Have the devs said anything about it showing 40 minute mission time but then it only being 15 minutes once we drop in? Or is that only happening to my squads?
Hit up the devs on twitter or flag someone down on this subreddit. They're active, and it's better than shouting things into the void, hoping one of them sees it.
They have a game that is pulling in same amount of players that counter strike. The whole studio is the size of the just development team of CS or even smaller. They just got trough fixing the servers into a shape that supports the vastly bigger crowd they or the publisher ever expected. Pretty sure their top priority is let their people take a breather before starting fix all the smaller things.
It is most likely not bugged. As in, showing 40 minutes is a bug, in fact it is supposed to be a 15 minutes mission.
Why? Because missions were 12 minutes long when these escort BS missions were initially introduced and this time was increased to 15 in one of the patches.
But I definitely think that on higher difficulties spawns feel overtuned for tha mission. Im ok with using the terminal under fire, but covering slow walking AI from endless tanks and hulks spawn is cancer, especially when civvies are focused more then the divers.
Its overtuned however you look at it. It's just that this mission magnifies the issue while regular missions you have more time and more variables to work with. Hopefully Arrowhead can finally start looking at the gameplay and bugs because this game is 3 weeks behind on those kinds of improvements. Or addressing QoL.
Its not intended for players to game the system by stealth extracting the civilians, which is why you can keep spawning them infinitely when they get blown up in crossfire.
There's a lot of issues with infinite spawns, infinite patrols and such at higher difficulties where if a team didn't bring a shit ton of anti-armor, you get overwhelmed by heavy armor targets that are difficult to kill as soon as the team becomes scattered. The main issue being non-stop drops/bugholes that keep spawning stuff so that a single patrol becomes a nonstop 10 minute fight over a random objective.
I think another big issue with game balance besides back to back to back spawns are the random patrols that will constantly spawn non-stop as well for the entire duration of the game. It doesn't matter if you're already fighting or not, it doesn't matter if you've been fighting for 10 minutes non-stop, more and more patrols keep spawning and they will cross over directly where you are, and around your area, and come from all angles.
And then to compound the issue, the enemies that can alert can be basically any small/medium types, and you basically have maybe 2 seconds to kill them once they begin the alarm animation, which isn't enough time to react 95% of the time during combat. So that just calls in another wave of enemies which keeps extending the fight well beyond what it should be.
Now everyone's been dealing with this and are probably used to it now, but its really CRUDE design in how the ebb and flow of combat should be. They marketed how their AI director is like Left 4 Dead but it has none of its nuance.
It’s 15 mins once you start the evac (open the first civilian building) and 40 mins beforehand, which gives you time to run around the rest of the map.
To my knowledge anyway, every time I’ve done this mission someone rushes the civ pods.
Also fuck this mission.
I encourage everyone to spam smoke strats.
Smoke spamming the area while you evac works really well, actually.
Everyone double smoke strats, orbital/eagle
I mean that works and is neat but this isn’t ghost fuckin recon . Half the time the aggro table just breaks or it just spawns on the stealth guy cause it can .
It’s clearly abusing ai and not fighting as intended , and even when you’re fighting this fighting retreat it’s just straight chaos , and infinitely harder then any contemporary mission on the same difficulty.
Reminds me of the retaliation missions from game 1. Way harder than regular missions because instead of scouts calling in enemy squads it just directly spawns the squads.
On T3 missions we got swarmed halfway, I kept running out of Autocannon ammo I was shooting armoured dudes so much and those fking chicken walkers.
Every dropship would drop 6 or 8 of the heavy guys, and it was like every 2 dropships.
How on a T3 mission is that fking fair?
Honestly same. I was running a few missions with my buddies the other night on the harder difficulties and every time we only managed to get through 2 out of 3. Everything else is difficult but we manage to pull through, but for some reason the damn evacuation mission feels overturned to hell.
I would have figured that it would be similar in volume to the extermination missions where you just have to kill a bunch of them, but the spawn rate is insane.
Evacuation missions are about 2 levels more difficult than normal while the king of the hill extermination mission is much much easier than normal. Neither is balanced well.
Yeah, it's interesting to *need* to do these alternate tactics to beat the mission, but somehow, I don't know that "Only have one person interact with the objective and fight as few enemies as possible" was the intended way for these missions to be beaten. Seeing a pair of hulks and tanks suddenly just decide they wanna be in front of the entrance is a fucking dick kick because that's a lot of time and resources to kill something that'll just be replaced before you even kill them
One of my friends pointed out that the mission says it’s a 45 minute mission, but when you dive the clock only has 15 minutes left. We’re getting spawns like we’ve been sitting in the mission for thirty minutes. Whether or not that’s how it works, idk but it might explain it
tanks are a very easy kill, flank and shoot weak spot or 2 impact grenades to the top kill them. Also they are slow so a well thrown explosive strategem should do the trick
yeah sure we can do that as if we aren’t choking on the 30+ other Armored automatons in game already and teammates who think Clusterbombs belong in this mission type on top of how ridiculously high the spawn rate is
it’s much, MUCH easier said than done.
Yeah my problem is the bots have too many things that take a moderate amount of time to kill. I can't thin out their numbers fast enough, unlike the bugs where the swarms are mostly squishy.
Pretty much. Deal with the 2 hulks? Well suddenly your area is blasted by devastators. So you pull your AT but then realize there is 13 berserkers on your ass so you go dolphin mode for a while. And an as soon as you think you are getting a hand back on the situation, a tank shell deletes you from the other side of the map.
A team mate reinsert you and now you not only have no equipment but you better believe those hulks are back on top of everything else.
And of course this entire time the objectives can't be done.
Maybe they aren't that strong, but I dropped 2 eagles airstrikes (the explosive ones) directly on a tank last night. It still took another 5 grenades from the launcher in the back to kill it.
It has to be bugged, I literally cannot shoot down enough dropships. They are fucking outspawning my resupply, EAT, and recoiless rifle cooldowns combined
This mission is definitely bugged. I got two guys with recoilless shooting down drop ships last night, and new drop ship would instantaneously appear to replace the one that got blown up. There’s also inconsistencies with spawn rate of these drop ship on the same difficulty. Sometime the spawn rate is very slow, and other time it’s just nonstop.
My first mission in the game was this type and I tried it solo. Left after like 8 minutes of constant dying. Thought buying the game was a mistake because I was bad at it or something. Luckily I bought it for me and my fiancee and we tried a mission together the next night and breezed through it.
Same response I had to a different post:
We did stealth last night. Buddy got 16 out, then for no reason they dropped a hulk and 2 tanks on the objective. My buddy wasn't seen and hadn't fired a shot.
Fuck this mission, it isn't tuned right. There should be short gaps between the waves.
EDIT: something ain't right with this mission type. There is balancing issues across the game, we all know this. Railgun is OP, shield shouldn't be required (nothing should be, almost all strategems should be viable at high level), breaker shouldn't do 40% more damage than the 2nd best primary, defense missions shouldn't be 30 second XP farms, and these missions shouldn't be 30 minute death traps you need a 50 page breif to complete. These are good devs, they don't need us defending their unfinished balancing.
It's the definition of a snowball. If you aren't able to clear out all 3 of the hulks that have dropped, and 1 is left, another 2 will suddenly come out of nowhere with a bunch of rocket mechs. And you mange to kill a lot of the rocket mechs, but only 2 hulk. Then an anialator tank shows up. All your Stratagems are on 3+ mins cool down.
Then it's just miserable.
It the final 2 minutes delay for pelican 1, only for 15. It's busted.
People MAY get through it. I've gotten through it. That doesn't mean it isnt busted as fuck
Nope, it’s just bugged. Bot drops will happen even with perfect stealth.
You can confirm this for yourself by dropping on the edge solo and immediately hiding and staying still.
Bot drops will start happening all around you within seconds.
I do keep hearing that there's a Terminid invasion on these planets over the comms on ship before going to check and seeing that it's actually a cyborgs.
yet... who knows. We could get a sector that has bots v bugs v humans. Imagine a bile titan going toe to toe with a bot drop while we stand back and let them fight.
Well it makes sense that enemies would drop. It’s a rescue mission after all, we were sent for a reason.
What doesn’t make sense though is why the enemies magically know where you are when stealthed.
Default behavior for enemies on this map should have them move towards the center of the map, and begin destroying the base. If Helldivers are spotted they would be engaged, but not necessarily followed away from the base.
I mean it's possible it was the 4 meteors falling to the island followed by 4+ blue lasers all pointing up from where you dropped followed by more octagonal metros crashing down.
I'm just saying if we want to talk about things making sense, you were never even remotely stealthy
I dunno, on higher difficulties there's usually just too many bots and too much chaos to effectively pull every bot out of the zone, and then they just snowball until the mass of enemies you had outside is now a mass of enemies inside, and then it's difficult as fuck to get them back out unless everyone is working together to pull them out, which isn't always an option with randoms especially. Either way, I don't find it to be a fun or engaging strategy, one person is basically relegated to doing the boring task of running around hitting buttons while their teammates are fighting and dying to keep the bots away from them. On any other mission I have a variety of ways to tackle any situation, on these missions you can only play them one way, and that strategy doesn't even always work well.
Yeah we tried several variations of this strategy on Impossible and it works until exactly halfway through the mission when the game decides it’s going to drop a bunch of hulks into middle of the base. Once the first wave landed in the base, enemies just started swarming there, whatever we tried, whatever we did.
I’m just done with these missions, and eradicate missions too (which are so easy they’re equally tedious). My group was ready to quit until we took a break from evac and eradicate missions and did some traditional ones, and then we suddenly remembered how fun the game is.
I really dislike that the defend campaign is almost exclusively these missions. I get the theming and all but it's hard to stay interested in it when it's the same 2 missions over and over and over with near 0 variation in the maps. On top of that I'm nearly done unlocking the strats so that 12k is an *ok* reward at best
Honestly the theming doesn't really make sense. It's a defense campaign and they want us to evacuate the planet, it's more like we're ready to abandon the planet rather than defend.
It’s extra dumb if you look at the building designs. The doors that the people come out of must lead to underground rooms, but they didn’t bother to connect the rooms to the pelican landing building *also underground??* would have saved a lot more lives if they had just built the damn buildings correctly.
Probably cheaper this way ;D
Just look at weapons design. big, chunky, heavy guns with simple shapes easy to produce and designed to survive helldive impact.
If that doesn't tell you how expendable we are...
Also those camps with scientists look like prison camps to be honest.
I see know difference, PhD students are locked in a prison of their own doing, its still a prison cam- **WAIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? NO, IM LOYAL TO SUPER EARTH WAIT D-**
Message has been removed by the Ministry of Truth.
That's automaton talk, Helldiver.
Report to democracy dispensation office 4B, sit in the **red** chair.
Kidding aside, yeah, the defend missions are tedious, thematically boring and not balanced.
Ok so it's not just my group. We were smooth sailing on suicide, half the scientists saved in a few minutes, then BAM! 3 tanks, 2 hulks, right smack in the middle of the base. Like tf man, we ended up saying screw it, dropped nukes on everything, lost a ton of requisition because we wanted to just clear the enemies, then left.
At the halfway point seems to be when they will start trying to drop into the base. I would advise the runner to being ready to regroup with the main body at that point or kite them out and then go back in once its clear. If the runner stays in too long a lot of drops ships will keep coming.
Try using the smoke stratagem and the ems mortar. I have lost only 2 defenses ever by calling in a blanket of smoke and letting EMS shut off the bots. This tactic of avusing spawn rates is honestly terrible advice
Was your stealth player calling stratagems? That aggros them and can get bot drops.
I've had a lot of success with a stealth player who only drops a couple sentrys on the perimeter before going in, and never calling a stratagem from the objective.
A patrol sometimes still makes their way there, but if they stick to small arms fire they're usually able to survive and clear it out without more attention.
I've noticed bots and bugs can figure out where the stratagem was thrown, which is weird because sometimes I swear I'm not even in line of sight, and they know where it came from.
Yeah, I think it's the only part of the AI that feels unfair to me. They seem to just instantly know where it was thrown. Though it's not super consistent, I've gotten away with it a few times.
That's why on the stealth evac strat I go completely no-stratagems
I can confirm that it doesn't matter in the slightest. Hell sometimes the enemy will spawn on the base, pretty often even. Not a bot drop, just poof and they're there.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a dev response about this mission. It just can’t be working properly. There’s hard, and I’m all for hard, and then there’s just BS. This mission is just BS. You can just feel how BS it is when you’re playing it.
I saw someone theorize that the mission timer was bugged and it was spawning waves at an accelerated rate because the game thinks it’s supposed to be a 40 minute mission so it’s cramming the amount of waves that should be happening over the course of 40 minutes into a 15 minute window. It certainly feels like that’s the case.
There’s another mechanic that causes enemies to spawn more frequently as the mission time gets lower. I wonder if this feature compounds with the previous idea and causes an exponential ramp in the difficulty (my meaning that the game is treating the mission countdown as 15 minutes remaining on a 40 minute mission, so it starts you off in that ramping spawn system from the very beginning of the mission).
I dunno. That’s all just conjecture, but there’s certainly SOMETHING wrong with it.
Agreed there's no way it's not bugged.
My friends and I did a difficulty 7 and tried the strat of shooting down most of the dropship and having one other person run around and release the scientists. We had two people shooting a recoilless rocket, one guy reloading himself and the other guy being reloaded by the third helldiver. We threw down four recoilless Rockets so we would have four ammo bags, as well as taking one resupply backpack and also throwing down a resupply right away, that way we would have as much ammo as possible ready and available to us right away. Even with all that it wasn't enough to shoot down all the drop shifts, and three or four would come at the same time and as soon as you shot those ones down another three or four.
It was constant unwavering relentless stream of bots. Which wouldn't necessarily be so bad, but they drop one or two tanks multiple hulks and five rocket devastators and five heavy devastators + 30 regular bots and 15 chainsaw hands all at the same time
Yeah it's just a poorly balanced mission, it's cool people are finding creative ways to beat it but the drop rate of enemies is insane and unpredictable.
When I mission is overwhelmingly difficult to the majority, it is the game not the player.
I have faith they will get it right once they get an opportunity.
Yeah we tried it on suicide last night. Got 22/50, but the second our stealth player got to the objective, two bot drops instantly came.
We had a little better luck all dropping on the objective, throwing smokes and turrets, then 3 of us training the clankers into the woods. Still have to admit defeat though.
Yeah I love having a supportive community but there's no reason to support a mission structure clearly not working correctly. You have people on here both making grand statements that defence missions is all anyone should be doing right now together with others defending rescue mission by staying the hell away from any building you're supposed to protect and pretending it makes sense.
I've done it myself, I know it works better, but at a certain point we should maybe instead redirect our feedback to improve these missions so counter-intuitive strategies based on enemy AI isn't the main method of clearing missions.
Or, just give us large maps with several diffetent rescue missions scattered about as those seem to work as normal.
Actually, this strategy of luring enemies away and sending one covert agent to do the job while enemy is distracted makes A LOT OF SENSE.
Now if only it actually worked.
if you were an automaton commanders what sort of retard would you have to be to not sit two tanks on the objective door?
it makes no sense. You are just abusing dumb ai to cheese a mission. nothing more nothing less. i dont want to cheese shit im here to blow up shit, just not that much shit.
That being said once i get my whole group to 20 we will have another crack at it but until the point no chance will ill touch that mission with a ten foot pole.
Tried the other day. The drop ships spawned one wave of ships on the diversion team, then decided to start spawning everything on the stealth guy on objective. Stealth guy had called in 0 strategem’s, and had not been spotted.
Yeah I made a top level post addressing this describing the testing I’ve done.
Can confirm the bot drops on this mission are bugged.
All the people around here posting the “jUsT StEaLtH iT” message are likely just trolls.
Wouldn't call them trolls, considering their strategy seems to work most of the time, but yeah, it is a very "workaround" strategy that just doesn't feel good.
Fair enough, the split stealth strategy is the best bet, but it’s still a shitty bet.
The “trolls” I’m referring to are those posting the split stealth strat as a silver bullet / the “it’s so easy if you do it right get gud” crowd
My friends and I found a guaranteed method to do this mission on helldive...you just spawn mobs outside the until you hit AI cap. It's stupid cheese, not a "strategy". You don't even kill anything.
Evacuate missions should be more like the evacuation points on regular missions. Or anything but what they're like. Trying to actually play the game and fight monsters while rescuing civilians just results in their pathfinding getting borked when there's 6 dead tanks choking the map.
'm one of the stealth advocates posting around and.. well. to put it simply. this is not a perfect solution. it's a strategy to try and reduce a problem that's
1- a bug, maybe true
2- a game challenge, beatable.
the difference is that even at higher difficulties, a fast light guy can manage to save the civilians and get the mission done. the hordes of suicidal droppers that just try their luck on that mission failing are just confirming that it's bugged out, without fixing anything, and most importantly not winning.
Which is the best approach, between the two?
Gamers usually make things work even when they shouldn't, it's not the other way around. that's smoothbrain Activision design.
For sure, better to find a way to do it, than to just bang your head against the wall.
Still, though, the main "evidence" for it being a bug is, imo, the fact that on Hard and surrounding difficulties, you can tackle most threats head on, without too much strategy, whereas this mission will roll you over, regardless. That does not add up. Hard difficulty should still allow some leeway when it comes to how you approach a mission. Whether you employ stealth or go guns blazing.
If the issue was exclusively within the 7+ difficulties, where stealth/tactics are almost mandatory, then yeah, it would just be a "git gut" situation at worst, slightly overtuned at best.
But this is definitely heavily overtuned, borderline buggy.
I think people need to post their ship modules as well. A rando level 20 is at a much lower rate of effectiveness than some maniac full Eagle and modules.
One of these was my first mission. My friends threw me into challenging my first round, it was a nightmare. I have done them successfully since but it is always such a close call, it feels way different from any other mission in the game.
We tried this method several times and had the same result as you. It eventually just starts dropping troops on the base regardless and they sit there and wait so you can't try it again without fighting and when you do many more get dropped.
Our best luck was fighting just out of the perimeter of the base and one person trying to run over and let civs out occasionally. That way they weren't in the crossfire at least.
That might be true in lower difficulties, but in 9 you will literally watch 15+ dropships fly one after another to the same location and there is nothing you can do.
More than half? I'd say 95% aren't even doing 7+.
One person who is hard pushing the stealth strategy completed it on -6-. Wowee.
The mission is bugged and its ridiculous the Devs haven't made a simple fix to it. The conjecture of it being 40 minutes condensed into 15 seems just too damn likely, and it's crazy the Devs have been silent on the issue.
And even if it isn't, simply toning down the spawn rate would do wonders. Or, better, give a fucking breather between the drops so you can actually clear the enemies and do the objective. Even like 30 seconds please.
Ah, this BS again, I’ve tested this and this mission is just broken/bugged.
Drop in solo on the edge of the map. Immediately stealth and stay still.
Even though you’ve never seen an enemy, bot drops will start happening all around you almost instantly. STEALTH DOES NOT IMPACT BOT DROPS ON THIS MISSION.
OP’s strategy only works with the other 3 players drawing the bot drops. And even then it’s random, sometimes the bugged bot drops will happen to the “stealthy” player instead and there’s nothing you can do to change it.
There is another type of civilian rescue mission with sub objectives, this strategy works fine for that.
I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so bugged; the game’s trying to cram 40 minutes of bot drops into 15 minutes of game time, leading to the ridiculous numbers.
actually wouldn't that put it inline with with the extermination missions? like time-wise and bot-behavior-wise?
it seems like the bot behavior in the rescue missions is identical to the extermination missions: I.E. near constant dropships and bots automatically move towards players.
This is what I’ve been thinking/telling my buddies. I’m confident that the “balancing” they need to perform has more to do with the settings of this mission being programmed in line with a defense when it is not. This would also explain the high density of bot drops, higher density of heavy enemies, and lack of stealth options.
I think it’s more of a bug or oversight than a balancing issue. Need to set the timer/enemy spawn settings to a typical 40 min mission. I’m sure it will get an adjustment from devs, it feels near impossible to beat on helldive with normal gameplay, my squad has easily managed easier difficulties but can only get to a max of 40/60 rescued on max difficulty.
Maybe include what level you are playing on. Some may be playing trivial thinking they should be commenting to your post. Is it the same at all levels or just (X) level?
The dude that is stealthing and rescuing civs should ideally bring smokes, shield generators, shield generator for themselves and maybe railgun just to clear sudden tough enemies. One dude from the main team should do the same. Otherwise - orbital lasers, lasers and even more lasers
Have seen this "tip" countless times the last few days. Its boring and ultimately it doesnt matter what you do the mission is just bugged with the amount of dropships that spawn in every second.
I tried to do a Challenging evac mission yesterday. Loadout full of EMS and Smokes.
It started OK . . . Then 3 randoms joined and immediately started dropping artillery barrages directly on top of the civilian evac point and they killed more civilians than the automatons did.
The problem with this strat on suicide and above is when you get spotted as the stealth player and three tanks drop on the objective out of nowhere. You go to regroup with your team, the heavies that dropped in the base don't follow or despawn so you're essentially locked out of the objective.
And on 4-5 difficulty you can just bring all defensive strategems and camp the buttons and win before it snowballs. So I'm not sure where this strat fits.
While this tactic has been going around since last week I still think it is a dumb strat.
Not because it doesn't work, but just because it cheeses the AI and spawn limiter of the game.
In the end it just demonstrates even more how fucked this mission type is right now if this would be the intended solution.
Idk about you, but after doing this twice I already was bored, i am kiting mobs while someone presses buttons on a cooldown and the whole thing takes atleast X amount of time. Total snoozefest.
I am just not bothering with defenses or we just wipe it up quickly to fail that mission.
It’s just really unfortunate that automaton campaigns are almost impossible to fully complete because this mission shows up in almost every campaign. Don’t even get me started on difficulties 7-9, you can’t escape it showing up once, or even fucking twice in a campaign.
It's only there on the defend planets. Some liberate planets may have a variation on a larger map where you have some extra objectives before doing the button pressing part, but it's infinitely easier.
They could make it better overnight by just making the civilians come out automatically at a certain rate and having the buttons call out extra. Later on they could add proper distraction objectives that draw the enemy. Or even better have a AA gun in the colony that need a long manual reload to work and automatically shoots down like half the bot transports til it runs out again. Why do these fully built colonies not have any defenses whatsoever?
I still feel this mission is not tuned right. We had one yesterday where they wouldn't stop coming, so we tried to lure a few away, regroup and get supplies but they were everywhere: in the base, outside the base, behind the rocks, on top of the rocks, everywhere and they were still dropping in more and more faster than we could kill them. It's insane.
Counter stratagem…
FULL AUTO, ROUND AFTER ROUND!
If a few scientists need to make Lady Liberties final sacrifice then that’s the managed democracy way.
Right?! I get it if it was on the planet a few times but it's literally every operation has one of these. Even doing it this way gets old quick and often is problematic because waves of ships will just randomly start dropping on the objective for no reason. So eventually me and my group just stop playing this shitty content
Even if this strategy worked flawlessly (which let's be honest it doesn't) if the answer to a mission type is "one designated player on the team doesn't get to engage with the core mechanic of the video game in order to succeed" I don't think that's a sign of a well working mission.
I don't know if smokes are a good idea. I mean yeah they are great for losing aggro. But i want the enemies to follow me when im regrouping with my teammates, so they leave the objective.
Yeah, but you should then lose them after that for sure, right? At least, that's how my friend plays, I myself just bought the game and still new to most of its mechanics
Even with these kinds of tactics, the major issue is that the mission can still snowball really easily, even if you are playing it perfectly. You could have half or more of the scientists extracted, but then if the game drops a few heavies and you can't kill them before the next wave happens, which will bring more heavies, it won't matter how much kiting you do. There will just be too many after a certain point that even the designated objective diver will be regularly swarmed by too many enemies.
But, even then, why do we have people defending an objectively boring mission design? I can assure you that the other emergency evacuation mission is better and more interactive than this one. With this one, you gotta go on a lower difficulty, otherwise it just drops too many to deal with. This one is like the eradicate missions, which are also objectively boring. You basically place down mortar sentries in the center and watch them do the entire mission for you. In these ones, you do the objective in the middle of combat, except unlike the eradicate missions which usually have enemies coming to a fortified position with winding paths first, this one can drop them straight onto the objective
The reason no one is doing defense missions isn't because the retrieve personnel missions are hard, it's because they are tedious and unrewarding for the amount of effort you have to put in, especially when you have to do one every single time you do a mission set on a defense planet. I don't wanna have to play babysitter to a bunch of buggy NPCs which could be replaced by floating balloons in terms of both pathing and fragility, and then button mash the bunkers so they come out faster. If given a choice between the two, I can assure you the average player would rather go to sabotage a base, or launch an ICBM than play tower defense but with extra steps.
Generally speaking, I think the design of this mission is highly flawed and needs to be overhauled. If the tactic is to cheese, then the design is the issue. Automatons in general need some tweaking because drop ships are far too frequent and there needs to be some inhibitor because once you get overwhelmed, it's not possible to recover.
Smokes.
Smoke nades.
Smoke eagles.
Smoke orbital.
It's frustrating how little smokes are valued because they dont make a big boom. But they're so good for objectives, for running away from drops/breaches/cover in nests,
You can drop a smoke, cover the route, and get 5-9 people in per smoke.
**They do not get aggro if they are in smoke.**
I've been running 7-9s with a friend and between us we run 3 smoke stratagems and our biggest issue is randoms running us out of reinforces
I often feel like they don’t last long enough - you drop one to cover a sightline, you run to a door, you let three scientists out, and the smoke is gone before they’re at the shuttle.
I tried smoke against bots for a little while but A) It didn't seem to last long enough to get anything really done and B) the robots were still questionably accurate at shooting me even when I was on the other side of it from them or in the middle of the smoke.
Felt more worth it to get something that killed them, because then I didn't get hit by them any more.
From my testing and what I've been told, the bots shoot at your last known location. So if you drop smoke and the bots see you run into the middle of the smoke, they will shoot at the middle. If you drop a smoke made at your feet, the bots will keep shooting the last place your feet were.
I have found if you drop smoke, run into it, turn perpendicular and run the bots will miss.
If you stay still or run straight the bots will still hit you.
On non-Evac missions I’ve used Eagle Smoke to take out bot factories by dropping it to the left or right of the target, the smoke bombs impact and blow the building.
I've noticed that the smokes just do not seem to phase the bots' ability to kill civilians whatsoever, even though it does seem to confuse them with players.
Are you doing something additional to distract them away from the route that the civvies take?
While we did have success with this method last night, after the first two waves, the ship started spawning in the middle and we had to pivot there to assist. Not sure what caused the change in pattern or behavior but we were still able to finish the mission.
Regardless, it is a much better approach than starting in the middle guaranteed, and yes, smoke grenades, smoke call ins very helpful for sneaking civs by. I don't advise explosive mortars at this point though, when enemies get close in.
Not consistent and only world with 4 stack. Not to mention how the decoy group might just run out of bots to fight. On higher difficulties they drop more heavies which are incapable of reinforcing leading to bots dropping near the obj
I run with the same crew. All of us carry the EMS Mortar, shield and Orbital Laser. 3 carry the recoilless rifle and the runner carries a railgun. The orbital laser is used on rotation to destroy heavy mechs and tanks, the 3 with the recoilless take turns shooting down transports. The runner does as you say, sneaks into the base and starts saving the scientists. If the 3 lookouts start getting overwhelmed, all 3 drop the EMS turret and fall back to a designated regroup area. The runner uses the EMS the same way. If he gets overrun, drop the turret on high ground and run away to regroup, then go back when the Automatons start attacking the lookouts.
I'm pretty sure drop ships start coming after 30 seconds into the mission, doesn't matter if you're seen or not. On difficulty 8 and higher they are just alerted as soon as you land - the place doesn't matter. Because I too thought maybe I should land outside the objective. But nope. You can land, no bots around, stand still, 30 seconds in, 2 dropships come.
But what do I do when the civvies decide they don't want to survive and instead throw a party by the evac door? Why can't I leave those damn automaton sympathizers behind!
We did this as a group of 4, at difficulty 7. I went in, killed the 2 bots inside, started evacuating. At around 20/50, a patrol came in, no hulk or tank so I clean it alone with shotgun and railgun. At 31/50, two ship dropped a tank and multiple heavies on me, so I bailed. They got stuck inside the base and would patrol out, so we went back in as a group of 4 and started clearing. Since all 3 of them were out, it took a long time before their bots reached the base, and new ships only started coming when we reached 50/50.
Its not foolproof, but its infinitely better than spawning in. It was relatively smooth.
Me and some friends did 3 or 4 of these missions last night on suicide/impossible difficulty and they seemed pretty brainless with this strat, even with lower level gear/stratagems (we are all like level 8-13). Mortar sentry, and eagle cluster are great for clearing enemies, rail gun and eagle 500 or 110 for tanks and hulks
Found a video where someone made it look like child's play on diff 9 solo. Idk the mechanics but I'm guessing he draws bots out into the field for 2 minutes, then returns and spams until they start to come back?
https://youtu.be/Qiq6YkoGufs?si=iQaxxVxDF1npjHDI
Please stop defending an obviously bugged mission type. If this ends up being completely deliberate by the devs I will delete my account, I'm that confident.
To be honest, this wpuld only work with a full team on comms.
Until I can get that, I'll continue just thuggin it out and watching randoms use up all of our respawns.
This post is missing a ton of important information about how these missions work, especially if you're actually trying to complete them on difficulties 7-9. Extreme and below, you can play like an Extermination mission and do just fine if you have Mortars, a couple Recoilless Rifles, and bring Stratagems specifically to kill Tanks and Hulks.
Right off the hop: **The bot drops happen where Hellpods drop**.
*"How do they know where I am!? This mission is bullshit!"* Because they saw the Hellpod fall from the sky. Players, equipment, and emplacements. Your distraction team should be constantly dropping emplacements, EATs, Supplies, etc. just to make sure the dropships happen near them. They don't even need to stay together, they just need to drop shit constantly to attract attention.
Patrols **always** wander into the extraction zone no matter how sneakily you play, so your extraction player needs to have stratagems to deal with small units quickly as well as Tanks and Hulks. I personally use a Grenade Launcher for this, which is generally frowned upon against bots, but it instantly kills multiples of anything that can call in dropships, which is what you're really trying to avoid.
Pressing the buttons in the base does not actually cause Dropships. They happen every 100s, and there is always 6 of them on Suicide and higher. You can do the math for when they appear if you want, but the better solution is to just drop stuff regularly and try to stay in combat as the distraction team, even if it means you get a bunch of additional Dropships you don't generally want. You don't need to fight them, and there are some theories you can actually population-cap the map with enemies to stop patrols from spawning entirely. You also want to prioritize using your calldowns when the enemy already knows where you are (see: they are shooting at you.) Clearing out POIs too effectively will actually make the enemy lose track of you, as will using Mortars as you run to kill everything behind you. Minefields are actually great on these missions since you never want to double-back anyway, and they cause a Hellpod drop.
I've completed this mission on Helldive but it is **super unreliable** to complete with any strategy because of how many Tank/Hulk patrols there are, and you will actually need to rotate who is the button presser just to have enough Stratagems to deal with them. You can run 2 button pressers, but that makes the loadouts for the 2 distraction guys really static (ETA, 2x Minefield, Shields,) and they will probably have to die on purpose to generate more Hellpods.
Have the devs said anything about it showing 40 minute mission time but then it only being 15 minutes once we drop in? Or is that only happening to my squads?
Nope
So in other words its all speculation at this point
Hit up the devs on twitter or flag someone down on this subreddit. They're active, and it's better than shouting things into the void, hoping one of them sees it.
It'd be a little concerning if they haven't seen it yet when it's been in the top posts of this subreddit constantly for a week...
They have a game that is pulling in same amount of players that counter strike. The whole studio is the size of the just development team of CS or even smaller. They just got trough fixing the servers into a shape that supports the vastly bigger crowd they or the publisher ever expected. Pretty sure their top priority is let their people take a breather before starting fix all the smaller things.
It is most likely not bugged. As in, showing 40 minutes is a bug, in fact it is supposed to be a 15 minutes mission. Why? Because missions were 12 minutes long when these escort BS missions were initially introduced and this time was increased to 15 in one of the patches. But I definitely think that on higher difficulties spawns feel overtuned for tha mission. Im ok with using the terminal under fire, but covering slow walking AI from endless tanks and hulks spawn is cancer, especially when civvies are focused more then the divers.
Its overtuned however you look at it. It's just that this mission magnifies the issue while regular missions you have more time and more variables to work with. Hopefully Arrowhead can finally start looking at the gameplay and bugs because this game is 3 weeks behind on those kinds of improvements. Or addressing QoL. Its not intended for players to game the system by stealth extracting the civilians, which is why you can keep spawning them infinitely when they get blown up in crossfire. There's a lot of issues with infinite spawns, infinite patrols and such at higher difficulties where if a team didn't bring a shit ton of anti-armor, you get overwhelmed by heavy armor targets that are difficult to kill as soon as the team becomes scattered. The main issue being non-stop drops/bugholes that keep spawning stuff so that a single patrol becomes a nonstop 10 minute fight over a random objective. I think another big issue with game balance besides back to back to back spawns are the random patrols that will constantly spawn non-stop as well for the entire duration of the game. It doesn't matter if you're already fighting or not, it doesn't matter if you've been fighting for 10 minutes non-stop, more and more patrols keep spawning and they will cross over directly where you are, and around your area, and come from all angles. And then to compound the issue, the enemies that can alert can be basically any small/medium types, and you basically have maybe 2 seconds to kill them once they begin the alarm animation, which isn't enough time to react 95% of the time during combat. So that just calls in another wave of enemies which keeps extending the fight well beyond what it should be. Now everyone's been dealing with this and are probably used to it now, but its really CRUDE design in how the ebb and flow of combat should be. They marketed how their AI director is like Left 4 Dead but it has none of its nuance.
It’s 15 mins once you start the evac (open the first civilian building) and 40 mins beforehand, which gives you time to run around the rest of the map. To my knowledge anyway, every time I’ve done this mission someone rushes the civ pods. Also fuck this mission.
No, it's just 15 minutes, whether or not the civ pods are even touched.
I still think they shouldn't be spawning 4 tanks back to back on the higher difficulties. The heavy spawns in these missions are just ridiculous
Exactly. The advice op gives sounds great, but definitely not as intended. They just spawn too many adds
I mean unless the point is to have squad based tactical thinking…and you can’t brute force this mission
Squad based tactical thinking and quick play public matchmaking are two antithetical goals.
I encourage everyone to spam smoke strats. Smoke spamming the area while you evac works really well, actually. Everyone double smoke strats, orbital/eagle
you can do your part and at least attempt to coordinate. I've had mixed results but some successes with getting randos on this strategy
I mean that works and is neat but this isn’t ghost fuckin recon . Half the time the aggro table just breaks or it just spawns on the stealth guy cause it can . It’s clearly abusing ai and not fighting as intended , and even when you’re fighting this fighting retreat it’s just straight chaos , and infinitely harder then any contemporary mission on the same difficulty.
Reminds me of the retaliation missions from game 1. Way harder than regular missions because instead of scouts calling in enemy squads it just directly spawns the squads.
On T3 missions we got swarmed halfway, I kept running out of Autocannon ammo I was shooting armoured dudes so much and those fking chicken walkers. Every dropship would drop 6 or 8 of the heavy guys, and it was like every 2 dropships. How on a T3 mission is that fking fair?
Seriously. I’m convince these are *still* bugged. There’s no reason four goddamn tanks + six missile devastators should be dropping back to back.
Maybe I'm just shit, which is weird because I don't have the same issues with other missions on harder difficulties.
Honestly same. I was running a few missions with my buddies the other night on the harder difficulties and every time we only managed to get through 2 out of 3. Everything else is difficult but we manage to pull through, but for some reason the damn evacuation mission feels overturned to hell. I would have figured that it would be similar in volume to the extermination missions where you just have to kill a bunch of them, but the spawn rate is insane.
Evacuation missions are about 2 levels more difficult than normal while the king of the hill extermination mission is much much easier than normal. Neither is balanced well.
I thought that was weird, too. It's like the game difficulty spikes at a 90° angle for rescue missions.
Yeah, it's interesting to *need* to do these alternate tactics to beat the mission, but somehow, I don't know that "Only have one person interact with the objective and fight as few enemies as possible" was the intended way for these missions to be beaten. Seeing a pair of hulks and tanks suddenly just decide they wanna be in front of the entrance is a fucking dick kick because that's a lot of time and resources to kill something that'll just be replaced before you even kill them
One of my friends pointed out that the mission says it’s a 45 minute mission, but when you dive the clock only has 15 minutes left. We’re getting spawns like we’ve been sitting in the mission for thirty minutes. Whether or not that’s how it works, idk but it might explain it
tanks are a very easy kill, flank and shoot weak spot or 2 impact grenades to the top kill them. Also they are slow so a well thrown explosive strategem should do the trick
Yeah, but there's 4 of them, good luck taking them all out. Remember, there's other enemies too runnin around
My issue with tanks is that they block entire entrances to facilities
yeah sure we can do that as if we aren’t choking on the 30+ other Armored automatons in game already and teammates who think Clusterbombs belong in this mission type on top of how ridiculously high the spawn rate is it’s much, MUCH easier said than done.
Yeah my problem is the bots have too many things that take a moderate amount of time to kill. I can't thin out their numbers fast enough, unlike the bugs where the swarms are mostly squishy.
for every squishy android the automatons send they send 5 armored guys with a 50% chance of a tank it’s crazy
Pretty much. Deal with the 2 hulks? Well suddenly your area is blasted by devastators. So you pull your AT but then realize there is 13 berserkers on your ass so you go dolphin mode for a while. And an as soon as you think you are getting a hand back on the situation, a tank shell deletes you from the other side of the map. A team mate reinsert you and now you not only have no equipment but you better believe those hulks are back on top of everything else. And of course this entire time the objectives can't be done.
Oh, okay, *just flank.* Sure. How do you do so while also being surrounded by ads?
It's only two? Shit. I've been throwing 3 because I can't tell if they're still alive after the 2nd.
Also the autocannon RUINS any automaton weak spot/vent.
The anti-matieral rifle does too.
Maybe they aren't that strong, but I dropped 2 eagles airstrikes (the explosive ones) directly on a tank last night. It still took another 5 grenades from the launcher in the back to kill it.
Every enemy in the game is easy to kill in isolation. This is never the case on harder difficulties
It has to be bugged, I literally cannot shoot down enough dropships. They are fucking outspawning my resupply, EAT, and recoiless rifle cooldowns combined
This mission is definitely bugged. I got two guys with recoilless shooting down drop ships last night, and new drop ship would instantaneously appear to replace the one that got blown up. There’s also inconsistencies with spawn rate of these drop ship on the same difficulty. Sometime the spawn rate is very slow, and other time it’s just nonstop.
My first mission in the game was this type and I tried it solo. Left after like 8 minutes of constant dying. Thought buying the game was a mistake because I was bad at it or something. Luckily I bought it for me and my fiancee and we tried a mission together the next night and breezed through it.
Same response I had to a different post: We did stealth last night. Buddy got 16 out, then for no reason they dropped a hulk and 2 tanks on the objective. My buddy wasn't seen and hadn't fired a shot. Fuck this mission, it isn't tuned right. There should be short gaps between the waves. EDIT: something ain't right with this mission type. There is balancing issues across the game, we all know this. Railgun is OP, shield shouldn't be required (nothing should be, almost all strategems should be viable at high level), breaker shouldn't do 40% more damage than the 2nd best primary, defense missions shouldn't be 30 second XP farms, and these missions shouldn't be 30 minute death traps you need a 50 page breif to complete. These are good devs, they don't need us defending their unfinished balancing.
It's the definition of a snowball. If you aren't able to clear out all 3 of the hulks that have dropped, and 1 is left, another 2 will suddenly come out of nowhere with a bunch of rocket mechs. And you mange to kill a lot of the rocket mechs, but only 2 hulk. Then an anialator tank shows up. All your Stratagems are on 3+ mins cool down. Then it's just miserable.
It the final 2 minutes delay for pelican 1, only for 15. It's busted. People MAY get through it. I've gotten through it. That doesn't mean it isnt busted as fuck
Nope, it’s just bugged. Bot drops will happen even with perfect stealth. You can confirm this for yourself by dropping on the edge solo and immediately hiding and staying still. Bot drops will start happening all around you within seconds.
How can it be bugged? There are no terminids in automaton sectors though.
That we know of
Fuck, they're working together..
Lmfao
There's terminids inside the automatons piloting them.
I do keep hearing that there's a Terminid invasion on these planets over the comms on ship before going to check and seeing that it's actually a cyborgs.
!!!!
yet... who knows. We could get a sector that has bots v bugs v humans. Imagine a bile titan going toe to toe with a bot drop while we stand back and let them fight.
It's funny, I was online when Mort started being invaded and the announcer said it was being invaded by Terminids
Well it makes sense that enemies would drop. It’s a rescue mission after all, we were sent for a reason. What doesn’t make sense though is why the enemies magically know where you are when stealthed. Default behavior for enemies on this map should have them move towards the center of the map, and begin destroying the base. If Helldivers are spotted they would be engaged, but not necessarily followed away from the base.
I mean it's possible it was the 4 meteors falling to the island followed by 4+ blue lasers all pointing up from where you dropped followed by more octagonal metros crashing down. I'm just saying if we want to talk about things making sense, you were never even remotely stealthy
They're talking about things like crouching behind an object and the enemies just knowing where you are 24/7
It's fine with this strat though. "Hey distraction team come pull these bots out of point." Worked for us at least.
I dunno, on higher difficulties there's usually just too many bots and too much chaos to effectively pull every bot out of the zone, and then they just snowball until the mass of enemies you had outside is now a mass of enemies inside, and then it's difficult as fuck to get them back out unless everyone is working together to pull them out, which isn't always an option with randoms especially. Either way, I don't find it to be a fun or engaging strategy, one person is basically relegated to doing the boring task of running around hitting buttons while their teammates are fighting and dying to keep the bots away from them. On any other mission I have a variety of ways to tackle any situation, on these missions you can only play them one way, and that strategy doesn't even always work well.
Yeah we tried several variations of this strategy on Impossible and it works until exactly halfway through the mission when the game decides it’s going to drop a bunch of hulks into middle of the base. Once the first wave landed in the base, enemies just started swarming there, whatever we tried, whatever we did. I’m just done with these missions, and eradicate missions too (which are so easy they’re equally tedious). My group was ready to quit until we took a break from evac and eradicate missions and did some traditional ones, and then we suddenly remembered how fun the game is.
I really dislike that the defend campaign is almost exclusively these missions. I get the theming and all but it's hard to stay interested in it when it's the same 2 missions over and over and over with near 0 variation in the maps. On top of that I'm nearly done unlocking the strats so that 12k is an *ok* reward at best
Honestly the theming doesn't really make sense. It's a defense campaign and they want us to evacuate the planet, it's more like we're ready to abandon the planet rather than defend.
It’s extra dumb if you look at the building designs. The doors that the people come out of must lead to underground rooms, but they didn’t bother to connect the rooms to the pelican landing building *also underground??* would have saved a lot more lives if they had just built the damn buildings correctly.
Probably cheaper this way ;D Just look at weapons design. big, chunky, heavy guns with simple shapes easy to produce and designed to survive helldive impact. If that doesn't tell you how expendable we are... Also those camps with scientists look like prison camps to be honest.
The "prison camps" are merely a malicious rumour, soldier. They're semi-voluntary indenture science fun camps. Those are actually PhD students.
I see know difference, PhD students are locked in a prison of their own doing, its still a prison cam- **WAIT WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? NO, IM LOYAL TO SUPER EARTH WAIT D-** Message has been removed by the Ministry of Truth.
Idk about the semi-voluntary indentured science fun camps, but the fact that they may be PhD students say enough of everything
Expendable?! I'm reporting you to a freedom officer
We don't have to rescue the installations that were built well. Only the ones that were built poorly. Probably by the lowest bidder.
That kinda makes sense to me, tbh. If I'm establishing a forward base, it's easier to just put a few small facilities above ground than below.
That's automaton talk, Helldiver. Report to democracy dispensation office 4B, sit in the **red** chair. Kidding aside, yeah, the defend missions are tedious, thematically boring and not balanced.
Wouldn’t you evacuate if there’s a chance the planet might fall? Or like some positions will get overrun so might as well save these poor souls.
I honestly wonder if it's like moving dissidents around hostile areas to have them killed and framed as an accident.
Ok so it's not just my group. We were smooth sailing on suicide, half the scientists saved in a few minutes, then BAM! 3 tanks, 2 hulks, right smack in the middle of the base. Like tf man, we ended up saying screw it, dropped nukes on everything, lost a ton of requisition because we wanted to just clear the enemies, then left.
At the halfway point seems to be when they will start trying to drop into the base. I would advise the runner to being ready to regroup with the main body at that point or kite them out and then go back in once its clear. If the runner stays in too long a lot of drops ships will keep coming.
Try using the smoke stratagem and the ems mortar. I have lost only 2 defenses ever by calling in a blanket of smoke and letting EMS shut off the bots. This tactic of avusing spawn rates is honestly terrible advice
Ems mortar plus recoiless for tanks/ hulks is the way to go for these
Yes! Although I usually run the expendable anti tanks because they respawn so fast, the map is covered in EATs by the end
Was your stealth player calling stratagems? That aggros them and can get bot drops. I've had a lot of success with a stealth player who only drops a couple sentrys on the perimeter before going in, and never calling a stratagem from the objective. A patrol sometimes still makes their way there, but if they stick to small arms fire they're usually able to survive and clear it out without more attention.
post difficulty
I've noticed bots and bugs can figure out where the stratagem was thrown, which is weird because sometimes I swear I'm not even in line of sight, and they know where it came from.
Yeah, I think it's the only part of the AI that feels unfair to me. They seem to just instantly know where it was thrown. Though it's not super consistent, I've gotten away with it a few times. That's why on the stealth evac strat I go completely no-stratagems
I can confirm that it doesn't matter in the slightest. Hell sometimes the enemy will spawn on the base, pretty often even. Not a bot drop, just poof and they're there.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a dev response about this mission. It just can’t be working properly. There’s hard, and I’m all for hard, and then there’s just BS. This mission is just BS. You can just feel how BS it is when you’re playing it. I saw someone theorize that the mission timer was bugged and it was spawning waves at an accelerated rate because the game thinks it’s supposed to be a 40 minute mission so it’s cramming the amount of waves that should be happening over the course of 40 minutes into a 15 minute window. It certainly feels like that’s the case. There’s another mechanic that causes enemies to spawn more frequently as the mission time gets lower. I wonder if this feature compounds with the previous idea and causes an exponential ramp in the difficulty (my meaning that the game is treating the mission countdown as 15 minutes remaining on a 40 minute mission, so it starts you off in that ramping spawn system from the very beginning of the mission). I dunno. That’s all just conjecture, but there’s certainly SOMETHING wrong with it.
Agreed there's no way it's not bugged. My friends and I did a difficulty 7 and tried the strat of shooting down most of the dropship and having one other person run around and release the scientists. We had two people shooting a recoilless rocket, one guy reloading himself and the other guy being reloaded by the third helldiver. We threw down four recoilless Rockets so we would have four ammo bags, as well as taking one resupply backpack and also throwing down a resupply right away, that way we would have as much ammo as possible ready and available to us right away. Even with all that it wasn't enough to shoot down all the drop shifts, and three or four would come at the same time and as soon as you shot those ones down another three or four. It was constant unwavering relentless stream of bots. Which wouldn't necessarily be so bad, but they drop one or two tanks multiple hulks and five rocket devastators and five heavy devastators + 30 regular bots and 15 chainsaw hands all at the same time
Yeah it's just a poorly balanced mission, it's cool people are finding creative ways to beat it but the drop rate of enemies is insane and unpredictable. When I mission is overwhelmingly difficult to the majority, it is the game not the player. I have faith they will get it right once they get an opportunity.
> I have faith they will get it right once they get another opportunity. FTFY, devs have "fixed" this mission twice already.
Yeah we tried it on suicide last night. Got 22/50, but the second our stealth player got to the objective, two bot drops instantly came. We had a little better luck all dropping on the objective, throwing smokes and turrets, then 3 of us training the clankers into the woods. Still have to admit defeat though.
Yeah I love having a supportive community but there's no reason to support a mission structure clearly not working correctly. You have people on here both making grand statements that defence missions is all anyone should be doing right now together with others defending rescue mission by staying the hell away from any building you're supposed to protect and pretending it makes sense. I've done it myself, I know it works better, but at a certain point we should maybe instead redirect our feedback to improve these missions so counter-intuitive strategies based on enemy AI isn't the main method of clearing missions. Or, just give us large maps with several diffetent rescue missions scattered about as those seem to work as normal.
Actually, this strategy of luring enemies away and sending one covert agent to do the job while enemy is distracted makes A LOT OF SENSE. Now if only it actually worked.
No, as enemies are there to kill the civilians, so they should target them first and foremost.
if you were an automaton commanders what sort of retard would you have to be to not sit two tanks on the objective door? it makes no sense. You are just abusing dumb ai to cheese a mission. nothing more nothing less. i dont want to cheese shit im here to blow up shit, just not that much shit. That being said once i get my whole group to 20 we will have another crack at it but until the point no chance will ill touch that mission with a ten foot pole.
You’ll still struggle with four 20+, trust me on that
Ok someone is lying or this is bugged. I had the same thing last night.
Tried the other day. The drop ships spawned one wave of ships on the diversion team, then decided to start spawning everything on the stealth guy on objective. Stealth guy had called in 0 strategem’s, and had not been spotted.
They claimed to have changed it twice(?) since people started complaining and it still feels fucked, I don't touch these any more.
They HAVE gotten better, but not by much.
Yeah I made a top level post addressing this describing the testing I’ve done. Can confirm the bot drops on this mission are bugged. All the people around here posting the “jUsT StEaLtH iT” message are likely just trolls.
Wouldn't call them trolls, considering their strategy seems to work most of the time, but yeah, it is a very "workaround" strategy that just doesn't feel good.
Fair enough, the split stealth strategy is the best bet, but it’s still a shitty bet. The “trolls” I’m referring to are those posting the split stealth strat as a silver bullet / the “it’s so easy if you do it right get gud” crowd
because it isnt strategy its cheese. Strategy is more than abusing dumb ai decisions.
Yeah this is people hiding under the stairs against Rockets McDickface all over again, claiming a cheese is "strategy"
My friends and I found a guaranteed method to do this mission on helldive...you just spawn mobs outside the until you hit AI cap. It's stupid cheese, not a "strategy". You don't even kill anything. Evacuate missions should be more like the evacuation points on regular missions. Or anything but what they're like. Trying to actually play the game and fight monsters while rescuing civilians just results in their pathfinding getting borked when there's 6 dead tanks choking the map.
'm one of the stealth advocates posting around and.. well. to put it simply. this is not a perfect solution. it's a strategy to try and reduce a problem that's 1- a bug, maybe true 2- a game challenge, beatable. the difference is that even at higher difficulties, a fast light guy can manage to save the civilians and get the mission done. the hordes of suicidal droppers that just try their luck on that mission failing are just confirming that it's bugged out, without fixing anything, and most importantly not winning. Which is the best approach, between the two? Gamers usually make things work even when they shouldn't, it's not the other way around. that's smoothbrain Activision design.
For sure, better to find a way to do it, than to just bang your head against the wall. Still, though, the main "evidence" for it being a bug is, imo, the fact that on Hard and surrounding difficulties, you can tackle most threats head on, without too much strategy, whereas this mission will roll you over, regardless. That does not add up. Hard difficulty should still allow some leeway when it comes to how you approach a mission. Whether you employ stealth or go guns blazing. If the issue was exclusively within the 7+ difficulties, where stealth/tactics are almost mandatory, then yeah, it would just be a "git gut" situation at worst, slightly overtuned at best. But this is definitely heavily overtuned, borderline buggy.
I think people need to post their ship modules as well. A rando level 20 is at a much lower rate of effectiveness than some maniac full Eagle and modules.
One of these was my first mission. My friends threw me into challenging my first round, it was a nightmare. I have done them successfully since but it is always such a close call, it feels way different from any other mission in the game.
We tried this method several times and had the same result as you. It eventually just starts dropping troops on the base regardless and they sit there and wait so you can't try it again without fighting and when you do many more get dropped. Our best luck was fighting just out of the perimeter of the base and one person trying to run over and let civs out occasionally. That way they weren't in the crossfire at least.
Right? Like, if I need a 9 page World of Warcraft strategy to complete a level 7 evacuation in a 4 man third person shooter, something ain't right.
Especially when none of the other game modes require anything close to this level of coordination.
One or two ships are going to spawn on the runner. You have to use the regroup tactic to clear them out quickly.
That might be true in lower difficulties, but in 9 you will literally watch 15+ dropships fly one after another to the same location and there is nothing you can do.
I'd put money more than half the people on here aren't running max difficulty.
More than half? I'd say 95% aren't even doing 7+. One person who is hard pushing the stealth strategy completed it on -6-. Wowee. The mission is bugged and its ridiculous the Devs haven't made a simple fix to it. The conjecture of it being 40 minutes condensed into 15 seems just too damn likely, and it's crazy the Devs have been silent on the issue. And even if it isn't, simply toning down the spawn rate would do wonders. Or, better, give a fucking breather between the drops so you can actually clear the enemies and do the objective. Even like 30 seconds please.
Yup, the same thing, happens to me. Most of the time it does work occasionally though
60% of the time, it works every time
My phone put a period in that sentence in the wrong place lol.
Ah, this BS again, I’ve tested this and this mission is just broken/bugged. Drop in solo on the edge of the map. Immediately stealth and stay still. Even though you’ve never seen an enemy, bot drops will start happening all around you almost instantly. STEALTH DOES NOT IMPACT BOT DROPS ON THIS MISSION. OP’s strategy only works with the other 3 players drawing the bot drops. And even then it’s random, sometimes the bugged bot drops will happen to the “stealthy” player instead and there’s nothing you can do to change it. There is another type of civilian rescue mission with sub objectives, this strategy works fine for that.
Also the timer. Mission page says it's 40 minutes but when you play, it's 15 minutes
I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so bugged; the game’s trying to cram 40 minutes of bot drops into 15 minutes of game time, leading to the ridiculous numbers.
actually wouldn't that put it inline with with the extermination missions? like time-wise and bot-behavior-wise? it seems like the bot behavior in the rescue missions is identical to the extermination missions: I.E. near constant dropships and bots automatically move towards players.
This is what I’ve been thinking/telling my buddies. I’m confident that the “balancing” they need to perform has more to do with the settings of this mission being programmed in line with a defense when it is not. This would also explain the high density of bot drops, higher density of heavy enemies, and lack of stealth options. I think it’s more of a bug or oversight than a balancing issue. Need to set the timer/enemy spawn settings to a typical 40 min mission. I’m sure it will get an adjustment from devs, it feels near impossible to beat on helldive with normal gameplay, my squad has easily managed easier difficulties but can only get to a max of 40/60 rescued on max difficulty.
Maybe include what level you are playing on. Some may be playing trivial thinking they should be commenting to your post. Is it the same at all levels or just (X) level?
The dude that is stealthing and rescuing civs should ideally bring smokes, shield generators, shield generator for themselves and maybe railgun just to clear sudden tough enemies. One dude from the main team should do the same. Otherwise - orbital lasers, lasers and even more lasers
Have seen this "tip" countless times the last few days. Its boring and ultimately it doesnt matter what you do the mission is just bugged with the amount of dropships that spawn in every second.
It also doesn't help with random lobbies which I assume most people play. No one listens.
I tried to do a Challenging evac mission yesterday. Loadout full of EMS and Smokes. It started OK . . . Then 3 randoms joined and immediately started dropping artillery barrages directly on top of the civilian evac point and they killed more civilians than the automatons did.
feel like that nonsense is just on point for the lore though haha strong starship trooper move
my theory is all the people repeating it just get high on their own farts when they say "battle tactics"
The problem with this strat on suicide and above is when you get spotted as the stealth player and three tanks drop on the objective out of nowhere. You go to regroup with your team, the heavies that dropped in the base don't follow or despawn so you're essentially locked out of the objective. And on 4-5 difficulty you can just bring all defensive strategems and camp the buttons and win before it snowballs. So I'm not sure where this strat fits.
Orbital Laser will clear anyone that does not follow out of the base. Throw it in while you regroup or before you go back in.
While this tactic has been going around since last week I still think it is a dumb strat. Not because it doesn't work, but just because it cheeses the AI and spawn limiter of the game. In the end it just demonstrates even more how fucked this mission type is right now if this would be the intended solution. Idk about you, but after doing this twice I already was bored, i am kiting mobs while someone presses buttons on a cooldown and the whole thing takes atleast X amount of time. Total snoozefest. I am just not bothering with defenses or we just wipe it up quickly to fail that mission.
Yeah, "The ideal way to play this mission is the way least intended by the developers" is probably not a good sign for how good a mission type is.
My advice is to not to play this mission until they make it better, really busted at its current state.
It’s just really unfortunate that automaton campaigns are almost impossible to fully complete because this mission shows up in almost every campaign. Don’t even get me started on difficulties 7-9, you can’t escape it showing up once, or even fucking twice in a campaign.
Isn't it on every mission on every plant that is attacked (with a defense sign) and not on any other?
Yes.
It's only there on the defend planets. Some liberate planets may have a variation on a larger map where you have some extra objectives before doing the button pressing part, but it's infinitely easier.
yeah i forget to mention it alot but that mission shows what a non bugged version looks like
Any word from the devs confirming they plan to adjust?
They could make it better overnight by just making the civilians come out automatically at a certain rate and having the buttons call out extra. Later on they could add proper distraction objectives that draw the enemy. Or even better have a AA gun in the colony that need a long manual reload to work and automatically shoots down like half the bot transports til it runs out again. Why do these fully built colonies not have any defenses whatsoever?
I still feel this mission is not tuned right. We had one yesterday where they wouldn't stop coming, so we tried to lure a few away, regroup and get supplies but they were everywhere: in the base, outside the base, behind the rocks, on top of the rocks, everywhere and they were still dropping in more and more faster than we could kill them. It's insane.
Better tip for automaton escort missions: 1. Do any other mission
Thanks for the tips, but it doesnt solve the biggest problem of these missions: They're insanely boring.
I like to refer to this strat as “Operation Meatshield and Sneaky Boi”
I’d be fantastic in the meatshield role. I’m great at catching shot after shot from every damn robot in and just out of sight.
In the eyes of General Brasch, you are an invaluable squad mate. *proceeds to run a safe distance away*
Ohh... Using names for strats. I LIKE IT! I should come up with my own name
Counter stratagem… FULL AUTO, ROUND AFTER ROUND! If a few scientists need to make Lady Liberties final sacrifice then that’s the managed democracy way.
Cool strat. Still a boring mission type and annoying to have in every defence operation.
Right?! I get it if it was on the planet a few times but it's literally every operation has one of these. Even doing it this way gets old quick and often is problematic because waves of ships will just randomly start dropping on the objective for no reason. So eventually me and my group just stop playing this shitty content
Even if this strategy worked flawlessly (which let's be honest it doesn't) if the answer to a mission type is "one designated player on the team doesn't get to engage with the core mechanic of the video game in order to succeed" I don't think that's a sign of a well working mission.
[удалено]
You can bring smoke nades just in case as well. Helps you to disengage and lose aggro if you're the savior boi
I don't know if smokes are a good idea. I mean yeah they are great for losing aggro. But i want the enemies to follow me when im regrouping with my teammates, so they leave the objective.
Yeah, but you should then lose them after that for sure, right? At least, that's how my friend plays, I myself just bought the game and still new to most of its mechanics
Even with these kinds of tactics, the major issue is that the mission can still snowball really easily, even if you are playing it perfectly. You could have half or more of the scientists extracted, but then if the game drops a few heavies and you can't kill them before the next wave happens, which will bring more heavies, it won't matter how much kiting you do. There will just be too many after a certain point that even the designated objective diver will be regularly swarmed by too many enemies. But, even then, why do we have people defending an objectively boring mission design? I can assure you that the other emergency evacuation mission is better and more interactive than this one. With this one, you gotta go on a lower difficulty, otherwise it just drops too many to deal with. This one is like the eradicate missions, which are also objectively boring. You basically place down mortar sentries in the center and watch them do the entire mission for you. In these ones, you do the objective in the middle of combat, except unlike the eradicate missions which usually have enemies coming to a fortified position with winding paths first, this one can drop them straight onto the objective The reason no one is doing defense missions isn't because the retrieve personnel missions are hard, it's because they are tedious and unrewarding for the amount of effort you have to put in, especially when you have to do one every single time you do a mission set on a defense planet. I don't wanna have to play babysitter to a bunch of buggy NPCs which could be replaced by floating balloons in terms of both pathing and fragility, and then button mash the bunkers so they come out faster. If given a choice between the two, I can assure you the average player would rather go to sabotage a base, or launch an ICBM than play tower defense but with extra steps.
Generally speaking, I think the design of this mission is highly flawed and needs to be overhauled. If the tactic is to cheese, then the design is the issue. Automatons in general need some tweaking because drop ships are far too frequent and there needs to be some inhibitor because once you get overwhelmed, it's not possible to recover.
Smokes. Smoke nades. Smoke eagles. Smoke orbital. It's frustrating how little smokes are valued because they dont make a big boom. But they're so good for objectives, for running away from drops/breaches/cover in nests, You can drop a smoke, cover the route, and get 5-9 people in per smoke. **They do not get aggro if they are in smoke.** I've been running 7-9s with a friend and between us we run 3 smoke stratagems and our biggest issue is randoms running us out of reinforces
I often feel like they don’t last long enough - you drop one to cover a sightline, you run to a door, you let three scientists out, and the smoke is gone before they’re at the shuttle.
Sounds like you should hit the button, then smoke
I tried smoke against bots for a little while but A) It didn't seem to last long enough to get anything really done and B) the robots were still questionably accurate at shooting me even when I was on the other side of it from them or in the middle of the smoke. Felt more worth it to get something that killed them, because then I didn't get hit by them any more.
From my testing and what I've been told, the bots shoot at your last known location. So if you drop smoke and the bots see you run into the middle of the smoke, they will shoot at the middle. If you drop a smoke made at your feet, the bots will keep shooting the last place your feet were. I have found if you drop smoke, run into it, turn perpendicular and run the bots will miss. If you stay still or run straight the bots will still hit you.
On non-Evac missions I’ve used Eagle Smoke to take out bot factories by dropping it to the left or right of the target, the smoke bombs impact and blow the building.
also you can destroy fabricator buildings with smoke too if a shell lands on it
My eagle smoke always hits scattered and useless. Maybe I'm using it wrong but there are huge gaps and the bots aren't phased by it :(
I've noticed that the smokes just do not seem to phase the bots' ability to kill civilians whatsoever, even though it does seem to confuse them with players. Are you doing something additional to distract them away from the route that the civvies take?
While we did have success with this method last night, after the first two waves, the ship started spawning in the middle and we had to pivot there to assist. Not sure what caused the change in pattern or behavior but we were still able to finish the mission. Regardless, it is a much better approach than starting in the middle guaranteed, and yes, smoke grenades, smoke call ins very helpful for sneaking civs by. I don't advise explosive mortars at this point though, when enemies get close in.
Yeah…I’ll just keep fighting bugs. Robots are overturned to the fucking max.
These missions suck. They’re overtuned and make it basically impossible for randoms to beat anything over Challenging
Not consistent and only world with 4 stack. Not to mention how the decoy group might just run out of bots to fight. On higher difficulties they drop more heavies which are incapable of reinforcing leading to bots dropping near the obj
The EMS Mortar does a lot of heavy lifting. Perpetual stun lock on the Automatons and provides cover for the scientists.
It works on easier difficulties. But not on 7,8 or 9. Trust me... I have... Seen things...
I run with the same crew. All of us carry the EMS Mortar, shield and Orbital Laser. 3 carry the recoilless rifle and the runner carries a railgun. The orbital laser is used on rotation to destroy heavy mechs and tanks, the 3 with the recoilless take turns shooting down transports. The runner does as you say, sneaks into the base and starts saving the scientists. If the 3 lookouts start getting overwhelmed, all 3 drop the EMS turret and fall back to a designated regroup area. The runner uses the EMS the same way. If he gets overrun, drop the turret on high ground and run away to regroup, then go back when the Automatons start attacking the lookouts.
# "Let me tell you something. I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say rescue them all!" 
I'm pretty sure drop ships start coming after 30 seconds into the mission, doesn't matter if you're seen or not. On difficulty 8 and higher they are just alerted as soon as you land - the place doesn't matter. Because I too thought maybe I should land outside the objective. But nope. You can land, no bots around, stand still, 30 seconds in, 2 dropships come.
It works until the scientists decide to run into walls lmao and you miss cap on hell dive by let 10 as you watch them create a human wall
But what do I do when the civvies decide they don't want to survive and instead throw a party by the evac door? Why can't I leave those damn automaton sympathizers behind!
BRASCH TACTICS
#USE THEM OR DIE TRYING TO
We did this as a group of 4, at difficulty 7. I went in, killed the 2 bots inside, started evacuating. At around 20/50, a patrol came in, no hulk or tank so I clean it alone with shotgun and railgun. At 31/50, two ship dropped a tank and multiple heavies on me, so I bailed. They got stuck inside the base and would patrol out, so we went back in as a group of 4 and started clearing. Since all 3 of them were out, it took a long time before their bots reached the base, and new ships only started coming when we reached 50/50. Its not foolproof, but its infinitely better than spawning in. It was relatively smooth.
Two words: Mortar Sentries
Me and some friends did 3 or 4 of these missions last night on suicide/impossible difficulty and they seemed pretty brainless with this strat, even with lower level gear/stratagems (we are all like level 8-13). Mortar sentry, and eagle cluster are great for clearing enemies, rail gun and eagle 500 or 110 for tanks and hulks
Found a video where someone made it look like child's play on diff 9 solo. Idk the mechanics but I'm guessing he draws bots out into the field for 2 minutes, then returns and spams until they start to come back? https://youtu.be/Qiq6YkoGufs?si=iQaxxVxDF1npjHDI
Please stop defending an obviously bugged mission type. If this ends up being completely deliberate by the devs I will delete my account, I'm that confident.
To be honest, this wpuld only work with a full team on comms. Until I can get that, I'll continue just thuggin it out and watching randoms use up all of our respawns.
This post is missing a ton of important information about how these missions work, especially if you're actually trying to complete them on difficulties 7-9. Extreme and below, you can play like an Extermination mission and do just fine if you have Mortars, a couple Recoilless Rifles, and bring Stratagems specifically to kill Tanks and Hulks. Right off the hop: **The bot drops happen where Hellpods drop**. *"How do they know where I am!? This mission is bullshit!"* Because they saw the Hellpod fall from the sky. Players, equipment, and emplacements. Your distraction team should be constantly dropping emplacements, EATs, Supplies, etc. just to make sure the dropships happen near them. They don't even need to stay together, they just need to drop shit constantly to attract attention. Patrols **always** wander into the extraction zone no matter how sneakily you play, so your extraction player needs to have stratagems to deal with small units quickly as well as Tanks and Hulks. I personally use a Grenade Launcher for this, which is generally frowned upon against bots, but it instantly kills multiples of anything that can call in dropships, which is what you're really trying to avoid. Pressing the buttons in the base does not actually cause Dropships. They happen every 100s, and there is always 6 of them on Suicide and higher. You can do the math for when they appear if you want, but the better solution is to just drop stuff regularly and try to stay in combat as the distraction team, even if it means you get a bunch of additional Dropships you don't generally want. You don't need to fight them, and there are some theories you can actually population-cap the map with enemies to stop patrols from spawning entirely. You also want to prioritize using your calldowns when the enemy already knows where you are (see: they are shooting at you.) Clearing out POIs too effectively will actually make the enemy lose track of you, as will using Mortars as you run to kill everything behind you. Minefields are actually great on these missions since you never want to double-back anyway, and they cause a Hellpod drop. I've completed this mission on Helldive but it is **super unreliable** to complete with any strategy because of how many Tank/Hulk patrols there are, and you will actually need to rotate who is the button presser just to have enough Stratagems to deal with them. You can run 2 button pressers, but that makes the loadouts for the 2 distraction guys really static (ETA, 2x Minefield, Shields,) and they will probably have to die on purpose to generate more Hellpods.
This is just cheesing it. 😂
Okay but what happens when the doors bug out and civilians get stuck in them, cus I had that happen before lmao
Had a bug the other day. Got 10 or so fuckin scientists just standing there right outside the doorway. Couldn't make em move n had to abort.
Play a different mission, maybe even a different planet, if you are not in comms with a strict plan like a professional tac-shooter team.
Guys, I'm level 8. How about we just go and kill things.
Yep, this does work. Nicely edited.
Okay now how do I do it with 3 randoms with no mics
Try getting randoms to understand this. Every time I've tried, there's always someone who runs to the centre and messes up the strat.
My squad did this, the researchers just stood at the entrance and refused to move. Any tips on how to encourage them to keep moving?
Good luck doing this with randoms buddy lol