I’m going to have to chalk up the timing to coincidence. That’s the simplest explanation. Also the Ark is mostly scientific personnel and security at the time of the banished invasion. It would have taken the UNSC a while to reach the Ark even if the created uprising wasn’t their main concern. The Ark is literally outside of the charted universe. I did mention that we beat the banished in 5 days right? Although they got kinda complacent after not facing serious threats for so long.
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Infinite is after.
The novel Shadows of Reach show Atriox using a portal to get off the ark and into the main galaxy again, leaving his other forces on the Ark to keep fighting the Spirit of Fire.
Yeah but that’s the thing. To say it’s a coincidence means Atriox planned to take over the Ark with the Infinity and all the UNSC fleet able to jump instantly from Earth to the Ark. We see that portal work in Halo 3; it’s instant. Atriox isn’t the one who closed it. The plan only works because the Created cripple the UNSC and close the Ark off. So he has to have known.
I mean, it could just be bad writing I admit. 343 is not consistent. Gleaning anything from the lore they put out is pretty pointless given all the retcons and changes in direction. For example Halo Infinite blames Cortana for Atriox wanting a Halo ring when he was after one in Halo Wars 2; which would have been before Doisac was destroyed per Divine Wind. But then that might be an error by the author and as depicted Doisac is destroyed when Cortana makes her demands at the end of Halo 5.
If they get complacent that’s the fault of the Uber Warmaster who leads them. He doesn’t have one hand tied behind his back. Atriox loses in Halo Wars 2. He is leading the Banished directly in the final missions. Making this all about the Endless and undoing the consequences of Halo Wars 2 stranding him on the Ark is part of this retcon/reboot they’re doing.
The only reason he’s still a threat is because somehow this small pirate faction that existed under the radar seems to have an inexhaustible supply of man power. 
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It’s not an instant portal. Hunters in the dark explains this really well. But knowing what we do about Atriox, I don’t doubt that he’d go after the Ark knowing what the UNSC would be able to retaliate with. We don’t know for a fact that he knew that the portal would shutdown. Also the banished isn’t some tiny pirate organization. This is a faction that the Covenant, which almost obliterated humanity, couldn’t take out at the hight of their power. The UNSC has known about the banished since at least 2553 (faction formed in 2549). They’re a pretty large group.
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Because that makes no sense:
If the Banished were a power like the Covenant. So they have thousands of ships, billions of soldiers and control thousands of worlds. Let’s say they’re just a fraction of that for fairness.
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Why wouldn’t the Guardians have destroyed all of these ships and worlds during the year between Halo 5 and Cortanas defeat? The typical excuse I ve heard is that the Banished are a small pirate raiding faction so couldn’t be targeted like the Elites or Humanity. If they are a galactic military power their destruction would be a priority.
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Why wouldn’t the UNSC be aware of such a massive threat and take actions against it. Namely, use nuclear weapons to destroy their planets and send Spartans to assassinate their leadership. Again, the typical excuse, which even some Halo Wars 2 audio logs imply, is that they’re a small pirate faction that went under the radar so ONI didn’t target them.
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Why wouldn’t the Elites….
Basically the bigger the Banished are the bigger a target they would have been and the harder it is to justify that they always existed.
Plus, it invalidates the victories in Halo Wars 2 and Infinite if we’re pasting these aliens and slaughtering tens of thousands of them without any impact on the narrative. Halo Wars 2 ending was that Atriox was stranded on the Ark and that the SoF sacrifice was to contain the Banished threat. This is literally handwaved by a Forerunner McGuffin. Given that they have their Home world and 12.5 billion of them killed without any impact to the factions strength clearly means they ain’t going anywhere.
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Halo Wars 2 takes place in 2559 while Halo Infinite is 2560.
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Doisac isn’t the main Banished base of operations. The Banished aren’t centralized like the UNSC or the covenant. It’s just the brute home planet. The UNSC had enough on it’s hands already between 2553 and 2559. Between covenant splinter factions, insurrection resurgence, covert destabilization of allies, and later dealing with the prometheans, they had their hands full. The Elites aren’t anywhere near as strong as you might think since they’re mostly fighting with themselves. Cortana had a reign of only about a year and was delusional enough to think she could strong arm the banished into bowing before her. Also the banished aren’t organized as rigidly as the UNSC or the covenant or even the splinter factions the covenant turned into. The tactics you suggest don’t work all that well against a decentralized faction that offers power and glory to mercenaries, pirates, and smugglers. Look at the wiki page for the banished.
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A decentralised faction shouldn’t be as powerful as the Banished are implied to be.
This is the same issue the First Order has in Star Wars. You can’t maintain a vast galactic military with advanced weapons, huge several km long spaceships and supply/repair etc then without having a state or territory to provide for it.
Cortana conquers the Orion Arm of the Galaxy in a day. Per the cutscene she isn’t trying to subjugate the Banished she’s trying to exterminate them. That should result in them being hunted down and killed very quickly.
In Shadows of Reach it’s mentioned that any weapons fire or even speaking Cortanas name on a comm anywhere in the Galaxy is enough to make her aware somethings up and send a Guardian. So, the BaniShed being able to hide thousands of ships and billions of soldiers isn’t reasonable; for an entire year.
If it was that easy to avoid Cortana then the UNSC should be in a much better state than it is. If they don’t need resources to sustain their war machine like the Banished then that should mean they haven’t been as weakened.
Why wouldn’t the UNSC and Elites be vastly more powerful than the Banished. They control hundreds of planets and have populations in the billions. They have all the logistics and support.
If you can support a fleet of a few thousand ships with no territory or state behind it then logically a planet like Earth should be able to produce and support vastly more and better quality ships. It’s like comparing Somali Pirates to the US Navy.
What you’re describing is having it both ways. If the Banished are too small to target then they shouldn’t be as big a threat as the Covenant.
Doisac is a legitimate target. Most of the Banished were recruited from that world and it must have been providing them with soldiers and supplies. The UNSC should have nuked it and compelled the Brutes to surrender after the Human Covenant War or else blockade the planet until they disappear.
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A decentralised faction shouldn’t be as powerful as the Banished are implied to be.
I wouldn’t call the Banished decentralized - they have a clear command structure and leadership that all members fall beneath. Instructions flow top down. They’re not operating as terrorist cells, but rather like a traditional nation/army.
This is the same issue the First Order has in Star Wars. You can’t maintain a vast galactic military with advanced weapons, huge several km long spaceships and supply/repair etc then without having a state or territory to provide for it.
I also believe it’s been well established in the novels that the Banished can and will raid supplies, and that they control moons, planets, etc. These activities and places should provide raw materials, and the land on which to work them. And, as can be seen in Infinite, the Banished seem adept at setting up “chop shops” on the fly - making materiel production less of an issue.
Cortana conquers the Orion Arm of the Galaxy in a day. Per the cutscene she isn’t trying to subjugate the Banished she’s trying to exterminate them. That should result in them being hunted down and killed very quickly.
I would suggest that the cut scene with Cortana and Atriox is intended to show that Cortana only destroyed Doisac because they would not bow, and not that the destruction was the goal from the onset. The destruction of Doisac was the “or else” - lay down arms, or else.
In Shadows of Reach it’s mentioned that any weapons fire or even speaking Cortanas name on a comm anywhere in the Galaxy is enough to make her aware somethings up and send a Guardian. So, the BaniShed being able to hide thousands of ships and billions of soldiers isn’t reasonable; for an entire year.
I believe the Shadows of Reach quotes about alerting Cortana were more geared towards being wary of intense fighting, since Cortana would be alerted once a threshold was crossed. A mugging where someone got shot wouldn’t alert Cortana, for example, but WW III would. And at the end of Shadows of Reach, the intensity of the fighting did alert her, but it took significant fighting to do so. The Infinity jumped away before the Guardian arrived, and it would likely be a safe assumption that if the Banished took similar actions - random jumps - they could avoid Cortana the same way that the Infinity is. Further, they could shack up on “primitive” planets without compromisable sensors nearby, as Osman and Lord Hood have done.
If it was that easy to avoid Cortana then the UNSC should be in a much better state than it is. If they don’t need resources to sustain their war machine like the Banished then that should mean they haven’t been as weakened.
My personal belief on the UNSC is that they were simply too reliant on the Infinity - a single ship. However, we also currently know little of the UNSC fleet beyond the Infinity. We know, per Infinite’s Academy, that there are squirreled away training facilities, so perhaps there is a chance that more UNSC exists than we have seen. However, with the reliance on AI the UNSC has (which the Banished do not), how much of the fleet is compromised? I suspect the EU or further campaign expansions will shed light on this angle eventually.
Why wouldn’t the UNSC and Elites be vastly more powerful than the Banished. They control hundreds of planets and have populations in the billions. They have all the logistics and support.
I believe the Elites are probably in the worst state of any of the species at the moment - civil war + Cortana == an inability to exert will across the galaxy. The UEG is likely crippled due to the Guardian at Earth, meaning most colony worlds (most of which aren’t even recovered from the Covenant war, mind you) aren’t in cohesion with one another via the UEG. Especially if they’re Outer Colonies and are generally separatist anyway, or if they’re under threat from a Guardian.
If you can support a fleet of a few thousand ships with no territory or state behind it then logically a planet like Earth should be able to produce and support vastly more and better quality ships. It’s like comparing Somali Pirates to the US Navy.
I might have missed something, where was the documentation about the fleet size of the Banished being in the thousands? Halopedia paints a picture of a smaller known fleet, but it’s possible I’ve missed something: https://www.halopedia.org/Banished#Ships
However, my thoughts are that Earth isn’t producing ships for the UNSC for obvious reasons, any ship production is off-world at a colony - but likely compromised by Cortana. Existing ships may be free, but would need further exploration in game or EU material to validate if there is any cohesive UNSC fleet outside of the Infinity and her fleet.
My general thoughts on the Banished are that they survived the Covenant not by being bigger in terms of troops and equipment, but by being harder to kill and by being tactically strong. They weren’t tied to any particular planets beyond Doisac through origin of their leader (though Doisac also was aligned with the Covenant, at the same time), so they weren’t able to be cornered and destroyed. Given the general hard-to-kill nature of Atriox, and those he inspired, along with knowing the tactical strengths and weaknesses of the Covenant, they were basically able to both survive and be a thorn in the Covenant’s side, growing organically through victories, raiding, and alliances - particularly post-war (though, admittedly, we know very little of the size and strength of the Banished during the Covenant War - perhaps something that would be cool for 343 to explore). There are holes that remain to be filled in, and questions answered, but overall the Banished’s position in Infinite makes enough sense given what we know from past games and novels.
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I accidentally bought the encyclopaedia this morning so I might one day know what you lot are talking about! I think I had to read half the posts on here to know what SoF meant!
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The encyclopedia leaks I’ve seen look like it’ll be pretty neat, hopefully you enjoy it even if it’s an accident lol
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If they’re a conventional military holding territory then:
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It should have been pretty easy for Cortana to find where they were and kill them. She had a year to run rampant and wasn’t exactly holding back on that.
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The UNSC would definitely be aware of them and use nuclear weapons against these facilities.
You can’t have it both ways. Either they are a small faction that couldn’t be targeted by a conventional military or they’re a big faction that should have taken serious losses against the UNSC and Created.
Also, a few chop shops might work to get a few Wraith tanks working. But how are they building and maintaining several KM battleships? With advanced technology and weapons? That doesn’t make sense. Even Orks in 40k have to dedicate huge resources to build up their fleets and they have the excuse of reality warping powers; brutes do not. How is the UNSC only able to build and support one Infinity whilst the Banished have all these capital ships?
Again, if this can all be manufactured and sustained really easily by a small faction with limited population and infrastructure why would a galactic civilisation like the UNSC with billions of people not have a vastly more powerful navy and army? I don’t think they’re depicting Atriox as an idiot so presumably this is intended to be a serious threat to humanity.
Per the dossiers most Banished leaders and soldiers were recruited from Doisac. Killing 12.5 billion Brutes should reduce the number of soldiers Atriox can get, not to mention whatever forces and industry he had on the planet. Plus, the UNSC, as far as I am aware never signed any sort of peace treaty with the Brutes, who had destroyed a lot of human worlds and murdered billions of innocents, so they really should be dropping nukes on them anyway. They were always enemies and they are the party refusing any possibility of peace. It’s on them to back down. 343 would be stretching it to say that the Banished didn’t take any damage from losing the Brute Homeworld. Esharum is full of bull when he says it made them stronger. It didn’t. The Brutes are dying just like he is and they’re too dumb to realise.
Given that the Weapon can hack the Banished Battlenet easily then why would Cortana with the Domain not be able to hack the Banished comms? find out where all their bases and ships are. Then proceed to send Guardians and Prometheans to kill them. It doesn’t make sense. Cortana was killing anybody who was a potential threat and not holding back; that should have equalled a lot of dead Banished.
What have the Banished done to indicate they have good tactics? They mostly just do wave attacks and use numbers to win. It’s not impressive that Eshcarum killed a few thousand humans when the Chief kills that many Banished in the first mission. Never mind Atriox utter fiasco on the Ark where they’ve had to retcon into a victory.
I just don’t like them. I think 343 has seized on a fairly mildly positive reception to the faction in Halo Wars 2 so have obnoxiously thrown them and Atriox into the role of the big bad of the series. The story and lore is being hammered to make that work and so you get a ton of contradictions. A faction small enough to evade being wrecked by Cortana but big enough to destroy the UNSC? I don’t buy it. Never mind Atriox. It would not surprise me if they have him doing dumb stuff like commanding Offensive Bias or controlling the Endless who are more dangerous than the Flood apparently.
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I wouldn’t call the banished a conventional military.
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You said they have a formal command structure, aren’t decentralised, hold territory with industry and possess a fleet of enormous starships. That’s a conventional military.
What stops the UNSC hacking the Banished Battlenet with their AI. Finding all these Banished leaders and worlds. Then proceed to nuke them or use Spartan Kill Teams if you are feeling like being humanitarian. A Covenant Splinter group shouldn’t be this mortal danger to the UNSC.
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Yeah that’s fair enough. I mean I can assume that Atriox being Atriox helps but from a tactical standpoint, I think it’d have been relatively easy to crush the banished early on if the UNSC had the intelligence on where Atriox and his commanders were. Kill off enough of the leadership and the banished would have eventually been shattered. From a lore standpoint it’s a bit of a miracle that the faction got as big as it did. But I can understand why they would play things out the way they have for gameplay and storyline reasons.
@total_war1402 I had hoped to win a lore debate to help bolster my mental health but honestly I can’t say that you’re wrong here lol. 
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I would point out here that the UNSC is a conventional military and Cortana was unable to wipe them out. Using similar tactics as the UNSC, it’s logical that the Banished would survive. This is an assumption, but I believe it is one based in logic.
We know that post-Cortana, the UNSC wasn’t in a position to strike back against the Banished. We have very little canon information on what UNSC-Banished interactions were like pre-Cortana. For all we know, they weren’t interacting except on the fringe of UEG-controlled space, making it likely that a big engagement, or series of big engagements, weren’t in the cards. I don’t believe the totality of the Banished forces has ever been confirmed in lore. We’ve seen forces on the Ark and forces on Zeta Halo, but not much beyond that. I would welcome lore in this area.
The Banished fleet is only confirmed to have one super carrier in service (presumably taken from the Covenant), one intrusion corvette, several destroyers, and several dreadnoughts. I’m not sure that classifies as “all these capital ships”. Personally, it reads as being formidable relative to the competition (underfunded fringe colony worlds). I believe they’d be maintaining it via either captured Huragok or via homemade repairs, which again I believe they are insinuated to be adept at, and I believe their “chop shops” would be able to provide some material - we know that the Banished “print” ammunition, and therefore perhaps their “printing” technology would apply to armor and more sophisiticated equipment?
I think the UNSC pre-Pax Cortana was a serious match with the Banished, but we have little lore to details whether or not the UNSC tangled with the Banished prior to Cortana’s rise. We do not know whether or not their territory and the UNSC’s territory would have brought them into conflict when the UNSC was at its full power post-war with the Infinity available. Once the Created and Cortana rose, the UNSC was not capable of the same logistics and power projection that they were prior to the Created conflict.
They may have hailed from Doisac, but IMO that’s not the same as representing Doisac. It’s important to note that the Banished raided places on Doisac as well. The government of Doisac (or lack thereof) is separate from the Banished. The Banished do not represent Doisac as a whole.
As for no treaties, I believe the lore lays out that basically the Brutes fell into infighting amongst the clans, and no real government formed on Doisac post-Covenant war. So it would have been hard to sign any treaty. However, there is extremely little lore regarding UNSC/UEG interaction with Doisac between the end of the Covenant war and the beginning of the Created conflict, so, any interaction would be speculation.
I don’t believe the Domain is on the same “plane”, so to speak, as the networks that interconnect devices in the Banished battlenet. The collated information on Halopedia makes it seem more a shared consciousness than any kind of interfaceable network: https://www.halopedia.org/Domain
Given that, I’m not certain that simply being connected to the Domain would allow Cortana access to networks throughout the universe. I would assume she would need to have some form of connection to an entity or device that is connected to said network. And, given this, and the fact that the Covenant, and therefore Banished, do not really employ smart AI, there would be little opportunity for Cortana to connect to the Banished battlenet.
I mean, they got the drop on the Infinity and overwhelmed its defenses before they could repel them. That is a tactic, and while not overly sophisticated, can be quite effective. They also defeated the Covenant throughout enough battles to grow their organization, so I do believe it to be no stretch to assume they are tactically competent. I’m also thinking the warship Gbraakon had more like hundreds of crew rather than thousands, but that is an assumption. I’ll be interested to see what the upcoming Encyclopedia states on crew size for this class of ship.
I think most of the contradictions you see in the lore surrounding the Banished are from your filling in of blank spots in the lore with assumptions - we have very little lore for the pre-Cortana years with the Banished and their interaction with the UNSC/UEG. While I completely agree that the lore should be filled in, I just don’t think we can form a complete judgement on many items without fully having the lore explored and fleshed out by 343 through novelization or game story.
However, if you don’t like them, I get it - your opinion, is what it is. I do, however, believe that the Banished aren’t super full of plot holes. There are questions, to be sure, but there aren’t a whole ton of plot holes. Just mostly whether or not you like them, and whether or not you believe their lore is worth expanding upon to answer said questions.
Fair bit after, it’s pretty clear.