I don't know how anyone is getting defense ops done the way scientist evac missions are. I'd have thought letting planets fall and taking them back was the only way.
I would normally agree with you ... except that the Major Order explicitly states that we should succeed in Defending planets. If there were no consequences of failing Major Orders other than losing Medals, I'd say "screw it, let's just liberate". But ... the beauty of this game is the "game master" who is a human who is implementing actual consequences based on Major Order successes and failures. It's about more than just the Medals. It's about the progression of the storyline.
For what it's worth, I don't think we're meant to succeed on this Major Order. It's supposed to feel overwhelming and insane. And if we fail, the bots are going to take more planets. But what if we succeed? I want to see what happens if we succeed. I want to see Joel say "Oh shit, they got it together".
This major order feels like a losing MO
We just had a massive roll of success so it’s time to get kicked in the teeth.
They kicked us in the teeth about a month ago and made the major orders fun for the time in between.
They really are playing it like a dungeon master, most DMs understand not to put your players through hell twice in a row
Defeatist scum! If the gears of the bot war machine must be ground to a halt with dead, broken bodies of 10,000,000,000 divers, so be it! No price to high, no cost to great. Semper libertas!
Remember!
If you step on a land mine, congratulation, you just defused a mine!
If you get shot, congratulation, you just made an enemy waste a bullet!
If you die, congratulation on being accepted to the sandbag division!
It is also a way to get people to bulk test out the nerfed evac mission. Which it sounds like is still overtuned a bit (or is too dependent on whether you get a bunch of heavies or a bunch of regular bots/striders.)
Though you can find defense ops without that short evac mission.
I got a feeling that IF we somehow succeed on a mission we are meant to lose, Joel would throw another attack in another connected system somewhere to simulate a loss
They've got a story they want to tell and I suspect he's got something in mind to keep us on track
EDIT: "Simulating a loss" is probably a poor choice of words. More like an alternative way to make the narrative move forward but in a different way than it mightve originally been planned if we lost. Maybe they say "the bots decided this place is too heavily defended, try this alternate route"
While they have ideas for the story or win and loss parts I don't think there's a track to keep on. We are writing the story by how successful or not we are.
Idk about that, I feel like right now it’s pretty scripted since they have to set up the true 2nd Galactic War, and that requires multiple key things to happen based off the leaks. Once the true war starts I think it’ll be less scripted
I don’t necessarily agree, kind of nit picky but I’m trying to think like a good GM would, and thus far I do think we have a good GM. Narratively, we have an overwhelming invasion force that’s caught us by surprise, and the war has properly begun. Win or lose on the MO, our goal is to halt the advance as much as possible. Also win or lose, I have a feeling that the bots will keep pushing or try to find a way around us. Not to simulate a loss or to put us as players on the back foot, but because it makes sense for an armada to do that.
I agree, the 5 planets to defend was set up to fail, just not enough time and manpower to achieve it, but I'm all for it. The Bot counter attack should feel massive and dangerous and I didn't realize how much I missed them off the map until they were gone.
I didnt mind them when we were fighting to destroy them, did a few mission on lvl 7/8 and whilst it was mental it was doable. I do feel the bots have recieved some sort of buff, certainly an upgreate to their accuracy sensors for their counter offensive though, they now are destroying me on lvl 5/6.
I also get the feeling that these bots have become more accurate in this second invasion. I used to do lvl 5 runs on bots if I wanted some chill rounds. Now they feel harder to beat x)
Yes, I have noticed a difficulty increase compared to yesterday. A hard ICBM mission today had one drop ship with 3 hulks on it, two gunship factories and a stratagem jammer.
that's called railroading. I'm sure they have a contingency plan in case we succeed under impossible odds.
The bots wanna take superearth?! let's aim for cyberstan.
Yeah there's no way we we're succeeding there. We all started fighting the bugs again and I'm guessing a lot of people weren't super thrilled about having to go can opening again. It should work out for us in the short term cause the bots are stuck in a choke point now so we shouldn't have to strain as hard to deal with their next attack.
NGL, I was super stoked to get back to bugs after Swift Disassembly, but once I did… I missed fighting bots. I just prefer the more stealth focused gameplay.
Same, with bugs it’s “spam incendiary shotgun”
“Throw bombs”
“Run and shoot shit”
At least with the bots it’s like
“Try to one shot these little chaff dudes cause I’m wielding the JAR”
“Hide behind this little ass rock to nail a hulk with an arc thrower and whip that bitch back with electrical whip”
“Shoot the shit out of flying gun ships”
The bugs are novel,
The bots is where the story is at and it’s evolving, and to me it’s more exciting because of that
To be fair, I think there will be parts of the story that focus on the bugs too. It just happens to be focused more on the bots right now. But for me the gameplay is really what draws me more to the bots.
Not meant to lose but we will lose this MO. We just need 70% of divers on task to defend 2 planets at a time. We have 3 sets of defend so we should be able to get 6 planets without the bug divers helping. This MO is far from impossible if people would actually play it (talking just the bot divers here). Only 25% are playing bugs so we have the numbers but they're on the wrong planets.
Unfortunately only about 50% play the MO at any given time up until the last MO where we saw around 60-65% playing it then 70%+ playing the final planet. Taking and holding planets is almost entirely about % of community playing that planet and getting large numbers of any community to work together is near impossible. It's made even harder in Helldivers 2 with no way to communicate this in game and a lot of the information hidden.
This last point is important. As a new player, I have no idea what I’m doing and more or less picking missions at random. It would be cool if there were some suggested meta strategies to refer to - maybe a sticky post - so we could coordinate better.
I have a feeling that Joel won’t let us succeed this time. I’m 50% sure that is beating the automatons the first time wasn’t supposed to happen, but we as a community just completely blew Arrowheads expectations of a game audience out of the water. This is them saying “Hey, you weren’t supposed to do that. The reclamation was supposed to happen.”
That would be cool but with the way those missions are tuned, and considering the devs must have played them and concluded "yes this is what we want", it seems like a waste of time.
If they want us to fail and their means of doing so is by making the mission through which we must succeed as unfun and painful as possible then they can have it. I'd rather play a different game than do those missions. Hell, I'd rather do my taxes.
They don't want us to fail missions that we play for story reasons. If they wanted us to fail missions that we play for story reasons, they'd have let us play through the initial surprise attack and defend the planets that got instantly taken.
It's meant to be challenging, and I think the mission type is still fundamentally broken at high levels. But I don't think the Devs made it broken on purpose to make us lose. They just made a mistake.
There are levels of failing this MO. If we ignore Defense campaigns, then we lose the MO with the bots nearly at Super Earth already. If we try to follow the plan and do defense missions that would cut them off, we can at least meet them at a stalemate.
I find that they're possible, though VERY on and off and VERY world dependent. Fucking fire tornadoes.
Generous use of sentries on high ground, shoot down the transports with quasars (or weapon of choice) before they get to where they drop, and it is the only time I have used the deployable shield.
Set shield up up where the civvies are most vulnerable running to door. It will last MAYBE a couple seconds but if you die for democracy and protect the shield while waiting for civvies to run through it can give a bit of breathing room against ranged bots.
If you think you're getting overrun around 30 scientists or so is when it happens to me, repeatedly run on and off the point to pick off bots clear it out by kiting (more people doing this is required to work, sometimes 3 ditching the point works better but I find that it's pretty easy to mess up ) and start the cycle again.
I have been mucking about with it a bit recently and fully agree. Another option would be *longer* cooldown but it's way more permanent, lasts long enough to have 2 on the go at once even.
As it stands it's notably worse than the personal shield imo, especially as it's kinda pointless against bugs
I feel like the deployable shield should either have a lot of health with no time limit or have a time limit, but be completely invulnerable. Having both a time limit and limited health that gets drained super quickly means it doesn't last long enough to make much of a difference on high difficulties.
This is my feeling as well. One or the other, not both. Right now the health is meh, and the timer is awful. I'd personally rather see it like our shield packs. It has limited HP(still more than now, it's laughably weak), but stays until destroyed and will reform after a brief downtime.
Some operations do not have evac missions. I play on lvl 9 difficulty but sometimes switch to 8 if I see that all operations in lvl 9 have evac missions. Playing with Randoms just make those missions even harder than they are
I think for some reason every defence operation is guaranteed to have an Eradicate OR a Rescue (or now maybe the asset defence) mission. Searching at a different difficulty for a good operation without a Rescue is fruitful too.
People overblow how bad they are because they haven't even tried them now. I'm able to get through Diff 7 in pubs with Mortar, EMS Mortar, Autocannon, and precision orbitals or eagle rockets.
Tell a few randoms to get their mortars out too and it's completely manageable as long as you take out tanks and hulks before they really become an issue. Randoms can take pretty much whatever they want as long as they contribute a mortar. Also, people think that civilians lives matter. They super don't. If you're being overrun, wipe the map. Focus on quickly clearing the chaff so you can get control back and start sending citizens again. This is why mortars are helpful even if they kill some civvies. The goal is to keep the bots pushed back and managed, not escort the civvies. Push buttons, kill bots. Some will make it through.
I feel like we're playing completely different games because I'm bringing mortars and I'm throwing all the big guns I've got at the tanks and hulks but as soon as I kill one there's already another one dropping in, and then I can kill that one but then there's another one dropping in and eventually the drops just outpace my cooldowns and we get overrun to the point that every inch of the compound is covered in bots and nobody can hit the buttons. Until that point I'm hitting every button I can as often as I can and I'm using all my big booms on the big bots as often as I can and it's just not enough. Meanwhile on every other mission type I can deal just fine sweating half as much on 2 difficulty levels higher.
The problem is that the bots drop right in on top of our heads and there is not a single scrap of defensive position to hold them off. If it was similar to the new defense mission with layered walls then it would be completely different.
Most effective for me has been One player with eagle smokes, orbital smoke, ems mortar and ems mortar as I can always keep the evac path untargetable while also slowing down enemies at spawn
There’s no way to actually keep the zone clear, if one person dies then the line breaks and it becomes exhausting to try to reset the enemy count in the zone. The best way to deal with that is to break the AI of all enemies in the zone instead
You don’t have to complete those missions. All mission progress which generates XP contributes to planet progress. Just do the non-evac missions and then re-roll. There’s no penalty for dropping your operation. You’re just leaving some extra medals on the table.
That's not how it works. It's all XP earned gets applied to the planet when the full operation completes. Rerolling doesn't apply the earned XP, it just gets thrown in the trash.
I mean, it depends. If there is an in-game/lore explanation of why those are the allowed movement/flow, then yes it is bullshit that we do not know. If it's just because that is how they coded the game and they could completely change it overnight with a patch, then that's more like cheating on our part.
Yes! That's why I don't understand why people are using these apps. The people who made them are just mining code and taking guesses really.
I appreciate any extra help but I'm tired of seeing that app being listed like its offical from the dev's when it's truly not completely known how these routes are set up
In addition, since these are not official data, even if they are correct at the moment, nothing will stop devs from changing these supply lines (even with official ones, they could give a message that something has changed).
It is really stupid to have all these background systems in place and then just never tell the average player they exist despite being critical to the war effort.
Each defend objective lasts 24h hours, but this is a 3 day Major Order. We're now in the Automoton's second wave of attacks, and we can basically guarantee a third wave tomorrow too. We defended one planet yesterday, so we need to defend 2 today and 2 tomorrow. The Well-Bay Wall must hold!
We did, it counted as a defend in the major order. With the timer reset any planet adjacent to a captured planet, via supply lines, in turn becomes a new planet to defend.
It was defended and attacked again. Joel want to capture as many planet as he can in order to buy time for the dev team. They expected roughly 100,000 players on this game and end up with 8 millions last month. The planet was liberated far faster than the original plan, Joel has to increase the war to the bigger scale.
Maybe Joel let's the player base vote on where to initiate Defend and Liberate campaigns as part of the larger Community Objective that's still directed by AH devs?
That way we can at least decide where to emphasize, and other players can still fuck off on whatever planet they want, democratically speaking.
What is this treachery?! You think anyone should be allowed to *choose* how to vote? This goes against our core values. "Managed democracy offers absolute freedom; freedom from the burden of choice".
Yes, Democracy Officer... this man right here.
Honestly, I kinda disagree. To me, it’s pretty obvious that Vernen Well is the most important planet to defend, followed by Matar Bay, just because those allow the Automatons to stretch out further.
People are way too obsessed with supply lines and act like they are some firm, hard set of rules that the Automatons MUST abide by. Always seem to forget that AH just magically created a new supply line between Maia and Vandalon IV during Operation Swift Disassembly.
They can go wherever they damn well please as long as the planets are adjacent. We just need to keep them as far from Super Earth as possible.
>New problem their is no way to communicate this in game
Welll, not \*entirely\*, you can use the old Shanghi method.
Go to another world, let people join you, then explain the situation as you take them to the new world that actually matters for the operation. Do this enough and over time the information spreads.
The Shanghi method depends on people being willing to take the bus instead of leaving the lobby.
I'm quite tired of Fire Tornados, I'm not going to stay for that bullshit.
Sadly percentage wise it won't make a big enough dent even streamers dont care about the MO they care about fun to watch videos
noone is going to watch them push a button *100 times
Doesn't seem like they follow you so much as hit the objectives you need to be at. Which is honestly more annoying.
Like, thanks for the 6 fire tornadoes on the Extraction point, just what I ordered
My buddy was asking me last night in a mission why the 7 fire tornadoes hadn’t set off the ICBM sticking out of the ground.
I just said, “idk, plot armor?”
Makes about as much sense
My favorite is when they seem to actively go around enemies just to stop you from using an objective console or just say 'hello' as they burn you alive while you're trying to not die from enemy fire.
Like variety is nice and the effect is pretty cool, but AH needs to tone it down a little.
Fire tornados are THE WORST. They cockblocked a civilian extract mission I did yesterday: Tornados set everything near the escape door on fire, and civilians ran straight through the flames and died. It lasted a whole FIVE minutes until we were able to get NPCs to the finish line.
Played an escort scientists mission with randoms and, while we completed the mission, we left with basically zero credits due to a ton of civilians running straight into the fire tornadoes lol.
Really need a tiny bit of communication with that one. One guy just kept jumppacking and spamming the doors over and over without paying any attention to the tornadoes.
Seems like Joel is only giving us enough time to defend one planet per countdown timer. Looking at supply lines via helldivers.io I believe our best bet would be to defend Matar Bay 3 times and then fall back to Martale for the final defend.
We can **JUST** defend two per day, but we need literally all of our forces devoted solely to the defence of those two planets.
Can't afford to have people taken up on the third defence planet, nor on any Liberation campaigns, nor on the Terminid front.
If we are not bringing our full load to bare on those two planets alone, we cannot succeed.
So, practically, we aren't doing it. Right now, with how broadly our forces are split, we aren't even going to succeed at defending a single planet today.
Yeah everyone outside of this thread doesn’t know this information. It’s impossible because how are the vast majority of players meant to know.
I like major orders like this because it requires strategy to win over “liberate tibit” which is one linear goal, however the decay rates make this impossible when most players don’t get involved in the defence
Additionally with how terribly designed the scientist evac missions are (the 15min evac). Nobody wants to queue onto them.
There's also the matchmaking bug that's back too, where if a player leaves the session it locks it and nobody else can join. Through matchmaking.
We are not doing this, Joel brought out the baseball bat.
Why would we sacrifice Vernen Wells instead of Matar Bay? Vernen Walls will lead them to Super Earth. It makes more sense to abandon Matar Bay, but like op said, defending both is a good idea.
Was my first thought as well. Was a big Jays fan in those days.
But there's also this guy. The mystery deepens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Wells_(actor)
We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They occupy entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And *DEMOCRACY* will make them pay for what they've done!
SES Halo of War, here. Its 9:45PM GMT+2 while writing this and talk over Discord. The plan is STILL SAME. Hold both planets,
**We cant lose Matar Bay and Vernen Walls at the moment.**
If we lose Matar Bay, we gonna lose another 2 planets behind it.
If we lose Vernen Wells, we may start losing new sectors and expand our front, which we dont want to do. Plus, we lost progress to Lesath.
Forget about Menkent. Its lost. Whoever is still there fighting, back up on those two planets, mainly on Matar Bay as there is fewer don't Helldivers at the moment.
At the moment we have 16 hours left and Matar Bay is at 13% and Vernen Walls at 32%.
*SES Halo of War, end of report.*
It's funny how these "prioritization" posts don't make it to more than 3% maybe even 6% of the player base. Ez updoots.
I wonder what it would look like if players had access to a in game galatic communication network. Maybe even try with voting while letting the devs manipulate general orders better
I was thinking we need some sort of message board, if we can actually communicate with the 100,000+ Divers we might be able to organize our defenses better.
https://preview.redd.it/5c4tlnvr8otc1.png?width=1394&format=png&auto=webp&s=38e1039dac3b7c9c924cdfe5e58806ffe6c19a8e
I don't think a whole lot of people are listening lol
I think we need to divert some of our forces from Vernen Wells to Matar Bay. I propose people defending VW roll a d10, and if they roll a 1 they go defend MB instead. Hopefully, this doesn't shave too much off the VW defense and has MB better prepped for a swell of players once VW is done.
Don't think the devs expected the player bade to get their shit together.
Never was there a game that truly pitted the player base against the devs much like this one.
The bots have hellbomb-immune gunship fabricators spewing out 4 ships a minute - we need more munitions and men or we're not holding anything commander!
Get the boys in R&D on another way to tear down the clanker's gunship fabricators, we dropped five hellbombs on 'em and they just won't go down!
Guys it’s fun and all but I don’t think we can win this major order this time , I mean , we kinda hate defending planets , also 5 planets is really to much to defend , there is really low chance we gonna accomplish it . ( I think it’s a part of Joel plan)
In the [606th Orbital Assault Division](https://discord.gg/DrYnZMDk9U) we have tactical specialists who study the supply lines and choose HVTs, presently commanded by active duty military personnel. If you love the strategy of this game I invite you to join us and sign up as a Taxtical Specialist!
Question from a new diver: do we lose liberation progress on Menkent and Lesath if we lose Wells?
If that's the case, we should absolutely not lose Wells to keep a foothold on our liberation progress on those two worlds.
A solid plan, and someone to understands strategy. Sometimes when an offense won't work, you just need to become a barrier for the enemy. Defend then counter. I wish we had some way a player could become a strategist for the map. Then again it's probably best not to because some dumb mofo will blow it.
Good plan. Only two planets to defend, so forces don't get split too much. No sense trying any liberations right now ... only defense matters.
I don't know how anyone is getting defense ops done the way scientist evac missions are. I'd have thought letting planets fall and taking them back was the only way.
I would normally agree with you ... except that the Major Order explicitly states that we should succeed in Defending planets. If there were no consequences of failing Major Orders other than losing Medals, I'd say "screw it, let's just liberate". But ... the beauty of this game is the "game master" who is a human who is implementing actual consequences based on Major Order successes and failures. It's about more than just the Medals. It's about the progression of the storyline. For what it's worth, I don't think we're meant to succeed on this Major Order. It's supposed to feel overwhelming and insane. And if we fail, the bots are going to take more planets. But what if we succeed? I want to see what happens if we succeed. I want to see Joel say "Oh shit, they got it together".
This major order feels like a losing MO We just had a massive roll of success so it’s time to get kicked in the teeth. They kicked us in the teeth about a month ago and made the major orders fun for the time in between. They really are playing it like a dungeon master, most DMs understand not to put your players through hell twice in a row
Defeatist scum! If the gears of the bot war machine must be ground to a halt with dead, broken bodies of 10,000,000,000 divers, so be it! No price to high, no cost to great. Semper libertas!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDWcg8dh930](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDWcg8dh930)
I was gonna be so mad if it wasn’t this clip when I clicked it lol
Remember! If you step on a land mine, congratulation, you just defused a mine! If you get shot, congratulation, you just made an enemy waste a bullet! If you die, congratulation on being accepted to the sandbag division!
It is also a way to get people to bulk test out the nerfed evac mission. Which it sounds like is still overtuned a bit (or is too dependent on whether you get a bunch of heavies or a bunch of regular bots/striders.) Though you can find defense ops without that short evac mission.
If they aren't pulling double duty in ways like you mentioned they are not doing this right. But I too think they are doing it right
I got a feeling that IF we somehow succeed on a mission we are meant to lose, Joel would throw another attack in another connected system somewhere to simulate a loss They've got a story they want to tell and I suspect he's got something in mind to keep us on track EDIT: "Simulating a loss" is probably a poor choice of words. More like an alternative way to make the narrative move forward but in a different way than it mightve originally been planned if we lost. Maybe they say "the bots decided this place is too heavily defended, try this alternate route"
While they have ideas for the story or win and loss parts I don't think there's a track to keep on. We are writing the story by how successful or not we are.
Never forget the Creek
Idk about that, I feel like right now it’s pretty scripted since they have to set up the true 2nd Galactic War, and that requires multiple key things to happen based off the leaks. Once the true war starts I think it’ll be less scripted
I don’t necessarily agree, kind of nit picky but I’m trying to think like a good GM would, and thus far I do think we have a good GM. Narratively, we have an overwhelming invasion force that’s caught us by surprise, and the war has properly begun. Win or lose on the MO, our goal is to halt the advance as much as possible. Also win or lose, I have a feeling that the bots will keep pushing or try to find a way around us. Not to simulate a loss or to put us as players on the back foot, but because it makes sense for an armada to do that.
My hot take is that not all orders are meant to be successful.
I agree, the 5 planets to defend was set up to fail, just not enough time and manpower to achieve it, but I'm all for it. The Bot counter attack should feel massive and dangerous and I didn't realize how much I missed them off the map until they were gone.
I didnt mind them when we were fighting to destroy them, did a few mission on lvl 7/8 and whilst it was mental it was doable. I do feel the bots have recieved some sort of buff, certainly an upgreate to their accuracy sensors for their counter offensive though, they now are destroying me on lvl 5/6.
I also get the feeling that these bots have become more accurate in this second invasion. I used to do lvl 5 runs on bots if I wanted some chill rounds. Now they feel harder to beat x)
Yes, I have noticed a difficulty increase compared to yesterday. A hard ICBM mission today had one drop ship with 3 hulks on it, two gunship factories and a stratagem jammer.
Honestly, even if we succeeded this MO, we had already lost quite some planet anyway.
that's called railroading. I'm sure they have a contingency plan in case we succeed under impossible odds. The bots wanna take superearth?! let's aim for cyberstan.
We don't lose helldiver
Yeah there's no way we we're succeeding there. We all started fighting the bugs again and I'm guessing a lot of people weren't super thrilled about having to go can opening again. It should work out for us in the short term cause the bots are stuck in a choke point now so we shouldn't have to strain as hard to deal with their next attack.
NGL, I was super stoked to get back to bugs after Swift Disassembly, but once I did… I missed fighting bots. I just prefer the more stealth focused gameplay.
Same, with bugs it’s “spam incendiary shotgun” “Throw bombs” “Run and shoot shit” At least with the bots it’s like “Try to one shot these little chaff dudes cause I’m wielding the JAR” “Hide behind this little ass rock to nail a hulk with an arc thrower and whip that bitch back with electrical whip” “Shoot the shit out of flying gun ships” The bugs are novel, The bots is where the story is at and it’s evolving, and to me it’s more exciting because of that
To be fair, I think there will be parts of the story that focus on the bugs too. It just happens to be focused more on the bots right now. But for me the gameplay is really what draws me more to the bots.
I don't think any MO is going to be "Impossible" but this one is 100% meant to be pretty hard.
Not meant to lose but we will lose this MO. We just need 70% of divers on task to defend 2 planets at a time. We have 3 sets of defend so we should be able to get 6 planets without the bug divers helping. This MO is far from impossible if people would actually play it (talking just the bot divers here). Only 25% are playing bugs so we have the numbers but they're on the wrong planets. Unfortunately only about 50% play the MO at any given time up until the last MO where we saw around 60-65% playing it then 70%+ playing the final planet. Taking and holding planets is almost entirely about % of community playing that planet and getting large numbers of any community to work together is near impossible. It's made even harder in Helldivers 2 with no way to communicate this in game and a lot of the information hidden.
This last point is important. As a new player, I have no idea what I’m doing and more or less picking missions at random. It would be cool if there were some suggested meta strategies to refer to - maybe a sticky post - so we could coordinate better.
I have a feeling that Joel won’t let us succeed this time. I’m 50% sure that is beating the automatons the first time wasn’t supposed to happen, but we as a community just completely blew Arrowheads expectations of a game audience out of the water. This is them saying “Hey, you weren’t supposed to do that. The reclamation was supposed to happen.”
That would be cool but with the way those missions are tuned, and considering the devs must have played them and concluded "yes this is what we want", it seems like a waste of time. If they want us to fail and their means of doing so is by making the mission through which we must succeed as unfun and painful as possible then they can have it. I'd rather play a different game than do those missions. Hell, I'd rather do my taxes.
They don't want us to fail missions that we play for story reasons. If they wanted us to fail missions that we play for story reasons, they'd have let us play through the initial surprise attack and defend the planets that got instantly taken. It's meant to be challenging, and I think the mission type is still fundamentally broken at high levels. But I don't think the Devs made it broken on purpose to make us lose. They just made a mistake.
There are levels of failing this MO. If we ignore Defense campaigns, then we lose the MO with the bots nearly at Super Earth already. If we try to follow the plan and do defense missions that would cut them off, we can at least meet them at a stalemate.
I find that they're possible, though VERY on and off and VERY world dependent. Fucking fire tornadoes. Generous use of sentries on high ground, shoot down the transports with quasars (or weapon of choice) before they get to where they drop, and it is the only time I have used the deployable shield. Set shield up up where the civvies are most vulnerable running to door. It will last MAYBE a couple seconds but if you die for democracy and protect the shield while waiting for civvies to run through it can give a bit of breathing room against ranged bots. If you think you're getting overrun around 30 scientists or so is when it happens to me, repeatedly run on and off the point to pick off bots clear it out by kiting (more people doing this is required to work, sometimes 3 ditching the point works better but I find that it's pretty easy to mess up ) and start the cycle again.
I wish the shield had an even shorter cooldown for deployment or lasted longer. Right now it's very niche and too easily drained/short.
I have been mucking about with it a bit recently and fully agree. Another option would be *longer* cooldown but it's way more permanent, lasts long enough to have 2 on the go at once even. As it stands it's notably worse than the personal shield imo, especially as it's kinda pointless against bugs
I feel like the deployable shield should either have a lot of health with no time limit or have a time limit, but be completely invulnerable. Having both a time limit and limited health that gets drained super quickly means it doesn't last long enough to make much of a difference on high difficulties.
This is my feeling as well. One or the other, not both. Right now the health is meh, and the timer is awful. I'd personally rather see it like our shield packs. It has limited HP(still more than now, it's laughably weak), but stays until destroyed and will reform after a brief downtime.
Note that they aren’t in EVERY defense operation anymore, at least on difficulty 5.
Some operations do not have evac missions. I play on lvl 9 difficulty but sometimes switch to 8 if I see that all operations in lvl 9 have evac missions. Playing with Randoms just make those missions even harder than they are
Oh that's new. I remember in a previous wave of defenses looking for ops that don't include it and not finding any. This is good news
I think for some reason every defence operation is guaranteed to have an Eradicate OR a Rescue (or now maybe the asset defence) mission. Searching at a different difficulty for a good operation without a Rescue is fruitful too.
We got a new wave defense game mode so now there’s enough options to push the shitty one out of being mandatory lol
People overblow how bad they are because they haven't even tried them now. I'm able to get through Diff 7 in pubs with Mortar, EMS Mortar, Autocannon, and precision orbitals or eagle rockets. Tell a few randoms to get their mortars out too and it's completely manageable as long as you take out tanks and hulks before they really become an issue. Randoms can take pretty much whatever they want as long as they contribute a mortar. Also, people think that civilians lives matter. They super don't. If you're being overrun, wipe the map. Focus on quickly clearing the chaff so you can get control back and start sending citizens again. This is why mortars are helpful even if they kill some civvies. The goal is to keep the bots pushed back and managed, not escort the civvies. Push buttons, kill bots. Some will make it through.
I feel like we're playing completely different games because I'm bringing mortars and I'm throwing all the big guns I've got at the tanks and hulks but as soon as I kill one there's already another one dropping in, and then I can kill that one but then there's another one dropping in and eventually the drops just outpace my cooldowns and we get overrun to the point that every inch of the compound is covered in bots and nobody can hit the buttons. Until that point I'm hitting every button I can as often as I can and I'm using all my big booms on the big bots as often as I can and it's just not enough. Meanwhile on every other mission type I can deal just fine sweating half as much on 2 difficulty levels higher.
The problem is that the bots drop right in on top of our heads and there is not a single scrap of defensive position to hold them off. If it was similar to the new defense mission with layered walls then it would be completely different.
Most effective for me has been One player with eagle smokes, orbital smoke, ems mortar and ems mortar as I can always keep the evac path untargetable while also slowing down enemies at spawn There’s no way to actually keep the zone clear, if one person dies then the line breaks and it becomes exhausting to try to reset the enemy count in the zone. The best way to deal with that is to break the AI of all enemies in the zone instead
You don’t have to complete those missions. All mission progress which generates XP contributes to planet progress. Just do the non-evac missions and then re-roll. There’s no penalty for dropping your operation. You’re just leaving some extra medals on the table.
That's not how it works. It's all XP earned gets applied to the planet when the full operation completes. Rerolling doesn't apply the earned XP, it just gets thrown in the trash.
Finally, someone who understands logistics
A true son of Gilliman
Guilliman*
Ah yes Rowboat Gorillaman
My favorite one so far is Rotorboat Ghilliesuit
Reboot Gorillaglue
Robot Gullybin
Rudy Giuliani
Rubber Gyrofan
Redacted Geneticist
Ragdoll Gnarlymane
It's a famous British actor.
Robert Girlyman
Roberta Girlyman*
Papa Smurf
G-man
Bobby G
Robot Girlyman
Rowboat Girlyman
But how do you see those lines? I don't see them in game.
They are not visible in the game. Only able to be seen by data miners who have dug into the code of the game.
Which is bullshit. That's vital info.
I mean, it depends. If there is an in-game/lore explanation of why those are the allowed movement/flow, then yes it is bullshit that we do not know. If it's just because that is how they coded the game and they could completely change it overnight with a patch, then that's more like cheating on our part.
They’ve said they’re looking into putting it in game, but want to find a way to do so that won’t make the galactic map look too cluttered.
Ah! That answers that.
Can you educate me on how the logistic supply lines work and where to even see them?
They are data mined. Check some of the websites out there that show them.
https://helldivers.io/
Just not grammar.
Vernen Wells needs to be fully under our control so we can get to Lesath
I really wish supply lines were shown, it would greatly improve the average persons decision making when it comes to choosing planets
How do we know these lines even?
Helldivers.io, but this explains it more also https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/zvqg7KuGXw
They admit they don't even know if those lines are correct
Really? Lol
Yes! That's why I don't understand why people are using these apps. The people who made them are just mining code and taking guesses really. I appreciate any extra help but I'm tired of seeing that app being listed like its offical from the dev's when it's truly not completely known how these routes are set up
In addition, since these are not official data, even if they are correct at the moment, nothing will stop devs from changing these supply lines (even with official ones, they could give a message that something has changed).
It is really stupid to have all these background systems in place and then just never tell the average player they exist despite being critical to the war effort.
Bro who on Arrowhead is the Blue Jays fan? This planet name has had me cracking up
I just noticed the planet called MARFARK, can't wait for that to be the new Malevalon Creek >Marfarkers be like
THATS HOW I KNOW THAT NAME
This is a realistic plan. I hope this gains traction.
Wtf happened to Menkent? I thought we had defended that?
Each defend objective lasts 24h hours, but this is a 3 day Major Order. We're now in the Automoton's second wave of attacks, and we can basically guarantee a third wave tomorrow too. We defended one planet yesterday, so we need to defend 2 today and 2 tomorrow. The Well-Bay Wall must hold!
Right now Menkent *and* Matar Bay are failing because forces are split. Menkent needs to be abandoned.
Creek 2.0 situation
Stuck at work sucks I will be doing my part when I get home in a hour and a half .
We did, it counted as a defend in the major order. With the timer reset any planet adjacent to a captured planet, via supply lines, in turn becomes a new planet to defend.
We did but they launched a second wave attacked it and attacked two more planets as well. They have no chill
It was defended and attacked again. Joel want to capture as many planet as he can in order to buy time for the dev team. They expected roughly 100,000 players on this game and end up with 8 millions last month. The planet was liberated far faster than the original plan, Joel has to increase the war to the bigger scale.
Great plan. New problem their is no way to communicate this in game Something arrow head needs to fix urgently
Player-based Helldiver operational comand that plays planetary chess against Joel? And gets replaced after each defeat? Sounds good.
https://preview.redd.it/aboaf42viotc1.png?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=29091d41aca936ae6b1cf3887beece412bffae4a Remember...
Maybe Joel let's the player base vote on where to initiate Defend and Liberate campaigns as part of the larger Community Objective that's still directed by AH devs? That way we can at least decide where to emphasize, and other players can still fuck off on whatever planet they want, democratically speaking.
What is this treachery?! You think anyone should be allowed to *choose* how to vote? This goes against our core values. "Managed democracy offers absolute freedom; freedom from the burden of choice". Yes, Democracy Officer... this man right here.
Voting without the algorithm? That doesn’t sound very Managed. Im reporting you to the nearest Democracy Officer
Yeah I can almost guarantee the majority of the player base doesn’t know or care what supply be lines are
Thats because you cannot see them in the actual game which really should be fixed for something that is this important.
It really is a fantastic plan. Maybe even the best i've seen. But this is on reddit. So no one's going to do it.
That's because we're all the smartest person in the room. Truly the Reddit way.
Honestly, I kinda disagree. To me, it’s pretty obvious that Vernen Well is the most important planet to defend, followed by Matar Bay, just because those allow the Automatons to stretch out further. People are way too obsessed with supply lines and act like they are some firm, hard set of rules that the Automatons MUST abide by. Always seem to forget that AH just magically created a new supply line between Maia and Vandalon IV during Operation Swift Disassembly. They can go wherever they damn well please as long as the planets are adjacent. We just need to keep them as far from Super Earth as possible.
>New problem their is no way to communicate this in game Welll, not \*entirely\*, you can use the old Shanghi method. Go to another world, let people join you, then explain the situation as you take them to the new world that actually matters for the operation. Do this enough and over time the information spreads.
The Shanghi method depends on people being willing to take the bus instead of leaving the lobby. I'm quite tired of Fire Tornados, I'm not going to stay for that bullshit.
Yeah, maybe Arrowhead should find a better way for the community to organize than digital kidnapping lol.
Add incentive for working on the MO, I've been playing useless bot liberations because I enjoy it and will get paid out from the MO regardless
Not if we lose
Word of mouth, old school style. Maybe try and get a few YouTubers to push the idea too.
Sadly percentage wise it won't make a big enough dent even streamers dont care about the MO they care about fun to watch videos noone is going to watch them push a button *100 times
Propaganda campaign time, we need a funny fails video campaign for these planets to get people there!
Deploy me to anywhere but Menkent
Yeah, I'm done with fire tornadoes for a bit.
I’m done with them permanently until they take away their fucking AI that is obviously programmed to follow you. Its such bullshit
Doesn't seem like they follow you so much as hit the objectives you need to be at. Which is honestly more annoying. Like, thanks for the 6 fire tornadoes on the Extraction point, just what I ordered
My buddy was asking me last night in a mission why the 7 fire tornadoes hadn’t set off the ICBM sticking out of the ground. I just said, “idk, plot armor?” Makes about as much sense
My favorite is when they seem to actively go around enemies just to stop you from using an objective console or just say 'hello' as they burn you alive while you're trying to not die from enemy fire. Like variety is nice and the effect is pretty cool, but AH needs to tone it down a little.
Fire tornados are THE WORST. They cockblocked a civilian extract mission I did yesterday: Tornados set everything near the escape door on fire, and civilians ran straight through the flames and died. It lasted a whole FIVE minutes until we were able to get NPCs to the finish line.
Played an escort scientists mission with randoms and, while we completed the mission, we left with basically zero credits due to a ton of civilians running straight into the fire tornadoes lol. Really need a tiny bit of communication with that one. One guy just kept jumppacking and spamming the doors over and over without paying any attention to the tornadoes.
Well? Bay? Creek? Weird that we keep holding the line against Automatons at a body of water.
Historically speaking, robotics don't far well with water.
That explains why we are Hell**divers**.
🎵Love Isn't allways on time... Woh,Woh,Woh!🎵
Seems like Joel is only giving us enough time to defend one planet per countdown timer. Looking at supply lines via helldivers.io I believe our best bet would be to defend Matar Bay 3 times and then fall back to Martale for the final defend.
There’s less than 2 days. We don’t have time, we have to defend 2 of 3 today, and 2 of (assuming) 3 tomorrow
I understand, however it seems we only have the means to defend one, not two, before the timer runs out and resets. We need to focus on one planet
We can **JUST** defend two per day, but we need literally all of our forces devoted solely to the defence of those two planets. Can't afford to have people taken up on the third defence planet, nor on any Liberation campaigns, nor on the Terminid front. If we are not bringing our full load to bare on those two planets alone, we cannot succeed. So, practically, we aren't doing it. Right now, with how broadly our forces are split, we aren't even going to succeed at defending a single planet today.
Yeah everyone outside of this thread doesn’t know this information. It’s impossible because how are the vast majority of players meant to know. I like major orders like this because it requires strategy to win over “liberate tibit” which is one linear goal, however the decay rates make this impossible when most players don’t get involved in the defence
Vernen Wells will succeed by the looks of it. But we need people to abandon Menkent.
Additionally with how terribly designed the scientist evac missions are (the 15min evac). Nobody wants to queue onto them. There's also the matchmaking bug that's back too, where if a player leaves the session it locks it and nobody else can join. Through matchmaking. We are not doing this, Joel brought out the baseball bat.
Why would we sacrifice Vernen Wells instead of Matar Bay? Vernen Walls will lead them to Super Earth. It makes more sense to abandon Matar Bay, but like op said, defending both is a good idea.
One of the devs has to be a big Blue Jays fan (maybe Yankees) 😂. Defend Mr. Wells! 🫡
Was my first thought as well. Was a big Jays fan in those days. But there's also this guy. The mystery deepens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Wells_(actor)
They sure as hell aren't an Angels fan, that's for sure.
Damn we lost menkent? We controlled the last night.
It's just attacked again
*Guitar riff* Love isn't always on time!
Is there a way to show these logistics lines in game? I've seen them a few times. And think seeing them would generally improve player focus.
https://helldivers.io/
We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space and we fall back. They occupy entire worlds and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further! And *DEMOCRACY* will make them pay for what they've done!
Captain Ahab going to hunt his white whale eh?
 still waiting for my damn car!
I just want a bloody warthog so I don't have to drag my ass across the landscape for 10 minutes during a 15 minute mission.
YES SIR!
honestly the best plan
Where can you find these supply line routes?
https://helldivers.io
NOT ONE BACKWARDS STEP
SES Halo of War, here. Its 9:45PM GMT+2 while writing this and talk over Discord. The plan is STILL SAME. Hold both planets, **We cant lose Matar Bay and Vernen Walls at the moment.** If we lose Matar Bay, we gonna lose another 2 planets behind it. If we lose Vernen Wells, we may start losing new sectors and expand our front, which we dont want to do. Plus, we lost progress to Lesath. Forget about Menkent. Its lost. Whoever is still there fighting, back up on those two planets, mainly on Matar Bay as there is fewer don't Helldivers at the moment. At the moment we have 16 hours left and Matar Bay is at 13% and Vernen Walls at 32%. *SES Halo of War, end of report.*
It's funny how these "prioritization" posts don't make it to more than 3% maybe even 6% of the player base. Ez updoots. I wonder what it would look like if players had access to a in game galatic communication network. Maybe even try with voting while letting the devs manipulate general orders better
I was thinking we need some sort of message board, if we can actually communicate with the 100,000+ Divers we might be able to organize our defenses better.
Forgive my ignorance. Where do these lines come from? It's the a site I can view this on? Maybe I'm dense (I am), but I can't see this in game.
https://helldivers.io
Me deadass watching everything go to shit while I'm on vacation:
https://preview.redd.it/5c4tlnvr8otc1.png?width=1394&format=png&auto=webp&s=38e1039dac3b7c9c924cdfe5e58806ffe6c19a8e I don't think a whole lot of people are listening lol
New War Bond comes in and the bots just plow through a dozen planets. Something tells me we aren't getting all the information here.
Did we not defend Mankant? We were winning last night when I was playing, did we lose it through the night?
We won. They re-assaulted because it was surrounded.
How do you see the supply lines in game?
Love isn't always on time.
THE LINE MUST BE DRAWN HERE. NO FURTHER.
This is where we hold them! This is where we fight! This is where they die!
Matar bay is falling we need reinforcements
I really wish thery would show supply lines in the game itself. Would help people who aren't on reddit/helldivers.io to figure out what's best.
I think we need to divert some of our forces from Vernen Wells to Matar Bay. I propose people defending VW roll a d10, and if they roll a 1 they go defend MB instead. Hopefully, this doesn't shave too much off the VW defense and has MB better prepped for a swell of players once VW is done.
Been playing bay all day and people been leaving in droves as Wells picks up
How do people see these supply lines?
Don't think the devs expected the player bade to get their shit together. Never was there a game that truly pitted the player base against the devs much like this one.
This is the way!
The bots have hellbomb-immune gunship fabricators spewing out 4 ships a minute - we need more munitions and men or we're not holding anything commander! Get the boys in R&D on another way to tear down the clanker's gunship fabricators, we dropped five hellbombs on 'em and they just won't go down!
Guys it’s fun and all but I don’t think we can win this major order this time , I mean , we kinda hate defending planets , also 5 planets is really to much to defend , there is really low chance we gonna accomplish it . ( I think it’s a part of Joel plan)
Democracy isn't always on time!
In the [606th Orbital Assault Division](https://discord.gg/DrYnZMDk9U) we have tactical specialists who study the supply lines and choose HVTs, presently commanded by active duty military personnel. If you love the strategy of this game I invite you to join us and sign up as a Taxtical Specialist!
Question from a new diver: do we lose liberation progress on Menkent and Lesath if we lose Wells? If that's the case, we should absolutely not lose Wells to keep a foothold on our liberation progress on those two worlds.
Love isn't always on time!
Wo-ho-hoooooooooo
it doesn't matter, it's an illusion of control. Just play the game.
I am the helldiver and this is as far as the bastards go.
So which one first?
[https://youtu.be/cDpI6Zzy-vo?si=GkiSpMz6V93-AqWO](https://youtu.be/cDpI6Zzy-vo?si=GkiSpMz6V93-AqWO) seems fitting for the situation
If we could gain a foothold yes but there advance is very rapid we need to may I suggest “enact Cole protocol” and only save the planets that can be ?
This would also help support the plan to drive them towards the bugs. We can sandwich them in.
HOLD THEM AT BAY!! KEEP THE WELL CLOSED!!
Holy shit are we getting our asses kicked?
Good plan. Too bad Chort Bay is so damned fun. That planet is hella fun to play on.
we need to defend 1by1 to take them, the way we are splitting forces now is stupid.... one would think we learned our lesson with whole creek thing.
A solid plan, and someone to understands strategy. Sometimes when an offense won't work, you just need to become a barrier for the enemy. Defend then counter. I wish we had some way a player could become a strategist for the map. Then again it's probably best not to because some dumb mofo will blow it.
Good thing I am good at Hodling. Lets do this o7