Mass Effect 3: War assets - Basic information Mass Effect 3 guide, walkthrough
Last update: 29 October 2022
On this page of the Mass Effect 3 game guide you will find the most important information about war assets. You will learn what impact they have on the course of the story campaign, as well as how to keep track of the current state of available war assets.
War Assets - what are they?
You will be gathering war assets throughout the entire campaign and they represent the strength of the fleet that will take part in the final battle with the Reapers.
The easiest way of obtaining new war assets is by completing quests and you can unlock the best ones by finishing primary missions which are about convincing various races (like the krogan or the turians) to join the cause. This isn't of course the only way, because you can also obtain war assets by recruiting new crew/Normandy members, by doing favors for important characters and by scanning the galaxy for interactive spots.
Sadly the mechanism works both ways. This means that you also must think about the consequences of your actions, because in the worst case scenarios you may weaken your war assets or even lose some of them for good. This usually occurs when you've angered an entire civilization or didn't save someone in time (more info on the most dangerous situations can be found in a section titled Possible conflicts of interests).
It's very important that you read the descriptions of all quests found in this guide so you'll know about the existence of these danger situations, you'll know how to avoid them and you'll also know how to make the best decisions when it comes to receiving new assets. You should also consider playing based on a savegame imported from the previous game, because this is the only way to guarantee yourself access to some of the war assets or to lower the difficulty of getting them.
The game allows you to track your progress and this means you can always find out how much war assets you've gathered. This is achieved by interacting with a console in the war room (screen above), located on the Combat Information Center (CIC) deck.
The war assets are divided into nine different groups:
I recommend that you regularly check how many assets you've gathered, especially since the game won't inform you about each addition via a message displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. You should also know that most assets can be updated many times, resulting in an increase or a decrease of their overall strength.