the Oceanborn:

Rasq'uire'laskar:

the Oceanborn:

Clarification: only around 30 Spartan II's. There were several hundred Spartan III's deployed for practically suicide mission. They should have just stuck with the Spartan II's if you ask me.

Au contraire.

The Spartans never did anything that a squad of ODSTs couldn't have done until the events of Halo... And then #117's activities on Alpha Halo actually prolonged the war.

The Spartan IIIs fulfilled a role that no one else could have... until the development of the NOVA.

As well as taking an Elite on in hand-to-hand combat. What I meant is that if they wanted super soldiers they should have stuck with the ones that had a higher life expectancy.

Without the Spartan IIs, more ODSTs and more ships could have been produced.

Now, let's take a look at their missions:

-Sigma Octanus: Break into the city, do recon, get survivors out. Probably doable by ODSTs

-Reach: Destroy NAV data: Again, probably doable by a larger group of ODSTs

-Reach on the Ground: This is iffy, but the  ODSTs would have had larger numbers, and could have done the same with higher casualty rates. However, their gains on the ground were of questionable benefit to the UNSC.

-Innie Refuge: Why they needed Spartans to find the NAV Data is beyond me. Quite honestly, they way the author portrayed the Spartans was questionable.

-New Hope: Again, doable with lots of Napalm and ODSTs.

the Oceanborn:

And how did John's actions on Installation 04 prolong the war? If anything, it hastened the Great Schism within the Covenant, which invariably led to the Covenant's defeat. Think of how much more damage would have been done to us if the Elites had stayed within the Covenant and not given us the intelligence that they did?

Heh, what really caused the Great Schism? Guilty Spark's Heresy, that's what.

Now, imagine the Covenant kicking around and trying to activate Halo. Sooner or later, they're going to come into contact with Guilty Spark, or information about the Flood. Seriously, they have to question why the Flood was on the Halos. But since this was delayed for a month or two, Humanity got the *@#$ kicked out of it.

And don't talk about the Covenant silencing Guilty Spark. He had an army of sentinels behind him at the time, so he could have evaded capture for quite a while.

the Oceanborn:

Also the NOVA bomb was basically 9 nuclear bombs encased in lithium triteride around a deuterium core, so pretty much a super-bomb. How could it do stealth missions that the Spartan III's had been doing since 2531? (Ironically the year that Halo Wars takes place in*) It blows stuff up, they sabotauge. Two somewhat different things.

Yeah, so what? The Spartan IIIs sabotage something, it can be rebuilt, eventually. A NOVA bomb is dropped, and NOTHING gets built there.

Lethe:

Then you should be pretty happy with the game; it's a lot of fun.
Even if a squad of marines out of dozens of units on a battle field has shoulder pads .25" too thick for a fanboy's tastes :)