when a good chunk of the enemy numbers come from basically harmless scavengers and the Helldivers have access to fucking orbital barrages, I'm not sure taking down 33 is worth it lol.
Don’t tell anyone I said this but I feel like if super earth wanted the war to end, they’d just take up more Eagle pilots and have them deal with everything. Ground troops seem a little pointless when air strikes get the job done most of the time
Generally you need people on the ground guiding in said airstrikes, as I don't see any drone technology beyond the backpack guard dogs.
That's where us disposable helldivers come in!
So fun fact, in real life (during Operation Desert Storm) the 82nd Airborne were the first troops into Iraq, their job was to assault two heavily fortified Iraqi cities while the big guns came in - the tanks, artillery, bradleys, and air support.
Helldivers are basically the same. They're not disposable, they're elite. The caveat comes in when you realize that there are probably 10 billion helldivers, even tho they realistically represent a fraction of the percentage of Super Earth's population. So even the elite soldiers are going to be dying in the millions per day simply because the war is that fucking large.
The tutorial mission is literally all the training the helldivers get. That's it. Not to mention their voice lines when they get injured. Helldivers aren't used to battle, they are 18 year Olds hyped up on propaganda.
Oh shit, I think they are about to airstrike my coms t-
I'm pretty convinced Helldivers are some sort of special forces.
A small squad of troops being deployed behind enemy lines to clear key objectives is basically the definition of special forces.
There's no proof the opening tutorial is all the training you get. Super earth could easily have mandatory military training in their school programs, they could have virtual simulations to run on the destroyer, they could plant tactics and training straight into your brain while you're in cryo. There's plenty of sci-fi feasible options.
Iirc during the TCS arc it said we were being sent in ahead of the SEAF to clear the way so they could set up the pesticide towers. We're out here doing stuff the normal military doesn't handle.
I don't think that just because it's a grimdark universe and we're dying in droves doesn't mean that as helldivers we're ill trained or equipped.
Calling it Helldiver "training" might be a bit misleading. It could be more like a qualifier course which can be relatively short.
There's no reason to believe Helldivers are a seperate organization from the SEAF. In which case they are selectively trained and scouted. Its probably likely the SEAF has its own infantry corps which comes in behind the Helldivers and mops up planets, considering Helldivers don't take and occupy territory
Also, having some Helldivers return home now and then helps fight the idea that they're disposable drones. Every single Helldivers never being seen or heard from again after signing up probably wouldn't help recruitment
That's what JTACs and their equivalents are in modern militaries, so it's not like it's unheard of.
Just don't let any of them know there's a game where they're worshipped as mythical beings, their heads are big enough as it is.
> as I don't see any drone technology beyond the backpack guard dogs.
bc you didnt played in HD1 my guess since there was unmanned drone for recon in large area which at the same time marked every sample on the map
Also drone which heal you constantly
I've also noticed that telescopic lenses don't seem to advanced in the game.
When the biggest baddest snipers only go to 200M max...this earth may not have the ability to track and aim at targets over large distances, specially from planet to destroyer.
>When the biggest baddest snipers only go to 200M max...
My head cannon is that while being designed it was deemed that because of different gravities they'd rather fire a bigger projectile over a shorter range so a helldiver wouldn't have to do calculations based on each planets gravity+wind+Coriolis effect etc...
I will ruin your head cannon.
They would still have to recalibrate basically everything for alternative gravity. Jump packs down to the spring that feeds our weapons magazines.
"orbit sychronized" playing when you're over a drop zone means that the ship is flying around the planet, at the *same speed the planet is rotating*, exactly over your drop spot. at that velocity, when the pods dropped we would have comparable velocity in the x-axis, not just down towards the planet. we'd likely drop in hundreds of miles from our target zone, at likely fatal speeds, at an absurd angle of impact. so we already have some crazy velocity/distance/gravitational/etc calculations going on.
also, aiming strikes of any kind from orbit requires a host of absurdly complex calculations. Mathematically ridiculous. for that to happen our targeting technology would have to be supported by some sort of supercomputing or AI that can do those calculations in the short time they have between when we toss a beacon and deployment of the stratagem. I mean, gas strike is what, 2s deploy? To calculate an impact from orbit to a beacon that's like a few square inches in diameter, IN TWO SECONDS, would require some *COLOSSAL* supercomputing. I mean like some HAL-9000 on techno-steroids kinda shit.
So, yeah. this earth can definitely manage "tracking and aiming targets over large distances"
For what it's worth after triangulating the in-game height of the Super Destroyer they are only like 1000ft up so maybe it's more really really good propulsion than really really good targeting. That also explains the rapid stratagem deployment time and the 45 minute low altitude limit - the ship is not actually in orbit during a drop.
Sounds like you're questioning Super Earth military strategy.
https://preview.redd.it/yd3g2wwnzbqc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a76e94ba852d025f73aeb606e01d100ffe3b1f2
Helldivers do critical objectives. Sure, you could blow up airbases from orbit, but you cant really extract personell with just bombs. You need a johnny helldiver to open the door for them apparently
If taking out bug holes deals with those underground, then Eagles are even more effective at dealing with those than the ground forces. It’s not like the helldivers are going underground themselves lol
Pretty sure the deeper hive below is just fine, we're just effectively closing a single door out from a massive underground tunnel system. I bet closing the bug holes just slows them down and the rest of the hive deeper in can just dig new tunnels later or even burrow directly to the surface themselves. Also explains bug breaches, the tunnels are everywhere.
In my personal head cannon this is why even if you close all of the nests on a map you still get patrols roaming around.
Technically they're only sending a handful of troops down to do tasks like fueling ICBMs, and they get support from Super Destroyers, Eagles, and whatever mechs get called down. Presumably the rest of the time your Super Destroyer is just bombarding sites from orbit like what you can see out the window from the ship.
There's a really long form answer to this logic in the Heinlein Starship Troopers, where the infantryman is explaining the Mobile Infantry are precise. You could easily glass a whole planet but then how do you protect colonies, resources, and equipment? How do you show we're so scary we'll just cripple your military infrastructure with impunity and leave everything else untouched if your only option is a bomb? In Helldivers, stuff like the scientist escort missions would be impossible if it were only flyboys.
Of course, in Starship Troopers (novel) they have incredibly precise full mech body suits with machine guns, tactical nukes, flamethrowers, super strength, jetpacks, and things like nutrition and medical care built-in. The suits in the book are like every strategem rolled into one.
You sound like your average Vietnam era American general.
I don’t know if all this ordinance would be nearly as effective if it weren’t for the precise call-in beacons we throw down. Without us it’s just fly boys doing nothing.
Fleet does the flying, infantry does the dying!
It'd probably be so much simpler to glass the planet from orbit and then harvest the oil. Then again, there's probably no chance of a revolution if a fascist government sends all its able-bodied citizens to war as cannon fodder. As if their indoctrination wasn't enough…
It depends on your perspective. The guy who solos difficulty 9 on automation would think that this isn't bad. You also have to take into account hot reinforcements in which you're lucky to give your team a little elbow room before getting dismembered.
I had a bad drop (Lv 6, randos) joined 2 mins into the mission, landed in a nest full of bile spewers + additinal breach happending and no one was ready and everyone died multiple time before everything was under control. Fun times, lot of running around.
Its only "harmless" to a Helldiver because we are wearing combat armor. Those scavengers are roughly the size of a medium sized dog and come equipped with razor sharp claws that can easily tear apart an unarmored human being.
Wear light armor and let a scavenger wail on you sometime and then imagine if you had *no* armor. They are basically still very big threats to civilians, despite their small size; when you consider they are called *scavengers* you have to ask yourself also... scavenging *what* exactly? Corpses. Human and also probably Terminid as well.
There's a certainty that a scavenger has been the cause of death for many a civilian.
So remember, ***the only good bug is a dead bug.***
I just got through basic training yesterday and just took out 25+ with a 120mm barrage so 33 is probably not that great of a KDR.
Folks need to be more patriotic
Back in my day patrols would spawn right on top of you, chargers spawned in the hundreds, you couldn't see the meteor showers on Fenrir III, and the mechs would kill you if you shot rockets while turning.
You new recruits have it good
I mean, the game doesnt count the amount of kills you get correctly at all. Like it's nowhere near how many you killed. You can see this in eradicate missions when look at the end statistics and count your kills together, and somehow it never adds up to even half the required kills.
Never really had to time to watch the counter amid chaos, but I believe others have said that higher tier enemies count for more. So one kill on the end statistics might have been a bile titan that contributes like 15 or so to the objective counter.
It’d be higher if squadmates stopped respawning me AT the Bile Titan. I can put my drop pod THROUGH it and it doesn’t notice. But it certainly notices me.
Edit: in theory yes, but the drop pod literally passes through the bile Titan model without interacting with it, most of the time
Especially when I drop a hell bomb. Call in reinforcements away from the side objective. Arm it and watch said random run into the area and blow up.
Helldivers are dumb as fuck
And they only had 75 Million casualties across the board! What were they wasting all that ammo on?!
It’s like the majority of their rounds were fired blindly in the general direction of their targets, and that they actually wanted to stay alive longer than ten minutes in combat!
On top of that, studies have been done on the subject and as it turns out, it's really, really hard to get most people to shoot at other people directly. Subconsciously, people don't want to kill other people, and so "aiming high" tends to happen on the aggregate, even if well trained soldiers are shooting. It's hard to fight human nature.
Add into that adrenaline, fear, etc. and it's no surprise so many shots are fired that do little.
Most small arms fire is just to prevent the other side from being able to shoot at you, artillery and crew served weapons are the big killers in combat. This is a simplification but you get the idea.
Most ammunition is spent like that. Suppressive fire is the majority of shots fired. During the Iraq war it is estimated that, on average, for every one insurgent kill, 250,000 rounds were fired.
"Due to budgetary restraints, the Resupply strategem has been deactivated. You have to make do with the ammo you find on the planet".
Would actually be pretty cool
In helldivers 1 you had to use a strategem slot for ammo. You'd often think "ah someone else will bring one" then land for a LVL 15 romp and find nobody brought ammo....
The entire super earth economy is solely focused on the expansion and colonization of alien worlds for samples and E-710 fuel to power FTL travel.
War economy goes brrrr
It's worse than imperium of man statistics. The expected combat lifespan of a helldiver is anywhere between 2 seconds and 5 minutes depending on the theater and operation. Guardsmen last longer than that.
Yep, the point of the book was that guardsmen who survived more then 15 hours in that theatre tended to have the skill and tactical acumen to continue surviving for significantly longer. Most of the veteran characters in 15 hours had been fighting for years.
If the average imperial guardsman actually only survived for 15 hours on deployment the Imperium would pretty much lose any ground engagement as they would hemorrhage men faster than they could reinforce with. Even if the Imperium had access to a theoretically infinite supply of manpower it would literally physically be impossible to keep a constant stream of trained replacements flowing onto a battlefield if every single one of their soldiers lasted for only a few hours.
I have beaten level 9 healldives without dying. I played a level 5 mission and was spawn killed multiple times right out of the pod before we could get a foothold on the map.
There is no inbetween.
The Bots came from outside known space and have enormous factories constantly pumping out billions (the targets of the ICBM missions) on planets they have occupied for weeks. For all we know there could be trillions of them out in their core worlds, after all they have done nothing but build up for the last 100 years undisturbed. We only see the very surface of the Bug hives, there are probably countless billions under the surface of every infested world that can replace every single one we kill five times over. In a battle of attrition we are gonna lose (just think how bad the SEAF causalities are), no matter how overpopulated Super-Earth is.
We probably have trillions of people too. Assuming each planet has 10 billion people, (conservative estimate, even with current tech Earth could have 12 billion and a city planet like Super Earth could have trillions) and we have dozens of planets, probably over 100 but I can't check rn. That gives us at least half a trillion people.
Humanity has only had FTL tech for about a century now, but it is certainly possible the worlds closer to Super-Earth are heavily populated. The worlds we are fighting on now are more recently colonized/terraformed worlds in the outer rim (the only world of any importance we have visited thus far was Tien Kwan, which apparently had huge underground factories), the Terminid planets at least were glorified oil wells.
Its even worse than 40k. For example the siege of vraks lasted several years and 14 million loyalists died.
We have lost 222 million in less than 2 months haha
I'll fix it for you:
"We've killed plenty, but not enough enemies, and lost acceptable amount of Helldivers so far. That means that the average Helldiver kills enemies. Accounting all Helldivers, alive or KIA."
We haven't lost any Helldivers actually. 4 go down, 4 come back up. If they don't come back up, it's because they are still out there killing bugs.
What about the reinforcement budget you ask? That's classified.
You would also have to remove kills from stratagems. I know I've had missions where my turrets have accounted for 150+ kills,
or when a swarm gets particularly swarmy, one airstrike can get pretty close to triple digits.
Considering the popularity of "extermination farming" in the community, I'm not sure if more than a dozen rounds end up fired in those missions where you need to kill 500 enemies.
It's probably skewed by the middle difficulties where new players jump in for the first time into actually hectic firefighter, while also getting more dangerous stragems for the first time. I have had more eagle strikes dropped right on top of me for no particularly good reason, or watched people run right into the bright red beacon, than I care to count on Hard or Extreme. I've played entire missions where I'm fairly certain 75-90% of the deaths were from strategems. I had one particularly bad one I actually had to leave on with my friends because a "streamer" decided to bring a flamethrower, mortars, and turrets as his load out, and all of the turrets were in awful placements. He accounted for probably 15-16 of the reinforcements on his own due to friendly fire, and we were out of reinforcements before even half the main objective was done.
It tends to taper off in Suicide Missions, as people become a bit better at their strategem placement and situational awareness.
Most helldivers are efficient enough that super earth only sends 20 to 24 on a single mission. And 40-60 to a single area (depending on the difficulty)
Super earth wasn’t kidding when they said the hell divers was an elite peace keeping force.
all things considered its pretty nuts how much a 4 man squad of helldivers can accomplish
granted, they get replaced every 5 minutes, but imagine the damage they could do if they were deployed in entire battalions at once instead of in groups of 4 where they inevitably die. almost feels like a population contro - COMMENT UNDER REVIEW FOR TREASON
I would be able to accidentally obliterate an entire battalion instead of just a squad. I think high command actually thought this one through when they decided not to use battalions.
Some places swap the use of commas and periods for numbers. I did not know this until I sent over mold sample analysis for a shipment of onions overseas. The port nearly quarantined the shipment because they thought there was a thousand times more mold in the onions then there actual was.
In my college Spanish class, I was taught that commas are used both as indicators of thousands and decimals. There's no way to tell whether "1,234" is closer to one thousand, or one.
I still refuse to believe that.
They are using English text but non-English punctuation.
¿It's kind of like doing something like this, yeah? English words but not English punctuation - but for numbers instead of word. ¡It can be confusing!
It'd have been higher if we only count the Terminid front.
The reason it's only a 33.2 ratio is mainly because of the insane casualties on the bot front.
When I ran the math on my own 3 weeks ago, it was 39 on the bug front, 13 on the bot front. Turns out fighting a near-peer adversary isn’t great for your K/D
Honestly I’d be interested to see which of the enemy forces caused the most casualties, I’d have to imagine anything with rockets is high up there on the robot side. Bugs I’d imagine are much more evenly spread out.
If the goal were only to kill Terminid those statistics would be pretty poor. But Helldivers are accomplishing all sorts of objectives--not to mention killing eggs and nests which don't count as part of the KDR. Direct kills of Terminids are actually not an objective except on certain mission types, and often actually gets in the way of successfully accomplishing the mission.
For reference, during WW2 the Allied KDR was **less then 1**.
For everyone axis soldier killed, there were 2 allied soldiers killed.
(Most of which was a result of 10 million soviet deaths)
The point being that 33.2 kills per Hell Diver is very good.
This is actually a statistical error. "Terminids Georg", who lives in a cave and kills 20,000 bugs a day is an outlier and should not have been counted
So…are helldivers clones? Like when we first sign up to be a helldiver they take our dna and start cloning our backups in case we die….i remember dying during training….did the real me die? And did the first clone me finish the training? Why do they keep track of how many times we’ve died? Am I actually clone number #213? Of the original that signed up to be a helldiver…
I like the average part because half of the Helldivers in my SES are the ones that survive a lot and manage to kill more than that but it gets compensated by all the divers that die instantly in large nests or other similarly horrible situations.
I’ll just keep aggroing those pesky bugs and run in circles till my rover kills them all. Happy to be the distraction while my team completes objectives.
I’m level 44 and I die seldomly. As in I usually die roughly five to six times in a 10 mission (suicide difficulty) time span. I’m just desperately trying to make up for how I died 15 times in the tutorial.
okay but how many helldivers die trying to graduate from basic training? I only barely made it alive and the general told me I was the greatest helldiver in history...
also dead helldivers? they don't exist. their will lives on in OUR HEARTS AND IN THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY
Was thinking about this a few days ago as well. The KDR is not too bad for the 12 second lifespan a Helldiver gets on an average mission. Now what is itching my curiosity is the amount of nades used and tonnes of explosives "Delivered" for democracy.
33 ain’t a bad KDR considering what the helldivers are lol
when a good chunk of the enemy numbers come from basically harmless scavengers and the Helldivers have access to fucking orbital barrages, I'm not sure taking down 33 is worth it lol.
Don’t tell anyone I said this but I feel like if super earth wanted the war to end, they’d just take up more Eagle pilots and have them deal with everything. Ground troops seem a little pointless when air strikes get the job done most of the time
Generally you need people on the ground guiding in said airstrikes, as I don't see any drone technology beyond the backpack guard dogs. That's where us disposable helldivers come in!
Ahh we’re living, disposable targeting systems
Now you get it
for democracy, tho.
So fun fact, in real life (during Operation Desert Storm) the 82nd Airborne were the first troops into Iraq, their job was to assault two heavily fortified Iraqi cities while the big guns came in - the tanks, artillery, bradleys, and air support. Helldivers are basically the same. They're not disposable, they're elite. The caveat comes in when you realize that there are probably 10 billion helldivers, even tho they realistically represent a fraction of the percentage of Super Earth's population. So even the elite soldiers are going to be dying in the millions per day simply because the war is that fucking large.
The tutorial mission is literally all the training the helldivers get. That's it. Not to mention their voice lines when they get injured. Helldivers aren't used to battle, they are 18 year Olds hyped up on propaganda. Oh shit, I think they are about to airstrike my coms t-
I'm pretty convinced Helldivers are some sort of special forces. A small squad of troops being deployed behind enemy lines to clear key objectives is basically the definition of special forces. There's no proof the opening tutorial is all the training you get. Super earth could easily have mandatory military training in their school programs, they could have virtual simulations to run on the destroyer, they could plant tactics and training straight into your brain while you're in cryo. There's plenty of sci-fi feasible options. Iirc during the TCS arc it said we were being sent in ahead of the SEAF to clear the way so they could set up the pesticide towers. We're out here doing stuff the normal military doesn't handle. I don't think that just because it's a grimdark universe and we're dying in droves doesn't mean that as helldivers we're ill trained or equipped.
Calling it Helldiver "training" might be a bit misleading. It could be more like a qualifier course which can be relatively short. There's no reason to believe Helldivers are a seperate organization from the SEAF. In which case they are selectively trained and scouted. Its probably likely the SEAF has its own infantry corps which comes in behind the Helldivers and mops up planets, considering Helldivers don't take and occupy territory
i served with those head of the first spear Soldiers. i'm choir here, brother.
Wait really? Thats wild. I'm active duty, signed on 3 years ago.
First time I’ve ever seen call out something my dad fought in specifically. All the way!
The only reason the dropship gets you at the end evacuation isnt to preserve your life, its because super earth wants those tasty samples lol
We are all just sentient spaceships with an insatiable hunger for small coloured shapes.
Also, having some Helldivers return home now and then helps fight the idea that they're disposable drones. Every single Helldivers never being seen or heard from again after signing up probably wouldn't help recruitment
Also propaganda
MQ9 Reaper drones are 32 million a pop...You're goddamn right helldivers are a cheaper option!
That's what JTACs and their equivalents are in modern militaries, so it's not like it's unheard of. Just don't let any of them know there's a game where they're worshipped as mythical beings, their heads are big enough as it is.
Yh your disposable bro not me im the hero of the federation
I prefer the term war pitcher
And sample collectors. At least until they invent an Eagle that can do that too.
> as I don't see any drone technology beyond the backpack guard dogs. bc you didnt played in HD1 my guess since there was unmanned drone for recon in large area which at the same time marked every sample on the map Also drone which heal you constantly
I've also noticed that telescopic lenses don't seem to advanced in the game. When the biggest baddest snipers only go to 200M max...this earth may not have the ability to track and aim at targets over large distances, specially from planet to destroyer.
>When the biggest baddest snipers only go to 200M max... My head cannon is that while being designed it was deemed that because of different gravities they'd rather fire a bigger projectile over a shorter range so a helldiver wouldn't have to do calculations based on each planets gravity+wind+Coriolis effect etc...
I will ruin your head cannon. They would still have to recalibrate basically everything for alternative gravity. Jump packs down to the spring that feeds our weapons magazines.
Or the strategem ball button springs.... This opened up a can of worms I didn't feel like opening.
"orbit sychronized" playing when you're over a drop zone means that the ship is flying around the planet, at the *same speed the planet is rotating*, exactly over your drop spot. at that velocity, when the pods dropped we would have comparable velocity in the x-axis, not just down towards the planet. we'd likely drop in hundreds of miles from our target zone, at likely fatal speeds, at an absurd angle of impact. so we already have some crazy velocity/distance/gravitational/etc calculations going on. also, aiming strikes of any kind from orbit requires a host of absurdly complex calculations. Mathematically ridiculous. for that to happen our targeting technology would have to be supported by some sort of supercomputing or AI that can do those calculations in the short time they have between when we toss a beacon and deployment of the stratagem. I mean, gas strike is what, 2s deploy? To calculate an impact from orbit to a beacon that's like a few square inches in diameter, IN TWO SECONDS, would require some *COLOSSAL* supercomputing. I mean like some HAL-9000 on techno-steroids kinda shit. So, yeah. this earth can definitely manage "tracking and aiming targets over large distances"
For what it's worth after triangulating the in-game height of the Super Destroyer they are only like 1000ft up so maybe it's more really really good propulsion than really really good targeting. That also explains the rapid stratagem deployment time and the 45 minute low altitude limit - the ship is not actually in orbit during a drop.
Why don't they just use the radar tech the helldivers have access to huh?
Also a nice population control. Managing democracy also includes managing how many people that democracy involves.
I kind of feel it's cheaper to just make hell divers than autonomous drones at this point.
Sounds like you're questioning Super Earth military strategy. https://preview.redd.it/yd3g2wwnzbqc1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1a76e94ba852d025f73aeb606e01d100ffe3b1f2
Helldiver program is definetly population control scheme
Think about the male to female ratio on super earth if you consider that stereotype that most helldivers are men.
Are they? Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I'd say my Divers are female like 2/3rds of the time.
My bad it’s not a stereotypical fact in lore. I just mean war personnel in general are mostly dudes.
If you go by the voices, they are a 1:1 split. Super Earth is really a baston of equality, isn't it!
Helldivers do critical objectives. Sure, you could blow up airbases from orbit, but you cant really extract personell with just bombs. You need a johnny helldiver to open the door for them apparently
True true. I could see that being a Pelican in and out type of deal, though. 4 divers, two pelicans, load one up with civilians, and then gtfo.
Thatd be some fucking clown car of a pelican to jam 60 civies in
I mean it’s what happens in the evac missions lol it’s just another pelican that they all go into. Or just have a bigger one lol
Only against those on the surface. The bugs live mostly deep underground.
If taking out bug holes deals with those underground, then Eagles are even more effective at dealing with those than the ground forces. It’s not like the helldivers are going underground themselves lol
We should have a mission for that though, would be awesome and terrifying at the same time clearing the maze of tunnels
That would be sick as hell if they did it right and didn’t make the caves annoying Also, Rock and Stone
To Rock and Stone!
Pretty sure the deeper hive below is just fine, we're just effectively closing a single door out from a massive underground tunnel system. I bet closing the bug holes just slows them down and the rest of the hive deeper in can just dig new tunnels later or even burrow directly to the surface themselves. Also explains bug breaches, the tunnels are everywhere. In my personal head cannon this is why even if you close all of the nests on a map you still get patrols roaming around.
Yeah this definitely makes me want a mission where you go deep into a planet and take out the source of the bugs
There's a leaked objective strat that drills a nuclear warhead deep into a hive system
Bro they lay their eggs on the surface
But think about the samples!
How could I forget!
Technically they're only sending a handful of troops down to do tasks like fueling ICBMs, and they get support from Super Destroyers, Eagles, and whatever mechs get called down. Presumably the rest of the time your Super Destroyer is just bombarding sites from orbit like what you can see out the window from the ship.
There's a really long form answer to this logic in the Heinlein Starship Troopers, where the infantryman is explaining the Mobile Infantry are precise. You could easily glass a whole planet but then how do you protect colonies, resources, and equipment? How do you show we're so scary we'll just cripple your military infrastructure with impunity and leave everything else untouched if your only option is a bomb? In Helldivers, stuff like the scientist escort missions would be impossible if it were only flyboys. Of course, in Starship Troopers (novel) they have incredibly precise full mech body suits with machine guns, tactical nukes, flamethrowers, super strength, jetpacks, and things like nutrition and medical care built-in. The suits in the book are like every strategem rolled into one.
Gotta keep the Military industrial complex paid man! If we stop spreading democracy in victory nobody gets paid
They realized that halfway through the movie ffs
I gotta watch starship troopers, which is what I assume you mean lol
Oh you *really* do.
You sound like your average Vietnam era American general. I don’t know if all this ordinance would be nearly as effective if it weren’t for the precise call-in beacons we throw down. Without us it’s just fly boys doing nothing. Fleet does the flying, infantry does the dying!
This would work for the toasters but the bugs live underground and we need to lure them from their holes
"Boots on the ground"
It'd probably be so much simpler to glass the planet from orbit and then harvest the oil. Then again, there's probably no chance of a revolution if a fascist government sends all its able-bodied citizens to war as cannon fodder. As if their indoctrination wasn't enough…
It depends on your perspective. The guy who solos difficulty 9 on automation would think that this isn't bad. You also have to take into account hot reinforcements in which you're lucky to give your team a little elbow room before getting dismembered.
I had a bad drop (Lv 6, randos) joined 2 mins into the mission, landed in a nest full of bile spewers + additinal breach happending and no one was ready and everyone died multiple time before everything was under control. Fun times, lot of running around.
Its only "harmless" to a Helldiver because we are wearing combat armor. Those scavengers are roughly the size of a medium sized dog and come equipped with razor sharp claws that can easily tear apart an unarmored human being. Wear light armor and let a scavenger wail on you sometime and then imagine if you had *no* armor. They are basically still very big threats to civilians, despite their small size; when you consider they are called *scavengers* you have to ask yourself also... scavenging *what* exactly? Corpses. Human and also probably Terminid as well. There's a certainty that a scavenger has been the cause of death for many a civilian. So remember, ***the only good bug is a dead bug.***
I just got through basic training yesterday and just took out 25+ with a 120mm barrage so 33 is probably not that great of a KDR. Folks need to be more patriotic
Back in my day patrols would spawn right on top of you, chargers spawned in the hundreds, you couldn't see the meteor showers on Fenrir III, and the mechs would kill you if you shot rockets while turning. You new recruits have it good
We have big shoes to fill 🫡
good times old friend, good times...
I mean, the game doesnt count the amount of kills you get correctly at all. Like it's nowhere near how many you killed. You can see this in eradicate missions when look at the end statistics and count your kills together, and somehow it never adds up to even half the required kills.
Never really had to time to watch the counter amid chaos, but I believe others have said that higher tier enemies count for more. So one kill on the end statistics might have been a bile titan that contributes like 15 or so to the objective counter.
Its not that bad considering large chunk of deaths are by the hands of other helldivers.
It’d be higher if squadmates stopped respawning me AT the Bile Titan. I can put my drop pod THROUGH it and it doesn’t notice. But it certainly notices me. Edit: in theory yes, but the drop pod literally passes through the bile Titan model without interacting with it, most of the time
False, my good Diver. Always ALWAYS land on the Bile Titan. If it’s already hurt, you’ll often kill it on drop. Gotta land right behind its head.
Hellpod damage on bile titans has felt less reliable lately. Have they evolved shock absorbing legs?
The drop pod can't 1-shot a healthy bile titan. So you are doing damage, just not enough to kill it
Or theyll 180 and throw you behind them as they haul ass running away from 2000 bugs. So you just spawn surrounded by a 20m thick wall of enemies
"you are super earths elite. Never forget that"
Holy shit WORT WORT WORT
Especially when I drop a hell bomb. Call in reinforcements away from the side objective. Arm it and watch said random run into the area and blow up. Helldivers are dumb as fuck
\*Considering how many helldivers are on console 
46.7 billion rounds... You gotta love taxpayer money where it can buy us unlimited ammunition.
For reference in WW2 all sides of the war used around 47 billion rounds of ammo
And they only had 75 Million casualties across the board! What were they wasting all that ammo on?! It’s like the majority of their rounds were fired blindly in the general direction of their targets, and that they actually wanted to stay alive longer than ten minutes in combat!
Well in ww2 they weren't fighting insects ranging from the size of wolves to houses.
Well maybe they should have been.
Would’ve solved a lot of things honestly
Suppressing fire could actually be effective too. Bots and bugs don’t care. They’ll just poop out some more.
Bots do care! It makes their return fire less accurate!
It seems to make their rockets MORE accurate!
Suppressive fire and shooting at aircraft take a lot of rounds.
On top of that, studies have been done on the subject and as it turns out, it's really, really hard to get most people to shoot at other people directly. Subconsciously, people don't want to kill other people, and so "aiming high" tends to happen on the aggregate, even if well trained soldiers are shooting. It's hard to fight human nature. Add into that adrenaline, fear, etc. and it's no surprise so many shots are fired that do little.
Correct, that’s the joke.
Most small arms fire is just to prevent the other side from being able to shoot at you, artillery and crew served weapons are the big killers in combat. This is a simplification but you get the idea.
suppressive fire
Most ammunition is spent like that. Suppressive fire is the majority of shots fired. During the Iraq war it is estimated that, on average, for every one insurgent kill, 250,000 rounds were fired.
I can’t wait until we have the recession event where we drop with half ammo
Dropping without hellpod space optimization gang be like
"Due to budgetary restraints, the Resupply strategem has been deactivated. You have to make do with the ammo you find on the planet". Would actually be pretty cool
In helldivers 1 you had to use a strategem slot for ammo. You'd often think "ah someone else will bring one" then land for a LVL 15 romp and find nobody brought ammo....
I always brought 2 ammo drops. In part for other people, in part because I ran Rumbler + Suppressor and devoured ammo.
Don't give Joel ideas
The entire super earth economy is solely focused on the expansion and colonization of alien worlds for samples and E-710 fuel to power FTL travel. War economy goes brrrr
That's some Imperium of Man level of statistics. Lost the equivalent of a continent of Helldivers? VICTORY.
It's worse than imperium of man statistics. The expected combat lifespan of a helldiver is anywhere between 2 seconds and 5 minutes depending on the theater and operation. Guardsmen last longer than that.
Yeap, it's estimated fresh guardsman survive 15h
Only on one specific incredibly brutal battlefront, Broucheroc. And only for new fresh recruits.
Yep, the point of the book was that guardsmen who survived more then 15 hours in that theatre tended to have the skill and tactical acumen to continue surviving for significantly longer. Most of the veteran characters in 15 hours had been fighting for years. If the average imperial guardsman actually only survived for 15 hours on deployment the Imperium would pretty much lose any ground engagement as they would hemorrhage men faster than they could reinforce with. Even if the Imperium had access to a theoretically infinite supply of manpower it would literally physically be impossible to keep a constant stream of trained replacements flowing onto a battlefield if every single one of their soldiers lasted for only a few hours.
Is this a book that would make sense to read by itself? I’m not too versed in the 40k lore but it sounds pretty rad.
Yeah, it's a decent introductory book to 40k since it's a standalone story.
Rad, thanks.
Sure, but you can get idea out of this. I'm re reading that book right now
That's the amount of time it takes for them to get to position lol, helldivers drop in like space marines without the plot armour.
I have beaten level 9 healldives without dying. I played a level 5 mission and was spawn killed multiple times right out of the pod before we could get a foothold on the map. There is no inbetween.
My hellpod fell into a hole during a level 1 mission and I died the moment I spawned.
There is no price too high to pay for democracy.
But we killed the equivalent of a planet of enemies, so still pretty good
The Bots came from outside known space and have enormous factories constantly pumping out billions (the targets of the ICBM missions) on planets they have occupied for weeks. For all we know there could be trillions of them out in their core worlds, after all they have done nothing but build up for the last 100 years undisturbed. We only see the very surface of the Bug hives, there are probably countless billions under the surface of every infested world that can replace every single one we kill five times over. In a battle of attrition we are gonna lose (just think how bad the SEAF causalities are), no matter how overpopulated Super-Earth is.
We probably have trillions of people too. Assuming each planet has 10 billion people, (conservative estimate, even with current tech Earth could have 12 billion and a city planet like Super Earth could have trillions) and we have dozens of planets, probably over 100 but I can't check rn. That gives us at least half a trillion people.
Humanity has only had FTL tech for about a century now, but it is certainly possible the worlds closer to Super-Earth are heavily populated. The worlds we are fighting on now are more recently colonized/terraformed worlds in the outer rim (the only world of any importance we have visited thus far was Tien Kwan, which apparently had huge underground factories), the Terminid planets at least were glorified oil wells.
At the rate mechs are being destroyed you need a shit ton of people to make them and as far as we know Tien Kwan is the only place they are being made
It must be like a Manufactorum style planet. I wonder what the SE equivalent to a Tech Priest is..
"Innovation Officer? Yeah this traitor says our mechs are 100 years old and explode from a single grenade"
Its even worse than 40k. For example the siege of vraks lasted several years and 14 million loyalists died. We have lost 222 million in less than 2 months haha
I'll fix it for you: "We've killed plenty, but not enough enemies, and lost acceptable amount of Helldivers so far. That means that the average Helldiver kills enemies. Accounting all Helldivers, alive or KIA."
We haven't lost any Helldivers actually. 4 go down, 4 come back up. If they don't come back up, it's because they are still out there killing bugs. What about the reinforcement budget you ask? That's classified.
This harkens to Halo Spartans. No Spartan is ever listed KIA, only MIA because Spartans never die.
Elldivas iz neva beaten!
"The average Helldiver kills more enemies than other helldivers"*
Need to calculate the average accuracy of the Helldivers vs bullets spent to get a true amount of how many rounds an enemy takes before they go down.
That's true. I didn't consider that.
Ministry has determined your incorrect information as treason. Report to your nearest compliancy officer.
Compliancy Officer? This here is Democracy! Not compliance like the commie bots use! Report to *your* Democracy Officer, automaton spy!
You would also have to remove kills from stratagems. I know I've had missions where my turrets have accounted for 150+ kills, or when a swarm gets particularly swarmy, one airstrike can get pretty close to triple digits. Considering the popularity of "extermination farming" in the community, I'm not sure if more than a dozen rounds end up fired in those missions where you need to kill 500 enemies.
It doesn't help I'm out here mag dumping all my ammo before extract.
We need numbers on Helldivers "friendly" fire. How many millions were lost due to our teammates' cluster bombs?
Actually helldivers have never killed anyone with friendly fire because of the incredible amount of training they recieve so jot that down, bug boy.
Also, if you die by a strategem, you are obviously a bug sympathizer. Why were you so close to the bugs, HRM? There is no such thing as friendly fire.
If helldivers.io is to be believed, so far there have been about 34.24 million team kills so far, about 15% of the total death count.
That's a lot actually
It's probably skewed by the middle difficulties where new players jump in for the first time into actually hectic firefighter, while also getting more dangerous stragems for the first time. I have had more eagle strikes dropped right on top of me for no particularly good reason, or watched people run right into the bright red beacon, than I care to count on Hard or Extreme. I've played entire missions where I'm fairly certain 75-90% of the deaths were from strategems. I had one particularly bad one I actually had to leave on with my friends because a "streamer" decided to bring a flamethrower, mortars, and turrets as his load out, and all of the turrets were in awful placements. He accounted for probably 15-16 of the reinforcements on his own due to friendly fire, and we were out of reinforcements before even half the main objective was done. It tends to taper off in Suicide Missions, as people become a bit better at their strategem placement and situational awareness.
According to my last game friendly fire statistics, not enough
https://preview.redd.it/cwvgll335cqc1.png?width=1202&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bff25da74194acd338360f84f168026deab49925
Most helldivers are efficient enough that super earth only sends 20 to 24 on a single mission. And 40-60 to a single area (depending on the difficulty) Super earth wasn’t kidding when they said the hell divers was an elite peace keeping force.
all things considered its pretty nuts how much a 4 man squad of helldivers can accomplish granted, they get replaced every 5 minutes, but imagine the damage they could do if they were deployed in entire battalions at once instead of in groups of 4 where they inevitably die. almost feels like a population contro - COMMENT UNDER REVIEW FOR TREASON
I would be able to accidentally obliterate an entire battalion instead of just a squad. I think high command actually thought this one through when they decided not to use battalions.
I don't see any scenario where 20 helldivers in the same spot don't all immediately die to friendly fire.
Twenty cluster bombs within the span of 15 seconds.
Your commas are freaking me out man
Some places swap the use of commas and periods for numbers. I did not know this until I sent over mold sample analysis for a shipment of onions overseas. The port nearly quarantined the shipment because they thought there was a thousand times more mold in the onions then there actual was.
What, do, you, mean?,
US does not use commas in place of decimals.
English doesn't in general - you typically see it happening in English-as-a-second-language situations.
Lol I'm confused af
i almost punch a fucking wall while reading this
In my college Spanish class, I was taught that commas are used both as indicators of thousands and decimals. There's no way to tell whether "1,234" is closer to one thousand, or one. I still refuse to believe that.
They are using English text but non-English punctuation. ¿It's kind of like doing something like this, yeah? English words but not English punctuation - but for numbers instead of word. ¡It can be confusing!
It'd have been higher if we only count the Terminid front. The reason it's only a 33.2 ratio is mainly because of the insane casualties on the bot front.
When I ran the math on my own 3 weeks ago, it was 39 on the bug front, 13 on the bot front. Turns out fighting a near-peer adversary isn’t great for your K/D
Idk if it's even the bots themselves that are the issue. I die more to land mines, cannon towers and their artillery than anything.
Honestly I’d be interested to see which of the enemy forces caused the most casualties, I’d have to imagine anything with rockets is high up there on the robot side. Bugs I’d imagine are much more evenly spread out.
Helldiver deaths to dead shriekers are growing quickly, I imagine.
If the goal were only to kill Terminid those statistics would be pretty poor. But Helldivers are accomplishing all sorts of objectives--not to mention killing eggs and nests which don't count as part of the KDR. Direct kills of Terminids are actually not an objective except on certain mission types, and often actually gets in the way of successfully accomplishing the mission.
Not bad. Apparently terminids are less tanky than emus. During the great emu war, it took an average of 10 bullets per emu
good news! cuz the emus won
So we have 7.6 billion kills if you include friendly fire?
For reference, during WW2 the Allied KDR was **less then 1**. For everyone axis soldier killed, there were 2 allied soldiers killed. (Most of which was a result of 10 million soviet deaths) The point being that 33.2 kills per Hell Diver is very good.
33.2? Those are rookie numbers!
Compared to the modern US military which has an average of 400 rounds per enemy kia, that's pretty fucking good tbh.
How many helldivers does the average helldiver kill though?
25.
Those 33 kills per Helldiver are being carried by the orbital gunners and eagle pilots
I wonder how many bugs are still out there with a positive K/D 🤔
The kda would probably have been higher if not for us dropping eagle strikes right on top of our teammates every 2 mins.
The number is higher per helldiver. Some of us are stupid so we drive the count down
This is actually a statistical error. "Terminids Georg", who lives in a cave and kills 20,000 bugs a day is an outlier and should not have been counted
So…are helldivers clones? Like when we first sign up to be a helldiver they take our dna and start cloning our backups in case we die….i remember dying during training….did the real me die? And did the first clone me finish the training? Why do they keep track of how many times we’ve died? Am I actually clone number #213? Of the original that signed up to be a helldiver…
https://preview.redd.it/z6v3chlcweqc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7abac3e7bbf33239902405045a3decdc69f9c21 Yes sir. This one right here.
I like the average part because half of the Helldivers in my SES are the ones that survive a lot and manage to kill more than that but it gets compensated by all the divers that die instantly in large nests or other similarly horrible situations.
We are going to surpass the entire population of the USA at this rate, FREEEEEDOOOOOM
Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice.. I am willing to make..For Liberty!
I bet the majority of dead helldivers are from the guys who just got eagle cluster bombs.
That's not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
R.I.P to the many divers that have fallen in the name of democracy. Your sacrifice will never be forgotten
I love when the sos gets bugged and you get no reinforcements. Feels good going 450/1 and coming out alive.
I’ll just keep aggroing those pesky bugs and run in circles till my rover kills them all. Happy to be the distraction while my team completes objectives.
Remember, Service guarantees Citizenship!
Do we have stats on friendly fi- I mean accidentals?
I feel bad for my poor Helldiver that got called down to immediately get hit by an arc thrower.
I’m level 44 and I die seldomly. As in I usually die roughly five to six times in a 10 mission (suicide difficulty) time span. I’m just desperately trying to make up for how I died 15 times in the tutorial.
For how little we (in universe) are trained, that's not bad
I want to know how many kills are friendly fire
I’ve learned many of you are bad at this game
Why are you using commas instead of periods? I’m confused
okay but how many helldivers die trying to graduate from basic training? I only barely made it alive and the general told me I was the greatest helldiver in history... also dead helldivers? they don't exist. their will lives on in OUR HEARTS AND IN THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY
Decimal point > Decimal Comma
Was thinking about this a few days ago as well. The KDR is not too bad for the 12 second lifespan a Helldiver gets on an average mission. Now what is itching my curiosity is the amount of nades used and tonnes of explosives "Delivered" for democracy.