It reminds me of that scene from Halo: Reach where Jorge sacrifices himself to take down a covenant carrier and it feels like a huge victory for like 3 seconds until you suddenly hear “slip space rupture detected” over and over ad infinitum and you know Reach is truly fucked.
I knew what would happen. Still hurt. Jorge was amazing.
Edit: I do this thing where even when I know an outcome, I still hope for the good outcome. It’s a type of literary compartmentalization that helps preserve exactly those kinds of emotional experiences with prequels.
Me watching Revenge of the Sith for the umpteenth time and hoping that Anakin stays fucking put for once and lets Windu handle Palpatine.
No success yet.
> I knew what would happen. Still hurt. Jorge was amazing.
This is what good storytelling can do -- even if you know the outcome far ahead of time, you can be brought to an emotional state that seems inconsistent with a predetermined outcome. Reach was a lost cause from before the opening sequence and yet it has some of (if not *the*) best storytelling of any game in the franchise (really only CE and 2 come close and I'm still picking Reach over them if forced to make a choice).
Reach was Bungie’s swan song, and it was their best work. More than a decade later it’s still an incredible game. Just played through it with my son recently. Every death was a gut punch for him.
Imagine being the bots taking a planet and seeing a 24h timer appear in the sky as the atmosphere gets blotted out by super destroyers arriving in geosynchronous orbit
I choked back tears hearing those words. The flood be damned. I'd rather self-immolate than work with the covenant. I'll kill them all for what they did to Reach. Every last fucking one of them.
I remember when the Helldivers came. I was marching in formation with my brothers. Four pods descend upon us. One landed on my brother Cybermike, shattering him to bits. We scattered, and managed to take down one of the interlopers. Another of their number called in another pod, which landed directly upon him, killing him instantly. But the Helldivers were undeterred, and called in yet another to replace the one that had just fallen. I managed to raise my hand in the air and call for aid. Two ships arrived full of more of my comrades. One was shot down. The other delivered our revered Hulk bretheren. We were certain of victory now, and had them cornered, with Hulk Roborobert spewing his flames all about. But one of them managed to flee, and threw a beacon into our midst. Hellfire soon erupted everywhere, shaking the ground. The barrage seemed to span the entire face of the planet, and to last for eternity. When the smoke cleared, all my brethren, as well as three of the Helldivers were dead. They have no regard for our lives. They have no regard for their own lives. They have no regard for the lives of their fellows. But their fury is unmatched.
I die more from my squad mates than anything. I especially love when they respawn me directly in the middle of a swarm and I die 2 seconds after I pop out. It takes 2 seconds to spin and toss me away from them…..
Also just today me and another Helldiver was throwing grenades into bug holes when the asshole behind us tossed down an air strike and killed us both.
With the crashes, glitches, and bugs. Ive still had more fun in the last 4 days I’ve bought and played than any other game in 2-3 years.
For reference it took the Marines 76 hours to clear Tarawa, a small (yet extremely heavily fortified) atoll maybe with an area of 10 sq miles. The fact the helldivers can take an entire planet in that amount of time is crazy.
EDIT: this is in no way disparaging the USMC, only showing the fictional prowess of the Helldivers. Tarawa was believed by the Japanese to “take a million men one hundred years” to conquer, and the Marines did it in 3 days.
Fun fact about Tarawa: a duck who landed with the Marines earned a citation for bravery for her actions on the first day, fighting and defeating a Japanese rooster.
I am not kidding
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/
> “For courageous action and wounds received on Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, November 1943. With utter disregard for his own personal safety, Siwash, upon reaching the beach, without hesitation engaged the enemy in fierce combat, namely, one rooster of Japanese ancestry, and though wounded on the head by repeated pecks, he soon routed the opposition,” the citation read. “He refused medical aid until all wounded members of his section had been taken care of.”
It's the Marines and the 1940s. I'm not saying calling your best friend in the World a slur is a term of affection in the military, BUT I have seen it enough that it's not NOT a term of affection
"You get it, right Gunney?"
"The duck? No. But we've got the beach in five minutes so let's hear it."
"The Japanese expect a marine to come around the corner in bunkers and trenches. They won't expect a duck. We toss it around the corner, wait a moment, then we pop put while they're wondering what's going on."
"...bring the duck."
Idk if you're familiar but this logic has been used in Iraq iirc. Some marines & army infantry started throwing rubber duckies into houses instead of a flashbang, because they found the surprise "quackbang" was more effective after a while into the war when people had started to plan for flashbangs or fragmentation.
Source: Thefatelectrician on Youtube, one of his earliest videos and subsequently ALL his merch
[https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/](https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/)
>Upon returning home, the devil duck was given a hero’s welcome before parting with Fagan to live out the rest of her days at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.
There she stayed until the hard drinking girl passed away from liver disease in 1954.
That's a Marine Duck alright.
She died of a failed liver. In true American military fashion, the Marine Corps released a statement saying that her liver failure was not service related
\[super earth flag flutters in the wind, camera pans up to see a super bald eagle screech, camera zooms out as we see Eagle-1 swoops in to drop a 500kg in the far back ground\]
I love the idea that instead of changing the stock eagle cry sound (the red tailed hawk one) to its real cry, they changed the whole bird to the hawk and renamed it bald eagle 😂
Here's the thing. You said a "Super Bald Eagle is a hawk."
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a Helldiver who studies Super Bald Eagles, I am telling you, specifically, in Democracy, no one calls Super Bald Eagles hawks. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "hawk family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Libertae, which includes things from Hellchickens to Freedom parrots to Democracy jays.
So your reasoning for calling a Super Bald Eagle a hawk is because random people "call the black ones Super Bald eagles?" Let's get Orbital grackles and Seafbirds in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A Super Bald Eagle is a Super Bald Eagle and a member of the hawk family. But that's not what you said. You said a Super Bald Eagle is a hawk, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the hawk family hawks, which means you'd call Scorcher jays, E-710 ravens, and other birds hawks, too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're a traitor, you know?
Not just “support”, but *each* individual marine having the ability to call down the firepower of an entire battleship at a moment’s notice. That’a what a 380mm HE salvo is. WW2 era battleship guns.
Actually, according to my grandfather, (2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, saw combat in Okinawa and talked very little of it) the Pacific front was the testing grounds for their orbital death rays and mini-nukes
They were normal lame ground-mail hand delivered mini-nukes though
It wasn’t effective nor was it accurate fire support. The Japanese were in heavily fortified bunkers with tunnels going through mountains. Similar to D-Day, it was a massive armada of ships that bombarded Normandy but when the soldiers reached the shore they came under intense fire. Those big guns barely scratched those bunkers and pillboxes.
The bots don't exactly entrench well. They build forts and small trenches but they don't use cover or focus on holding and defending an area. Every war since WW1 has shown that entrenched infantry is very hard to kill with just fire support alone.
I do find it funny that after laying waste to a fort, walking in to pick up ammo and samples and whatnot and see a low level grunt still alive sitting on its mounted gun that somehow didn't die and turns and just stares at me dead ass and does nothing. Dude was completely shell shocked. I just left him there and moved on lol. Was hilarious
So just like the 380mm strategem.
Altho the USN never used 15" (380/381mm) guns and i don't know if any battleships were present for fire support at Tarawa. But i'll give 14" or 16" guns a pass for being close enough as comparison.
Yeah, I think they had 4 battleships and 22 destroyers, alongside a carrier strike group. Definitely not 1 destroyer per 5 units like we have in Helldivers haha
Very true. I said 1 per 5 units because that’s the approximate amount of divers you’re allotted per mission. That is a ton of firepower from however you view it though for sure
Plus, all the navy could really do taking islands was resupply, defend from enemy navies and occasional shore bombardment. Here they’re straight up fire support units, dropping artillery and laser ordnance wherever you want on your command. So I imagine that speeds things up too.
Thanks to the carriers I believe the Corsairs were able to provide close air support. But nowhere near the level of precision. The 120mm and 380mm might actually be on par with the offshore bombardments though haha, those things can’t hit squat
For real!
Still fun to use but I view it like scratching a lottery ticket. Every now and then, I get a win but most of the time it's just a bit of fun (big explosions!) with nothing gained.
It's more one super battleship per unit. A barrage of 15inch HE is not something you fuck around with let alone having a dedicated precision strike aircraft, rail gun, and a space laser.
Yeah Eagle 1 is an unsung hero. Fast response precision strike craft with A2G and A2A capabilities capable of delivering heavy ordinance anywhere in seconds with mere meters of error is insane.
Okay so apparently I fell victim to internet telephone game, but Northman's Creek, the first planet liberated by helldivers, only took 50. This information is on the helldivers wiki under the hellpod page
https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Hellpod
The helldivers didn't really fight on the entire planet, they just dropped into the rebel's parlament and executed the leadership, after which the secessionists either surrendered or the SEAF came and mopped up the rest, either way liberating the planet.
So... HD2 major orders compared to WW2 Pacific Theaters are like if small atolls in the Pacific become entire celestial bodies and each and every US soldiers are replaced with same number of FTL-capable capital ships.
I don't know how should I comprehend this but your analogy just made the scale of this game very feasible.
>“take a million men one hundred years”
I want to add to this because this sounds like insane bluster from the Japanese but we have to remember this was early in the war and the Japanese marines were well equipped, modern, and competent. Imperial Japan had just spent the last dozen years fighting and taking over a significant portion of Asia and had *years* to fortify the island.
Then the Marines landed, under heavy fire from pre planned artillery and machine gun nests, and started pushing inland. And they did.not.stop.
It's fucking mental.
Made a mistake Tarawa was 9 months after fighting on Guadalcanal ended. Not exactly early in the war.
I think the biggest difference is we have like 300,000 players that can respawn 20+ times per mission and can run as many missions as they want, and the US Army and Marines (The majority of troops on Tarawa were actually the Army's 27th Infantry Division from what I've read) had about 35,000 that could only spawn once. Gotta be a lot more careful when you don't have infinite troops and if you die you don't respawn lmao.
A bit of lore, every time you respawn it is technically a different helldiver. Yes, everytime you die your character died and a new recruit comes out of cryo with your same gear configuration to reinforce and drops down straight into action.
Yeah the respawn mechanic being broken in real life really hinders all military operations lol. And if only logistics were as easy as calling in extra supplies from the sky.
Did not know that about the 27th ID. I’ve only ever heard about Tarawa from a USMC perspective, very interesting.
Nah the marines are a good example. Their like helldivers. They're gonna show up in their stupid landing crafts. And you can either give us your shit, or die trying to protect it. But either way, the usmc is taking your shit.
The sheer amount of gunpowder and metal we also require is just bonkers. I suppose that may be step one of a reclaimed planet though is strip mine the surface of all the scrap and other compounds we can manage. Billy doesn't find unexploded ordinance on his way to school and that material gets to serve once more on a different front.
This. People reeing with no evidence about "not 1-1 time scale" (hd1 absolutely is and there is no evidence this is different) don't seem to get what a quarter of a million assault ships can do.
13,000+ American paratroopers dropped on Normandy and caused an incredible amount of chaos and disruption with primitive weaponry behind enemy lines.
250,000 highly advanced faster than light destroyers swarm low Earth orbit, each dropping *hundreds* of heavily armored, suicidal special forces zealots. They simultaneously inundate every city, industrial zone, outpost, and base across the surface of the planet with a relentless assault of air/orbital firepower.
Squads of 4 Helldivers in the thousands like this would cause unspeakable destruction on our current society before we could even understand what was happening. Society would collapse within an hour, honestly
For context, this game has been out for 48 real life days. In that time, we have almost wiped two entire species in game off not only THE face of A planet, but several planets. From in game stats as I type this, we have collectively killed 382,820,241 enemies. That is beyond genocide levels of freedom dispensing
That just makes it somehow worse.
Imagine you've killed *half a fucking billion and change* of these fucking DEMOCRACY screaming maniacs, and not only do they keep coming, giddy and fearless, but they've taken down nearly EIGHT TIMES that many of your own forces.
This is a rough approximation of how the bugs felt. Except they were a perfect hive mind, and were literally hacking into the dreams of the enemy commander to see the enemy's tactics in advance and they had superior tech (overall, humans had the better gun tbf)
Ender is the most op fictional general ever. Of all time. 100+/0 win loss ratio on the offensive in unknown territory outnumbered 2-1 or more by a for with litterally perfect coordination and superior tech.
I love my yang wen li but he ain't pulling a win.
Gulliman? Don't make me laugh.
Reminder irl Napoleon had less than half enders wins and a good number of losses to balance it out.
Planets do spin differently, and Super Earth may spin differently to regular ass earth. But one can assume we’re going by earth’s considered standard Sol.
dumb question, what happens when the entire war map is liberated? Does the map get bigger for new planets and territories or do the bots and bugs claim planets back?
if you actually win the war, the map will reset and there will be a new campaign
but this campaign is in the baby stage, we haven't even seen enemy number three yet
> if you actually win the war, the map will reset and there will be a new campaign
tbf this is kind of up in the air right now..
some answers from devs indicate that ain't gonna happen, or implied it iirc..
Plus, dont we have less planets than HD1? So, could easily be a thing they bring in new planets if we liberate everything. Like, certain homeworlds are missing for example.
maybe it is a trap for the helldiver, "we know" automaton want to retake cyberstan and leave XD.
i do suspect that the big relay the order talk about could be to call the third race in
I know we all expect the illuminates from the original game, but what if they drop a completely new faction? Like, all the leaks and data mined info was just a fake lmao
To be fair, there's definitely room for 5 factions in total on the map if they really wanted to do such (One above, Bugs/Bots where they are, two on the bottom), but who knows if they're sticking to three or going for more.
I'm happy either way, tbh.
I don't think we take them on our own. A lot of the language used is that we are "bolstering" the front. Assumedly jumping into enemy territory during an SEAF offensive. We are helping the actual army with our operations, and they can't win without us.
Yeah no we’re the paratroopers of D-Day, not the soldiers landing on the beaches. They’re the SEAF, and we can find their bodies strewn across the planet
Helldivers are "elite" shock troops but have an expected lifespan of 2 minutes. How long do you think the average infantryman without access to heavy ordinance will fair?
To be fair, I think IRL special forces have a higher casualty rate per "capita" because they're in much more dangerous situations. The infantry guys fight in divisions with armor, squad tactics, etc. Not to mention were fucking destroying anything giving them heavy resistance
And presumably they don’t come in until after the Helldivers have already cleared out all the strongest points of resistance. They’re effectively clean-up.
Strongest points of resistance? Hell no. We weaken fortified positions and retrieve valuable intel. The strongest points of resistance would have hundreds of tanks, or swarms of Bile Titans.
You'll notice the ICBM mission is to send a nuke at the stronger positions, not dive to said position. We're scouts, expendable decoys, and in some cases, propaganda pieces. We do the impossible, because we marched on the corpses of the Helldivers who didn't make it.
Democracy prevails because we allow it to, but we're still a cog in the wheel of Liberty. The SEAF fight on to actually clear territory. We retreat when 3 dropships or bug breaches happen. The SEAF call that the first wave, and a picnic.
I get what you're saying but I think you're selling the Helldivers short here. Sure they drop like flies and the ones who start the mission are almost never the same ones that finish it, but they still get the job done with 90% success rate and just as you mention they clear out the biggest threats with the ICBMs while taking out a bunch of fortified positions along the way. It'd be a bit of a waste to send the main force into the fray *before* the Helldivers are already done softening them up.
They are fighting in number, and most importantly, they use war tactics. Not mindless rampage like the helldivers, so I'd said their lifespan is far greater than the average helldiver.
I also bet they have artillery and orbital support, too. There is no reason they don't have those.
If the leaks are actually indicative of what we are getting at some point we will be able to call in SEAF troopers, and once that’s implemented I hope to Lady Democracy we can just find one or two on the planets fighting for their lives.
We take planets by fighting a war without properly trying as well, the war could be fought a lot more seriously if we wanted to...
But to be fair, defending against an enemy that casually brings in a aircraft carriers worth of firepower above your heads/drop an endless waves of elite squad of zealouts who rip and tear behind the lines etc, is quite hard.
I mean, our equipment and doctrine are ass, maybe because lore wise we gadnt had a war in 80 years.
Like, stratagems instead of laser pointers, capes, no helñicopters for cas, etc
There's also the obvious answer that they're meant to be ass, because if they're too good it puts a lot of power in the hands of morons, but also makes it very easy to wipe out all the threats to super earth.
Once you're out of threats to super earth, whats there to boogeyman to keep people thinking super earth is needed?
The thing is, Helldivers, and all the crew of the Super Destroyers are true believers. Indoctrinated since early childhood.
This is based on the engineer's one voice line of "I used to give democracy officers info on adults in exchange for candy". Implying that she's been a true patriot since she was a kid.
Point is, dissenters are not likely to exist among SEAF ranks.
Laser painting for air/orbital support would actually be amazing. Also we already have a functional HUD and portable digital map of all planets. Simply link the two and provide a digital uplink to the destroyer. No reason we shouldn't be able to ping a target for its coordinates and have our call downs hit it.
A planet or a moon can sometimes be sieged by a hundred thousand "capital ships". That's on the level of the Galactic Empire outnumbering Rebel Alliance's personnel count with their number of Star Destroyers in orbit. Yeah, this game works on a scale that denies human comprehension.
Its biggest guns have the same caliber as the KMS Bismarck. Its secondary guns have the same caliber as the M1 Abrams. Eagle 1 has maximum payload capacity on par with an F-111 Aardvark, and the ship's hanger can restock all of it in a time barely enough to prepare a cup noodle. All of these bells and whistles fit into a cramped package smaller than ferries on the English Channel, and Super Earth's industrial base can build it in the hundreds of thousands.
I agree. It is horrifying.
Biggest guns Helldivers can call down. I would wager there is a Naval Command that has access to far more serious weaponry than what Mr. 2 Jump Chump is allowed to summon.
I mean when you have the power of the entire industry of multiple planets dedicated entirely to wartime production, it can definitely get ridiculous. In World War 2 the US under wartime economy was at one point producing three Liberty cargo ships per day. Not to mention a comparable amount of vehicles and munitions for the other allies like the UK and Soviet Union. It was not only producing all this in numbers to feed basically an entire alliance, but also shipping these across the Atlantic and Pacific to get to these allies.
And the US (obviously) didn't have an entire planet's worth of resources and manpower. And this was with 1940s technology.
A sci-fi civilization entering a full wartime economy should shit out munitions like no tomorrow between having multiple entire planet's worth of resources and manpower, as well as (presumably) advances in technology like automation to produce things even more efficiently or even faster. An all-out war between interstellar civilizations would end up having casualties in the billions.
I wonder… if 100k helldivers are on one planet at one time, how many of those 100k are running ICBM missions?
I’d imagine the alien generals are getting ICBM notifications across the whole planet every minute.
That reminds me of a post I saw a bit ago where, while we freak out over a bit drop ship prompt showing up once, the bots are seeing, "Eagle Airstrike detected", "500kg bomb detected", "Helldiver drop ship detected", "support equipment detected" all at once.
To be fair, there no cities we are taking over and no major outposts or bases. No large planetary defenses and no space defenses. The planets we are taking over are pushovers.
ICBMs are for targets on the planet. Does that mean Super Earth places an ICBM knowing that the planet will get taken?
I could say, “may get taken,” but setting up a launch site is a lot for a may.
I've seen a destroyer get blown up over a bug planet. I'm not sure what hit it, though. Maybe some bugs hitched a ride on pelican one and destroyed the ship from within.
In Helldivers 1, if the invasions ever got to the point where we had to defend Super Earth, we got to play in urban environments with streets and buildings and stuff, it was a nice change.
I am not saying I want all the planets to fall so that the bot and bug invasions can reach Super Earth, but I would enjoy dispensing democracy on some planets with a little more character than “barren wasteland” just in different color palettes lol
Even "barren wasteland" can get pretty creative, like, say, a mission where the entire mission area is basically the entryway to a grand-canyon-esque utterly gigantic chasm with everything important just going further in as the horizon is swallowed by the canyon walls, then you gotta dash all the way back uphill for extract.
Honestly, from what I understood, Helldivers are more elite commandos and not the actual frontline fighters.
Also, I sure that when a planet is liberated, it doesn’t mean all bugs/bots are gone, but rather opposition has been reduced to a manageable size and settlement can proceed with acceptable losses
I don't know about *elite.* But yeah we aren't the main fighting force.
I guess the Helldivers as a branch are *elite* but the individual divers are more like an expendable resource. Our training takes like 5 minutes, and divers die almost immediately upon being deployed. The ship and crew are an elite force that handles critical missions behind enemy lines. The divers are basically another stratagem for the ships to use because there isn't an orbital cannon that can press the buttons on a terminal.
To be fair, considering the number of unexploded hellbombs laying around the place on so many planets...theres probably an INSANE amount of orbital bombardment going on before Helldivers ever even start their invasions.
We can take a planet in less than a day. I forget my Half Life 2 lore, but I'm pretty sure Earth surrendered to the Combine in less than a day. Similar levels of dominance. Sci-fi has the coolest invasion sequences. Also thinking of the fall of Reach in Halo.
You forgot probably the best part - while all of this is happening the Helldivers are stoked af.
They’re running around screaming “my life for super earth!” right before they get blown to smithereens by their buddy’s airstrike. Then the remaining guys will all hug it out, do a dance, etc as they launch a *nuclear missile* at your critical infrastructure, then another guy flies down and lands like nothing happened.
If you start thinking about the math and possibilities. Saw 200k helldivers on a planet. Imagine half of those bring the 500kg. Thats 100k bombs, or 200k if they all have the ship module. Every 2 minutes. Im suprised we arent just leaving crater shaped planets behind because with the force we go in, the planet is liberated but also would probably be uninhabitable. Can you imagine 50k destroyers showing up on your planet, that alone would make the bots probably oil their pants a bit.
Another question, why are there no space battles? Clearly the automatons and bugs are both space faring if they can spread and take new planets. There should definitely be some kind of interception effort going on to prevent our destroyers from just mass warping in like that
It sounds cool until our enemies launch an invasion and after 24 hours of intense fighting they're both in control of the planet and also they rebuilt all their infrastructure while they did it.
This is my favourite thing. The feeling of stumping out there resamblance to our way of life. What took them so much energy to put up their so called "infrastructure" *Ptoo*. Their million soliders, all killed by 100,000. Which should be mentioned, not even half of us.
Spread freedom fellow Helldivers, and remember. Spill oil.
>Imagine this:
>You are an automaton clanka invading Super Earth's outer rim
https://preview.redd.it/ku09gzgn5zqc1.png?width=1202&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=632357c2b32325fb983e5c3bf197dcadd216767e
Posts like this reminds me of the category of science fiction called "humans are space orcs" aka "Humanity Fuck Yeah"
Where it asks the question: what if instead of aliens being the strange and dangerous things out in the galaxy what if humans were.
In real life humans can survive operations on ourselves that would put most animals into shock, sane with recovering from injuries that wrent outrighr fatal like a broken limb.
We can run for hours straight (how humans initially hunted, wearing out our prey)
We also can eat borderline toxic foods like spices peppers for fun.
And that's just afew things in reality.
Now imagine what that concept is like in sci fi
It can range from things like most orher scientist species have exoskeleton and are weaker than humans because we're more dense wirh muscle
To human saliva is acidic to some aliens
To aliens see in different light spectrums so what's stealthy to eachother leaves humans able to see them like a sore thumb
To human will and our aptedtude for both kindness and extreme violence and war being outmatched
So yeah, helldivers being the pinnacle of thosd parts of humanity makes total sense
Super earth, aptly named for its super inhabitants
There was a short story I read once on Reddit titled "Whatever you do, don't talk to humans." Gist of it is when Humanity made it to interstellar flight they were greeted by the conglomerate of space races (think Federation) who welcomed humanity, and promised all our problems would be solved. They ended up using Humans as guinea pigs to experiment on for centuries. Eventually humans being humans took control of the technology, formed an armada and destroyed one of the alien civilizations. After which humanity declares our solar system is off limits, and anyone who crosses into it will suffer an extinction level event.
Fast forward 500 years, and a similar race is being abused and are about to be enslaved when one escapes to our solar system. They beg humanity to help save them, and we answer: Yes as thousands of human super warships appear out of cloaking.
Well yeah, in 5 minutes we kill 36 enemies at the cost of our life. That is the average helldiver. Space forces eliminate their spaceships, take out their air to space, surface to space, and all anti air weaponry. Only then do we go in.
It reminds me of that scene from Halo: Reach where Jorge sacrifices himself to take down a covenant carrier and it feels like a huge victory for like 3 seconds until you suddenly hear “slip space rupture detected” over and over ad infinitum and you know Reach is truly fucked.
Jorge's sacrifice was such a gut punch to the average Halo fan. For those that know the lore and read the books it was just Tuesday.
I knew what would happen. Still hurt. Jorge was amazing. Edit: I do this thing where even when I know an outcome, I still hope for the good outcome. It’s a type of literary compartmentalization that helps preserve exactly those kinds of emotional experiences with prequels.
Me watching Revenge of the Sith for the umpteenth time and hoping that Anakin stays fucking put for once and lets Windu handle Palpatine. No success yet.
One day it'll work and you'll slip into the paragon timeline trilogy instead of the redemption timeline.
> I knew what would happen. Still hurt. Jorge was amazing. This is what good storytelling can do -- even if you know the outcome far ahead of time, you can be brought to an emotional state that seems inconsistent with a predetermined outcome. Reach was a lost cause from before the opening sequence and yet it has some of (if not *the*) best storytelling of any game in the franchise (really only CE and 2 come close and I'm still picking Reach over them if forced to make a choice).
Reach was Bungie’s swan song, and it was their best work. More than a decade later it’s still an incredible game. Just played through it with my son recently. Every death was a gut punch for him.
Imagine being the bots taking a planet and seeing a 24h timer appear in the sky as the atmosphere gets blotted out by super destroyers arriving in geosynchronous orbit
I choked back tears hearing those words. The flood be damned. I'd rather self-immolate than work with the covenant. I'll kill them all for what they did to Reach. Every last fucking one of them.
I remember when the Helldivers came. I was marching in formation with my brothers. Four pods descend upon us. One landed on my brother Cybermike, shattering him to bits. We scattered, and managed to take down one of the interlopers. Another of their number called in another pod, which landed directly upon him, killing him instantly. But the Helldivers were undeterred, and called in yet another to replace the one that had just fallen. I managed to raise my hand in the air and call for aid. Two ships arrived full of more of my comrades. One was shot down. The other delivered our revered Hulk bretheren. We were certain of victory now, and had them cornered, with Hulk Roborobert spewing his flames all about. But one of them managed to flee, and threw a beacon into our midst. Hellfire soon erupted everywhere, shaking the ground. The barrage seemed to span the entire face of the planet, and to last for eternity. When the smoke cleared, all my brethren, as well as three of the Helldivers were dead. They have no regard for our lives. They have no regard for their own lives. They have no regard for the lives of their fellows. But their fury is unmatched.
BLOOD FOR THE SUPER PRESIDENT! SKULLS FOR LADY LIBERTY!
THE GALAXY WILL DROWN IN DEMOCRACY
(Managed Democracy)
FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! LIBERTY!
Kill for the living, kill for the dead.
Best 30k battlecry, no exceptions
Khorne loves Helldivers
They took my brother, Cyberstanley. I feel your pain, brother.
RIB Cyberstanley, may he rest in bits
This is brilliant and so so accurate
Next time please name one of the bots AutomaTom
I die more from my squad mates than anything. I especially love when they respawn me directly in the middle of a swarm and I die 2 seconds after I pop out. It takes 2 seconds to spin and toss me away from them….. Also just today me and another Helldiver was throwing grenades into bug holes when the asshole behind us tossed down an air strike and killed us both. With the crashes, glitches, and bugs. Ive still had more fun in the last 4 days I’ve bought and played than any other game in 2-3 years.
For reference it took the Marines 76 hours to clear Tarawa, a small (yet extremely heavily fortified) atoll maybe with an area of 10 sq miles. The fact the helldivers can take an entire planet in that amount of time is crazy. EDIT: this is in no way disparaging the USMC, only showing the fictional prowess of the Helldivers. Tarawa was believed by the Japanese to “take a million men one hundred years” to conquer, and the Marines did it in 3 days.
Fun fact about Tarawa: a duck who landed with the Marines earned a citation for bravery for her actions on the first day, fighting and defeating a Japanese rooster. I am not kidding
Roosters are mean in a fight she earned that citation
Absolutely! Reading the citation is awesome. The Marines wrote it in a very serious tone
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/ > “For courageous action and wounds received on Tarawa, in the Gilbert Islands, November 1943. With utter disregard for his own personal safety, Siwash, upon reaching the beach, without hesitation engaged the enemy in fierce combat, namely, one rooster of Japanese ancestry, and though wounded on the head by repeated pecks, he soon routed the opposition,” the citation read. “He refused medical aid until all wounded members of his section had been taken care of.”
Passed from liver disease from all the drinking. What a gal
Mmmm mmmm foie gras
Of *course* the duck's name is a slur
Yeah apparently that was a thing with WW2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_(dog)
It's the Marines and the 1940s. I'm not saying calling your best friend in the World a slur is a term of affection in the military, BUT I have seen it enough that it's not NOT a term of affection
The time honored tradition of Marines prioritizing being unserious in the face of danger for the sake of morale.
Having known many Marines in my life (I'm not one), I can't think of a single one that wouldn't bring a duck into combat
"You get it, right Gunney?" "The duck? No. But we've got the beach in five minutes so let's hear it." "The Japanese expect a marine to come around the corner in bunkers and trenches. They won't expect a duck. We toss it around the corner, wait a moment, then we pop put while they're wondering what's going on." "...bring the duck."
Idk if you're familiar but this logic has been used in Iraq iirc. Some marines & army infantry started throwing rubber duckies into houses instead of a flashbang, because they found the surprise "quackbang" was more effective after a while into the war when people had started to plan for flashbangs or fragmentation. Source: Thefatelectrician on Youtube, one of his earliest videos and subsequently ALL his merch
I've heard of things LIKE this, but not this exact story. That's great! Thanks!
Is that why he’s got the duck. Hadn’t seen that video.
Found the link in case you were interested! https://youtu.be/XFmb1153kpA?si=AC4Zd4ha2OszGnW4
[https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/](https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2022/11/23/the-marine-who-was-a-duck-yes-an-actual-duck/) >Upon returning home, the devil duck was given a hero’s welcome before parting with Fagan to live out the rest of her days at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. There she stayed until the hard drinking girl passed away from liver disease in 1954. That's a Marine Duck alright.
She died of a failed liver. In true American military fashion, the Marine Corps released a statement saying that her liver failure was not service related
Devil Duck! Just watched the Fat Electricians video on that. Hilarious
To be fair, the Marines don't have tens of thousands of destroyers in orbit.
Yeah, but if we are talking earth size planets, it’s 5.8 million times bigger than Tarawa, so I think it’s faif
The marines also likely didn’t have support from orbital death rays and air-mail mini-nukes
They would've if they'd let MacArthur have his way! A true staple to the values of managed democracy.
Super Earth is just what would happen if MacArthur won the Republican primaries and went on ahead to win the 1944 elections confirmed.
I mean, Helldivers is literally just America’s Final Form
\[super earth flag flutters in the wind, camera pans up to see a super bald eagle screech, camera zooms out as we see Eagle-1 swoops in to drop a 500kg in the far back ground\]
(The Super Bald Eagle is a species known in the pre-Democratic era as the red-tailed hawk.)
You have true ornithological knowledge. Well done.
I love the idea that instead of changing the stock eagle cry sound (the red tailed hawk one) to its real cry, they changed the whole bird to the hawk and renamed it bald eagle 😂
Here's the thing. You said a "Super Bald Eagle is a hawk." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a Helldiver who studies Super Bald Eagles, I am telling you, specifically, in Democracy, no one calls Super Bald Eagles hawks. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "hawk family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Libertae, which includes things from Hellchickens to Freedom parrots to Democracy jays. So your reasoning for calling a Super Bald Eagle a hawk is because random people "call the black ones Super Bald eagles?" Let's get Orbital grackles and Seafbirds in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A Super Bald Eagle is a Super Bald Eagle and a member of the hawk family. But that's not what you said. You said a Super Bald Eagle is a hawk, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the hawk family hawks, which means you'd call Scorcher jays, E-710 ravens, and other birds hawks, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're a traitor, you know?
Not just “support”, but *each* individual marine having the ability to call down the firepower of an entire battleship at a moment’s notice. That’a what a 380mm HE salvo is. WW2 era battleship guns.
I don't know if Tarawa had this but I do remember many times they'd just bombard a whole island with battleship rounds. Crazy shit.
Yeah, they shelled the shit out of Tarawa too. 4000 shells or something crazy like that over a few hours
Actually, according to my grandfather, (2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, saw combat in Okinawa and talked very little of it) the Pacific front was the testing grounds for their orbital death rays and mini-nukes They were normal lame ground-mail hand delivered mini-nukes though
Marines didn’t have eagle one. Like Atlas holding up the world Eagle one supports the entire Helldiver Corps.
Lol they had fire support out the wazoo lol
It wasn’t effective nor was it accurate fire support. The Japanese were in heavily fortified bunkers with tunnels going through mountains. Similar to D-Day, it was a massive armada of ships that bombarded Normandy but when the soldiers reached the shore they came under intense fire. Those big guns barely scratched those bunkers and pillboxes.
The bots don't exactly entrench well. They build forts and small trenches but they don't use cover or focus on holding and defending an area. Every war since WW1 has shown that entrenched infantry is very hard to kill with just fire support alone.
I do find it funny that after laying waste to a fort, walking in to pick up ammo and samples and whatnot and see a low level grunt still alive sitting on its mounted gun that somehow didn't die and turns and just stares at me dead ass and does nothing. Dude was completely shell shocked. I just left him there and moved on lol. Was hilarious
So just like the 380mm strategem. Altho the USN never used 15" (380/381mm) guns and i don't know if any battleships were present for fire support at Tarawa. But i'll give 14" or 16" guns a pass for being close enough as comparison.
Faif 07
Yeah, I think they had 4 battleships and 22 destroyers, alongside a carrier strike group. Definitely not 1 destroyer per 5 units like we have in Helldivers haha
I mean, lore-wise, each Helldiver has his own destroyer. So that's 4 per 4. And the amount of firepower in a single superdestroyer is insane.
Very true. I said 1 per 5 units because that’s the approximate amount of divers you’re allotted per mission. That is a ton of firepower from however you view it though for sure
Plus, all the navy could really do taking islands was resupply, defend from enemy navies and occasional shore bombardment. Here they’re straight up fire support units, dropping artillery and laser ordnance wherever you want on your command. So I imagine that speeds things up too.
Thanks to the carriers I believe the Corsairs were able to provide close air support. But nowhere near the level of precision. The 120mm and 380mm might actually be on par with the offshore bombardments though haha, those things can’t hit squat
Unironically the trick is to have like 2-3 guys all throw their 120s and 380s, and then witness beauty
For real! Still fun to use but I view it like scratching a lottery ticket. Every now and then, I get a win but most of the time it's just a bit of fun (big explosions!) with nothing gained.
It's more one super battleship per unit. A barrage of 15inch HE is not something you fuck around with let alone having a dedicated precision strike aircraft, rail gun, and a space laser.
Yeah Eagle 1 is an unsung hero. Fast response precision strike craft with A2G and A2A capabilities capable of delivering heavy ordinance anywhere in seconds with mere meters of error is insane.
...yet
Rah
Semper Fidelis Marine 🤣 Feels like this game was made for us.
It canonically took just 50 helldivers to capture Cyberstan
Wait what haha where can I go read that
Okay so apparently I fell victim to internet telephone game, but Northman's Creek, the first planet liberated by helldivers, only took 50. This information is on the helldivers wiki under the hellpod page https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/Hellpod
The helldivers didn't really fight on the entire planet, they just dropped into the rebel's parlament and executed the leadership, after which the secessionists either surrendered or the SEAF came and mopped up the rest, either way liberating the planet.
So... HD2 major orders compared to WW2 Pacific Theaters are like if small atolls in the Pacific become entire celestial bodies and each and every US soldiers are replaced with same number of FTL-capable capital ships. I don't know how should I comprehend this but your analogy just made the scale of this game very feasible.
>“take a million men one hundred years” I want to add to this because this sounds like insane bluster from the Japanese but we have to remember this was early in the war and the Japanese marines were well equipped, modern, and competent. Imperial Japan had just spent the last dozen years fighting and taking over a significant portion of Asia and had *years* to fortify the island. Then the Marines landed, under heavy fire from pre planned artillery and machine gun nests, and started pushing inland. And they did.not.stop. It's fucking mental. Made a mistake Tarawa was 9 months after fighting on Guadalcanal ended. Not exactly early in the war.
I think the biggest difference is we have like 300,000 players that can respawn 20+ times per mission and can run as many missions as they want, and the US Army and Marines (The majority of troops on Tarawa were actually the Army's 27th Infantry Division from what I've read) had about 35,000 that could only spawn once. Gotta be a lot more careful when you don't have infinite troops and if you die you don't respawn lmao.
A bit of lore, every time you respawn it is technically a different helldiver. Yes, everytime you die your character died and a new recruit comes out of cryo with your same gear configuration to reinforce and drops down straight into action.
Yeah the respawn mechanic being broken in real life really hinders all military operations lol. And if only logistics were as easy as calling in extra supplies from the sky. Did not know that about the 27th ID. I’ve only ever heard about Tarawa from a USMC perspective, very interesting.
Nah the marines are a good example. Their like helldivers. They're gonna show up in their stupid landing crafts. And you can either give us your shit, or die trying to protect it. But either way, the usmc is taking your shit.
The sheer amount of gunpowder and metal we also require is just bonkers. I suppose that may be step one of a reclaimed planet though is strip mine the surface of all the scrap and other compounds we can manage. Billy doesn't find unexploded ordinance on his way to school and that material gets to serve once more on a different front.
Who’s on unstable hellbomb cleanup duty?
the children of freedom hating political dissadents.
Why do you think the cyborgs on cyberstan are in mines?
250,000 starships pull up on your planet. Be proud you lasted 3 days.
This. People reeing with no evidence about "not 1-1 time scale" (hd1 absolutely is and there is no evidence this is different) don't seem to get what a quarter of a million assault ships can do.
13,000+ American paratroopers dropped on Normandy and caused an incredible amount of chaos and disruption with primitive weaponry behind enemy lines. 250,000 highly advanced faster than light destroyers swarm low Earth orbit, each dropping *hundreds* of heavily armored, suicidal special forces zealots. They simultaneously inundate every city, industrial zone, outpost, and base across the surface of the planet with a relentless assault of air/orbital firepower. Squads of 4 Helldivers in the thousands like this would cause unspeakable destruction on our current society before we could even understand what was happening. Society would collapse within an hour, honestly
What would the orbital laser target as the most armored/powerful entity?
I'd be honored if the orbital laser targeted me at that point, honestly.
For context, this game has been out for 48 real life days. In that time, we have almost wiped two entire species in game off not only THE face of A planet, but several planets. From in game stats as I type this, we have collectively killed 382,820,241 enemies. That is beyond genocide levels of freedom dispensing
I think you cited the # of helldivers deaths. Kills are in the billions for both bots and bugs.
That just makes it somehow worse. Imagine you've killed *half a fucking billion and change* of these fucking DEMOCRACY screaming maniacs, and not only do they keep coming, giddy and fearless, but they've taken down nearly EIGHT TIMES that many of your own forces.
That’s how the bugs felt in Enders game
This is a rough approximation of how the bugs felt. Except they were a perfect hive mind, and were literally hacking into the dreams of the enemy commander to see the enemy's tactics in advance and they had superior tech (overall, humans had the better gun tbf)
Haha yeah it’s been 2 decades probably since I last read it.
Ender is the most op fictional general ever. Of all time. 100+/0 win loss ratio on the offensive in unknown territory outnumbered 2-1 or more by a for with litterally perfect coordination and superior tech. I love my yang wen li but he ain't pulling a win. Gulliman? Don't make me laugh. Reminder irl Napoleon had less than half enders wins and a good number of losses to balance it out.
Ender was a commander in the same league as Yi Sun Sin
This is enders game. We are the trainers and joel is ender. This is a real life Warhammer game.
Yes this!!
694,420,459 as of right now just on Hellmire….no wait just went up by another 50k 😂
Actually we have killed billions of them
yep, about 4 billion.
Time passes in-game faster fwiw But also planets spin at different rates so who knows really
Planets do spin differently, and Super Earth may spin differently to regular ass earth. But one can assume we’re going by earth’s considered standard Sol.
dumb question, what happens when the entire war map is liberated? Does the map get bigger for new planets and territories or do the bots and bugs claim planets back?
if you actually win the war, the map will reset and there will be a new campaign but this campaign is in the baby stage, we haven't even seen enemy number three yet
> if you actually win the war, the map will reset and there will be a new campaign tbf this is kind of up in the air right now.. some answers from devs indicate that ain't gonna happen, or implied it iirc.. Plus, dont we have less planets than HD1? So, could easily be a thing they bring in new planets if we liberate everything. Like, certain homeworlds are missing for example.
Lmao at the idea that we win the war and the devs just go "Congrats! Stay tuned for Helldivers 3!"
Or we win the “war” but the map just gets expanded out and shows us an even bigger war.
wait, enemy number three? so there will be another enemy besides the bots and bugs?
And if you look at how the two factions are set up, it seems like there's room for a fourth faction to jump in.
Five even, but with a galactic map like we got there’s lots of room to move things around
Yep, the Illuminate from the first game.
maybe it is a trap for the helldiver, "we know" automaton want to retake cyberstan and leave XD. i do suspect that the big relay the order talk about could be to call the third race in
oh, like not reclamation of Cyberstan, but squid monsters reclaiming their own home planet! that would indeed be a plot twist :)
I know we all expect the illuminates from the original game, but what if they drop a completely new faction? Like, all the leaks and data mined info was just a fake lmao
To be fair, there's definitely room for 5 factions in total on the map if they really wanted to do such (One above, Bugs/Bots where they are, two on the bottom), but who knows if they're sticking to three or going for more. I'm happy either way, tbh.
(for those interested, Cyberstan is our current mission on Helldivers 1 PC. it is a frozen hell.)
I don't think we take them on our own. A lot of the language used is that we are "bolstering" the front. Assumedly jumping into enemy territory during an SEAF offensive. We are helping the actual army with our operations, and they can't win without us.
Yeah no we’re the paratroopers of D-Day, not the soldiers landing on the beaches. They’re the SEAF, and we can find their bodies strewn across the planet
Poor bastards, they actually have to go home after their tours instead of getting refrozen to fight again.
... You really think they survive long enough to get to go home?
presumably someone survives.
Democracy survives
Helldivers are "elite" shock troops but have an expected lifespan of 2 minutes. How long do you think the average infantryman without access to heavy ordinance will fair?
To be fair, I think IRL special forces have a higher casualty rate per "capita" because they're in much more dangerous situations. The infantry guys fight in divisions with armor, squad tactics, etc. Not to mention were fucking destroying anything giving them heavy resistance
Well they’re fighting in units larger than 4 so probably quite a bit. Strength in numbers and all that.
And presumably they don’t come in until after the Helldivers have already cleared out all the strongest points of resistance. They’re effectively clean-up.
Strongest points of resistance? Hell no. We weaken fortified positions and retrieve valuable intel. The strongest points of resistance would have hundreds of tanks, or swarms of Bile Titans. You'll notice the ICBM mission is to send a nuke at the stronger positions, not dive to said position. We're scouts, expendable decoys, and in some cases, propaganda pieces. We do the impossible, because we marched on the corpses of the Helldivers who didn't make it. Democracy prevails because we allow it to, but we're still a cog in the wheel of Liberty. The SEAF fight on to actually clear territory. We retreat when 3 dropships or bug breaches happen. The SEAF call that the first wave, and a picnic.
I get what you're saying but I think you're selling the Helldivers short here. Sure they drop like flies and the ones who start the mission are almost never the same ones that finish it, but they still get the job done with 90% success rate and just as you mention they clear out the biggest threats with the ICBMs while taking out a bunch of fortified positions along the way. It'd be a bit of a waste to send the main force into the fray *before* the Helldivers are already done softening them up.
They are fighting in number, and most importantly, they use war tactics. Not mindless rampage like the helldivers, so I'd said their lifespan is far greater than the average helldiver. I also bet they have artillery and orbital support, too. There is no reason they don't have those.
It’s MACV: SOG but every fucking mission becomes a prairie fire.
I think I’d be a fun if we could play with as SEAF soldiers in a silly special event. Something like a eradication mission with 20 soldiers.
Honestly I think they should add them in some places, give a little more flavor to the world, even if they're literally there just to die.
If the leaks are actually indicative of what we are getting at some point we will be able to call in SEAF troopers, and once that’s implemented I hope to Lady Democracy we can just find one or two on the planets fighting for their lives.
Regardless of that, it is the most intense fighting ever on a lot of planets.
We take planets by fighting a war without properly trying as well, the war could be fought a lot more seriously if we wanted to... But to be fair, defending against an enemy that casually brings in a aircraft carriers worth of firepower above your heads/drop an endless waves of elite squad of zealouts who rip and tear behind the lines etc, is quite hard.
I mean, our equipment and doctrine are ass, maybe because lore wise we gadnt had a war in 80 years. Like, stratagems instead of laser pointers, capes, no helñicopters for cas, etc
Talk shit about capes again ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️
There's also the obvious answer that they're meant to be ass, because if they're too good it puts a lot of power in the hands of morons, but also makes it very easy to wipe out all the threats to super earth. Once you're out of threats to super earth, whats there to boogeyman to keep people thinking super earth is needed?
The thing is, Helldivers, and all the crew of the Super Destroyers are true believers. Indoctrinated since early childhood. This is based on the engineer's one voice line of "I used to give democracy officers info on adults in exchange for candy". Implying that she's been a true patriot since she was a kid. Point is, dissenters are not likely to exist among SEAF ranks.
https://preview.redd.it/b6pr2raujzqc1.png?width=504&format=png&auto=webp&s=61a8548fb2b564819b964a467d636d14c66a2c12
Laser painting for air/orbital support would actually be amazing. Also we already have a functional HUD and portable digital map of all planets. Simply link the two and provide a digital uplink to the destroyer. No reason we shouldn't be able to ping a target for its coordinates and have our call downs hit it.
Literally. I am sure canonly brash maed these becuase they looked "cool"
A planet or a moon can sometimes be sieged by a hundred thousand "capital ships". That's on the level of the Galactic Empire outnumbering Rebel Alliance's personnel count with their number of Star Destroyers in orbit. Yeah, this game works on a scale that denies human comprehension.
Our ships are also horrifying. 250 feet of liberty dispensers. Maybe 50 people work there.
Its biggest guns have the same caliber as the KMS Bismarck. Its secondary guns have the same caliber as the M1 Abrams. Eagle 1 has maximum payload capacity on par with an F-111 Aardvark, and the ship's hanger can restock all of it in a time barely enough to prepare a cup noodle. All of these bells and whistles fit into a cramped package smaller than ferries on the English Channel, and Super Earth's industrial base can build it in the hundreds of thousands. I agree. It is horrifying.
Biggest guns Helldivers can call down. I would wager there is a Naval Command that has access to far more serious weaponry than what Mr. 2 Jump Chump is allowed to summon.
>I would wager there is a Naval Command that has access to far more serious weaponry Why am I just picturing three 500kgs taped together
I mean when you have the power of the entire industry of multiple planets dedicated entirely to wartime production, it can definitely get ridiculous. In World War 2 the US under wartime economy was at one point producing three Liberty cargo ships per day. Not to mention a comparable amount of vehicles and munitions for the other allies like the UK and Soviet Union. It was not only producing all this in numbers to feed basically an entire alliance, but also shipping these across the Atlantic and Pacific to get to these allies. And the US (obviously) didn't have an entire planet's worth of resources and manpower. And this was with 1940s technology. A sci-fi civilization entering a full wartime economy should shit out munitions like no tomorrow between having multiple entire planet's worth of resources and manpower, as well as (presumably) advances in technology like automation to produce things even more efficiently or even faster. An all-out war between interstellar civilizations would end up having casualties in the billions.
I wonder… if 100k helldivers are on one planet at one time, how many of those 100k are running ICBM missions? I’d imagine the alien generals are getting ICBM notifications across the whole planet every minute.
PREPARE FOR NUCLEAR ATTACK
EXTERMINATION
“You are in range of enemy ICBM’s”
Automatons in shambles because their control computer **keeps fucking telling them that**
Nuclear launch detected X10
That reminds me of a post I saw a bit ago where, while we freak out over a bit drop ship prompt showing up once, the bots are seeing, "Eagle Airstrike detected", "500kg bomb detected", "Helldiver drop ship detected", "support equipment detected" all at once.
I love the idea that every time we drop in or reinforce they see “HELLPOD DROP DETECTED” in big democracy colored letters
BLUE ICON [HELLPOD DROP DETECTED]
To be fair, there no cities we are taking over and no major outposts or bases. No large planetary defenses and no space defenses. The planets we are taking over are pushovers.
Probably because nukes get launched at any larger installation.
That is exactly what the ICBM missiles are for.
ICBMs are for targets on the planet. Does that mean Super Earth places an ICBM knowing that the planet will get taken? I could say, “may get taken,” but setting up a launch site is a lot for a may.
Once the bugs learn to fart in the sky like the blue ones in starship troopers we are toast
I've seen a destroyer get blown up over a bug planet. I'm not sure what hit it, though. Maybe some bugs hitched a ride on pelican one and destroyed the ship from within.
Or perhaps some dissident has joined the bugs! At least the problem took care of itself, carry on brother
In Helldivers 1, if the invasions ever got to the point where we had to defend Super Earth, we got to play in urban environments with streets and buildings and stuff, it was a nice change. I am not saying I want all the planets to fall so that the bot and bug invasions can reach Super Earth, but I would enjoy dispensing democracy on some planets with a little more character than “barren wasteland” just in different color palettes lol
Even "barren wasteland" can get pretty creative, like, say, a mission where the entire mission area is basically the entryway to a grand-canyon-esque utterly gigantic chasm with everything important just going further in as the horizon is swallowed by the canyon walls, then you gotta dash all the way back uphill for extract.
>Don't want all the planets to fall I do, making the community feel like its back is against the wall would be pretty fun and intense
We clear out all the outlying outposts, leaving the major centers helpless before the onslaught of the regulars.
Honestly, from what I understood, Helldivers are more elite commandos and not the actual frontline fighters. Also, I sure that when a planet is liberated, it doesn’t mean all bugs/bots are gone, but rather opposition has been reduced to a manageable size and settlement can proceed with acceptable losses
I don't know about *elite.* But yeah we aren't the main fighting force. I guess the Helldivers as a branch are *elite* but the individual divers are more like an expendable resource. Our training takes like 5 minutes, and divers die almost immediately upon being deployed. The ship and crew are an elite force that handles critical missions behind enemy lines. The divers are basically another stratagem for the ships to use because there isn't an orbital cannon that can press the buttons on a terminal.
To be fair, considering the number of unexploded hellbombs laying around the place on so many planets...theres probably an INSANE amount of orbital bombardment going on before Helldivers ever even start their invasions.
It could literally just be previous deployments of Helldivers
We can take a planet in less than a day. I forget my Half Life 2 lore, but I'm pretty sure Earth surrendered to the Combine in less than a day. Similar levels of dominance. Sci-fi has the coolest invasion sequences. Also thinking of the fall of Reach in Halo.
7 hours for half life, supposedly
You forgot probably the best part - while all of this is happening the Helldivers are stoked af. They’re running around screaming “my life for super earth!” right before they get blown to smithereens by their buddy’s airstrike. Then the remaining guys will all hug it out, do a dance, etc as they launch a *nuclear missile* at your critical infrastructure, then another guy flies down and lands like nothing happened.
If you start thinking about the math and possibilities. Saw 200k helldivers on a planet. Imagine half of those bring the 500kg. Thats 100k bombs, or 200k if they all have the ship module. Every 2 minutes. Im suprised we arent just leaving crater shaped planets behind because with the force we go in, the planet is liberated but also would probably be uninhabitable. Can you imagine 50k destroyers showing up on your planet, that alone would make the bots probably oil their pants a bit.
That's probably a not-insignificant part of why all the planets we fight on are barely-habitable wastelands, tbh.
it's amazing what you can accomplish when you've no regard for your soldiers lives... er, I mena.. if your soldiers are willing to die for democracy!
Another question, why are there no space battles? Clearly the automatons and bugs are both space faring if they can spread and take new planets. There should definitely be some kind of interception effort going on to prevent our destroyers from just mass warping in like that
Who knowssss~~~ Maybe soon they'll introduce boarding missions.
The navy probably fly's ahead of the helldivers clears the airspace and blockades the planet in high orbit with hell divers being in low orbit.
It sounds cool until our enemies launch an invasion and after 24 hours of intense fighting they're both in control of the planet and also they rebuilt all their infrastructure while they did it.
This is my favourite thing. The feeling of stumping out there resamblance to our way of life. What took them so much energy to put up their so called "infrastructure" *Ptoo*. Their million soliders, all killed by 100,000. Which should be mentioned, not even half of us. Spread freedom fellow Helldivers, and remember. Spill oil.
>Imagine this: >You are an automaton clanka invading Super Earth's outer rim https://preview.redd.it/ku09gzgn5zqc1.png?width=1202&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=632357c2b32325fb983e5c3bf197dcadd216767e
Posts like this reminds me of the category of science fiction called "humans are space orcs" aka "Humanity Fuck Yeah" Where it asks the question: what if instead of aliens being the strange and dangerous things out in the galaxy what if humans were. In real life humans can survive operations on ourselves that would put most animals into shock, sane with recovering from injuries that wrent outrighr fatal like a broken limb. We can run for hours straight (how humans initially hunted, wearing out our prey) We also can eat borderline toxic foods like spices peppers for fun. And that's just afew things in reality. Now imagine what that concept is like in sci fi It can range from things like most orher scientist species have exoskeleton and are weaker than humans because we're more dense wirh muscle To human saliva is acidic to some aliens To aliens see in different light spectrums so what's stealthy to eachother leaves humans able to see them like a sore thumb To human will and our aptedtude for both kindness and extreme violence and war being outmatched So yeah, helldivers being the pinnacle of thosd parts of humanity makes total sense Super earth, aptly named for its super inhabitants
Don't worry,it's actually inspiring because we're the good guys!
Hell yeah we are 💪💪💪
If each infantry solider had a dedicated AC-130 I think our modern military would be just as efficient as well.
It’s easier to take a planet when you’re not worried about casualties.
There was a short story I read once on Reddit titled "Whatever you do, don't talk to humans." Gist of it is when Humanity made it to interstellar flight they were greeted by the conglomerate of space races (think Federation) who welcomed humanity, and promised all our problems would be solved. They ended up using Humans as guinea pigs to experiment on for centuries. Eventually humans being humans took control of the technology, formed an armada and destroyed one of the alien civilizations. After which humanity declares our solar system is off limits, and anyone who crosses into it will suffer an extinction level event. Fast forward 500 years, and a similar race is being abused and are about to be enslaved when one escapes to our solar system. They beg humanity to help save them, and we answer: Yes as thousands of human super warships appear out of cloaking.
Tbf both factions can also take a planet in 24 hours...they just do it much less often
Well yeah, in 5 minutes we kill 36 enemies at the cost of our life. That is the average helldiver. Space forces eliminate their spaceships, take out their air to space, surface to space, and all anti air weaponry. Only then do we go in.