close-quarters combat doesn't mean that you aren't a strategist - Sangheili have such a big advantage in CQC that they simply don't need to be tactical in such engagements, though neither does this mean that they don't use strategic tactics" --ProfessorStalhmanSaysHello 10:30, 13 August 2011 (EDT) Not very consistent in your arguments are you.
 * Why do I find it odd that you're having the same debate that CookieMonster was having...--ハローファン (H1234-NET) 11:23, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Who the hell is CookieMonsterayshello? --ProfessorStalhmanSaysHello 11:27, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Oh wait thats my older brother, sorry this is ex-call of duty hater and we share the same first name btw. Sorry for any confusion, yeah me and Cookie had a very-long discussion and we agreed that if I was to stop vandalising on Halopedia using his account and stop being a "COD fanboy extremist" in his words, he would allow me a place on Halopedia so that I can learn to understand the Halo universe and appreciate it more. Since then, ive been hooked on the lore and me and Cookie's views on Halo have become very similar. --ProfessorStalhmanSaysHello 11:37, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Yes.--UP TO NOW I HAVE TOLERATED THESE CRACKPOT EXPERTS AND ONLY OFFERED A TOKEN OBJECTION!!! NOW THAT THE DRILLING HAS BEEN ACCELERATED, I will not be obstructed any further. 11:53, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Ex-COD Hater" ex- Halo hater sorry lol. --UP TO NOW I HAVE TOLERATED THESE CRACKPOT EXPERTS AND ONLY OFFERED A TOKEN OBJECTION!!! NOW THAT THE DRILLING HAS BEEN ACCELERATED, I will not be obstructed any further. 11:56, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

Re: some gibberish
"[H]umans only win when outnumbered". The Covenant have a habit of using the overflow strategy akin to the Red Army. By your logic the UNSC only looses when fighting a handful of enemies.....strange.--  Fore  run  ner '' 10:25, 13 August 2011 (EDT)

In an attempt to answer that age-old question once and for all, I shall compare tactics we have seen in battle.

The Navies
The Covenant Navy is largely used to clear up huge numbers of enemies. The space engagements have been known to routinely involve the Navy overwhelming the UNSC fleet before focussing their attention towards reinforcing the Army. With no more artefacts to gather, the Navy begins to systematically assault the planet via orbital bombardment.

Early on in the war the Covenant and UNSC fleets would simply attack eachother head-on to increase the likelyhood of striking a hit. This was highly-effective against the UNSC, which lacked remotely-adequate shielding technology until decades later. Also early on, however, the Covenant would send small battlegroups, sometimes only a single ship, to take out a colony. As was the case in the Second Battle of Harvest, the Covenant ship took advandage of the UNSC's inability to damage it in order to take out dozens of ships, though once its weakness was discovered, its stationary-status didn't stand a chance. The deloyment of only one vessel could be considered either evidence of advanced intelligence of the sector or simply not expecting the UNSC to put up a fight. In their second assault on Arcadia, they intentionally used a number of ships far more than what was needed, which Dr. Halsey believed to have been part of a psychological ploy to terrify the UEG.

The Armies and Marines
The role of the Covenant Army is to recover Forerunner artefacts while under fire - remember that all human-occupied worlds appear on luminaries as locations of Forerunner artefacts. As was the case during their attacks on Ariel and Cleveland, they avoided killing civilians if they believed them necessary to fulfill their aims - during the Battle of Cleveland, the Jiralhanae assumed that everyone knew what the Key of Osanolan was and kept them alive to be questioned. However, they refused to believe that none of them knew of it, and likely assumed them to be hiding it from them. It seems to be a common trait amongst the Covenant Army's artefact-retreival operations to kill very few people, should they be of use. It can be assumed that, upon discovering that there weren't any Forerunner artefacts, they would assume that the humans, just like what they believed about Harvest, had destroyed them to deny retreival. This would seal their fate as heretics and be actively-butchered.

Covenant Army strategies have shown many variations. During the Battle of Jericho VII, hundreds of Unggoy were sent out into the battlefield to swarm small groups of marines and kill them. As what happened on Draco III, they likely ate them. In a number of engagements the Covenant seem to consider the retreival of artefacts the primary objective and the elimination of hostiles a secondary. As such the Army force on Arcadia paid more attention to the Forerunner ruins than assemblage of military defences by the UNSC. As such, the UNSC was able to reach their canopy and destroy it.

As said by William Lovell, the UNSC is known to win most of the ground engagements, albeit with a heavy price. The Covenant's strategy of simply overwhelming their enemy has been used on land as well as space. Consider the Battle of Aszod, where they sent in Scarabs to neutralise remaining UNSC forces - despite having effectively won the campaign, they still focused on eliminating the survivors in overly-destructive ways.

They have shown special care, however, in some places. For example, they installed radio-jammers in New Alexandria to confuse the Marines while they continued to sweep the city - either for artefacts; survivors or both. However, New Alexandria is the only known example of its usage out of the many engagements known.

The SPARTAN-IIs; SPARTAN-IIIs and ODSTs have all been known for their successful missions, even if the larger battle was lost. Examples include the Battle of Chi Ceti IV where a SPARTAN-II team infiltrated a Covenant ship and destroyed it from the inside; Operation: TORPEDO where the S-III Beta company took out a large refueling plant, and the final raid on the Truth and Reconciliation, when the few-remaining ODSTs under Major Silva momentarily captured a Covenant cruiser before its unrelated destruction.

The UNSC has shown its competence against the Covenant Army time after time, and its focus on specific objectives rather than a general aim has allowed it to beat the Covenant back many times, though it should be noted that the Covenant do focus their attention on artefacts rather than combat. This was shown during the Covenant invasion of Sigma Octanus IV. While their forces outside of the city of Cote d'Azure destroyed UNSC fortifications, the forces inside the city concentrated on looting a museum of Forerunner artefacts. Even when the museum's infiltration by Blue team became evident, they were much more interested in their artefact-retreival operation than the defence of the captured city, only deploying Mgalekgolo when the artefact was threatened. In a similar manner, the Covenant refused to engage the UNSC forces under Menachite mountain after Blue team captured an artefact - they even killed a Mgalekgolo pair for trying to kill the SPARTANs, which could damage the object.

Intelligence-gathering
ONI managed to decode Covenant messages, learning that the Covenant plan their invasions. Using their hacking methods, ONI began the evacuation of one colony world shortly before its invasion, and also discovered important Covenant assets such as a ship-building facility and a refueling plant - the destruction of which gave the Covenant a tougher time supplying to the front line. Since the adoption of the Cole Protocol, the Covenant found it hard to find human worlds with the navigational data of captured vessels already erased. Since then they have discovered the locations of worlds and planned their offensives ahead.

A personnal look at the leaders
Arbiter Ripa 'Moramee of 2531 was known to send Unggoy to their deaths as suicide bombers to slow down the UNSC advance, believing that killing his own soldiers was easily justifiable if it meant a victory. This cold belief was shown again during the raid on the Third Fleet of Glorious Consequence, when the Covenant fleetmaster Thel 'Lodamee had antimatter charges placed inside one of his ships to devise a trap which killed a SPARTAN and anyone else onboard the vessel. Another two ships were ordered to collide into each other in order to crush a second. This complete disregard of lives in the name of victory is an age-old philosophy employed in the Dark Ages, when it was also believed that dying for a religious cause would guarentee passage to the afterlife - the Covenant coincidentally also followed such a strict view on religion.

On the UNSC side, Admiral Cole was exceptionally-bright. Using his ships as more than simply objects to be thrown at the enemy until it goes away, he made sure to lay one such trap at Psi Serpentis, whereby he lured the Covenant reinforcement fleet (numbering 200 on arrival) into the gravity well of a planet which, upon the detonation of a number of nuclear warheads, led to their complete destruction.

During the Battle of Installation 00, we see that the separatist fleet is outnumbered by the loyalists by "three-to-one". Despite this, along with the retreat of the two UNSC frigates, the fleet managed to decimate the Jiralhanae-led forces, and repeat their victory on the ground. We can see from this that the Sangheili are much better tacticians than the Jiralhanae, who could have easily destroyed them.

Final verdict
After carefully observing the outcomes of these engagements, I feel that it is quite evident that the Sangheili were the driving force of the Covenant military machine, and their removal from society was among the Hierarchs' worst decisions, particularly given the success in capturing the Index, anyway.

In many engagements in space with the UNSC, the Covenant has won. However, they have also relied many times on outnumbering the defenders by rediculous figures. Further, please take note of their use of shielding, which makes them much harder to destroy than a UNSC ship. This seemingly-well defended design may appear much better than the UNSC's, though you must also take into note the commanders. While many Covenant fleets have been observed to lie stationary in space or else fly in a straight line towards the UNSC fleet, their counterparts have had to use evasive manouveres avoid being destroyed so easily, even resorting to sacrificing a refit station to defend their own ships (though it should be taken into consideration the fact that the crew of the Cradle sacrificed themselved without orders to do such, unlike the fleet under Thel 'Lodamee). We have seen many engagements in which the UNSC has employed their own tactics to take on larger Covenant fleets - the Keyes' loop, for instance, in which a single UNSC destroyer took out a battlegroup.

On the ground, it would appear that, contradictory to claims from other users, the SPARTAN-IIs are not the only way the UNSC can succeed. The UNSC relies on support between the Marines and Army, and the Air Force, allowing attacks to be prepared for both ground-based and aerial-based. The calling of air strikes has been seen several times to work well against the Covenant, who do not have an equally-devestating comparison other than simply glassing with a cruiser. Instead the Banshee relies on the patrolling of already-captured territory - take note that it is neither particularly fast nor well-armed. The men and women of the UNSC have succeeded in carefully-planned assaults destined to disturb the Covenant invasion force's ability to fight - the Battle of Actium involved three Covenant Army bases being destroyed in nuclear detonations; while the UNSC forces sacrificed themselves to make this achievement, their survival after this would have led to a total collapse of the groundside control.

I conclude that, as best the Sangheili are in their engagements, they rely more on technological-superiority in fights than strategy, which is why the UNSC has managed to pull back the Covenant so many times, which is also why they are so well respected by many Sangheili as rival warriors.--  Fore  run  ner '' 14:52, 13 August 2011 (EDT)