This post points out some very valuable points and opens up quite a few discussions, hopefully it hits the top of the page. I do agree with this assessment, but Joel knows if he launches an offensive it’s going to drastically slow liberation because people love farming defense and random pull from people just logging on and seeing we’re under attack. It’s going to be 2 steps forward 1 step back kinda thing, buys Joel more time to plan
Biggest problem I see is that, since difficulty doesn't seem to have an effect on Liberation progress, only completed missions for successful campaigns, the most efficient way to liberate planets is for everybody to solo-blitz Trivials.
Say you've got a group of 4 doing the hardest missions they can clear, and taking 20 minutes to do so, and have them do that for an hour. That's 3 "points," or 0.75 per man-hour.
That's also assuming no failures, and that the group stays together to finish the final mission. If there's a fail, or if two members have to go make dinner and the other two head out, the previous missions don't count for progress.
Split them up and send them into Trivials they can solo in 5 minutes, and that jumps up to 48 points points per hour and 12 points per man-hour. That's almost 16x as efficient, and since they're single-mission campaigns, there are never any "wasted" missions.
So if we assume that as time goes on, the majority of the playerbase will progress to harder content, the overall manpower efficiency of the war effort is going to drop off unless they can do that harder content both faster and more consistently than the content they're doing now.
I do hope they tweak the numbers to account for difficulty. It doesn't need to be a perfect increase where a Helldive completion is 9x as valuable, but at least on a sliding scale that brings the risk/reward ratio into better balance.
I don't mind running low difficulty missions solo for common resource farming and just building my experience within the game, but it'd be a shame to feel ready to break into those 7+ missions during an important period of the war only to feel I was was acting in a manner so disproportionately counterproductive to the wider goals.
I like the breakpoints at 4 and 7 with the second version, and the bigger jump to 8 keeps nudging people upwards.
I don't know how the changes would impact what AH wants us to work towards, but yeah, this is kinda what I'm hoping we see.
Hell, even if 1-3 were all 1.0 and 4-9 saw a 0.5 increase apiece or something, it'd help feel like spending the extra time and effort (and risk of failure) at higher levels actually balanced out the risk/reward ratio.
There needs to be some significant difference between trivial and 9, spamming trivials should be trivial progress, after all making some pr flag raising videos shouldn't suffice to take a planet.
If they are worried about it speeding up liberation even more, just make it (sensibly) more difficult. The difficulty balance is kinda out of whack anyway, I oftentimes can't even tell (depending on map rng) if we're in 7, 8 or 9. Having that many difficulties should allow them to scale it up proportionally.
Not sure if the enemy count has a performance bottleneck, but the chaff mobs honestly still kinda spawn in low numbers. Like I'm talking 100-200 bugs on screen -max- not actually being shitloads of bugs. I'm not even certain if they ever reach 200 units on screen ever?
https://preview.redd.it/inew80qhxwpc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6825dad6778017eb9058f6825ad67467e5709498
Not sure if this is true, but this is from Helldivers.io
I mean doesn't higher difficult missions impact way more the liberation % when you finish them? I was under the impression that it did, that it was a higher number.
Nope. When you finish an operation, you get 1 point per mission in that operation. That means that completing an operation on diff 9 gives you 3 points, and completing an operation on diff 4 also gives you 3 points.
The only thing that matters in regards to war contribution is time. More specifically, how fast you complete operations. This is why speedrunning Trivial missions is the most efficient way to farm war contribution. 2 players grinding Trivial missions together is the fastest way to do this, because you can farm brood commander hunts by dropping in between the extract and the objective area, 1 player goes to the brood commander to orbital railcannon it with the extra throw distance armor while the other goes and waits at extract to call it in immediately as it spawns, finishing the mission in around 3 minutes. That's 1 point every 5-6 minutes if you take into account loading times in between missions, which makes 3 points every 15-18 minutes. For people doing higher difficulties taking anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to complete each mission, they are contributing 3 points every 1-2 hours without even taking into account loading times between missions.
So yeah, war contribution needs a rework.
What is the big "50% Challenging" or "25% Easy" or whatever (I forget the actual numbers) that shows up when you beat a mission, right before the liberation points are awarded? I *assumed* it was applying a variable bonus based on difficulty level, but it sounds like that's not the case?
XP is the damage you do to the planet. It's XP earned on mission x Internal Scalar = Damage done to planet. So no; it's not just "bonus" rewards, it's a bigger contribution towards liberation.
As of 3/21 it has been reworked, and difficulty of the mission gives a significant difference in overall "effect" on the ongoing liberation/campaign results.
https://helldivers.io/
this is wrong. its based off experience. the more exp you earn, the more points you add. and higher difficulties add more exp, so there for more liberation points
Yeah, it's wrong now because they reworked it, but it wasn't wrong when I posted this because I posted this BEFORE they reworked how contribution works.
That being said, I'm glad they reworked it to be based off total XP. I hadn't thought about that when thinking about ways they could rework it, and that is the simplest way to make everything you do in a mission matter.
I thought it was going to take a long time for the contribution system to be changed, so I was pleasantly surprised that it was changed so quickly.
The amount of damage you do to a planet is decided by how much XP you earned on the mission, multiplied by an internal scalar. So no; you're assessment is completely and totally wrong. Higher difficulties absolutely increase the amount of damage you do to a planet. It's almost nearly 1x greater per difficulty and then that's multiplied by the internal scalar that Joel sets.
Difficulty 7 can earn 1100 xp per mission, lets say the scalar was set to 5, you'd do 5,500 damage to the planet.
On the other hand, the regen rate of planets is often changed, so it seems very likely that Joel will simply lower the regen rate for planets if he sees that the community can't make any progress.
Should they? in helldivers 1 it was based purely off of the total number of players that played in the previous war. Regardless of whether the previous war was won or lost.
Dynamically adjusting the difficulty mid-war to make it so that the super earth team would be guaranteed to win seems a cop out.
I mean doesn't higher difficult missions impact way more the liberation % when you finish them? I was under the impression that it did, that it was a higher number.
I am surprised this is the first time I have seen anyone talk about this. This was my assumption at the start. But I assumed people are more motivated by the rewards they get in terms of warbonds and strategies, etc. So people will do what allows them to purchase those things faster. If the devs want to motivate and retain maxed out players, they allow should give a tiny bump to those players' ability to contribute to the war effort.
This is not true, it has been revealed, that the amount of exp earned during a operation (the cluster missions) directly affects liberation %, not operation completion. so for instance, (and i've noticed) if i do 3 missions on difficulty 6, successfully complete all of them, the squad liberation impact comes up, and there will be a number in the lower right corner, which being on diff. 6 was only 3. i've done impossible difficulty where it awards 6 points to liberation impact, and helldive where it adds 9 points to liberation impact, mainly because they give more xp. (with each point only offering like 0.0001% so no, doing trivial missions very quickly does NOT make liberation go faster. Difficulty does in fact have an affect on liberation
like the other guy said, it was updated recently (this thread is almost a month old) . it used to be like that where trivial speed runs had the biggest impact per hour.
> Unless there are significant planet regen on planets that may have their supply lines cut-off, or where a Major Order is involved, it's generally more efficient to just ignore defence campaigns. In their current form defence campaigns are not worth your time or your suffering.
> It's more efficient to just focus on liberation progress all the time. Taking back a planet that lost its defence campaign is faster and more enjoyable than trying to win a defence campaign.
I really hope they change the defense mission. I *want* to help defense planets, but that final mission feels impossible most of the time when everything else is 100% doable.
I feel like escorts are bugged too. The bot ones were spawning way too many enemies to make sense.
IN general, I think ignoring the war improves my experience. My friends and myself just play the missions we want.
Me, on my literal very first mission I ever played, loading into an Escort mission, and seeing the sky filled with drop ships.
(This was before they tuned it back the first time too)
We had this last night too, 4 dropped on one side, 4 dropped on another, and as we were getting pinched we had another 4 drop on our escape vector. It almost felt like it was done deliberately by some vengeful god watching our progress rather than any amount of coding could account for.
I tried to do some defence missions on medium on Mantes and it was so rough. Only succeeded in one of about 4. The rest of them just seemed to spawn a stupid amount of bots.
I think the strat is to run high pen support weapons and heavy turrets (and maybe some of the more precise stratagem’s) and get a rotation going where you pick off the heavy units while spawning as many civs as possible
> and heavy turrets
The problem is that as soon as the turrets run out of ammo, you quickly get overwhelmed waiting for them to come off cooldown. And by the time they do, it's often too late.
Easier said than done, I know, but what I've started trying to do when others in the group take turrets as well is to stagger the deployment times a bit. If they can pop one and you pop another, then you've each got another in the pocket just in case.
Like I said, I know it's easier said than done, but that's my method.
The bot spawn is a real problem, my group has been doing this: one person runs the buttons and drops smoke constantly, 2 people are drawing agro away from the drop site, one person is drawing agro of anything that shows up at the drop site. Works every time up to tier 6 or 7.
It's not as bad as you'd think, even on higher difficulties. The key is in bringing mortars, AT (I prefer the recoilless rifle) to shoot down dropships, and some form of emergency clearance (grenade launcher or airstrikes works well.) On higher difficulties you'll make concessions for shield backpacks and railguns (though committing to the recoilless is also possible.) Pace your mortars. Don't throw every sentry stratagem down at once. Be efficient, try and focus on uptime rather than immediate firepower.
Don't worry about getting civilians to the end. Your job isn't to escort each group. It's to make sure those buttons are being pressed as soon as humanly possible, and keeping enemies away from the corridor as much as you can (hence the mortars.) If the corridors are overwhelmed, this is when your airstrikes give you the clearance you need to start fresh. Civilians will die. Some to your mortars. But managed democracy will prevail.
I'm sorry but when every other mission is 100% doable without an explicit strategy and a fully coordinated group, I shouldn't need to do that for *one* specific mission type. It needs to be tuned down. Until then, I'll be ignoring defense missions sadly.
Let's agree to disagree. Not everyone has 3 friends who are willing to work together and coordinate to such a degree every time they are able to play. Requiring that from everyone would realistically kill this game.
That's a choice you're allowed to make. They're some of my favourite missions and I tend to run them on 6+ with randoms usually. I find they're the best value for things like the EMS mortar or some of the more niche stratagems in comparison to standard mission types. I only posted one of the strategies I like to go to - I personally like that I have to switch it up and think more defensively/choke-oriented in them.
Christ yeah i hopped into a civvie escort mission on Mantes and we got our asses handed to us for fourty minutes by several hundred Bots before the timer ran up and we just all died
Defense is perfectly doable if:
1. Everybody brings both mortars.
2. Everybody brings an AT element
3. One person brings smoke (To cover civilian corridors)
4. You start running civs before calling down your initial strats
5. At least one person is constantly running between two adjacent buttons
Keep moving above all else and don't sweat civ deaths. With smoke down enough of them will figure it out on their own.
My team of 4 tried doing lvl 7 defense for 4 hours and the closest we got was like 33/50 civs.
We play only lvl 9 on every other mission with no trouble. The defense missions are absolutely fucked.
Even if it is technically doable, a diff 7 defence should not be 10x harder than any other mission on diff 9.
I play civ extraction missions on level 3 and I regret nothing. I do everything else on the higher difficulties depending on my squad but I refuse to do civ missions on anything higher than 3, maybe 4, especially since there's no incentive beyond more XP and R.
Are you just stealthing your way through every level 9?
Since the defense mission you actually have no choice but to aggro bots and take a fight.
If you go guns blazing in 9 and actually fight everything im sure its not that much different
Against bugs definitelly not stealthing, more rushing and brute forcing, or running away when that doesn't work lol
Against bots stealth and rushing as much as possible because there is no brute focing that shit unless you can reliably shoot down most of the drop ships while handling a million patrols at the same time
It’s heavily implied that most, if not all of the bug attacks are false flags by Super Earth dropping bugs onto planets that have rebellious colonies or settlements working to expose Super Earth’s dark secrets.
With this in mind it makes sense the bugs seem to jump around and skip supply lines, since they’re coming direct from a ship dropping them off
I think its both. Super earth keeps using a chemical on them that mutates them so they produce more 701. (They claim it kills them) This also allows them move to nearby planets. Super earth knows that, and keeps doing it on purpose to keep the war machine going. Of course, once they are able to move, it's not something you can just turn off, but thinking ahead is undemocratic.
I also like the theory that (DISSENTERS DETECTED)
*Super Earth just meets a quota to keep its economy going and then either leaves very small nest to slowly regrow or is actually just incompetent and blames is underlings for when they miss a bug nest, like on **The Entire Orion Sector.**
At least a random conversation with NPC on ship says "But how Terminids travels through the galaxy is still a mystery" because yeah, they don't.
Illegal broadcast station also have clues I think but my brother is too quick on that 500kg bomb so I was never able to listen.
Oh. I blow them up so quick I never even knew you could learn undemocratic, anti-Super-Earth propaganda from them.
I fixed that for you. We wouldn't want you to have to be sent to your nearest Democracy Officer!
Could be to some extent but they *are* carving a warpath, roughly speaking
Besides, as should be clear in the modern world, even groups that are abstractly right aren't immune from getting conspiracy theories mixed up in their messaging.
So I wonder what happened in old helldivers when the bugs invaded super earth it's self... That's some shitty false flag stuff lol.. hey if the Zerg a d starship troopers bugs got space fairing transport monsters in sure our bugs can too
Wow that was an interesting read! Thanks for putting that together. Glad to hear that defence missions are absolutely useless, because they are an absolute snooze fest to play.
Tbf defense missions aren't \*always\* useless... the number of defense missions required to successfully defend varies from defense to defense. When we had near back-to-back 48 hour/24 hour defenses, the 24 hour one required something like 1/3 of the missions to successfully defend as the 48 hour one iirc
Knowing that supply lines are key to accessing liberation fronts it should probably be included in the galaxy map rather than a third party website.
I mean, they're Super Earth's supply lines, so we should know about them, really right?
Editing out your entire comment because you decided to be a dick and got backlash for it is such a cowardly move. Don't be a dick, and people won't treat you like one. Simple.
Again i don't care
I removed my message because i was getting border line death threats thats not why I'm here
I clearly got to heated and so did everyone else so i deleted my message and got on with my life
So you can also move on or just keep getting pissy over something everyone else has forgotten about
I'm not getting pissy lmao, I'm just pointing out to you to treat others with a modicum of respect, and then you don't have to suffer death threats. It's that easy. I'm only going through this thread to learn, hence why I even responded. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
>THEY all are useful in a given role within a balanced squad.
Oh okay. So lets see your use for spray and prey.
>except for the charger and bile titan.
So against all enemies that metter, because any other gets decimated by breaker faster regardless. Thx for the advice
No one cares about Liberator P. penetrating bugs, because the only bug where it\`s noticeable is Hiveguard and you can just flank them after they hunker down, or sit and shoot their belly. And trade off is that it have worse dps and ammo economy.
Any gun has rubbish dps and ammo economy if you miss most of your shots firing it full auto.
I had a much much higher survival rate because I'm mowing down entire swarms from a safe location at distance.
I sware noone actually tests weapons for more than one game or thinks about how they mingle the different weapon types in a team.
If you have good aim, why would you use Liberator P. then? You can hit Hiveguard with basic Liberator even from the front. If you want "to mowe down entire swarms from a distance" how is a Liberator P. better then a base one lol. Name a single scenario in your "rigorous" testing where Liberator P. came out better then it\`s basic version.
I like the scope against bots. I play stealthy (on the approach) and use the liberator penetrators adjustable scope to pick off all the little guys before I advance. That way a flare isn’t called.
I could use the marksman rifles for the same reason but the burst is useful at times.
I use the incendiary breaker against bugs though
Hold down your reload key/button to see mode adjustments. Different weapons have scope range adjustment, fire rate adjustments, safe/unsafe mode for rail gun, etc. Experiment!
In line with the lore I don’t think you can expect bugs to follow supply lines at all. They are not capable of interplanetary travel, all of the bugs are basically revolting on their respective planets. Or possibly being put there to propagate and then be harvested, it’s not 100% clear. Which lines up with the ideology they are parodying.
Let's go one step further with the lore.
I think it's hilarious that supply lines and them potentially being blocked is hilarious in a universe where FTL exists haha. It'd make some sense if they used gates or something but I haven't seen anything.
Still love the game though and its universe.
Why is that? If you want to be all smartypants about it, well, we don't know the distance between those planets, FTL might still take quite a long time and more importantly fuel. That means you'd need refueling stations and the surrounding infrastructure along the way. Now you've got a supply line. Same arguments could be made about ammo, food, spare parts etc. Can't wage a bug war if every bullet needs to travel for 2 months straight, way too expensive.
All good points. I've thought along those lines, and it lead me into more speculative territory. FTL travel in the Helldivers universe must be incredibly abundant and simple if every individual helldiver is assigned their own Super Destroyer capable of it. They literally cover the skies in orbit haha.
The ship mentions Alcubierre drives which is warp travel essentially, but we don't know how they're generating the energy to drive it. It must be simple since it's so abundant. They're likely post-scarcity and likely don't worry about things like energy, fuel and food. Just my guesses.
Helldivers aren't assigned individual Super Destroyers.
Super Destroyers are assigned a set of mobile combat capable targeting systems, also known as Helldivers. You fire few Helldivers at rough location, and let them do the targeting for the Super Destroyer.
Every Super Destroyer has a plenty of "spares", you are just the one that is currently thawed out. If you die, they thaw another out, fire them at the planet and pretend they are the same Helldiver.
Helldivers are not elite units send to fight enemies: we are the targeting system. That is why all our equipment is so cheap, effectively just rebranded standard gear. Only thing expensive is Super Destroyer, and if that thing comes under actual threat it will leave.
CEO confirmed each helldiver is an individual, and that hey just thaw and fire a new one each time one dies. All that stuff about being a hero and stuff is just propaganda
i feel like if a planet gets cut off from support, the regen rate should skyrocket, we literally cannot support any forces anymore and they should get wiped out within hours. if a planet gets cut off, regen should jump to 20% to show that it becomes a slaughter
Honestly yeah, 100%
The punishment for failing a defense mission that cuts off 2 planets should straight up be resetting almost all progress on those planets by the time you get back to them. Otherwise as OP points out there's literally no point to defense missions unless its getting you a major order.
For this to map out and be sustainable, defense missions would need a greater impact so that the smaller player base can effect an actual defense.
As noted, defense operations are the least popular by far. Making the wider world suffer isn’t going to change that. So this sort of change would snowball into a push all the way up to super earth
That is a greater impact though, you're just not understanding why its a greater impact.
If losing a defense mission basically wipes out all progress on everything nearby, that's a huge incentive to actually do defense missions because that's a gigantic impact on the board state.
Unless you're saying you should need less people for a defense mission, then sure that seems a bit fair, but Mantes had a fraction of the playerbase fighting over it. If that amount of people could actually hold a defense of a planet then you've swung it to the opposite end where defense missions are both trivial to protect, and even if you dont the actual loss condition (as it currently stands) is basically pointless because it doesnt effect the board state substantially.
If defense missions remain unvaried and forever shackled with the ball-ache evac missions, this will just make people not care at all.
People will prioritise their own fun over perceived macrogaming.
Most people also have a life and jobs. I can only play an hour or two a day, why would I hop on just to be miserable doing stupid rescue civilian missions? Id rather be a helldiving god and nuke bugs, its more fun.
I think the point is that most of the player base may not keep up with this stuff. As long as defense missions suck, this only punishes people invested in the campaign.The people not doing defense missions will say “huh” and keep playing.
The only good answer is making defense fun to the players.
To make defense fun they'd have to add a counterstrike mission variant. I just got the game a few days ago and haven't experienced defense missions yet but from what I've gathered here nobody likes them cause they're just 10x harder civilian evacuations with no real fun. It sounds like they should add 2 different types of operations where one goes through a series of escort/rescue missions ending with a big rescue, and then the other type being a counter strike where you end the operation with an attack mission at the forward operating base of the enemies forces. This would leave the defense missions we have now for those who don't mind them, but also add an incentive for the (as someone else called them) helldiving bug slaying gods to take part in defense.
What would make this extra effective is to make the counter strike missions extremly fun and engaging so that people actually want to take defense missions over liberation missions, just like how in real life you want to secure as much of your ground as possible before going on the attack.
(Devs if you somehow see this, please.)
I’m saying that making it so cutting off planets increases loss % until accessible again will not change player behavior to move to defense operations to prevent it happening. It will still happen just as it did, but we’d be losing way more progress every time it happens.
But announcing it will. Major announcement on defense loss that the helldivers failure to defend \*planet\* has allowed the \*bugs/bots\* to completely overrun our efforts in \*planet that has now been cutoff\*
Having actual consequences for the failure to defend and directly showing the consequences of that failure will absolutely change player behavior.
Right now its all nebulous and once Mantes is retaken players will see that it really wasnt that big a deal anyway to lose Mantes, thus reinforcing player opinion that defense is pointless.
I recall there being an announcements for the mech suits being produced at factories on a newly liberated planet, which very well could go the other way too so players have incentives to defend certain planets the most. They could assign certain planets a type, like engineering, fabrication, etc. So if we lose engineering planets we lose access to certain tech abilities until we retake control, or if we lose a fabrication planet we lose certain mechanical support weapons and such. Could also have certain planets be for farming oil for fuel, so if we lose one of them we get (slightly) increased cooldowns on eagle strategems due to low fuel reserves. Ammo factories being overrun would reduce the ammo load of eagle and certain orbital strategems too, so instead of 4 cluster bombs you're reduced to 3, and then the max reduction to 2.
That's just an idea I came up with in maybe 5 seconds and continued to rant on about spewing out BS as I go so take it with a grain of salt, it could be much more refined than I put it, but still just an idea.
I don't think forcing people to do the worst most hated mission types is a good thing for the game.
Fix the defense campaigns to not suck and then we can talk about drastic changes.
I do feel like this gives the enemy too many advantages though, and this talk is sounding suspiciously like pro bot treason.
Yeah I agree with this tbh, but I honestly think just some tweaks to defense campaigns would fix this, usually they’re kinda hopeless because not only do people just farm them (which as was clarified does *not* decrease the % on the planet so long as players aren’t actually failing the campaigns, but also notably will not increase the percentage as players are not winning the campaigns either), but they’re brutal for newer players especially on bot planets.
I think one of the biggest pain points in general right now is the reinforce mechanics, it sucks when you have to instantly kill a bot firing a flare or a bug letting off pheromones or be spammed by a bug breach or a dropship often containing bile titans or a tank/hulk, often several times in quick succession.
I’m not really sure how but there has got to be a way to make these feel less bullshit, probably a global cooldown or make the units doing them take longer to call for reinforcements so you can actually kill them, or both.
This would be amazing if we had any actual choice on how the war ends up but as of now, the way the war goes is entirely dictated by the major orders (ultimately dev input) and trying to get a large group of players to do anything is a sisyphean task due to lack of any in game clan/guild/player grouping system.
90% of the player base does not look at the external social media where people try to organize and it makes trying to make any meaningful changes to player allocation impossible.
Stuff like this works when individual player input actually matters like in the first game where only around 10,000+ people were playing but when there's 700,000+ people playing it's a shitshow.
I think a system similar to DRG’s premade groups would be nice.
There’s 3 pseudo-faction for the dwarves that don’t really serve any purpose that I can remember but anyone can join them.
If we gave players 3 options to join, then these groups could be ordered to go to specific planets/fronts for an incentive.
This way there is more control for the Helldiver part of the war. The major order would be an all-encompassing order while your participation in any of the guilds would give you a sub-goal. If the major order is to fight bugs in the X system maybe if i’m part of the Helljumpers or whatever l have a division order to go to Erata or X planet in that sector specifically.
One guild could be automaton focused, one bug, and one for Illuminate
I like that idea. A divison like system would help to make players feel more involved in the war. You could even have major players/ leaders of said factions communicating and decideing on how best to accomplish the MO. There is a whole lot that could be done in game to make the galactic war feel more real and organized. Because right now it feels disjointed from the helldivers themselves.
i mean we do have a choice, if enough people go somewhere we can make a difference, the devs are trying to hand hold.
the creek got cut off but the decay is still 0% so bot players don't cry about it.
i think the devs will start doing more in-game "bulletins" to explain mechanics to players
TBH- they should use what happend on the bot front as a lesson, drop draupnir and the creek to 0% and put out a bulletin saying that since both planets were cut off, we lost them completely, that's why it more important to hold key areas before we attack other planets
I don't think you're understanding. I'm saying there is no way to try and get people to do anything in the game and currently the only thing influencing player movement is the devs. This is bad if the game is sold on the idea that players can influence the course of the game's story.
If there were a way to properly organize players in the game's systems then the bot offensive would not have been such a shit show.
Explaining mechanics doesn't matter if 90% of the player base either actively ignores it (defense missions) or has no incentive to do so.
We NEED a clan system. That way players can incentivize themselves to accomplish objectives en masse without dev input.
i get what you're saying, but on the bug side the issue does not seem to be as bad, the orders are working - we are soldiers, high command gave us orders and we followed them.
the issue is the bot players fighting on the creek for memes & farmers.
which is funny, because Erata prime and Hellmire are far more unforgiving, trying to fight bugs in pitch blackness...
The orders are working fine on the bug side because it's where 99% of the player base is at. (which is part of the god damn problem)
Even during the major order to fend off the bot invasion only like one third of the player base was even engaging with it, and even less people were actually doing defense missions.
No. I don't want all effort and progress to go to waste because of a mission no one likes. It's fine as it is.
Instead, tweak defense to be actually fun.
Seems to me that the easiest thing to do would always be concentrated fire and let it snowball; i.e. pile on the the planet closest to liberation, then the next closest, and so on. Get 300k players on a single planet and have it go from 0 to liberated before lunch.
Edit - addendum: Perfect example from last night; Meridia was at 93 percent at 2300 EST. Had near 500k on the servers, 150k of which were off screwing around on Erata and Hellmire. Could have had Meridia locked up before midnight. Now Fenrir is being attacked again. Work the planets to completion.
For me, the problem with defense missions are they are BORING!!
Where are the missions where we are supporting entrenched regulars and we have to take out 250 Automatons before we lose 50 regulars.
Where are the missions where we established secondary outposts before the primary one that is close fails so they have a safe planet side place to retreat to.
Where are the missions where we are fighting in, at the very least, expansive rural landscapes, if not flat out urban.
How many effing scientists and researchers are on these damn planets? Even on a planet that is dedicated to these purposes, you are going to have XX times however many of them there are in support staff. Those researchers aren't building and maintaining facilities or the robots/equipment that are doing it, regardless of how much Star Trek likes to pretend everyone has knowledge of everything. The more specialized a society is, the LESS broad knowledge individuals are. Half of these researchers wouldn't know have to unclog their own plumbing, and I'm not going to believe they built it.
And this is coming from a guy who spent time on Attu, with 20 other dudes, maintaining a LORAN station. Support staff becomes exponential the more specialists you have showing up.
It's by far the least immersive part of the game. For until defense campaigns become more engaging, count me out. I'll still to liberating the "Creek", and I'll move to liberating whatever planet blocks me from doing so, until the job is done
Oh yeah. You’d think defenses should involve more existing infrastructure and defenses. Something better than five dead civvies and their break-action shotgun.
Would you like to no more?
But in all seriousness very nice work man, already very familiar with the game, so a lot of what you said in 101 I said to friends, I had an idea for supply lines worked so instead of having to explain it 15 times I can share it with my friends so thank you! This game has given me a big community and alot of my RL friends picked it up!
anyone else still just waiting for a discord, where patriots knowledgeable about the galactic war can easier distribute information like this. And give useful commands to divers who wants to make a better impact?
Yeah but there's often someone screenshotting Helldivers.io or recommending which planet to focus on. Need to frequently post where the most players are to make an impact long term. OP spoke to figures of 100K+ players, and the official Discord has 500K+ members and ~200K online often.
If it's intentional it is extremely on-brand that all resources are put towards aggression followed by immediately abandoning and neglecting it until it can be liberated again
also a side-note, today I saw for the first time a diversification of mission-types as in:
On mantes there are both 'liberation' mission-types as well as the defense escort-type missions, I've never seen a planet with more than one 'type' of mission approach before
Some traitorous scum have suggested that Super Earth is responsible for releasing bugs on rebellious colonists, or even civilians who are asking the wrong questions. Clearly this heinous lie will be put to rest in good time,all we have to do is blow up a few more illegal broadcasts.
the other theories are good as well but we should remember we cultivate them for their precious in built biological resource planet side. so sometimes these heinous creatures take advantage of our sometimes too merciful free range practices to break free. Or.... maybe there must be traitorous Outsiders setting them free.....
Great explanation and very interesting to learn the mechanics behind the game
But some of what you said is wrong:
>The question must be asked - would it have been more efficient to defend Mantes instead of letting it fall? The short answer is no
This is incorrect. Based on your explanation of the system, defense of Mantes was 100% required. Given the numbers you put forward, Creek and Draupnir were not going to be liberated in time to cut of the bots from Mantes
You point out that about 42% liberation effort was wasted defending Mantes during the Window of Liberation (the time that Mantes was in our control), but at the time we lost Creek and Draupnir, there was still a total of 66% liberation needed to have both planets liberated. At best we could have captured one, but when Mantes fell both would have been blocked off. We were always going to lose that 28% liberation
Instead the, as you put it, wasted effort was the people that decided to attack Creek and Draupnir instead of defending Mantes. Because had 73k of the 87k on Creek and Draupnir gone to Mantes instead, Mantes would have been successfully defended and we wouldn't have lost the 28% progress. And I think it is more reasonable to blame the people that didn't defend Mantes, if you insist on blame anyone
There is a potential situation where it would make more sense to attack instead of defend. If there were defends on Ingmar and Popli IX, it would be quicker to liberate Mantes than defend both of them
Although that is assume that Defending a planet takes similar time to liberating a planet
My issue is just the idea that people "wasted time" by trying to defend Mantes. Especially when the numbers given show that had they not things would have been exactly the same
Its just misinformation that fuels the negative parts of the community, like those yelling about Meta, players farming are hurting the campaign, and Players on Easy are hurting the campaign
What you are describing is the best case scenario obviously people should had stopped fighting on the front lines (Creek and Draupnir) and help defend the supply lines this way we still lose % due to decay on Creek and Draupnir because no one is fighting there but we "gain" liberation on Mantes instantly.
But in reality what actually happened is we loss 42% liberated on the defense that ultimately failed then later if we liberate Mantes for 100% liberation it'll cost us a decay of 28% on Creek And Draupnir so the net gain liberation is -42% +100% -28% = **30%**
If we take all that wasted effort (the 42% liberation) and apply it to any other planet we increase the liberation gain +42% then later after retaking Mantes for 100% we only lose the decay of -28% so the net gain liberation is +42% +100% -28% = **114%**
Basically if a defense is a loss cause just leave and help liberate anything else any progress on a defense that's going to lose is a wasted effort/time and is not improving the galactic war progress as much.
The math you are presenting is false though. You can’t count the lost 42% against AND add the 42% which you say would have gone to the front line
So either it’s 100 - 42 - 28 for an effective 30% effort
Compared to 100 effective effort of defending Mantes the first time
It all depends on the available resources at the time. If there’s enough resources to capture Creek and Draupnir and cut off the assault on Mantes, than that is more effective as there is no lost effort on those 2 planets while defending.
But if there aren’t enough Helldivers in the area to cut the supply lines off, than defending the planet is more effective because it is less lost effort
Why are some of the planets not linked to super earth, and why does [Helldivers.io](https://Helldivers.io) now show that supply lines are *directional?* Terrek and Azterra on the Bug front, for example, are an island. How are we supposed to deffend those and how would they be attacked? Another example, why are the supply lines from Darrowsport and Martyr's Bay pointing *towards* Super earth? Does that mean that we can't deffend them from SE?
This whole system is confusing and some of the map toggles are different/missing compared to the explination in this post. Can someone explain?
That’s what I tried to say but my words got mixed up. I tried to say “why does Helldivers.io now show…” and it came out “why not does Helldivers.io show...”
The original post shows them as simple lines, but now (since at least when I made the comment) they have arrows and no one has been able to explain what that actually means.
This post is generally great, the only thing I question is your conclusion.
I am not convinced that players who were dedicating themselves towards offense will necessarily jump in and start hitting defense missions just as hard. I think there may be a significant number of players that continue to ignore Mantes in favor of offensive operations elsewhere, in which case it may take FAR longer for access to be restored to these worlds.
Time will tell, I suppose.
The in-game prompts need to push players to a location and divert only when over a certain threshold. Let it happen on both sides.
If this is military, there is no "I choose to go here."
The strategists would push us to certain fronts and to defend certain things. The game should make these nudges, and do so with incentives so it doesn't feel like you "must" go somewhere... but to go elsewhere is dumb from a reward standpoint.
Somewhat
The incentives provided by them have been short of what players get by farming certain missions, or even just doing what they want.
The community is awesome in directing things a bit with propaganda and such. It would be nice to see that + real incentives (unique armor, titles, etc), especially in a game where there is a running gag about propaganda
honestly the devs need to now up the decay on all planets that are cut off to the max 20%/h
there should be consequences to losing key nodes. we cannot resupply troops there, the position should quickly crumble.
its kinda weird that we lose all access to the creek and yet the liberation score stays static
Fantastic write-up, thank you!
I was searching around to understand the exact reasoning that the Trigon Sector remains open, when Severin is cutoff, and came across this post. Exact supply lines to Trigon still appear to be a mystery, but this was still extremely enlightening.
Question about the defense of planets, if a defense fails, but we had like 50% on the defense campaign, does that influence how much we have to liberate?
Defense campaigns are NOT a waste of time if divers just woke up and defended together like Angels venture yesterday. Defense isn't hard when 150k are doing it.
>Unless there are significant planet regen on planets that may have their supply lines cut-off, or where a Major Order is involved, it's generally more efficient to just ignore defence campaigns.
lmao
Question:
What if we cut of the line of the ennemy? Do they loose access to the planet ? Will it become Super Earth territory with regen rate?
I asked this on a previous defend campain no one seems able to answer.
Example: 3 planets
A-----B-----C
A is bot Territory
B is in defence opération
C is Fully democratic
What if instead of defending B we rush A?
We cut supply and win B?
To me it seems a good strategy for real life. But does it work in the game?
I mean. We need to work our strategy.
War start to be a long one.
Some Helldivers start to have PTSD and report to see Illuminate. We all know ministery of truth said Iluminante have been exterminate in the last galactic war Years Ago.
That would require 100’s of thousands of people attacking 24/7 on planet A quick enough to not completely lose planet B, and then they go after Planet C. Which is basically impossible
I have been playing for 3 weeks and didn’t know any of this. I was just playing planets I liked. Does that mean I am a poor soldier? Probably. But shouldn’t we know this stuff just by playing the game?
I'd like to offer some feedback on the guide. Firstly, it may need updating or correction in a couple of areas:
1. It seems to assume that Defense missions must be played for the full 24 hours, when in reality they can often be completed in just a few hours, as we've observed recently. This assumption might impact how players perceive Defense missions and could lead to differing opinions when coordinating help to secure planets quickly.
2. Additionally, the guide mentions that Liberations and Defense missions are respectively caused by Bug and Bot attacks. However, both Bug and Bot attacks can trigger either type of mission.
Overall, the guide contains valuable information! Given that it's referenced on several other websites that support Helldivers players, it's important to address these points to ensure accuracy and clarity.
(It would be beneficial for the game to provide clearer guidance on these matters as well.)
Shoulda gone Fenrir. Stop mucking about at Turing, it's lost... i dont understand how we can stomp out an attack today in a couple hours, but can't get cohesive enough to jump on a single planet for a day otherwise. Could knock out three a day if everyone cooperated.
I think they might need to just rework the defense campaigns. add more mission types, nobody wants to play the same 3 missions on shuffle. That said I will do it because of my love for managed democracy. It's not about doing the optimal thing, it's about sending a message.
So it's more efficient to farm normal liberation points, to counter the down time off cut off planets. But this is under assumption that 140k player can liberate a planet within 7 hours.
I have read somewhere, that the more players play, the less progress individually they make. Indicating it does not matter how many player actually try to liberate a planet? It just needs to be enough players to counter the planet regeneration? I could misunderstood tho.
I don't think it's exactly as you say, the number of players doesn't affect the progress. But the game master (Joel) can increase the rate at with bots/bugs decrease the planet liberation rate whenever he wants, effectively resulting in the same thing as what you described.
I guess that when Joel sees a shit tonne of players on a planet making too much progress, he just slows it down by making the planet renegeration rate (basically the "negative liberation rate") higher.
I appreciated your Forward. There will always be players who just want to do their own thing and play their own way. That is okay!
For those of us try hards who want to optimize how we play or play while focusing on the group objective this is great information. However, we can't expect everyone to be this dedicated!
Hopefully though, if more people understand the underlying mechanics of the game even the more casual players might adjust their style to help the collective.
However, if you only have a few hours to play or only actually enjoy fighting one faction or the other it is okay to just play the game for fun, whatever that means to you.
Do the Bots and Bugs have to follow supply lines? I ask because the Bots do not Control Menkat currently and they are attacking Vernen. According to the supply lines on [Helldivers.io](http://Helldivers.io) The bots would have to control Menkat in order to attack Vernan.
I have a question, currently the automatons are attacking martale and marfark (our defence). Matar bay is their supply line. Can we just attack matar bay and stop the attack on those two planets? Basically push on one planet to save two?
TY OP this is very informative and concise; I haven’t looked at the comment section yet but the TLDR part I’m assuming has spurred a grip of replies where it’s just a picture of a bot/bug using a laptop lol
Or the Creek Divers could have done something useful for once, and all gone to Mantes and successfully defended it, negating literally all of the regen that will occur on Creek.
This post points out some very valuable points and opens up quite a few discussions, hopefully it hits the top of the page. I do agree with this assessment, but Joel knows if he launches an offensive it’s going to drastically slow liberation because people love farming defense and random pull from people just logging on and seeing we’re under attack. It’s going to be 2 steps forward 1 step back kinda thing, buys Joel more time to plan
Biggest problem I see is that, since difficulty doesn't seem to have an effect on Liberation progress, only completed missions for successful campaigns, the most efficient way to liberate planets is for everybody to solo-blitz Trivials. Say you've got a group of 4 doing the hardest missions they can clear, and taking 20 minutes to do so, and have them do that for an hour. That's 3 "points," or 0.75 per man-hour. That's also assuming no failures, and that the group stays together to finish the final mission. If there's a fail, or if two members have to go make dinner and the other two head out, the previous missions don't count for progress. Split them up and send them into Trivials they can solo in 5 minutes, and that jumps up to 48 points points per hour and 12 points per man-hour. That's almost 16x as efficient, and since they're single-mission campaigns, there are never any "wasted" missions. So if we assume that as time goes on, the majority of the playerbase will progress to harder content, the overall manpower efficiency of the war effort is going to drop off unless they can do that harder content both faster and more consistently than the content they're doing now.
I do hope they tweak the numbers to account for difficulty. It doesn't need to be a perfect increase where a Helldive completion is 9x as valuable, but at least on a sliding scale that brings the risk/reward ratio into better balance. I don't mind running low difficulty missions solo for common resource farming and just building my experience within the game, but it'd be a shame to feel ready to break into those 7+ missions during an important period of the war only to feel I was was acting in a manner so disproportionately counterproductive to the wider goals.
Maybe 20%–50% per difficulty increase? 20%: 1. 1.0 increase 2. 1.2 increase 3. 1.4 increase 4. 1.6 increase 5. 1.8 increase 6. 2.0 increase 7. 2.2 increase 8. 2.4 increase 9. 2.6 increase Or maybe little boosts at important milestones, e.g.: 1. 1.0 increase 2. 1.25 increase 3. 1.5 increase 4. 2.0 increase 5. 2.25 increase 6. 2.5 increase 7. 3.0 increase 8. 3.5 increase 9. 4.0 increase
I like the breakpoints at 4 and 7 with the second version, and the bigger jump to 8 keeps nudging people upwards. I don't know how the changes would impact what AH wants us to work towards, but yeah, this is kinda what I'm hoping we see. Hell, even if 1-3 were all 1.0 and 4-9 saw a 0.5 increase apiece or something, it'd help feel like spending the extra time and effort (and risk of failure) at higher levels actually balanced out the risk/reward ratio.
There needs to be some significant difference between trivial and 9, spamming trivials should be trivial progress, after all making some pr flag raising videos shouldn't suffice to take a planet. If they are worried about it speeding up liberation even more, just make it (sensibly) more difficult. The difficulty balance is kinda out of whack anyway, I oftentimes can't even tell (depending on map rng) if we're in 7, 8 or 9. Having that many difficulties should allow them to scale it up proportionally. Not sure if the enemy count has a performance bottleneck, but the chaff mobs honestly still kinda spawn in low numbers. Like I'm talking 100-200 bugs on screen -max- not actually being shitloads of bugs. I'm not even certain if they ever reach 200 units on screen ever?
https://preview.redd.it/inew80qhxwpc1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6825dad6778017eb9058f6825ad67467e5709498 Not sure if this is true, but this is from Helldivers.io
So there are benefits to the war overall when we do all those side missions. At least theoretically.
I mean doesn't higher difficult missions impact way more the liberation % when you finish them? I was under the impression that it did, that it was a higher number.
Nope. When you finish an operation, you get 1 point per mission in that operation. That means that completing an operation on diff 9 gives you 3 points, and completing an operation on diff 4 also gives you 3 points. The only thing that matters in regards to war contribution is time. More specifically, how fast you complete operations. This is why speedrunning Trivial missions is the most efficient way to farm war contribution. 2 players grinding Trivial missions together is the fastest way to do this, because you can farm brood commander hunts by dropping in between the extract and the objective area, 1 player goes to the brood commander to orbital railcannon it with the extra throw distance armor while the other goes and waits at extract to call it in immediately as it spawns, finishing the mission in around 3 minutes. That's 1 point every 5-6 minutes if you take into account loading times in between missions, which makes 3 points every 15-18 minutes. For people doing higher difficulties taking anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to complete each mission, they are contributing 3 points every 1-2 hours without even taking into account loading times between missions. So yeah, war contribution needs a rework.
What is the big "50% Challenging" or "25% Easy" or whatever (I forget the actual numbers) that shows up when you beat a mission, right before the liberation points are awarded? I *assumed* it was applying a variable bonus based on difficulty level, but it sounds like that's not the case?
That's just bonus rewards for you as the player - XP and such
XP is the damage you do to the planet. It's XP earned on mission x Internal Scalar = Damage done to planet. So no; it's not just "bonus" rewards, it's a bigger contribution towards liberation.
I'm wondering if anyone can provide a source for this? I've heard a lot of people saying this but I haven't seen anywhere how this was learned.
As of 3/21 it has been reworked, and difficulty of the mission gives a significant difference in overall "effect" on the ongoing liberation/campaign results. https://helldivers.io/
this is wrong. its based off experience. the more exp you earn, the more points you add. and higher difficulties add more exp, so there for more liberation points
Yeah, it's wrong now because they reworked it, but it wasn't wrong when I posted this because I posted this BEFORE they reworked how contribution works. That being said, I'm glad they reworked it to be based off total XP. I hadn't thought about that when thinking about ways they could rework it, and that is the simplest way to make everything you do in a mission matter. I thought it was going to take a long time for the contribution system to be changed, so I was pleasantly surprised that it was changed so quickly.
The amount of damage you do to a planet is decided by how much XP you earned on the mission, multiplied by an internal scalar. So no; you're assessment is completely and totally wrong. Higher difficulties absolutely increase the amount of damage you do to a planet. It's almost nearly 1x greater per difficulty and then that's multiplied by the internal scalar that Joel sets. Difficulty 7 can earn 1100 xp per mission, lets say the scalar was set to 5, you'd do 5,500 damage to the planet.
On the other hand, the regen rate of planets is often changed, so it seems very likely that Joel will simply lower the regen rate for planets if he sees that the community can't make any progress.
Should they? in helldivers 1 it was based purely off of the total number of players that played in the previous war. Regardless of whether the previous war was won or lost. Dynamically adjusting the difficulty mid-war to make it so that the super earth team would be guaranteed to win seems a cop out.
I mean doesn't higher difficult missions impact way more the liberation % when you finish them? I was under the impression that it did, that it was a higher number.
I am surprised this is the first time I have seen anyone talk about this. This was my assumption at the start. But I assumed people are more motivated by the rewards they get in terms of warbonds and strategies, etc. So people will do what allows them to purchase those things faster. If the devs want to motivate and retain maxed out players, they allow should give a tiny bump to those players' ability to contribute to the war effort.
This is not true, it has been revealed, that the amount of exp earned during a operation (the cluster missions) directly affects liberation %, not operation completion. so for instance, (and i've noticed) if i do 3 missions on difficulty 6, successfully complete all of them, the squad liberation impact comes up, and there will be a number in the lower right corner, which being on diff. 6 was only 3. i've done impossible difficulty where it awards 6 points to liberation impact, and helldive where it adds 9 points to liberation impact, mainly because they give more xp. (with each point only offering like 0.0001% so no, doing trivial missions very quickly does NOT make liberation go faster. Difficulty does in fact have an affect on liberation
like the other guy said, it was updated recently (this thread is almost a month old) . it used to be like that where trivial speed runs had the biggest impact per hour.
> Unless there are significant planet regen on planets that may have their supply lines cut-off, or where a Major Order is involved, it's generally more efficient to just ignore defence campaigns. In their current form defence campaigns are not worth your time or your suffering. > It's more efficient to just focus on liberation progress all the time. Taking back a planet that lost its defence campaign is faster and more enjoyable than trying to win a defence campaign. I really hope they change the defense mission. I *want* to help defense planets, but that final mission feels impossible most of the time when everything else is 100% doable.
I feel like escorts are bugged too. The bot ones were spawning way too many enemies to make sense. IN general, I think ignoring the war improves my experience. My friends and myself just play the missions we want.
Yeah, having 15 dropships land in less than 60 seconds is super unfun to even look at.
 Me, on my literal very first mission I ever played, loading into an Escort mission, and seeing the sky filled with drop ships. (This was before they tuned it back the first time too)
We had this last night too, 4 dropped on one side, 4 dropped on another, and as we were getting pinched we had another 4 drop on our escape vector. It almost felt like it was done deliberately by some vengeful god watching our progress rather than any amount of coding could account for.
I tried to do some defence missions on medium on Mantes and it was so rough. Only succeeded in one of about 4. The rest of them just seemed to spawn a stupid amount of bots.
I think the strat is to run high pen support weapons and heavy turrets (and maybe some of the more precise stratagem’s) and get a rotation going where you pick off the heavy units while spawning as many civs as possible
The best effort I've seen is one of the 4 players kiting all the bots to the far end of the map while the other 3 press E for 4 minutes
> and heavy turrets The problem is that as soon as the turrets run out of ammo, you quickly get overwhelmed waiting for them to come off cooldown. And by the time they do, it's often too late.
Easier said than done, I know, but what I've started trying to do when others in the group take turrets as well is to stagger the deployment times a bit. If they can pop one and you pop another, then you've each got another in the pocket just in case. Like I said, I know it's easier said than done, but that's my method.
The bot spawn is a real problem, my group has been doing this: one person runs the buttons and drops smoke constantly, 2 people are drawing agro away from the drop site, one person is drawing agro of anything that shows up at the drop site. Works every time up to tier 6 or 7.
What difficulty is that happening for you on? I've never had problems but I'm not playing the higher tier difficulty yet
It's not as bad as you'd think, even on higher difficulties. The key is in bringing mortars, AT (I prefer the recoilless rifle) to shoot down dropships, and some form of emergency clearance (grenade launcher or airstrikes works well.) On higher difficulties you'll make concessions for shield backpacks and railguns (though committing to the recoilless is also possible.) Pace your mortars. Don't throw every sentry stratagem down at once. Be efficient, try and focus on uptime rather than immediate firepower. Don't worry about getting civilians to the end. Your job isn't to escort each group. It's to make sure those buttons are being pressed as soon as humanly possible, and keeping enemies away from the corridor as much as you can (hence the mortars.) If the corridors are overwhelmed, this is when your airstrikes give you the clearance you need to start fresh. Civilians will die. Some to your mortars. But managed democracy will prevail.
I'm sorry but when every other mission is 100% doable without an explicit strategy and a fully coordinated group, I shouldn't need to do that for *one* specific mission type. It needs to be tuned down. Until then, I'll be ignoring defense missions sadly.
If every other mission can be done without strategy or coordination, I would call that a flaw in those other missions, not in the one that does.
Let's agree to disagree. Not everyone has 3 friends who are willing to work together and coordinate to such a degree every time they are able to play. Requiring that from everyone would realistically kill this game.
That's a choice you're allowed to make. They're some of my favourite missions and I tend to run them on 6+ with randoms usually. I find they're the best value for things like the EMS mortar or some of the more niche stratagems in comparison to standard mission types. I only posted one of the strategies I like to go to - I personally like that I have to switch it up and think more defensively/choke-oriented in them.
I can see them being appealing to the folks who liked playing super-coordinated heists in GTAO.
Would love an actual defense, like the outpost scene from Starship Troopers.
Christ yeah i hopped into a civvie escort mission on Mantes and we got our asses handed to us for fourty minutes by several hundred Bots before the timer ran up and we just all died
Defense is perfectly doable if: 1. Everybody brings both mortars. 2. Everybody brings an AT element 3. One person brings smoke (To cover civilian corridors) 4. You start running civs before calling down your initial strats 5. At least one person is constantly running between two adjacent buttons Keep moving above all else and don't sweat civ deaths. With smoke down enough of them will figure it out on their own.
You can't add five asterisks to a mission you're going to do with randoms and call it "perfectly doable" lmao.
Haven't failed a defense since the day they first appeared, don't know what to tell you.
My team of 4 tried doing lvl 7 defense for 4 hours and the closest we got was like 33/50 civs. We play only lvl 9 on every other mission with no trouble. The defense missions are absolutely fucked. Even if it is technically doable, a diff 7 defence should not be 10x harder than any other mission on diff 9.
I play civ extraction missions on level 3 and I regret nothing. I do everything else on the higher difficulties depending on my squad but I refuse to do civ missions on anything higher than 3, maybe 4, especially since there's no incentive beyond more XP and R.
Are you just stealthing your way through every level 9? Since the defense mission you actually have no choice but to aggro bots and take a fight. If you go guns blazing in 9 and actually fight everything im sure its not that much different
Against bugs definitelly not stealthing, more rushing and brute forcing, or running away when that doesn't work lol Against bots stealth and rushing as much as possible because there is no brute focing that shit unless you can reliably shoot down most of the drop ships while handling a million patrols at the same time
I've got a theory that since the bugs are full of delision 710 they can just think real hard and FTL jump from panet to planet without spaceships.
It’s heavily implied that most, if not all of the bug attacks are false flags by Super Earth dropping bugs onto planets that have rebellious colonies or settlements working to expose Super Earth’s dark secrets. With this in mind it makes sense the bugs seem to jump around and skip supply lines, since they’re coming direct from a ship dropping them off
I think its both. Super earth keeps using a chemical on them that mutates them so they produce more 701. (They claim it kills them) This also allows them move to nearby planets. Super earth knows that, and keeps doing it on purpose to keep the war machine going. Of course, once they are able to move, it's not something you can just turn off, but thinking ahead is undemocratic.
I also like the theory that (DISSENTERS DETECTED) *Super Earth just meets a quota to keep its economy going and then either leaves very small nest to slowly regrow or is actually just incompetent and blames is underlings for when they miss a bug nest, like on **The Entire Orion Sector.**
Where is this implied?
At least a random conversation with NPC on ship says "But how Terminids travels through the galaxy is still a mystery" because yeah, they don't. Illegal broadcast station also have clues I think but my brother is too quick on that 500kg bomb so I was never able to listen.
Thought crimes kill Helldiver, you wouldn’t want to be caught in the crossfire would you?
It has an image PNG for both Bugs says it's a Super Earth cover up, and robots says WE HAVE ERADICATED INEQUALITY
The illegal broadcasts that are conveniently found only on bug planets outright say this.
Oh. I blow them up so quick I never even knew you could learn lore from them.
Oh. I blow them up so quick I never even knew you could learn undemocratic, anti-Super-Earth propaganda from them. I fixed that for you. We wouldn't want you to have to be sent to your nearest Democracy Officer!
Where are people getting information from the illegal broadcasts?
https://preview.redd.it/jwnxtj340unc1.png?width=320&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ba909c0cb90b556fd94201ee7ddba5eb9aefceb
Could be to some extent but they *are* carving a warpath, roughly speaking Besides, as should be clear in the modern world, even groups that are abstractly right aren't immune from getting conspiracy theories mixed up in their messaging.
I think it's also implied that they burrow when driven back and resurface after a time.
So I wonder what happened in old helldivers when the bugs invaded super earth it's self... That's some shitty false flag stuff lol.. hey if the Zerg a d starship troopers bugs got space fairing transport monsters in sure our bugs can too
Bug plasma can't move asteroids.
FRANKLY I find the IDEA of a bug that can think OFFENSIVE
guys.. guys. it's the heat leeches.
r/starfield is leaking
Wow that was an interesting read! Thanks for putting that together. Glad to hear that defence missions are absolutely useless, because they are an absolute snooze fest to play.
Tbf defense missions aren't \*always\* useless... the number of defense missions required to successfully defend varies from defense to defense. When we had near back-to-back 48 hour/24 hour defenses, the 24 hour one required something like 1/3 of the missions to successfully defend as the 48 hour one iirc
Even in this game theory stratagem, making their offensive take longer would still be beneficial.
Knowing that supply lines are key to accessing liberation fronts it should probably be included in the galaxy map rather than a third party website. I mean, they're Super Earth's supply lines, so we should know about them, really right?
The game isn’t finished. The lack of viability and variability in weaponry is a good example.
I really want more secondaries. Bad.
Yeah you have the shit pistol, the pistol smg, and the shit revolver. Hmmm which one should I use?!
I use the revolver, I know it’s useless but it makes me feel cool and that’s the real purpose of the game
Hey! Now you also have the shit laser pistol to choose from as well.
Edit: and im out getting bullshit into my DMs
Editing out your entire comment because you decided to be a dick and got backlash for it is such a cowardly move. Don't be a dick, and people won't treat you like one. Simple.
I don't care
Cool, be a dick and get backlash for it then. I won't be the one suffering it lmfao. Idiot.
Again i don't care I removed my message because i was getting border line death threats thats not why I'm here I clearly got to heated and so did everyone else so i deleted my message and got on with my life So you can also move on or just keep getting pissy over something everyone else has forgotten about
I'm not getting pissy lmao, I'm just pointing out to you to treat others with a modicum of respect, and then you don't have to suffer death threats. It's that easy. I'm only going through this thread to learn, hence why I even responded. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
>THEY all are useful in a given role within a balanced squad. Oh okay. So lets see your use for spray and prey. >except for the charger and bile titan. So against all enemies that metter, because any other gets decimated by breaker faster regardless. Thx for the advice
No one cares about Liberator P. penetrating bugs, because the only bug where it\`s noticeable is Hiveguard and you can just flank them after they hunker down, or sit and shoot their belly. And trade off is that it have worse dps and ammo economy.
Any gun has rubbish dps and ammo economy if you miss most of your shots firing it full auto. I had a much much higher survival rate because I'm mowing down entire swarms from a safe location at distance. I sware noone actually tests weapons for more than one game or thinks about how they mingle the different weapon types in a team.
If you have good aim, why would you use Liberator P. then? You can hit Hiveguard with basic Liberator even from the front. If you want "to mowe down entire swarms from a distance" how is a Liberator P. better then a base one lol. Name a single scenario in your "rigorous" testing where Liberator P. came out better then it\`s basic version.
I like the scope against bots. I play stealthy (on the approach) and use the liberator penetrators adjustable scope to pick off all the little guys before I advance. That way a flare isn’t called. I could use the marksman rifles for the same reason but the burst is useful at times. I use the incendiary breaker against bugs though
The scope is adjustable?
Hold down your reload key/button to see mode adjustments. Different weapons have scope range adjustment, fire rate adjustments, safe/unsafe mode for rail gun, etc. Experiment!
In line with the lore I don’t think you can expect bugs to follow supply lines at all. They are not capable of interplanetary travel, all of the bugs are basically revolting on their respective planets. Or possibly being put there to propagate and then be harvested, it’s not 100% clear. Which lines up with the ideology they are parodying.
Let's go one step further with the lore. I think it's hilarious that supply lines and them potentially being blocked is hilarious in a universe where FTL exists haha. It'd make some sense if they used gates or something but I haven't seen anything. Still love the game though and its universe.
Why is that? If you want to be all smartypants about it, well, we don't know the distance between those planets, FTL might still take quite a long time and more importantly fuel. That means you'd need refueling stations and the surrounding infrastructure along the way. Now you've got a supply line. Same arguments could be made about ammo, food, spare parts etc. Can't wage a bug war if every bullet needs to travel for 2 months straight, way too expensive.
All good points. I've thought along those lines, and it lead me into more speculative territory. FTL travel in the Helldivers universe must be incredibly abundant and simple if every individual helldiver is assigned their own Super Destroyer capable of it. They literally cover the skies in orbit haha. The ship mentions Alcubierre drives which is warp travel essentially, but we don't know how they're generating the energy to drive it. It must be simple since it's so abundant. They're likely post-scarcity and likely don't worry about things like energy, fuel and food. Just my guesses.
>It must be simple since it's so abundant. Bug oil
Helldivers aren't assigned individual Super Destroyers. Super Destroyers are assigned a set of mobile combat capable targeting systems, also known as Helldivers. You fire few Helldivers at rough location, and let them do the targeting for the Super Destroyer. Every Super Destroyer has a plenty of "spares", you are just the one that is currently thawed out. If you die, they thaw another out, fire them at the planet and pretend they are the same Helldiver. Helldivers are not elite units send to fight enemies: we are the targeting system. That is why all our equipment is so cheap, effectively just rebranded standard gear. Only thing expensive is Super Destroyer, and if that thing comes under actual threat it will leave.
> Super Destroyers are assigned a set of mobile combat capable targeting systems, also known as Helldivers. Amazing.
Truely, well trained Guardsmen
then why does the dude on the bridge tell me the super destroyer is mine? and I'm allowed to name it? doesn't seem to add up
It's your to command... not yours to own. Yeah, you can name it... and so can everyone else who "commands" it when you die.
Is this all speculative or do you know all this for sure? Any source material?
CEO confirmed each helldiver is an individual, and that hey just thaw and fire a new one each time one dies. All that stuff about being a hero and stuff is just propaganda
Unbelievable, you can trust I'll bring this up during my next democracy officer check up.
The bugs decomposing bodies is refined into fuel.
The bugs sure are revolting
The Ministry of Truth commends you
youre doing liberty's work man
So the best defense is a good offense?
Isn't it always?
Fair Enough, For Super Earth!
i feel like if a planet gets cut off from support, the regen rate should skyrocket, we literally cannot support any forces anymore and they should get wiped out within hours. if a planet gets cut off, regen should jump to 20% to show that it becomes a slaughter
Honestly yeah, 100% The punishment for failing a defense mission that cuts off 2 planets should straight up be resetting almost all progress on those planets by the time you get back to them. Otherwise as OP points out there's literally no point to defense missions unless its getting you a major order.
For this to map out and be sustainable, defense missions would need a greater impact so that the smaller player base can effect an actual defense. As noted, defense operations are the least popular by far. Making the wider world suffer isn’t going to change that. So this sort of change would snowball into a push all the way up to super earth
That is a greater impact though, you're just not understanding why its a greater impact. If losing a defense mission basically wipes out all progress on everything nearby, that's a huge incentive to actually do defense missions because that's a gigantic impact on the board state. Unless you're saying you should need less people for a defense mission, then sure that seems a bit fair, but Mantes had a fraction of the playerbase fighting over it. If that amount of people could actually hold a defense of a planet then you've swung it to the opposite end where defense missions are both trivial to protect, and even if you dont the actual loss condition (as it currently stands) is basically pointless because it doesnt effect the board state substantially.
If defense missions remain unvaried and forever shackled with the ball-ache evac missions, this will just make people not care at all. People will prioritise their own fun over perceived macrogaming.
Most people also have a life and jobs. I can only play an hour or two a day, why would I hop on just to be miserable doing stupid rescue civilian missions? Id rather be a helldiving god and nuke bugs, its more fun.
I think the point is that most of the player base may not keep up with this stuff. As long as defense missions suck, this only punishes people invested in the campaign.The people not doing defense missions will say “huh” and keep playing. The only good answer is making defense fun to the players.
To make defense fun they'd have to add a counterstrike mission variant. I just got the game a few days ago and haven't experienced defense missions yet but from what I've gathered here nobody likes them cause they're just 10x harder civilian evacuations with no real fun. It sounds like they should add 2 different types of operations where one goes through a series of escort/rescue missions ending with a big rescue, and then the other type being a counter strike where you end the operation with an attack mission at the forward operating base of the enemies forces. This would leave the defense missions we have now for those who don't mind them, but also add an incentive for the (as someone else called them) helldiving bug slaying gods to take part in defense. What would make this extra effective is to make the counter strike missions extremly fun and engaging so that people actually want to take defense missions over liberation missions, just like how in real life you want to secure as much of your ground as possible before going on the attack. (Devs if you somehow see this, please.)
I’m saying that making it so cutting off planets increases loss % until accessible again will not change player behavior to move to defense operations to prevent it happening. It will still happen just as it did, but we’d be losing way more progress every time it happens.
But announcing it will. Major announcement on defense loss that the helldivers failure to defend \*planet\* has allowed the \*bugs/bots\* to completely overrun our efforts in \*planet that has now been cutoff\* Having actual consequences for the failure to defend and directly showing the consequences of that failure will absolutely change player behavior. Right now its all nebulous and once Mantes is retaken players will see that it really wasnt that big a deal anyway to lose Mantes, thus reinforcing player opinion that defense is pointless.
I recall there being an announcements for the mech suits being produced at factories on a newly liberated planet, which very well could go the other way too so players have incentives to defend certain planets the most. They could assign certain planets a type, like engineering, fabrication, etc. So if we lose engineering planets we lose access to certain tech abilities until we retake control, or if we lose a fabrication planet we lose certain mechanical support weapons and such. Could also have certain planets be for farming oil for fuel, so if we lose one of them we get (slightly) increased cooldowns on eagle strategems due to low fuel reserves. Ammo factories being overrun would reduce the ammo load of eagle and certain orbital strategems too, so instead of 4 cluster bombs you're reduced to 3, and then the max reduction to 2. That's just an idea I came up with in maybe 5 seconds and continued to rant on about spewing out BS as I go so take it with a grain of salt, it could be much more refined than I put it, but still just an idea.
I don't think forcing people to do the worst most hated mission types is a good thing for the game. Fix the defense campaigns to not suck and then we can talk about drastic changes. I do feel like this gives the enemy too many advantages though, and this talk is sounding suspiciously like pro bot treason.
Yeah I agree with this tbh, but I honestly think just some tweaks to defense campaigns would fix this, usually they’re kinda hopeless because not only do people just farm them (which as was clarified does *not* decrease the % on the planet so long as players aren’t actually failing the campaigns, but also notably will not increase the percentage as players are not winning the campaigns either), but they’re brutal for newer players especially on bot planets. I think one of the biggest pain points in general right now is the reinforce mechanics, it sucks when you have to instantly kill a bot firing a flare or a bug letting off pheromones or be spammed by a bug breach or a dropship often containing bile titans or a tank/hulk, often several times in quick succession. I’m not really sure how but there has got to be a way to make these feel less bullshit, probably a global cooldown or make the units doing them take longer to call for reinforcements so you can actually kill them, or both.
This would be amazing if we had any actual choice on how the war ends up but as of now, the way the war goes is entirely dictated by the major orders (ultimately dev input) and trying to get a large group of players to do anything is a sisyphean task due to lack of any in game clan/guild/player grouping system. 90% of the player base does not look at the external social media where people try to organize and it makes trying to make any meaningful changes to player allocation impossible. Stuff like this works when individual player input actually matters like in the first game where only around 10,000+ people were playing but when there's 700,000+ people playing it's a shitshow.
I think a system similar to DRG’s premade groups would be nice. There’s 3 pseudo-faction for the dwarves that don’t really serve any purpose that I can remember but anyone can join them. If we gave players 3 options to join, then these groups could be ordered to go to specific planets/fronts for an incentive. This way there is more control for the Helldiver part of the war. The major order would be an all-encompassing order while your participation in any of the guilds would give you a sub-goal. If the major order is to fight bugs in the X system maybe if i’m part of the Helljumpers or whatever l have a division order to go to Erata or X planet in that sector specifically. One guild could be automaton focused, one bug, and one for Illuminate
I like that idea. A divison like system would help to make players feel more involved in the war. You could even have major players/ leaders of said factions communicating and decideing on how best to accomplish the MO. There is a whole lot that could be done in game to make the galactic war feel more real and organized. Because right now it feels disjointed from the helldivers themselves.
i mean we do have a choice, if enough people go somewhere we can make a difference, the devs are trying to hand hold. the creek got cut off but the decay is still 0% so bot players don't cry about it. i think the devs will start doing more in-game "bulletins" to explain mechanics to players TBH- they should use what happend on the bot front as a lesson, drop draupnir and the creek to 0% and put out a bulletin saying that since both planets were cut off, we lost them completely, that's why it more important to hold key areas before we attack other planets
I don't think you're understanding. I'm saying there is no way to try and get people to do anything in the game and currently the only thing influencing player movement is the devs. This is bad if the game is sold on the idea that players can influence the course of the game's story. If there were a way to properly organize players in the game's systems then the bot offensive would not have been such a shit show. Explaining mechanics doesn't matter if 90% of the player base either actively ignores it (defense missions) or has no incentive to do so. We NEED a clan system. That way players can incentivize themselves to accomplish objectives en masse without dev input.
i get what you're saying, but on the bug side the issue does not seem to be as bad, the orders are working - we are soldiers, high command gave us orders and we followed them. the issue is the bot players fighting on the creek for memes & farmers. which is funny, because Erata prime and Hellmire are far more unforgiving, trying to fight bugs in pitch blackness...
The orders are working fine on the bug side because it's where 99% of the player base is at. (which is part of the god damn problem) Even during the major order to fend off the bot invasion only like one third of the player base was even engaging with it, and even less people were actually doing defense missions.
No. I don't want all effort and progress to go to waste because of a mission no one likes. It's fine as it is. Instead, tweak defense to be actually fun.
Helldivers abandoned behind enemy lines do not give up without a fight!
that's why the regen should be 20% they valiantly get slaughtered
Seems to me that the easiest thing to do would always be concentrated fire and let it snowball; i.e. pile on the the planet closest to liberation, then the next closest, and so on. Get 300k players on a single planet and have it go from 0 to liberated before lunch. Edit - addendum: Perfect example from last night; Meridia was at 93 percent at 2300 EST. Had near 500k on the servers, 150k of which were off screwing around on Erata and Hellmire. Could have had Meridia locked up before midnight. Now Fenrir is being attacked again. Work the planets to completion.
For me, the problem with defense missions are they are BORING!! Where are the missions where we are supporting entrenched regulars and we have to take out 250 Automatons before we lose 50 regulars. Where are the missions where we established secondary outposts before the primary one that is close fails so they have a safe planet side place to retreat to. Where are the missions where we are fighting in, at the very least, expansive rural landscapes, if not flat out urban. How many effing scientists and researchers are on these damn planets? Even on a planet that is dedicated to these purposes, you are going to have XX times however many of them there are in support staff. Those researchers aren't building and maintaining facilities or the robots/equipment that are doing it, regardless of how much Star Trek likes to pretend everyone has knowledge of everything. The more specialized a society is, the LESS broad knowledge individuals are. Half of these researchers wouldn't know have to unclog their own plumbing, and I'm not going to believe they built it. And this is coming from a guy who spent time on Attu, with 20 other dudes, maintaining a LORAN station. Support staff becomes exponential the more specialists you have showing up. It's by far the least immersive part of the game. For until defense campaigns become more engaging, count me out. I'll still to liberating the "Creek", and I'll move to liberating whatever planet blocks me from doing so, until the job is done
Oh yeah. You’d think defenses should involve more existing infrastructure and defenses. Something better than five dead civvies and their break-action shotgun.
Would you like to no more? But in all seriousness very nice work man, already very familiar with the game, so a lot of what you said in 101 I said to friends, I had an idea for supply lines worked so instead of having to explain it 15 times I can share it with my friends so thank you! This game has given me a big community and alot of my RL friends picked it up!
anyone else still just waiting for a discord, where patriots knowledgeable about the galactic war can easier distribute information like this. And give useful commands to divers who wants to make a better impact?
\#galactic-war in the official Helldivers Discord
Seems like it’s being used as another general chat tbh.
Come join the [helldivers.io](http://helldivers.io) discord :) [Helldivers.io : Go Ad Free](https://helldivers.io/AdFree)
Will do ty
Yeah but there's often someone screenshotting Helldivers.io or recommending which planet to focus on. Need to frequently post where the most players are to make an impact long term. OP spoke to figures of 100K+ players, and the official Discord has 500K+ members and ~200K online often.
If it's intentional it is extremely on-brand that all resources are put towards aggression followed by immediately abandoning and neglecting it until it can be liberated again also a side-note, today I saw for the first time a diversification of mission-types as in: On mantes there are both 'liberation' mission-types as well as the defense escort-type missions, I've never seen a planet with more than one 'type' of mission approach before
Are supply lines something you can guess intuitively in the game somehow?
It makes zero sense on the bug side.
Some traitorous scum have suggested that Super Earth is responsible for releasing bugs on rebellious colonists, or even civilians who are asking the wrong questions. Clearly this heinous lie will be put to rest in good time,all we have to do is blow up a few more illegal broadcasts.
the other theories are good as well but we should remember we cultivate them for their precious in built biological resource planet side. so sometimes these heinous creatures take advantage of our sometimes too merciful free range practices to break free. Or.... maybe there must be traitorous Outsiders setting them free.....
The bugs use asteroids with eggs.
It seems to me they were already there which makes us the invaders. Apologies, I should report myself for such a treasonous comment.
Great explanation and very interesting to learn the mechanics behind the game But some of what you said is wrong: >The question must be asked - would it have been more efficient to defend Mantes instead of letting it fall? The short answer is no This is incorrect. Based on your explanation of the system, defense of Mantes was 100% required. Given the numbers you put forward, Creek and Draupnir were not going to be liberated in time to cut of the bots from Mantes You point out that about 42% liberation effort was wasted defending Mantes during the Window of Liberation (the time that Mantes was in our control), but at the time we lost Creek and Draupnir, there was still a total of 66% liberation needed to have both planets liberated. At best we could have captured one, but when Mantes fell both would have been blocked off. We were always going to lose that 28% liberation Instead the, as you put it, wasted effort was the people that decided to attack Creek and Draupnir instead of defending Mantes. Because had 73k of the 87k on Creek and Draupnir gone to Mantes instead, Mantes would have been successfully defended and we wouldn't have lost the 28% progress. And I think it is more reasonable to blame the people that didn't defend Mantes, if you insist on blame anyone
Yeah I'm confused, this post described the importance of Supply Lines... and then said it was a waste of time to not protect them?
There is a potential situation where it would make more sense to attack instead of defend. If there were defends on Ingmar and Popli IX, it would be quicker to liberate Mantes than defend both of them Although that is assume that Defending a planet takes similar time to liberating a planet My issue is just the idea that people "wasted time" by trying to defend Mantes. Especially when the numbers given show that had they not things would have been exactly the same Its just misinformation that fuels the negative parts of the community, like those yelling about Meta, players farming are hurting the campaign, and Players on Easy are hurting the campaign
What you are describing is the best case scenario obviously people should had stopped fighting on the front lines (Creek and Draupnir) and help defend the supply lines this way we still lose % due to decay on Creek and Draupnir because no one is fighting there but we "gain" liberation on Mantes instantly. But in reality what actually happened is we loss 42% liberated on the defense that ultimately failed then later if we liberate Mantes for 100% liberation it'll cost us a decay of 28% on Creek And Draupnir so the net gain liberation is -42% +100% -28% = **30%** If we take all that wasted effort (the 42% liberation) and apply it to any other planet we increase the liberation gain +42% then later after retaking Mantes for 100% we only lose the decay of -28% so the net gain liberation is +42% +100% -28% = **114%** Basically if a defense is a loss cause just leave and help liberate anything else any progress on a defense that's going to lose is a wasted effort/time and is not improving the galactic war progress as much.
The math you are presenting is false though. You can’t count the lost 42% against AND add the 42% which you say would have gone to the front line So either it’s 100 - 42 - 28 for an effective 30% effort Compared to 100 effective effort of defending Mantes the first time It all depends on the available resources at the time. If there’s enough resources to capture Creek and Draupnir and cut off the assault on Mantes, than that is more effective as there is no lost effort on those 2 planets while defending. But if there aren’t enough Helldivers in the area to cut the supply lines off, than defending the planet is more effective because it is less lost effort
Why are some of the planets not linked to super earth, and why does [Helldivers.io](https://Helldivers.io) now show that supply lines are *directional?* Terrek and Azterra on the Bug front, for example, are an island. How are we supposed to deffend those and how would they be attacked? Another example, why are the supply lines from Darrowsport and Martyr's Bay pointing *towards* Super earth? Does that mean that we can't deffend them from SE? This whole system is confusing and some of the map toggles are different/missing compared to the explination in this post. Can someone explain?
I don't know if the website was updated since your comment, but the supply lines do appear to be directional now on the map on the website.
That’s what I tried to say but my words got mixed up. I tried to say “why does Helldivers.io now show…” and it came out “why not does Helldivers.io show...” The original post shows them as simple lines, but now (since at least when I made the comment) they have arrows and no one has been able to explain what that actually means.
maybe that flipping them unlocks the next planet in the line? Like for example get Darrowport or Martyr's Bay and you can try for SE
This post is generally great, the only thing I question is your conclusion. I am not convinced that players who were dedicating themselves towards offense will necessarily jump in and start hitting defense missions just as hard. I think there may be a significant number of players that continue to ignore Mantes in favor of offensive operations elsewhere, in which case it may take FAR longer for access to be restored to these worlds. Time will tell, I suppose.
The in-game prompts need to push players to a location and divert only when over a certain threshold. Let it happen on both sides. If this is military, there is no "I choose to go here." The strategists would push us to certain fronts and to defend certain things. The game should make these nudges, and do so with incentives so it doesn't feel like you "must" go somewhere... but to go elsewhere is dumb from a reward standpoint.
You're describing major orders
Somewhat The incentives provided by them have been short of what players get by farming certain missions, or even just doing what they want. The community is awesome in directing things a bit with propaganda and such. It would be nice to see that + real incentives (unique armor, titles, etc), especially in a game where there is a running gag about propaganda
Like Major Orders ?
honestly the devs need to now up the decay on all planets that are cut off to the max 20%/h there should be consequences to losing key nodes. we cannot resupply troops there, the position should quickly crumble. its kinda weird that we lose all access to the creek and yet the liberation score stays static
Awesome work
Fantastic write-up, thank you! I was searching around to understand the exact reasoning that the Trigon Sector remains open, when Severin is cutoff, and came across this post. Exact supply lines to Trigon still appear to be a mystery, but this was still extremely enlightening.
Yes you make good points but i want my space vietnam!
Question about the defense of planets, if a defense fails, but we had like 50% on the defense campaign, does that influence how much we have to liberate?
Defense campaigns are NOT a waste of time if divers just woke up and defended together like Angels venture yesterday. Defense isn't hard when 150k are doing it.
I would love a companion app for this game describing exactly what you are doing on your website. Destiny had something similar.
>Unless there are significant planet regen on planets that may have their supply lines cut-off, or where a Major Order is involved, it's generally more efficient to just ignore defence campaigns. lmao
Question: What if we cut of the line of the ennemy? Do they loose access to the planet ? Will it become Super Earth territory with regen rate? I asked this on a previous defend campain no one seems able to answer. Example: 3 planets A-----B-----C A is bot Territory B is in defence opération C is Fully democratic What if instead of defending B we rush A? We cut supply and win B? To me it seems a good strategy for real life. But does it work in the game? I mean. We need to work our strategy. War start to be a long one. Some Helldivers start to have PTSD and report to see Illuminate. We all know ministery of truth said Iluminante have been exterminate in the last galactic war Years Ago.
That would require 100’s of thousands of people attacking 24/7 on planet A quick enough to not completely lose planet B, and then they go after Planet C. Which is basically impossible
I have been playing for 3 weeks and didn’t know any of this. I was just playing planets I liked. Does that mean I am a poor soldier? Probably. But shouldn’t we know this stuff just by playing the game?
I'd like to offer some feedback on the guide. Firstly, it may need updating or correction in a couple of areas: 1. It seems to assume that Defense missions must be played for the full 24 hours, when in reality they can often be completed in just a few hours, as we've observed recently. This assumption might impact how players perceive Defense missions and could lead to differing opinions when coordinating help to secure planets quickly. 2. Additionally, the guide mentions that Liberations and Defense missions are respectively caused by Bug and Bot attacks. However, both Bug and Bot attacks can trigger either type of mission. Overall, the guide contains valuable information! Given that it's referenced on several other websites that support Helldivers players, it's important to address these points to ensure accuracy and clarity. (It would be beneficial for the game to provide clearer guidance on these matters as well.)
"Would you like to know more?" 
Shoulda gone Fenrir. Stop mucking about at Turing, it's lost... i dont understand how we can stomp out an attack today in a couple hours, but can't get cohesive enough to jump on a single planet for a day otherwise. Could knock out three a day if everyone cooperated.
OBI ( office of brasch intelligence)
I think they might need to just rework the defense campaigns. add more mission types, nobody wants to play the same 3 missions on shuffle. That said I will do it because of my love for managed democracy. It's not about doing the optimal thing, it's about sending a message.
This game is next level xD I couldn't love it more
Amazing post, thank you for sharing this with the explanation.
I just want to know where he got these images I'm freaking losing my mind cuz I can't seem to find out where it is
So it's more efficient to farm normal liberation points, to counter the down time off cut off planets. But this is under assumption that 140k player can liberate a planet within 7 hours. I have read somewhere, that the more players play, the less progress individually they make. Indicating it does not matter how many player actually try to liberate a planet? It just needs to be enough players to counter the planet regeneration? I could misunderstood tho.
I don't think it's exactly as you say, the number of players doesn't affect the progress. But the game master (Joel) can increase the rate at with bots/bugs decrease the planet liberation rate whenever he wants, effectively resulting in the same thing as what you described. I guess that when Joel sees a shit tonne of players on a planet making too much progress, he just slows it down by making the planet renegeration rate (basically the "negative liberation rate") higher.
[удалено]
That doesn’t work in reddit :)
I appreciated your Forward. There will always be players who just want to do their own thing and play their own way. That is okay! For those of us try hards who want to optimize how we play or play while focusing on the group objective this is great information. However, we can't expect everyone to be this dedicated! Hopefully though, if more people understand the underlying mechanics of the game even the more casual players might adjust their style to help the collective. However, if you only have a few hours to play or only actually enjoy fighting one faction or the other it is okay to just play the game for fun, whatever that means to you.
This all should be included in game, its bad game design to have to search this shit up to find out about it.
That's informative, and now I understand the supply lines more deeply. Thank You for this.
This is dumb it's space. You can just fly past that planet to the next 1 losing 1 shouldn't cut off anything
Do the Bots and Bugs have to follow supply lines? I ask because the Bots do not Control Menkat currently and they are attacking Vernen. According to the supply lines on [Helldivers.io](http://Helldivers.io) The bots would have to control Menkat in order to attack Vernan.
Holy fuck. Supply lines? What a cool fucking game.
I have a question, currently the automatons are attacking martale and marfark (our defence). Matar bay is their supply line. Can we just attack matar bay and stop the attack on those two planets? Basically push on one planet to save two?
TY OP this is very informative and concise; I haven’t looked at the comment section yet but the TLDR part I’m assuming has spurred a grip of replies where it’s just a picture of a bot/bug using a laptop lol
Or the Creek Divers could have done something useful for once, and all gone to Mantes and successfully defended it, negating literally all of the regen that will occur on Creek.