If you guys remeber Hl1, the aliens (Vorts, headcrabs, bullsquid, etc…) teleported at random locations, who’s to say the combine didn’t do the same? Also remember the vortigaunts were also slaves to the Nihilanth who was in turn slave to the combine, perhaps the already weakend military, didn’t stand a chance when the actual combine appeared.
G-man was behind combine coming to Earth, EP 2 Eli tells Gordon, that Gman was the one who gave him the Xen crystal. But, then Gman turns against the combine, in favor of another “employer” thus “Point Insertion”. Who his current employer is, won’t probably be revealed until HL3?
Dr.Breen knew about Gordon’s “Employment” to Gman, at the HL2 Dr.Breen tells Gordon “Did you know your contract was open to the highest bidder?” But other than that he doesn’t tell you much mainly because, Gordon pretty much kills him.
The Advisors are probably the Combine, or at least a part of it, Dr.Breen is seen negotiating with them just before the elevator at the end of the game.
it could be that the Combine is more like a unification of alien races kinda like the Covenant from Halo (without the religious part of course)? Though I don’t have much proof of this though.
Nihilanth wasn’t part of the Combine during Half-Life. He went to Xen because the Combine couldn’t go there. It seems like he was a slave of the Combine at one point, but was in hiding during HL1, and took the opportunity that the resonance cascade gave him to try and get one step further from the Combine.
And the Advisors are definitely part of the Combine. Are they the original race, or mostly the original race? Who knows. Are they in a position of power within the group? Definitely.
I wrote a poem about the seven hour war.
Trumpets blared nightmarishly
because fallopian tubes
farmed earthworms hydroponically,
and brobdingnagian squelchers
upholstered their clogs.
Colossal togs were opened
wide!
“Gadzooks!”
proclaimed Chief Freezing-Their-Bazookas-Off,
while raggedly clad
atop sweet gum tree.
Headcrabs, cavorting wildly,
plow the turnpike green
with limes, zucchini, spinach,
slime and Xenians.
Lol, nice.
Personally, and someone else said this earlier, I think the Combine just got overconfident and decided to let Breen handle things on his own. Once they saw how shit was starting to go down on Earth, they wanted to bring in their reinforcements to take care of the resistance, and they were going to, until the gateway to their homeworld was shut down in EP2. Now, the remaining Combine forces are stranded, and all they have now is what they left Breen with.
I was thinking about why that message wouldn’t be sent out during the “one week” inbetween the Entanglement and Anticitizen One chapters.
Maybe Breen didn’t even think to send out the message early on. Actually, it would all tie in well with him trying to win Eli’s cooperation at the end of Half-Life 2…he decided NOT to report to his superiors, so he could show how awesome humanity is (that is, the trans-human soldiers) by destroying the entire resistance on his own. Once Breen died, the remaining Combine and any advisors still in the citadel decided “Fuck it, Breen was an idiot, we’re calling for help.” and started preparing that communication.
I think it’s entirely possible that, if we assume just COMMUNICATING between such distance worlds is a hassle, maybe the real Combine don’t even know that humanity destroyed the Citadel and everything. They’ll get back from conquering several other worlds and be all “BREEEEEEEN!!! I leave you to babysit ONE race and look what happens!!!”
Actually kind of helps make the advisors’ names make more sense. If upper management was going to assign some new race (humans, Dr. Breen) to a position of authority, they’d want some of their own kind watching over him and making sure he’s not screwing everything up or betraying them at the last minute.
If the speculation is true, breen didn’t die. He was given a host body.
Well, the portal did open before Gordon blew the mechanism. I would think they would have realized something went wrong when it suddenly and violently closed.
Also how the packet was sent out at the end of Episode 1…
SCIENCE!!!111!!!1!!!
What I believe has happened is:
When Gordon Freeman has managed to kill the controller, portal storms broke out all across the globe, except for certain parts of Russia which would make sense as it’s nearly on the other side of globe to USA. It is obvious from one of the newspapers showing a skyscraper being obliterated that the combines used some sort of super weapon that could easily destroy whole cities. However, this weapon would be inefficient if it was single use and so it must have been a cannon of some sort. Many people fled to Russia and of course after the war many more were imported there. Though the 7 hour scenario is the one presumed the war had to last at least twice the amount because of the units that hid around forests and countryside leaving the combine with a “cleaning up” job. It was obvious that an invasion force was incapable of keeping Earth by itself and so the combine decided to create an army of humans and half humans that would serve as normal police and soldiers. After, presumably, around 6-7 years, as we all know, Gordon Freeman returns, greeted, surprisingly as a hero, not a villain and that where Half Life 2 kicks off.
I’m amazed by the amout of bullcrap people come up with when trying to explain stuff the game’s devs emselves didnt even think about.
I just think the first thing the combine did was send either a small group, or a single advisor through, to act as a scout to learn about earth; that advisor was able to accumluate enough knowledge to know where the capitals of a few strong countries are; so they just prepared the invasion force, and as soon as they went through, they went to different capitals and just smashed them (especially if they could teleport in where ever they wanted)
At that point, advisors would just start probing the memories of the officials in the cities, learning about major military installments and crushing them to, and repeating this over and over until the only fighting force left would be people who owned guns, and they would not be hard to get rid of
Breen probably negotiated for the people of Earth kept alive as lab rats, possible synths, etc; and the combine agreed since Earth works as a nice stepping stone into a new part of the universe
The way I see it, Earth was defeated because the military was so disorganised and couldn’t form into a coherrent fighting force.
The majority of Earths Military forces were at peacetime readiness at the time the Portal Storms commenced I would imagine. As soon as the Portal Storms hit a lot of NCOs and COs were probably decimated by alien entities such as the headcrabs. This caused the already established military hierarchy to be screwed beyond comprehension, war assets never even used, because their operators either were never given orders, got killed or even never at the right place at the right time.
Also don’t forget half the world was at nighttime, soldiers on leave were probably boozing/sleeping and totally caught of guard. Probably explains why there seems to be more American accents ingame because the other half of the world are dead from sleeping