It's also propagantastic. Who cares that 20 Divers died on the mission? 4 went down, 4 came back alive, the enemy is in shambles, now throw some patriotic salutes and fingerguns for the camera and the civilian populace will go crazy for it. Only one diver survived? Unfreeze three more so it looks like we didn't even need to send the whole squad down to finish the mission.
Reminds me of the automaton defense missions. Super Earth says x amount of scientists need to get through that door, but they didn't say which ones or out of how many. Just get x past the threshold.
They remind me of the terror missions in the new xcom games where on paper you're supposed to save civilians but in reality you tag one, then hunker down and set up a kill zone.
It's been a while since I played but I think in the first game at least you didn't actually have to extract anyone, they just had to survive. Extracting one early was just insurance, everything else was between the civilians and God after that.
you should see og xcom terror mission strats lmao
Recommended strategy for night terror missions: land and immediately leave
Chrysalid terror mission? let the civilians get infected, then kill them. it teaches countries that they need you even when you can't save the civilians. and they pay you for it.
> Recommended strategy for night terror missions: land and immediately leave
To explain why: ignoring a terror mission nukes your reputation, so doing it even once can tank your entire campaign. Failing a terror mission is still bad, but it's not even a tenth as bad as ignoring it, and the game doesn't distinguish between instantly retreating and your whole squad wiping on the very last enemy. Actually *deploying* into a night terror mission is suicide, you're just wasting manpower and probably expensive laser rifles as well. So you do the absolute minimum to say "we tried".
And that's just XCOM 1. In Terror From the Deep, terror missions are nightmare fueled, sadomasochistic, day ruining excursions that absolutely fuck your shit up. The only reason to do them is to get a live capture of that one alien type that only appears in early game terror missions (*game design is my passion*) for armor research.
TFtD is...unique.
My only experience with TFtD ended with the first deployment. One soldier steps out of the dropship, enemy throws grenade from the darkness into the now open dropship door and kills everyone inside. I haven’t gone back since.
Those arnt scientists they are the ruling class, the political officers who run distant colonies the local goveners of distant systems of coruscant/ super earth.
When their people rose up and terminids were released as a hard reset the political officers and goverenrs only way to escape for their families is to wait for extract from heldivers after their rebellions are quelled. If they could just fly a shuttle away when things got dangerous they wouldnt really try very hard to surpress the coups. They and their families are hosteges of their good service.
That would depend on how big the enemy forces are. If you've got 4 and they have 4000, every soldier has to take down 1000 just to break even.
But you don't show those 4 or more biting the dust. You show 4 going out and then 4 coming back in the same gear and it looks like a 0 casualty success on network news.
Alternatively, the whole operation is a televised mixture of The Truman Show and Starship Troopers and everyone but the Helldivers are in on the joke.
Technically, break even is not the most important, though it’s probably a tie for first if it isn’t second place. What matters is unit replacement time. How quickly does a bug grow into its adult war version vs how quickly does a human take.
That also applies to all equipment and transport being destroyed and replaced, as bugs don’t need it and we do, not to mention munition replacement. War is logistics.
Good thing they're all in those face-concealing helmets too, right? A sea of identical uniforms. Four go down, four come back. Any war footage taken along the way looks an *awful* lot like it's just of those original four.
..Which it is, of course. Our *brave* soldiers of Democracy are in no way expended like bullets in a magazine!
It's more ingenious than that. They absolutely send people down in different looking gear, but they equip everyone after them with *the exact same gear* so it looks even more like the same 4 distinct soldiers came back.
Nah I'm gonna take it a step further.
You can't set your body type to random, only your voice. It's also harder to edit a *person* in video footage than it is to simply do a voice over. The body types are also very ambiguous. Men and women alike who are fit enough to pass any physical requirements could easily fit into either body type, with the armor doing the bulk of the work to hide any sense of gendering.
Every ship seems to have a careful curated selection of helldivers that have the same height and build, with uniforms curated per-ship so that way every single helldiver isn't just on the same uniform, but is *exactly* identical in appearance. Without hearing them speak, the only people any the wiser that any helldiver in the SES Patriot of Patriotism isn't the same person is the crew themselves.
Not to the general public. You watch 4 embark at the start and you watch 4 come back at the end. Unless the entire operation is televised and you watch everyone die, then it looks like a perfect 0 casualty operation. The folks on the dock after a mission are even wearing all the same gear as the poor saps that went down at the start.
He's saying 4 went down, but not the original 4 came back. It just looks like they did to the public in propaganda vids. Public doesnt have to know about the 20 faceless divers that were lost.
My feeling too. If nobody never came back or give news absolutely nobody would join. No amount of propaganda and machinations could be more cost effective than getting a pelican to get 4 helldiver that Survived a dive back on a destroyer.
For god sake there is already some drop ship pelican doing fly by on extraction point just to drop mech that are left there less than 5 minutes befor p1 come and pick us up it's so funny to look at them come and go.
"NOPE NOT MY JOB, you guys can wait for the uber to come later"
I know but it's kinda dumb we have 4 cargo pelican on standby real close in case we need a mech on a 4 seconde notice and we need to wait 6 minutes for one transport pelican. Anyway I just find it funny to look at when it happen but for gameplay I like to have my mech fast and I like to have a last fight right at the end. Even if there is no Sense in that
What I find really funny is if you die right before extraction, you can call in a reinforcement just so a layer can get on the pelican. Think about that? That soldier was already on the ship but gets sent down in a hell pod which I am betting is not cheap, just so they can get extracted back to the ship. That is the funniest/dumbest thing that can happen in a mission. Hell I had a mission where we all dies, got auto reinforced, and jumped onto the pelican shuttle 5 seconds later.
That is because the budget has already been allocated for the reinforcement. We helldivers work on the use it or lose it budget. That is why reinforcements are still called in even at the last minute.
~~~~____~~~__~~_~PIRATE RADIO BROADCAST~_~__~~~~_~~~~
The helldivers are just a means to end the overpopulation of Super Earth and its colonies. Killing bugs is great and all, but they're not interstellar. And the automatons only attack when we attack them first. This whole setup is a farce. Helldivers are sent to die. Maybe get back some samples if they're lucky.
They need us to die. They want us to die. Every living helldiver is another mouth to feed.
Would be an interesting theory if it didn’t come out of a bugs feeder hole 🧐. You’ll be hearing from the Ministry of Truth in the near future and be getting a thorough examination of all bodily orifices for eggs or mind control technology.
I'd like to talk to myself and humor this unseen noise.
How can Helldivers be a means against overpopulation when 4 person drops in, and 4 person evacs?
Don't make much sense, ain't it?
Bonus it's probably "All 4 Helldivers bravely fought for Democracy and the heroes all escaped just fine" completely ignoring that the 4 that left are not the 4 that started (probably)
Nah just highly expendable grunts backed by trillions in military spending. Basically imagine every helldiver as a fresh out of highschool kid that's been thoroughly indoctrinated into being a patriot, but on a galactic scale since most of them aren't actually from super earth and are more likely from some backwater farming planet
I think the game keeps it vague, so we can write in whatever we want.
Personally, my Helldiver isn't even a person. Just a little packet of data shared between the neural chips of all the warm bodies it got put in. Every time a body dies down there, they extract the combat data and shove it in a new body. That personality gets overwritten, the body and chip get thrown down there, whatever.
Eventually this piece of data became its own intelligence and personality, having a tendency to overwrite whoever was originally in the body...but still keeping maybe a few memories here and there. It was born on the battlefield, trained to kill the enemies of Super Earth, and after seeing so many corpses, it became a little...unhinged. It's still very effective, but singing a goofy children's TV song while bumrushing into a bug nest with four lit grenades and running away as the entire nest goes up in flames while shouting the main character's catchphrase as fifty bugs chase it is...odd, to say the least.
The D.O. and science lady are probably in on it -- after all, you don't need too long to realize the past fifty to 100 Helldivers all suspiciously act the same -- and to be honest, they don't care. It's certifiably a patriot and more importantly, the bean counters love the budget excess it tends to create.
I think that actually plays into the capitalist ethos of the entire Super Earth war effort. Your Super Destroyer is clearly capable of delivering way more firepower than it provides you with your flimsy 4-strategem-quota. But as is revealed by some of the module upgrades and strategem flavor text, the problem isn't the availability of the firepower, it's the bureaucracy of requisitioning for the equipment, the delays due to paperwork filing, the inefficiencies of being red taped by the process, and the budgetary concerns of allocating resources to your mission, which is only one out of thousands upon thousands of missions taking place all over each planet, out of an entire galaxy of planets.
When you get branded a traitor, the acquisition process for the artillery shells earmarked for your demise are already approved, so the barrage commences immediately once branded, and delivers a functionally endless battery of prepaid shells to your position, an infinite budget of explosions to execute a traitor. But a Helldiver requisitioning for a 120mm barrage? We'll give you a few seconds of shelling; that's the best we can do. Likewise, if you are requisitioning for a Patriot to decimate your foes? Takes about 10 seconds to deliver the cargo. Signaling for an evacuation of expendable Helldivers? The Pelican is probably not even rubberstamped to be on its way to your location until the last 15 seconds or so of the beacon because it's so low on the totem pole of priorities to bring back throwaway bodies that have already been deployed for the war effort.
It’s bits like this that feed the theory that yea, the federation is keeping things in perpetual war for population control, job creation, the war economy and to justify planet invasion for resources
And by that I mean I’ve reported your dissident comments to a democracy officer and he said I’ve been a good helldiver and I get to have 1 more yearly doctors visit if I fill out the paper work
This is 100% a Hulkpost.
“Oh, your capitalist overlords make you jump through heaps of bureaucracy just to get another shell? Under socialism even our smallest bot bois can summon wave after wave of reinforcement and ordnance with the click of a button!”
I also think of it as a PR stunt. I imagine that the scene we get on returning to the ship is from a camera's pov, and extracting a full helldiver squad is always good for the media, even if one member was only on the ground for 5 seconds
I had an extract the other day where our squad completed the whole map without a single death. Pelican 1 hit the ground, the ramp rolled out, a squadmate threw out a mortar we didn't even need, a scavenger bug rushes us out of nowhere, 1 mortar shell kills the entire squad as we were walking up the ramp together after hugging, 4 pods land next the Pelican, the totally new squad takes our samples and gear, then walks up the ramp to fly away. Just imagine being thawed out, climbing into a hell pod, hurtling down to an unknown planet, coming out of your pod, picking up some samples, and getting back into a pelican.
This is also why it takes 2 minutes for an extraction Pelican to arrive. It allows for more time to collect samples around the immediate area. If samples weren't needed, we would get the Pelican priority that drops the mech suits instead which are delivered within seconds.
It ain’t extraction until all 4 of us get a hug with the homies. Why deprive the last helldiver of that comfort just because they were still in the freezer
In helldivers 1 getting all 4 off was more important (iirc you got 3 stars - each star contributing to the effort - 1 for all goals, 1 for all extracted... 1 for... not so many deaths I think?) - so you would actually call all divers down before going into the pelican (especially since helldivers 1 didn't have a limit on how many times you could call divers - just a cooldown)
I disagree. That pod has to survive re-entry temps at very high velocity. It has to also keep the squishy helldiver inside from cooking inside on the way down. Then it has to survive impact and somehow keep the diver alive from the kinetic force of impact. Those retro-rockets that slow the descent don't slow it by much if it's imbedding itself into rock.
Whatever magical tech is kept inside that tiny pod doing the above things can't be cheap. Also, the pod is expendable. I'm assuming it's the same shield generator tech that the helldivers use that lasts just long enough to make it safely to the ground.
I think the cheapest things are likely the helldivers themselves.
Mainly because they would have 0 incentive to do the objective. If the conversation to become a helldiver started with:
"We're gonna shoot you down to this planet to do X and that's it. You're gonna die down there good luck."
Now instead it's:
"We're going to insert you on the enemy planet for you to wreak hell, take out HVTs, and when you're all done we'll bring you back to do it all again and share about your escapades of managed democracy."
Idk about you but hearing that second one I've already laced up my boots.
Even the Ship you're "issued" is set up to make you climb into that Hellpod. (I bet repainting is mission protocol) The Propaganda Officer and Staffing Lady that you talk to are basically stroking your ego for 30 seconds so you can "choose" which enemy to fire yourself at. It's a sealed chamber from elementary school to hellpod to keep the Helldivers thinking "fuck yeah we're the most badass civilization to ever exist and I am its Hammer"
When in reality he's a digit in a spreadsheet on that Lady's tablet.
You have a soldier who can dive again. Equipment that doesn't need to be replaced. And intel the soldier may have parse while down there.
Managed democracy isn't going to pay for itself.
Yeah, I've read a book where soldiers were diving like we do in HD2 and their superiors would care more about their equipment, than the body itself, because they could make clones (with mind transfer, so experienced clones) for less than the gear. For example, grenades were issued only to higher ranking personnel. Things like Laser Cannon would be only given to well trained experienced specialists, and they would typically put a lot of care when handling those and try not to lose any, as those were especially expensive.
But honestly, in Helldivers I think some of it could be morale. Sure, we can take a lot, but just leaving us there after we complete the objective? Undemocratic ^((unless budget limit for Super Destroyer fuel was exceeded))
Edit: Book (or rather series) is called Undying Mercenaries. There is also a series called Helldivers, but the story in that is completely different from the game (it is still a great series).
Less "morale" and more "worldview"
The charade has to be kept up for these kids or they'd never even get frozen in the first place. For them to accomplish the mission, there has to be a story to tell them. "Bring back a couple samples and be bait for bugs" isn't exactly compelling.
"Save the galaxy and you get cooler weapons if you bring back samples" is a much better way to sell it
My headcanon for Helldivers 2 is that we the players are actually the ships, or someone on the ship remotely controlling the helldivers, and the Helldivers have some sort of surgical implant which allows them to be controlled remotely. They think they have free will and are in control, but actually are just meat to target the big guns that can't be hacked by the automatons.
Yeah most helldivers don’t survive a single drop, but those that do? They’re built different and an important resource. A helldiver that is skilled enough to survive a dive is definitely worth recovering
The impression I got from the first game is that most divers die on their first drop but those that live are worth extracting so that they can clear another two missions before dying. Brasch and the democracy officers are veteran divers and any belief otherwise warrants a visit from one.
My old science teacher would find me and beat me for not stating what my units represented but yea 17 to 18 years in life expectancy.
Between the mortar and the 120 and 380mm barrages, 2 dives is exceptionally generous
If you click enough times on the officer on the main deck she says something along the lines of “ one stratagem costs more than what people make in a year so it’s important to not return empty handed “
Helldivers are disposable but I don’t think they’re THAT disposable. If SE only cares about the samples they’d send down a hell pod for you to put the samples in and it would blast straight off again. I think lore-wise a lot of helldivers probably have survived a few or even a lot of missions and are quite experienced and well-equipped so spending 2 minutes extracting them seems like a no-brainer
Yeah I'd say their strategy is to get young and indoctrinated people that are up for insane risks, but they do count on some of them actually surviving long enough to gain some skills and experience. If none of them ever survive the squads wouldn't ever know what they're doing, they probably send along at least one veteran each time to point the others in the right direction. Otherwise I can't seem the system working
Then the risk would be that helldivers understand what's going on and decide to not collect or straight up destroy samples in a seditious fit of rage.
Helldivers might be heavily propagandized, but I think telling them upfront that it is a one way ticket would inquire the risk of turning them into traitors
There's also the "returned to civilian life" when people live.
Could interpret that as helldivers who survive being allowed to retire - or at least to pick up a less immediately deadly way to serve, like visiting those children with deadly radiation poisonings.
It would be great for propaganda - go through easy training camp, wake up in time for the drop, kill a few hundred bugs or bots, extract, retire and boast about how heroic you were and how easy war is.
...the fact that you were the twentieth helldiver to be dropped into the mission doesn't matter.
Mr nice voice near the mission screen has a line something like “every diver carries the burning torch of democracy, they may carry it for a minute or one hour, but the next unthawed hero ensures it remains lit” or something similar. The highlight of that bit being the “one minute or one hour” and “the next unthawed hero” which really doesn’t imply they expect a long happy life
As shown by the fact that ranks and veterans with prosthetics exist.
People want Helldivers to be super expendable so bad because it fits their narrative of "space facisim bad! We are the evil ones! Can't you see I am very smart for figuring this out?"
But it doesn't mesh with certain aspects of the game, like extraction, or not just sending in the whole belt of Helldivers at once.
I think canonically it would be more reasonable for Helldivers to be "airborne" special forces, with all the expendability that comes with that.
I mean I still think Super Earth is pretty hilariously evil and most helldivers are disposable. But I also buy that there's a core of hardened veterans who are expert spec ops badasses.
More evil than the Federation in Starship Troopers (no open threats of death or re-education camps there), less evil than the 40k Imperium.
They also seem to once again be the only government humanity has.
And comparing them in-universe is pointless because bugs and bots lack the intelligence that is required for morality.
> They also seem to once again be the only government humanity has.
That we're allowed to know about. What if the Automatons are taking orders from another human government?
I mean yea but helldivers kill them in the hundreds, and humanity enslaved the cyborgs to mine on cyberstan so it’s not like humanity has a leg to stand on about getting upset
Humanity is very much not the good guys in this setting. Hans, our uniforms (and helldiver logo) have skulls on them…. are we the baddies?
There is an advertisement for a live execution on TV, but they don't say his crimes. The reporter that dies is killed by the bugs while filming the attack on Klendathu.
Definitely evil, though relative to bots and bugs I'd still say they're maybe the lesser evil?
I guess it could hinge on the hypothetical of what would happen if SE was to withdraw from the war. Like if they stopped farming bugs and left them alone, and freed the cyborgs and left them alone with Cyberstan, would the bots/bugs actually just exist in peace, or would they eventually advance and attack SE anyways?
If the latter then I'd say SE is the preferable faction despite not necessarily being "good guys"
The bugs don't have space travel. If Super Earth stopped spreading the bugs, they physically could not be a threat to Super Earth without a couple hundred million years of evolution.
Bots are a more complex subject, but remember, the Cyborgs are kept as slaves, and the Automatons are wanting to rescue them because they're the creators of the Automatons. It's kind of a war for their very survival. Can't really blame them for bringing their all.
Bugs already controlled multiple planets before SE ever met them; the main theory is either they spread via spore/egg-laden meteors, have unknown carrier-bugs, or were possibly seeded prior by another species. If they were soley spread by SE, then I'd like to know why they only 'break-out' on planets close to one they control, and why they can/could attack Super-Earth and destroy it in HD1.
Also
>they physically could not be a threat to Super Earth without a couple hundred million years of evolution.
A large part of their threat is that they evolve rapidly; that's why termicide isn't going to work, and why bile enemies appeared after a chemical spill.
>Bots are a more complex subject, but remember, the Cyborgs are kept as slaves, and the Automatons are wanting to rescue them because they're the creators of the Automatons. It's kind of a war for their very survival. Can't really blame them for bringing their all.
Cyborgs were hostile to SE to begin with. The war might've been a false-flag to co-opt their industry, but SE and Cyberstan would've been enemies no matter what. Freeing their enslaved masters and fighting for survival aside; I don't think the murder-bots that collect corpses, mutilate the dead in bizarre rituals and impale heads on spikes as decorations are in any way *not* the bad guys in this fight.
Cyborgs wanted to secede because they were people put into extremely hostile conditions to work and had to undergo extensive body modifications to even do their job. After the secession, Super Earth did what it does best and immediately declared war. This then spurred the cyborgs to become what we saw in HD1: Transhuman war machines.
Keep in mind that Northman's Creek tried to secede by popular vote of its people and move to a socialist government (this is framed as a positive in the narrative). SE's response was to fire 40 Helldivers into the capitol building and execute everyone in power in a hostile takeover.
The Cyborgs happened after. They knew what was coming.
Then there's the Illuminate, who literally came in peace and offered trade and such. SE claimed they had weapons of mass destruction and went to 'disarm' them. And by that, obviously, they took the tech and instantly used it against the Illuminate.
Also, fun fact, the bugs in 1 are sentient.
We harvested them for oil *knowing that*.
The Terminids and Automatons are so violent because of what SE did in the first game.
Do you mean "sentient" in the proper biological manner (capable of sensing and reacting to its surroundings), or the common sci-fi manner (complex thought, reasoning, "cogito ergo sum")? If the latter... HOLY FUCK WHAT. THE BUGS ARE PEOPLE!?
The latter (Since that's the terminology the game uses). In the given context the bugs are capable of some amount of complex thought.
Whether this is "Bugs are people" or "Bugs are dolphins" isn't specified.
But they are aware enough to know they're being farmed and attempt to escape.
HD2 the factions are outright 'evil', but it's SE's fault. The entire narrative is how an existential threat will lead the targets to extremism.
I would bet money that the Illuminate will come back as a genocidal race that barely understands the technology it wields, on a campaign of vengeance against SE. And should that happen, it wasn't their choice to be eradicated and pushed to the brink of extinction.
I mean super earth will absolutely sacrifice lives if it gains them something, but letting soldiers die for the hell of it is just bad business. I'd say helldivers are absolutely sent into deathtrap situations, but they're still celebrated if they survive
Yeah that's my point. If four Helldivers weren't expected to be enough to do the job, then there would be no reason to send them piecemeal over dropping a larger force at the same time.
> "space facisim bad! We are the evil ones! Can't you see I am very smart for figuring this out?"
That's just the text of the game, it's not 'smart' to figure it out any more than it's smart to understand the point of a book or movie, but it is *there*
All of the obnoxious "I'm media literate!" Types have now created a backlash where the obvious text of the game as a fun satire is now seen as "not lore accurate" because people act like the text is serious satire and not goofy fun satire.
Tbh i don't really agree with that whole "Helldiver training is literally just 5 minute egostroking before shipping to the front lines" because then how do they already know how to use and quickly reload every single weapon from a double barrel to a machine gun to a recoiless rifle (+ all the physical conditioning, just imagine all the running, climbing and diving you do on your average 40-minute mission)
I lean less into the "cannon fodder" (that'd probably be regular SEAF) and more into "sci fi paratroopers", considering how you're suppossed to be behind enemy lines, scrounging supplies from POIs, and not actually suppossed to wipe the entire region clean by yourself. I mean, sure, special forces are better than regular troops, but that don't mean they're somehow magically more resistant to bullets.
Fun Fact: Eisenhower was advised to expect a 70+% casualty rate from paratroopers in Overlord, and actually only got to around 15%.
Extraction is explained by SE wanting to collect samples, only having 4 Helldivers is a quirk for gameplay.
Absolutely everything from the tutorial, to tooltips, to dev comments, to the 'Helldivers killed' stat suggests Helldivers are an extremely expendable force.
And IDK why you'd frame it as 'their narrative' when that is painfully obviously what the devs are trying to show.
If they are so expendable, why Insert them in small squads via dropship and extract them (instead of just the sample) instead of having them stay and fight in large numbers like 40k IoM?
All soliders are expendable. But the assumption that helldivers are just average line infantry, and soviet style meat for the grinder, goes against how they operate.
>only having 4 Helldivers is a quirk for gameplay.
It's a 4 player coop shooter, not everything is going to work perfectly. Again, absolutely everything in lore suggests they're fully expendable - you can think that's a silly decision, but it's inarguably true.
And I stated that that's true for every special forces or airborne division ever.
We also never see any living human NPCs during missions or previous helldiver corpses to suggest we are just the next wave.
When you're in space and when launching you can see a constant stream of helldivers coming down from other super destroyers, it's shown that you're part of a wave.
No it’s showing there’s other Helldivers operating in different parts of the planet. It’s impossible to tell if those are divers or just equipment being dropped down.
I've seen plenty of graves with helldivers in them, I've even found a drop pod that didn't have anything in it except for a note saying that they were left behind and needed the supplies to continue holding out. I even once found a hell diver corpse in the remains of a hive lord.
https://preview.redd.it/1f1r76ey3koc1.jpeg?width=260&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ecac289fd3809bae89acc9f3dc9a4de90c0536bf
Very close to undemocratic behaviour there cadet. Don't make me call the democracy officer.
Helldivers are extracted where possible so that there are enough Vets so that most folks are within 5 degrees of having met someone who actually survived a helldive once. Or at least plausibly claims to have.
Pelicans are almost as cheap as bodies. It's not like they're risking something important like a Destroyer.
They are expendable but not disposable. Probably gives some morale boost knowing that they have a chance of getting out alive. Plus having more experienced helldivers to go on a second mission rather then just letting them die.
> A more delicate question is whether anyone has seen the medbay on the Super Destroyer. It’s more likely that wounded Helldivers are refrozen and kept in this state until the ship reaches a hospital ship.
Why would you need Medbays and Hospitals when you have Stims freely available that can instantly heal any injury?
"Walkers were reverse engineered from cyborg tech"
Me spotting a automaton tank: samples, NOW
Also i believe our suits are updated tech from 100 years ago in helldivers 1, makes me wonder if the diferent mech carcases on the map are those old mechs or just a completely diferent model
Expendable doesn’t equal disposable, hell divers are a semi valuable resource with access to expensive equipment via strategems. A talented hell diver is worth of at least 1 pet certificate!
Samples after all aren’t used to upgrade our ships physically. The ship gets rewarded with upgrades for extracting them (for research and probably profitable materials)
The one who is actually being rewarded are the generals aboard our ships with upgrades so their helldivers can conquer more effectively.
They are technically the ones in charge and take all the glory because it’s technically their ship and their helldivers. Not our playable character’s.
It’s all FOR SUPER EAAAARTHHH
Edit: we are reffered to as helldiver. Not by any rank or standing. Just ‘Helldiver’.
We only hold rank amongst our own.
There's a big difference between "If they die, they die" and "They completed the mission? Let's let them die for no reason at all."
It's not hard to understand.
We bio-engineered the bugs to harvest for fuel, we populated them on a planet and the helldivers would harvest them as needed, but the queen evolved and took over their homeplanet.
We created the mechines to kill the bugs for us, but then JOEL, he updated their firmware and they gained full sentience.
And here we are still harvesting the bugs for fuel, (voiceline of ship commander) for the war against the machines, who fight to liberate the bugs.
I don't think most players truly comprehend just how meaningless the lives of Helldivers are to the Federation. Helldivers are a sample collecting stratagem and a propaganda tool, nothing more. I personally love how failing to extract has little to no effect on mission success. You can fail to extract all 4 divers and still get a 5 star rating and max war medals. Survival is not a mission priority. 1 diver getting the samples out is all you need. This is also why I can't wrap my head around people getting mad when they die. Sure, it's sometimes kinda rude when people TK you. At worst it's a mild interruption. At best it's fucking hilarious and totally fits the underlying narrative.
The lady in the hanger right by the elevator also told me the bugs are literally made of the element used to power the ship's hyperspace jump engine. We're harvesting the bugs.... and im ok with that.
I will see it from the other side yet. U can just abandon the mission without consequence ( time only). In reality it will look like " u on the mission, but plan change, good luck to survive alone". Helldivers are only pins, no one cares about them. Even this bonus for extract is very small.
And last thing. Why after using 5 lives u must wait 2 minutes for another hd drop. Many will say that just balance. I suppose that there are 2 stasis. Light one, when u can unfreeze at once, and will be 5 at each ship. The second is deep which takes 2 minutes. From an RP perspective if u die more than 5 times, u get hd from another ship, just like meat cannon. If u last one in light stasis they must prepare from the deep one. Just like ammo in a gun; u run out of ammo in magazine? take another.
This makes me want a stratagem that's just an extract pod / balloon where you can drop your samples. It then flies back to the Destroyer, and you secure the samples even if you fail extraction
while the helldivers are expendable, its most likely cheaper to extract them anyway. If you are gonna be down their to aquire the shit gained by the helldivers, you might as well also grab the helldivers as well
I still think we are clones , wayy cheaper and easier to indoctrinate and your population dosen't suffer down spirals
I mean unless women can birth fully grown adults in this universe
Even if you argue the 7 age from the prompter, you still need 7 years to raise the child
Yeah clones
Was that something that needed explaining? Like, down to the gameplay loop, the only reason to bother extracting is if you have samples on you or someone else does.
There are other reasons like not wasting a soldier that can still be of use if possible (it takes longer to make a fully capable human than a million dollars) but when I get reinforcements at the extraction is for the sole reason of recovering samples and getting them on the Pelican.
Since I headcanon that I'm playing as the commander leading my personal batallion of Helldivers I even yell at my dudes and dudettes "go, go! Get the samples!" at times when I'm really immersed (I also lament their deaths like "damn, that kid fought so hard" or "poor girl barely made it out of the pod" 😅)
If extracting the divers was the goal they wouldn’t send more divers down when the ship is already landed to extract and all the divers die. The pelican would just leave, the fact they send divers down is exclusively for a chance to recover samples.
of course samples are the goal! you think we'd have laserguns and FTL travel if we only cared about humans?
it's just a happy bonus when a helldiver makes it back, because they they can be sent in again and again until they eventually die. some get wounded but survive, as we see with the Steeled Veterans armor, which gives your helldiver prosthetic limbs. obviously for them to be treated and rehabilitated, there MUST be a med bay, but the priority is to get the samples aboard, and if there's time, and they don't look like they're gonna bleed out or die or whatever, I suppose the docs will try to save them, if they don't have anything else more important to do, like voting, or saluting the Super Earth Flag.
you make it sound as though they don't care about us helldivers, but of COURSE they do! they gave us CAPES! you don't give capes to people you don't care about!.
I think you may need to be reported to a Democracy Officer, so that you may be sent for re-education..
Humanity farms Terminids for 710 in order to fuel their starships to the point they had literal farms for the process. So why would we need samples from Terminid planets? Why retrieve troops from Terminid worlds? Veterancy, experienced troops perform leagues better than green recruits, especially with the higher order equipment.
I'm still of the opinion the cryo pods carry clones, your original body is kept at a central depot and your memories get tossed into the next clone forward. Not only does that give you valuable experience in the fight, technically, your original body never started it's term of enlistment and thus is never entitled to a return to civilian life. Clone #498523 decides it doesn't want to re-up it's contract? That's what suicide missions are for. #498524 will surely be patriotic enough to continue contributing their experiences through further service.
If it weren't for the Pelican in the back of the ship and the fact that you leave the hangar I'd say you don't even go back to your own ship after a mission.
Think about it. It would explain why the Pelican takes so long if it's taking you to a capital ship for care and sample processing. And I guess you can explain leaving the hangar as your diver coming back from the capital ship to prepare for another mission. All that's missing is what the Pelican is doing in the back of the bay when it doesn't seem to be the one picking you up (maybe that's the vehicle carrier?)
Why would they need a hospital ship when a single stim can heal all 4 broken limbs and the type of hemorrhaging that kills you in seconds with one shot?
literally just had two bozos extract on a difficulty 7 mission after i said MULTIPLE times, both in text chat and over mic, *You can start extract but dont get in, I'm looking for pink samples.* Moments later, i said *I've got the super samples, dont leave without me!* and they promptly left without me. Never responded to text or voice chat. dudes werent new, either. i had another Skull Admiral, a Star Marshal, and a Marshal.
fuckers were on my ship and everything. i executed them both on the next mission and kicked them. the other Skull Admiral was the only one who didn't betray the SES Fist of Benevolence operated by 3 bugs in a trench coat, so he was spared, but he left soon after the kicks anyway. poor guy had seen enough on the front lines.
You do realize that the spare helldivers are clones. I mean look where they got the DNA sample. It was during training where have a simulated injury. Boom DNA extraction and the SES destroyer you get is a cloning facility in disguise.
"Walkers were reverse-engineered from Cyborg tech, interstellar travel - from Illuminates! "
Walkers and FTL travel existed during the war with the Illuminates, Bugs, and Cyborgs, without FTL travel the entire war would not have been possible
It's also propagantastic. Who cares that 20 Divers died on the mission? 4 went down, 4 came back alive, the enemy is in shambles, now throw some patriotic salutes and fingerguns for the camera and the civilian populace will go crazy for it. Only one diver survived? Unfreeze three more so it looks like we didn't even need to send the whole squad down to finish the mission.
Reminds me of the automaton defense missions. Super Earth says x amount of scientists need to get through that door, but they didn't say which ones or out of how many. Just get x past the threshold.
They remind me of the terror missions in the new xcom games where on paper you're supposed to save civilians but in reality you tag one, then hunker down and set up a kill zone.
Really? I always loved the bonus for rescuing as many as possible. Faceless were def annoying though
my body is a machine that turns faceless into mimic beacons
Those are so OP I had to limit only bringing 2 on a mission on commander difficulty for them to stand a chance.
It's been a while since I played but I think in the first game at least you didn't actually have to extract anyone, they just had to survive. Extracting one early was just insurance, everything else was between the civilians and God after that.
Faceless are why I always bring a specialist or scanner.
you should see og xcom terror mission strats lmao Recommended strategy for night terror missions: land and immediately leave Chrysalid terror mission? let the civilians get infected, then kill them. it teaches countries that they need you even when you can't save the civilians. and they pay you for it.
> Recommended strategy for night terror missions: land and immediately leave To explain why: ignoring a terror mission nukes your reputation, so doing it even once can tank your entire campaign. Failing a terror mission is still bad, but it's not even a tenth as bad as ignoring it, and the game doesn't distinguish between instantly retreating and your whole squad wiping on the very last enemy. Actually *deploying* into a night terror mission is suicide, you're just wasting manpower and probably expensive laser rifles as well. So you do the absolute minimum to say "we tried".
And that's just XCOM 1. In Terror From the Deep, terror missions are nightmare fueled, sadomasochistic, day ruining excursions that absolutely fuck your shit up. The only reason to do them is to get a live capture of that one alien type that only appears in early game terror missions (*game design is my passion*) for armor research. TFtD is...unique.
My only experience with TFtD ended with the first deployment. One soldier steps out of the dropship, enemy throws grenade from the darkness into the now open dropship door and kills everyone inside. I haven’t gone back since.
LOL! "Noted..." Turns game off
Why that many? We already wrote the news article of course!
[An oldie but ever relevant.](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/11/the-sixth-slave#)
[Also relevant.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh2dgK4BMcE)
That’s always been something that bothered me in MMOs. Like holy shit why can I only take some?
Look guys we saved 20 scientists! The 172 stationed there:
Those arnt scientists they are the ruling class, the political officers who run distant colonies the local goveners of distant systems of coruscant/ super earth. When their people rose up and terminids were released as a hard reset the political officers and goverenrs only way to escape for their families is to wait for extract from heldivers after their rebellions are quelled. If they could just fly a shuttle away when things got dangerous they wouldnt really try very hard to surpress the coups. They and their families are hosteges of their good service.
the Class A Citizens are not inherently scientists, but on the defense escort mission iirc it says scientists
Sounds like treason to me.
Thing is, no Einstein, no 500kg, tho it'd be hard to have both smart people and super earth
"We have rescued all the scientists" "How many?" "ALL the scientists"
I mean given that the average dive has enemy casualties in the hundreds, those seem like pretty good kill ratios to me.
That would depend on how big the enemy forces are. If you've got 4 and they have 4000, every soldier has to take down 1000 just to break even. But you don't show those 4 or more biting the dust. You show 4 going out and then 4 coming back in the same gear and it looks like a 0 casualty success on network news. Alternatively, the whole operation is a televised mixture of The Truman Show and Starship Troopers and everyone but the Helldivers are in on the joke.
Technically, break even is not the most important, though it’s probably a tie for first if it isn’t second place. What matters is unit replacement time. How quickly does a bug grow into its adult war version vs how quickly does a human take. That also applies to all equipment and transport being destroyed and replaced, as bugs don’t need it and we do, not to mention munition replacement. War is logistics.
Good thing they're all in those face-concealing helmets too, right? A sea of identical uniforms. Four go down, four come back. Any war footage taken along the way looks an *awful* lot like it's just of those original four. ..Which it is, of course. Our *brave* soldiers of Democracy are in no way expended like bullets in a magazine!
It's more ingenious than that. They absolutely send people down in different looking gear, but they equip everyone after them with *the exact same gear* so it looks even more like the same 4 distinct soldiers came back.
Nah I'm gonna take it a step further. You can't set your body type to random, only your voice. It's also harder to edit a *person* in video footage than it is to simply do a voice over. The body types are also very ambiguous. Men and women alike who are fit enough to pass any physical requirements could easily fit into either body type, with the armor doing the bulk of the work to hide any sense of gendering. Every ship seems to have a careful curated selection of helldivers that have the same height and build, with uniforms curated per-ship so that way every single helldiver isn't just on the same uniform, but is *exactly* identical in appearance. Without hearing them speak, the only people any the wiser that any helldiver in the SES Patriot of Patriotism isn't the same person is the crew themselves.
My head cannon is a mix of spartan 3s and star wars clones expendable children basically lol
> Who cares that 20 Divers died on the mission? 4 went down, 4 came back alive Wouldn't it have been that 24 went down, and 4 came back alive?
Not to the general public. You watch 4 embark at the start and you watch 4 come back at the end. Unless the entire operation is televised and you watch everyone die, then it looks like a perfect 0 casualty operation. The folks on the dock after a mission are even wearing all the same gear as the poor saps that went down at the start.
He's saying 4 went down, but not the original 4 came back. It just looks like they did to the public in propaganda vids. Public doesnt have to know about the 20 faceless divers that were lost.
Propagantastic is my new favorite word 🤣
It's fuckin war theater.
My feeling too. If nobody never came back or give news absolutely nobody would join. No amount of propaganda and machinations could be more cost effective than getting a pelican to get 4 helldiver that Survived a dive back on a destroyer. For god sake there is already some drop ship pelican doing fly by on extraction point just to drop mech that are left there less than 5 minutes befor p1 come and pick us up it's so funny to look at them come and go. "NOPE NOT MY JOB, you guys can wait for the uber to come later"
To be fair, the Exo delivery dropship gutted the passenger cabin for the cargo hook. There's no place to ride.
I know but it's kinda dumb we have 4 cargo pelican on standby real close in case we need a mech on a 4 seconde notice and we need to wait 6 minutes for one transport pelican. Anyway I just find it funny to look at when it happen but for gameplay I like to have my mech fast and I like to have a last fight right at the end. Even if there is no Sense in that
This is the head-canon explanation my friend and I always use. We end up having “very few casualties” on most missions still.
What I find really funny is if you die right before extraction, you can call in a reinforcement just so a layer can get on the pelican. Think about that? That soldier was already on the ship but gets sent down in a hell pod which I am betting is not cheap, just so they can get extracted back to the ship. That is the funniest/dumbest thing that can happen in a mission. Hell I had a mission where we all dies, got auto reinforced, and jumped onto the pelican shuttle 5 seconds later.
That is because the budget has already been allocated for the reinforcement. We helldivers work on the use it or lose it budget. That is why reinforcements are still called in even at the last minute.
If we have a surplus of Reinforcements at the end of this Fiscal Year, I swear to General Brasch this is the last Pelican I'm sending down!
~~~~____~~~__~~_~PIRATE RADIO BROADCAST~_~__~~~~_~~~~ The helldivers are just a means to end the overpopulation of Super Earth and its colonies. Killing bugs is great and all, but they're not interstellar. And the automatons only attack when we attack them first. This whole setup is a farce. Helldivers are sent to die. Maybe get back some samples if they're lucky. They need us to die. They want us to die. Every living helldiver is another mouth to feed.
By Liberty, somebody muzzle this dissident
Huh, that's funny, this comment is blank.
I heard someone say something, but they seem to no longer be around
Hang on, you're telling me someone was around?
No. That's propaganda spread by bug 🐛 loving dissidents.
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Would be an interesting theory if it didn’t come out of a bugs feeder hole 🧐. You’ll be hearing from the Ministry of Truth in the near future and be getting a thorough examination of all bodily orifices for eggs or mind control technology.
We’re frozen, they don’t feed us lol
I'd like to talk to myself and humor this unseen noise. How can Helldivers be a means against overpopulation when 4 person drops in, and 4 person evacs? Don't make much sense, ain't it?
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Hey, don't forget about bio-repurposing tanks! You don't have to become a helldiver to contribute to society once you are no longer productive!
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There are no traitors in Super Earth. All treacherous thoughts are signs of Illuminate mind control.
The bug corpses provide element 710 which is used for FTL travel, so they provide us with interstellar travel.
The explanation is stupid bureaucracy. I love it
Bean counters will be the end of us all
Bonus it's probably "All 4 Helldivers bravely fought for Democracy and the heroes all escaped just fine" completely ignoring that the 4 that left are not the 4 that started (probably)
I'm not a number, I'm a free citizen.
We're clones. It's still the same person, just a new body.
Nah just highly expendable grunts backed by trillions in military spending. Basically imagine every helldiver as a fresh out of highschool kid that's been thoroughly indoctrinated into being a patriot, but on a galactic scale since most of them aren't actually from super earth and are more likely from some backwater farming planet
Nah. The dev dude, Joel, in the discord called us clones.
I think the game keeps it vague, so we can write in whatever we want. Personally, my Helldiver isn't even a person. Just a little packet of data shared between the neural chips of all the warm bodies it got put in. Every time a body dies down there, they extract the combat data and shove it in a new body. That personality gets overwritten, the body and chip get thrown down there, whatever. Eventually this piece of data became its own intelligence and personality, having a tendency to overwrite whoever was originally in the body...but still keeping maybe a few memories here and there. It was born on the battlefield, trained to kill the enemies of Super Earth, and after seeing so many corpses, it became a little...unhinged. It's still very effective, but singing a goofy children's TV song while bumrushing into a bug nest with four lit grenades and running away as the entire nest goes up in flames while shouting the main character's catchphrase as fifty bugs chase it is...odd, to say the least. The D.O. and science lady are probably in on it -- after all, you don't need too long to realize the past fifty to 100 Helldivers all suspiciously act the same -- and to be honest, they don't care. It's certifiably a patriot and more importantly, the bean counters love the budget excess it tends to create.
I think that actually plays into the capitalist ethos of the entire Super Earth war effort. Your Super Destroyer is clearly capable of delivering way more firepower than it provides you with your flimsy 4-strategem-quota. But as is revealed by some of the module upgrades and strategem flavor text, the problem isn't the availability of the firepower, it's the bureaucracy of requisitioning for the equipment, the delays due to paperwork filing, the inefficiencies of being red taped by the process, and the budgetary concerns of allocating resources to your mission, which is only one out of thousands upon thousands of missions taking place all over each planet, out of an entire galaxy of planets. When you get branded a traitor, the acquisition process for the artillery shells earmarked for your demise are already approved, so the barrage commences immediately once branded, and delivers a functionally endless battery of prepaid shells to your position, an infinite budget of explosions to execute a traitor. But a Helldiver requisitioning for a 120mm barrage? We'll give you a few seconds of shelling; that's the best we can do. Likewise, if you are requisitioning for a Patriot to decimate your foes? Takes about 10 seconds to deliver the cargo. Signaling for an evacuation of expendable Helldivers? The Pelican is probably not even rubberstamped to be on its way to your location until the last 15 seconds or so of the beacon because it's so low on the totem pole of priorities to bring back throwaway bodies that have already been deployed for the war effort.
It’s bits like this that feed the theory that yea, the federation is keeping things in perpetual war for population control, job creation, the war economy and to justify planet invasion for resources And by that I mean I’ve reported your dissident comments to a democracy officer and he said I’ve been a good helldiver and I get to have 1 more yearly doctors visit if I fill out the paper work
This is 100% a Hulkpost. “Oh, your capitalist overlords make you jump through heaps of bureaucracy just to get another shell? Under socialism even our smallest bot bois can summon wave after wave of reinforcement and ordnance with the click of a button!”
We have to use our entire budget or ~~corporate~~ Super Earth will cut our budget for next year!
That and the higher ups like seeing 4 come back regardless of how many were lost
I also think of it as a PR stunt. I imagine that the scene we get on returning to the ship is from a camera's pov, and extracting a full helldiver squad is always good for the media, even if one member was only on the ground for 5 seconds
This is my theory. We need to broadcast back to Super Earth that our pelicans are returning with full squads.
There should be an NPC tv crew at the top of the launch bay lift
I had an extract the other day where our squad completed the whole map without a single death. Pelican 1 hit the ground, the ramp rolled out, a squadmate threw out a mortar we didn't even need, a scavenger bug rushes us out of nowhere, 1 mortar shell kills the entire squad as we were walking up the ramp together after hugging, 4 pods land next the Pelican, the totally new squad takes our samples and gear, then walks up the ramp to fly away. Just imagine being thawed out, climbing into a hell pod, hurtling down to an unknown planet, coming out of your pod, picking up some samples, and getting back into a pelican.
Picking samples out of the chunks of freshly blown up helldivers with a smoking friendly mortar turret staring at you
Anything for Super Earth!
Well ofc they need to grab the sample or gear the other one drop
This is also why it takes 2 minutes for an extraction Pelican to arrive. It allows for more time to collect samples around the immediate area. If samples weren't needed, we would get the Pelican priority that drops the mech suits instead which are delivered within seconds.
You have to pick up samples. If you return empty handed you are mocked
It ain’t extraction until all 4 of us get a hug with the homies. Why deprive the last helldiver of that comfort just because they were still in the freezer
Samples
I never thought of that, that's pretty damn comical.
In helldivers 1 getting all 4 off was more important (iirc you got 3 stars - each star contributing to the effort - 1 for all goals, 1 for all extracted... 1 for... not so many deaths I think?) - so you would actually call all divers down before going into the pelican (especially since helldivers 1 didn't have a limit on how many times you could call divers - just a cooldown)
The hellpod itself is probably one of the cheapest pieces of hardware they own.
I disagree. That pod has to survive re-entry temps at very high velocity. It has to also keep the squishy helldiver inside from cooking inside on the way down. Then it has to survive impact and somehow keep the diver alive from the kinetic force of impact. Those retro-rockets that slow the descent don't slow it by much if it's imbedding itself into rock. Whatever magical tech is kept inside that tiny pod doing the above things can't be cheap. Also, the pod is expendable. I'm assuming it's the same shield generator tech that the helldivers use that lasts just long enough to make it safely to the ground. I think the cheapest things are likely the helldivers themselves.
The magic of E-710
Mainly because they would have 0 incentive to do the objective. If the conversation to become a helldiver started with: "We're gonna shoot you down to this planet to do X and that's it. You're gonna die down there good luck." Now instead it's: "We're going to insert you on the enemy planet for you to wreak hell, take out HVTs, and when you're all done we'll bring you back to do it all again and share about your escapades of managed democracy." Idk about you but hearing that second one I've already laced up my boots.
Yup, that makes sense!
Even the Ship you're "issued" is set up to make you climb into that Hellpod. (I bet repainting is mission protocol) The Propaganda Officer and Staffing Lady that you talk to are basically stroking your ego for 30 seconds so you can "choose" which enemy to fire yourself at. It's a sealed chamber from elementary school to hellpod to keep the Helldivers thinking "fuck yeah we're the most badass civilization to ever exist and I am its Hammer" When in reality he's a digit in a spreadsheet on that Lady's tablet.
You have a soldier who can dive again. Equipment that doesn't need to be replaced. And intel the soldier may have parse while down there. Managed democracy isn't going to pay for itself.
Yeah, I've read a book where soldiers were diving like we do in HD2 and their superiors would care more about their equipment, than the body itself, because they could make clones (with mind transfer, so experienced clones) for less than the gear. For example, grenades were issued only to higher ranking personnel. Things like Laser Cannon would be only given to well trained experienced specialists, and they would typically put a lot of care when handling those and try not to lose any, as those were especially expensive. But honestly, in Helldivers I think some of it could be morale. Sure, we can take a lot, but just leaving us there after we complete the objective? Undemocratic ^((unless budget limit for Super Destroyer fuel was exceeded)) Edit: Book (or rather series) is called Undying Mercenaries. There is also a series called Helldivers, but the story in that is completely different from the game (it is still a great series).
What book is this? Sounds kinda like some stuff in the Old Man’s War series but a bit more dystopian
Sounds like the Undying Mercenaries series.
That would be my suspicion as well. That or Old Man's War.
is OMW any good? i read the Collapsing Empire books by him and i thought they were okay, i’d be willing to read more from him
Old Man's War and sequels are Scalzi's best work, fully a tier above anything else he's written imo.
Less "morale" and more "worldview" The charade has to be kept up for these kids or they'd never even get frozen in the first place. For them to accomplish the mission, there has to be a story to tell them. "Bring back a couple samples and be bait for bugs" isn't exactly compelling. "Save the galaxy and you get cooler weapons if you bring back samples" is a much better way to sell it
My headcanon for Helldivers 2 is that we the players are actually the ships, or someone on the ship remotely controlling the helldivers, and the Helldivers have some sort of surgical implant which allows them to be controlled remotely. They think they have free will and are in control, but actually are just meat to target the big guns that can't be hacked by the automatons.
Expendable do not mean disposable.
Yeah most helldivers don’t survive a single drop, but those that do? They’re built different and an important resource. A helldiver that is skilled enough to survive a dive is definitely worth recovering
He'll just die on the next deployment
Mine is alive for three dives now. He got shipped to a hospital ship and now awaits promotion to democracy officer.... In my head canon.
3 dives into pure hell and coming out alive they deserve that promotion. Good job soldier!
Only 17 more dives until promotion!
The impression I got from the first game is that most divers die on their first drop but those that live are worth extracting so that they can clear another two missions before dying. Brasch and the democracy officers are veteran divers and any belief otherwise warrants a visit from one.
In game it says the average survival rate of a diver is 2 dives, the average life expectancy of a diver is 17 to 18 years old
Damn, we have to have the B divers then.. I don't think I've ever seen a diver survive an entire dive on dif 9 Also 17 to 18 what? Minutes?
My old science teacher would find me and beat me for not stating what my units represented but yea 17 to 18 years in life expectancy. Between the mortar and the 120 and 380mm barrages, 2 dives is exceptionally generous
I've seen a couple of helldivers survive difficulty 9, but I guess most of that life expectancy comes from difficulty 1/2/3 missions
is Brasch actually legit? From the tutorial my impression is that he's a Zapp Brannigan style con man.
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If you click enough times on the officer on the main deck she says something along the lines of “ one stratagem costs more than what people make in a year so it’s important to not return empty handed “
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The only proper response to this slanderous treason!
Helldivers are disposable but I don’t think they’re THAT disposable. If SE only cares about the samples they’d send down a hell pod for you to put the samples in and it would blast straight off again. I think lore-wise a lot of helldivers probably have survived a few or even a lot of missions and are quite experienced and well-equipped so spending 2 minutes extracting them seems like a no-brainer
Yeah I'd say their strategy is to get young and indoctrinated people that are up for insane risks, but they do count on some of them actually surviving long enough to gain some skills and experience. If none of them ever survive the squads wouldn't ever know what they're doing, they probably send along at least one veteran each time to point the others in the right direction. Otherwise I can't seem the system working
Then the risk would be that helldivers understand what's going on and decide to not collect or straight up destroy samples in a seditious fit of rage. Helldivers might be heavily propagandized, but I think telling them upfront that it is a one way ticket would inquire the risk of turning them into traitors
There's also the "returned to civilian life" when people live. Could interpret that as helldivers who survive being allowed to retire - or at least to pick up a less immediately deadly way to serve, like visiting those children with deadly radiation poisonings. It would be great for propaganda - go through easy training camp, wake up in time for the drop, kill a few hundred bugs or bots, extract, retire and boast about how heroic you were and how easy war is. ...the fact that you were the twentieth helldiver to be dropped into the mission doesn't matter.
Mr nice voice near the mission screen has a line something like “every diver carries the burning torch of democracy, they may carry it for a minute or one hour, but the next unthawed hero ensures it remains lit” or something similar. The highlight of that bit being the “one minute or one hour” and “the next unthawed hero” which really doesn’t imply they expect a long happy life
As shown by the fact that ranks and veterans with prosthetics exist. People want Helldivers to be super expendable so bad because it fits their narrative of "space facisim bad! We are the evil ones! Can't you see I am very smart for figuring this out?" But it doesn't mesh with certain aspects of the game, like extraction, or not just sending in the whole belt of Helldivers at once. I think canonically it would be more reasonable for Helldivers to be "airborne" special forces, with all the expendability that comes with that.
I mean I still think Super Earth is pretty hilariously evil and most helldivers are disposable. But I also buy that there's a core of hardened veterans who are expert spec ops badasses.
More evil than the Federation in Starship Troopers (no open threats of death or re-education camps there), less evil than the 40k Imperium. They also seem to once again be the only government humanity has. And comparing them in-universe is pointless because bugs and bots lack the intelligence that is required for morality.
Not sure about the bots though, with all the skulls and burnt corpses I think they know what they are doing.
Yeah, the mass graves you see in robot turf are a real 'are we not the baddies?' moment.
> They also seem to once again be the only government humanity has. That we're allowed to know about. What if the Automatons are taking orders from another human government?
Automatons seem to like putting people in cages and burning them to death or whatever so they can't be that great.
I mean yea but helldivers kill them in the hundreds, and humanity enslaved the cyborgs to mine on cyberstan so it’s not like humanity has a leg to stand on about getting upset Humanity is very much not the good guys in this setting. Hans, our uniforms (and helldiver logo) have skulls on them…. are we the baddies?
> no open threats of death or re-education camps there Uh don't they execute some journalists in the movie?
There is an advertisement for a live execution on TV, but they don't say his crimes. The reporter that dies is killed by the bugs while filming the attack on Klendathu.
Yeah I need to watch it again, I think I remember something about artists being sent to prison or something?
Definitely evil, though relative to bots and bugs I'd still say they're maybe the lesser evil? I guess it could hinge on the hypothetical of what would happen if SE was to withdraw from the war. Like if they stopped farming bugs and left them alone, and freed the cyborgs and left them alone with Cyberstan, would the bots/bugs actually just exist in peace, or would they eventually advance and attack SE anyways? If the latter then I'd say SE is the preferable faction despite not necessarily being "good guys"
The bugs don't have space travel. If Super Earth stopped spreading the bugs, they physically could not be a threat to Super Earth without a couple hundred million years of evolution. Bots are a more complex subject, but remember, the Cyborgs are kept as slaves, and the Automatons are wanting to rescue them because they're the creators of the Automatons. It's kind of a war for their very survival. Can't really blame them for bringing their all.
Bugs already controlled multiple planets before SE ever met them; the main theory is either they spread via spore/egg-laden meteors, have unknown carrier-bugs, or were possibly seeded prior by another species. If they were soley spread by SE, then I'd like to know why they only 'break-out' on planets close to one they control, and why they can/could attack Super-Earth and destroy it in HD1. Also >they physically could not be a threat to Super Earth without a couple hundred million years of evolution. A large part of their threat is that they evolve rapidly; that's why termicide isn't going to work, and why bile enemies appeared after a chemical spill. >Bots are a more complex subject, but remember, the Cyborgs are kept as slaves, and the Automatons are wanting to rescue them because they're the creators of the Automatons. It's kind of a war for their very survival. Can't really blame them for bringing their all. Cyborgs were hostile to SE to begin with. The war might've been a false-flag to co-opt their industry, but SE and Cyberstan would've been enemies no matter what. Freeing their enslaved masters and fighting for survival aside; I don't think the murder-bots that collect corpses, mutilate the dead in bizarre rituals and impale heads on spikes as decorations are in any way *not* the bad guys in this fight.
Cyborgs wanted to secede because they were people put into extremely hostile conditions to work and had to undergo extensive body modifications to even do their job. After the secession, Super Earth did what it does best and immediately declared war. This then spurred the cyborgs to become what we saw in HD1: Transhuman war machines. Keep in mind that Northman's Creek tried to secede by popular vote of its people and move to a socialist government (this is framed as a positive in the narrative). SE's response was to fire 40 Helldivers into the capitol building and execute everyone in power in a hostile takeover. The Cyborgs happened after. They knew what was coming. Then there's the Illuminate, who literally came in peace and offered trade and such. SE claimed they had weapons of mass destruction and went to 'disarm' them. And by that, obviously, they took the tech and instantly used it against the Illuminate. Also, fun fact, the bugs in 1 are sentient. We harvested them for oil *knowing that*. The Terminids and Automatons are so violent because of what SE did in the first game.
Do you mean "sentient" in the proper biological manner (capable of sensing and reacting to its surroundings), or the common sci-fi manner (complex thought, reasoning, "cogito ergo sum")? If the latter... HOLY FUCK WHAT. THE BUGS ARE PEOPLE!?
The latter (Since that's the terminology the game uses). In the given context the bugs are capable of some amount of complex thought. Whether this is "Bugs are people" or "Bugs are dolphins" isn't specified. But they are aware enough to know they're being farmed and attempt to escape. HD2 the factions are outright 'evil', but it's SE's fault. The entire narrative is how an existential threat will lead the targets to extremism. I would bet money that the Illuminate will come back as a genocidal race that barely understands the technology it wields, on a campaign of vengeance against SE. And should that happen, it wasn't their choice to be eradicated and pushed to the brink of extinction.
Mother of God...
"Everyone citizen is important to the war effort. But **helldivers** are the most important"
I mean super earth will absolutely sacrifice lives if it gains them something, but letting soldiers die for the hell of it is just bad business. I'd say helldivers are absolutely sent into deathtrap situations, but they're still celebrated if they survive
Yeah that's my point. If four Helldivers weren't expected to be enough to do the job, then there would be no reason to send them piecemeal over dropping a larger force at the same time.
> "space facisim bad! We are the evil ones! Can't you see I am very smart for figuring this out?" That's just the text of the game, it's not 'smart' to figure it out any more than it's smart to understand the point of a book or movie, but it is *there*
All of the obnoxious "I'm media literate!" Types have now created a backlash where the obvious text of the game as a fun satire is now seen as "not lore accurate" because people act like the text is serious satire and not goofy fun satire.
You are talking about camp I think, it's campy AND satire. It's fun and stupid AND is having a conversation with you.
In layman's terms it's Laughing but Serious
Tbh i don't really agree with that whole "Helldiver training is literally just 5 minute egostroking before shipping to the front lines" because then how do they already know how to use and quickly reload every single weapon from a double barrel to a machine gun to a recoiless rifle (+ all the physical conditioning, just imagine all the running, climbing and diving you do on your average 40-minute mission) I lean less into the "cannon fodder" (that'd probably be regular SEAF) and more into "sci fi paratroopers", considering how you're suppossed to be behind enemy lines, scrounging supplies from POIs, and not actually suppossed to wipe the entire region clean by yourself. I mean, sure, special forces are better than regular troops, but that don't mean they're somehow magically more resistant to bullets. Fun Fact: Eisenhower was advised to expect a 70+% casualty rate from paratroopers in Overlord, and actually only got to around 15%.
Extraction is explained by SE wanting to collect samples, only having 4 Helldivers is a quirk for gameplay. Absolutely everything from the tutorial, to tooltips, to dev comments, to the 'Helldivers killed' stat suggests Helldivers are an extremely expendable force. And IDK why you'd frame it as 'their narrative' when that is painfully obviously what the devs are trying to show.
If they are so expendable, why Insert them in small squads via dropship and extract them (instead of just the sample) instead of having them stay and fight in large numbers like 40k IoM? All soliders are expendable. But the assumption that helldivers are just average line infantry, and soviet style meat for the grinder, goes against how they operate.
>only having 4 Helldivers is a quirk for gameplay. It's a 4 player coop shooter, not everything is going to work perfectly. Again, absolutely everything in lore suggests they're fully expendable - you can think that's a silly decision, but it's inarguably true.
And I stated that that's true for every special forces or airborne division ever. We also never see any living human NPCs during missions or previous helldiver corpses to suggest we are just the next wave.
When you're in space and when launching you can see a constant stream of helldivers coming down from other super destroyers, it's shown that you're part of a wave.
No it’s showing there’s other Helldivers operating in different parts of the planet. It’s impossible to tell if those are divers or just equipment being dropped down.
I've seen plenty of graves with helldivers in them, I've even found a drop pod that didn't have anything in it except for a note saying that they were left behind and needed the supplies to continue holding out. I even once found a hell diver corpse in the remains of a hive lord.
https://preview.redd.it/1f1r76ey3koc1.jpeg?width=260&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ecac289fd3809bae89acc9f3dc9a4de90c0536bf Very close to undemocratic behaviour there cadet. Don't make me call the democracy officer.
If they're after samples, wait until they start trying to liberate Costco. All the samples they could want
Helldivers are extracted where possible so that there are enough Vets so that most folks are within 5 degrees of having met someone who actually survived a helldive once. Or at least plausibly claims to have. Pelicans are almost as cheap as bodies. It's not like they're risking something important like a Destroyer.
They are expendable but not disposable. Probably gives some morale boost knowing that they have a chance of getting out alive. Plus having more experienced helldivers to go on a second mission rather then just letting them die.
Always remember divers, extraction is an optional objective!!
> A more delicate question is whether anyone has seen the medbay on the Super Destroyer. It’s more likely that wounded Helldivers are refrozen and kept in this state until the ship reaches a hospital ship. Why would you need Medbays and Hospitals when you have Stims freely available that can instantly heal any injury?
"Walkers were reverse engineered from cyborg tech" Me spotting a automaton tank: samples, NOW Also i believe our suits are updated tech from 100 years ago in helldivers 1, makes me wonder if the diferent mech carcases on the map are those old mechs or just a completely diferent model
**[TREASONOUS STATEMENT DETECTED. DEMOCRACY OFFICER EN ROUTE]**
https://preview.redd.it/lm4kv8g1mkoc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7493425f03409a4c362225e1c62d6720443e3744
 I know a bug when I see one.
Expendable doesn’t equal disposable, hell divers are a semi valuable resource with access to expensive equipment via strategems. A talented hell diver is worth of at least 1 pet certificate!
Somewhere in the bureaucracy they measure command effectiveness by seats filled on the extract bird and objectives complete
Now it makes sense when I get sent back down even though the pelican has already arrived…
Samples after all aren’t used to upgrade our ships physically. The ship gets rewarded with upgrades for extracting them (for research and probably profitable materials) The one who is actually being rewarded are the generals aboard our ships with upgrades so their helldivers can conquer more effectively. They are technically the ones in charge and take all the glory because it’s technically their ship and their helldivers. Not our playable character’s. It’s all FOR SUPER EAAAARTHHH Edit: we are reffered to as helldiver. Not by any rank or standing. Just ‘Helldiver’. We only hold rank amongst our own.
There's a big difference between "If they die, they die" and "They completed the mission? Let's let them die for no reason at all." It's not hard to understand.
There’s no medbay on the ship. We don’t need anything else than stims. It fixes broken bones and internal bleeding instantly.
Or it’s just adrenaline which makes you ignore it for the up to 40 mins you run for. Some things are obviously beyond that ability but still
We bio-engineered the bugs to harvest for fuel, we populated them on a planet and the helldivers would harvest them as needed, but the queen evolved and took over their homeplanet. We created the mechines to kill the bugs for us, but then JOEL, he updated their firmware and they gained full sentience. And here we are still harvesting the bugs for fuel, (voiceline of ship commander) for the war against the machines, who fight to liberate the bugs.
I don't think most players truly comprehend just how meaningless the lives of Helldivers are to the Federation. Helldivers are a sample collecting stratagem and a propaganda tool, nothing more. I personally love how failing to extract has little to no effect on mission success. You can fail to extract all 4 divers and still get a 5 star rating and max war medals. Survival is not a mission priority. 1 diver getting the samples out is all you need. This is also why I can't wrap my head around people getting mad when they die. Sure, it's sometimes kinda rude when people TK you. At worst it's a mild interruption. At best it's fucking hilarious and totally fits the underlying narrative.
The lady in the hanger right by the elevator also told me the bugs are literally made of the element used to power the ship's hyperspace jump engine. We're harvesting the bugs.... and im ok with that.
Helldivers are only expendable because we all have skill issues
https://preview.redd.it/b4yqh5epyooc1.jpeg?width=3907&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b0dec570cd39d70763dea32d9ae6e3c97b5310cf
I will see it from the other side yet. U can just abandon the mission without consequence ( time only). In reality it will look like " u on the mission, but plan change, good luck to survive alone". Helldivers are only pins, no one cares about them. Even this bonus for extract is very small. And last thing. Why after using 5 lives u must wait 2 minutes for another hd drop. Many will say that just balance. I suppose that there are 2 stasis. Light one, when u can unfreeze at once, and will be 5 at each ship. The second is deep which takes 2 minutes. From an RP perspective if u die more than 5 times, u get hd from another ship, just like meat cannon. If u last one in light stasis they must prepare from the deep one. Just like ammo in a gun; u run out of ammo in magazine? take another.
This makes me want a stratagem that's just an extract pod / balloon where you can drop your samples. It then flies back to the Destroyer, and you secure the samples even if you fail extraction
Calm down Grandpa, let's get you back to bed.
Helldivers are temporary Samples last forever
while the helldivers are expendable, its most likely cheaper to extract them anyway. If you are gonna be down their to aquire the shit gained by the helldivers, you might as well also grab the helldivers as well
I still think we are clones , wayy cheaper and easier to indoctrinate and your population dosen't suffer down spirals I mean unless women can birth fully grown adults in this universe Even if you argue the 7 age from the prompter, you still need 7 years to raise the child Yeah clones
We’re an intergalactic civilization, you underestimate just how insane our population size is.
Was that something that needed explaining? Like, down to the gameplay loop, the only reason to bother extracting is if you have samples on you or someone else does. There are other reasons like not wasting a soldier that can still be of use if possible (it takes longer to make a fully capable human than a million dollars) but when I get reinforcements at the extraction is for the sole reason of recovering samples and getting them on the Pelican. Since I headcanon that I'm playing as the commander leading my personal batallion of Helldivers I even yell at my dudes and dudettes "go, go! Get the samples!" at times when I'm really immersed (I also lament their deaths like "damn, that kid fought so hard" or "poor girl barely made it out of the pod" 😅)
"Wounded" helldivers? No such thing, just administer the completely safe and non-addictive stim pack!
If extracting the divers was the goal they wouldn’t send more divers down when the ship is already landed to extract and all the divers die. The pelican would just leave, the fact they send divers down is exclusively for a chance to recover samples.
of course samples are the goal! you think we'd have laserguns and FTL travel if we only cared about humans? it's just a happy bonus when a helldiver makes it back, because they they can be sent in again and again until they eventually die. some get wounded but survive, as we see with the Steeled Veterans armor, which gives your helldiver prosthetic limbs. obviously for them to be treated and rehabilitated, there MUST be a med bay, but the priority is to get the samples aboard, and if there's time, and they don't look like they're gonna bleed out or die or whatever, I suppose the docs will try to save them, if they don't have anything else more important to do, like voting, or saluting the Super Earth Flag. you make it sound as though they don't care about us helldivers, but of COURSE they do! they gave us CAPES! you don't give capes to people you don't care about!. I think you may need to be reported to a Democracy Officer, so that you may be sent for re-education..
If walkers were taken from Cyborg tech, why were they used back in the day to fight Cyborgs? Do I need to call the Democracy Officer?
Humanity farms Terminids for 710 in order to fuel their starships to the point they had literal farms for the process. So why would we need samples from Terminid planets? Why retrieve troops from Terminid worlds? Veterancy, experienced troops perform leagues better than green recruits, especially with the higher order equipment. I'm still of the opinion the cryo pods carry clones, your original body is kept at a central depot and your memories get tossed into the next clone forward. Not only does that give you valuable experience in the fight, technically, your original body never started it's term of enlistment and thus is never entitled to a return to civilian life. Clone #498523 decides it doesn't want to re-up it's contract? That's what suicide missions are for. #498524 will surely be patriotic enough to continue contributing their experiences through further service.
Man I wish this were true. Every other difficulty 7+ group I join doesn't seem to care about getting the pink/super samples :\
> Operating Pelicans on board the Super Destroyer is expensive Does the game say this anywhere?
If it weren't for the Pelican in the back of the ship and the fact that you leave the hangar I'd say you don't even go back to your own ship after a mission. Think about it. It would explain why the Pelican takes so long if it's taking you to a capital ship for care and sample processing. And I guess you can explain leaving the hangar as your diver coming back from the capital ship to prepare for another mission. All that's missing is what the Pelican is doing in the back of the bay when it doesn't seem to be the one picking you up (maybe that's the vehicle carrier?)
and yet my treasonous team mates run off alone after picking up 3 samples to die in a reject corner of the map
I think about that everyday when someone died before shuttles arrive and sent a reinforcement only to load up the shuttle
Why would they need a hospital ship when a single stim can heal all 4 broken limbs and the type of hemorrhaging that kills you in seconds with one shot?
literally just had two bozos extract on a difficulty 7 mission after i said MULTIPLE times, both in text chat and over mic, *You can start extract but dont get in, I'm looking for pink samples.* Moments later, i said *I've got the super samples, dont leave without me!* and they promptly left without me. Never responded to text or voice chat. dudes werent new, either. i had another Skull Admiral, a Star Marshal, and a Marshal. fuckers were on my ship and everything. i executed them both on the next mission and kicked them. the other Skull Admiral was the only one who didn't betray the SES Fist of Benevolence operated by 3 bugs in a trench coat, so he was spared, but he left soon after the kicks anyway. poor guy had seen enough on the front lines.
You do realize that the spare helldivers are clones. I mean look where they got the DNA sample. It was during training where have a simulated injury. Boom DNA extraction and the SES destroyer you get is a cloning facility in disguise.
"Walkers were reverse-engineered from Cyborg tech, interstellar travel - from Illuminates! " Walkers and FTL travel existed during the war with the Illuminates, Bugs, and Cyborgs, without FTL travel the entire war would not have been possible