i'm trying to sort out torfan specifics for fic writing purposes and boy, this is a pain in the ass. i do like that it's kept intentionally vague because it leaves me a lot of wiggle room to fill in the gaps to my preference. my issue is more in the fact the information they do give you is so vague as to be worthless, because a lot of the military terminology mass effect uses doesn't seem to parallel real life. i guess that could be a pro in and of itself because it allows for free reign to believe whatever you want, but i like having a jumping board to work off, personally.

the character creation screen says that shepard sent 3/4ths of their unit to die. but then the personal history codex entry says shepard led a corps. when i go to research military terminology, corps and units are apparently two different things with massively different numbers involved. i find it incredibly hard to believe that, even in an emergency chain of command type situation, a 24 year old marine commanded upwards of 20,000+ other marines and sent 3/4ths of them to their deaths.

it seems a lot more realistic that the number is significantly lower than that. according to this wiki page, a majority of units seem to be below 1,000 people. this would also make more sense with what we do know of torfan - that the slaver base was underground, and they had to fight melee instead of by artillery strikes. getting more people into an underground base is easier the less people you have. i have 0 military knowledge, so this is just me throwing some wall spaghetti, but a company or battalion seem the most plausible to me - so that's 80 to 1,000 people. i personally think the lower end of battalion (300) is more realistic number to work with than 1,000. that's still a fairly wide margin, but it's something more concrete to bounce off.

it would mean that the alliance had anywhere from 60 (80 x .75) to 225 (300 x .75) casualties. extrapolating the batarian losses is a lot more difficult and i wouldn't even know where to begin. i don't even know that you could say "well, torfan more or less ended the conflict with the batarians, so it had to be a lot!" because it could've been the decisive victory by virtue of the fact torfan seemed to be an overall base of operations, and its elimination could've just made organizing further efforts in the verge more difficult and more trouble than it's worth, esp. if any technology or resources were also lost on torfan (which is likely) and the fact batarians already suffered a series of losses before torfan.

i'll probably just end up throwing a dart to pick a number that feels high enough to stir the controversy ruthless shep inspires, but low enough that it doesn't feel (personally) absurd they're still trusted to command

(whether or not what ruthless shepard does on torfan is considered a war crime is unclear to me, considering mass effect is milprop regardless so the protagonist being a war criminal more or less serves the purpose of the series. i do personally lean toward it being morally condemned, but not legally a war crime - what is and isn't a war crime by humanity standards likely does not match with citadel morals or laws, let alone with turian, asari, salarian, etc. but that's deserving of its own post and i should stop here before i get more distracted.)