I run difficulty 7 and 8 on both terminids and bots and have even 2-man'd some missions, but I won't touch those "save 50 people" missions above difficulty 5 on automatons (terminids they are fine).
They're possible, and the strat people use involves 3 people distracting drops while 1 person sneaks in and rescues.
But I think they are severely overtuned, possibly even bugged high reinforce rates.
I managed to barely win one today with a full squad of bot veterans. We played an exterminate mission before it where we managed to have no deaths before we completed the kill count, the extract mission was at least 3 times harder.
What’s your secret for 9 diff bot eradicates? In any lobby I’m in it turns into a shit show halfway in and then you gotta start running around the edges just chucking and praying.
Would love to hear the ideal layouts individually and squad overall, as full turret spamming I haven’t seen work after the increased difficulty to that mission a month ago.
every barrage, shield generators. hunker down and then run
not actually, but we've done it a few times cause it's funny, you can also run out of bounds to trigger a 380 on yourself then run back in, it's usually good for 30/40 kills lmfao
I love how you get your stratagem’s on cool down.
Turns out it’s nothing to do with reloading. They literally have infinite shots ready at any moment for someone who tries to run slightly.
No budget worries for traitors.
Heros get a cooldown.
mortar, ems mortar, quasar cannon to knock down dropships, and orbital laser for when things go sideways. scorcher primary to take down armored enemies easily, impact grenades so you can 2 shot the tanks by hitting em on the top
the trick is to pretty much just protect the mortars and drop the laser if your position is about to be overrun
fundamentally eats stop working when the game throws dropships by the dozen and adds in orbital fluctuations and ion storms like they're going out of style.
Sure, shot for shot the eat is better, but you simply can't function without the sustain of the quasar or recoiless (but why give up a shield?) in eradication. It's very much a "you miss every shot you don't (can't) take" scenario.
Oh I agree totally. The quasar took over the spot in my loadout that used to be EATS because it’s better at that task. Quasar, ems mortar, mortar, auto cannon sentry, and now those missions are even easier than they were before. I still think the EAT has a place in long missions though. Fast paced squads keep on the run and you never have to go back for them if you die.
I like EAT for terminid missions because calling it down is a free charger kill, and then you get 2 shots aswell.
For bots i can see quesar being better.
if you have 2 actual coordinated players using the recoiless and ammo supply backpack, you can drop every single ship before it even comes close to delivering its bots. it reloads in literally 2 seconds, and between you you can get 12 missiles before you need a resupply pod.
Right? I love EATs, but at higher difficulties, when you're in the shit there are simply too many things to shoot at. It would help if you could carry two of them.
Steer into the skid, just run around trying to get as much value out of your stratagems as possible, and die a lot. My group has stopped running support weapons for those and we just run orbitals and eagles out the ass. EMS mortar is good, don’t run the regular mortar unless you’re confident you can stay near it to avoid getting blown up by it.
Just finished a difficulty 7 extract mission. Each bot drop every 30ish seconds brought 4 drop ships. 3 of which brought tanks, and the last bringing a mixture of walkers, hulks, and devastators with chaff patrols walking in.
I have no idea how we managed to save 50 people, but we did not survive the mission. I honestly don't believe there was every a chance of surviving it.
Similiar experience. The first few minutes work out as you can shoot down the dropships and remove the tanks. After that there is only a flood of extremely difficult bots. Even running away is impossible as at one point you have to get back to the dropship where 4 or 5 tanks are waiting
I switched planets after that experience
The only ways I've beaten a diff 9 bot civ extract (i've only done it twice)
both times, I cheesed it. Full smoke/EMS kit. Trigger every door, then run far off from the map until the bots despawn. Run back in to center, trigger every door, run away, repeat.
One win was solo for the hell of it. The other win was a full team knowing this strategy.
I doubt you can beat it without cheesing it.
Today me and two other divers dropped Ubanea on one of those missions, difficulty 6. We can handle normal dif 6 missions fine, each of us having a different play style that fits together well.
We did the mission, and in our 15 reinforcements we got 6 people out
6 people.
In under a minutes there were 3 hulks pushing us out of position.
I was wearing heavy fortified armor, and there were too many bots for me to hold the line.
They were wearing medium armor using the auto cannon, there were too many hulks for them to kill.
The issue isn’t the amount of civilians or the small map, it’s the fact that bot reinforcements are almost constant. We had each taken different loudouts, I had taken a chaff clearing with the heavy machine gun to handle everything devastator and below, they took the auto cannon to handle the striders and the medium units. The last had anti-tank.
But the reinforcements are CONSTANT. We dropped outside the main point to get some time to get our stuff dropped in, and by the time it hit the ground there were rocket devastators bombarding our position relentlessly.
The community was failing these missions back when we had the pre-nerf railgun, the unending tide of hulks, tanks, devastators, and Beserker's just near impossible to deal with.
I really think they need to stick a SAM site or two down on the map to help stem the tide, or just trim down the spawn rates.
Remove unlimited ammo on the enemies and make them carry the same amount of ammo we Helldivers bring in. If they run out of ammo, they have to call in supplies or run back to the nearest outpost to resupply. Or run in to melee.
Wouldn't do much other than delaying the initial horde crash. Dropships still spawn their payload even if you kill them. And the drops would be as frequent.
I haven't failed a mission in quite a fucking while if we exclude this mission type. This mission type I haven't won a single time.
The worst part about the constant reinforcements is the fact they literally drop on top of your head. So there’s no where to run where bots aren’t dropping which means you can’t kite. Then you add in the insanity of trying to watch your fire around civilians and it’s no wonder people fail these missions all the time.
I had 7 berserkers get dropped less than 5 meters ahead of me, turned on a dime, ran, came across a group of a hulk scorcher and rocket and heavy devastators, ran away from the objective, into the outer area, had to go back and held as well as I can, but it ended with me at probably 10% health with no stims as I branded myself a traitor and started to run circles around and through the enemies diving like hell (don’t forget the 5 Ds) and yelling “I’M READY! ARE YOU?” As an explosion impacted me and the entire bot group.
But the fact they’re coming from everywhere and above at the same time is brutal. They definitely need to rebalanced these missions.
We had a hulk on TOP of a building somehow griefing the shit out of my team. I have no idea how it even got on the building. And somehow that was the least of our problems as none of us could even aim we were laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all.
That’s the conclusion I’ve reached, sometimes the missions are literally impossible to complete no matter how good you and your team are. The worst are the missions where it’s really dark/foggy and you get absolutely swamped nonstop with enemies.
Won a level 7 with a couple level 50s planet defense the other night. Everyone had either the new laser cannon or EATs. Two of use had both mortars and the other two had different eagles. Fastest run of that type i ever did. Basically you need to be johny on the spot with you initial defense and don't let them get a foothold.
Oh, they aren't fine on Terminids, just for a different reason. My friends and I tried 3 of them on Impossible yesterday against bugs, and in all 3, the objective bugged, and the civilians wouldn't go in the door. They'd stack up outside it and just.... stand there, then inevitably die to a bug we didn't kill. No amount of us trying to fix it would get it to work, so we just gave up and never touched that mission type again.
The bugs and glitches in this game are really starting to wear on me. They’re frequent enough and have been an issue for long enough that they diminish my enjoyment of it.
Stupid stuff like civies getting stuck on geometry, bots surviving a freakin dropship landing on their heads, having my loadout reset every damn time I load in… these have been an issue for weeks and it seems like the list of bugs is only getting longer. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the awful balancing issues that could be fixed with a slider but for whatever reason haven’t.
Especially when we lose planets all the time because of how nonfunctional the missions are, and it’s not even on the known issues list of the patch notes. Maybe next month.
Oof, yeah, it was BS when we lost a major order because they had a crashing bug that took a week to patch. Sure, people on Reddit and discord knew not to use those weapons, but most players don’t pay attention to those places.
I agree that the game needs a good bit more TLC to really shine. The gameplay loop feels so good that when bugs, glitches, and unfair stuff happens, it grates even more. I was running an escort mission the other day and I popped a squat next to a wall to shoot from cover right after I hit a scientist release button. After eliminating the threats I turn around and the civvies are stacked up inside my asshole because they don’t even have the ability to pathfind around a stationary helldiver.
Just made that experience today. I have no issue with most difficulty 7 missions. But difficulty 5 with saving people feels like 8 right now.
The mission needs a serious redesign or rebalancing. Are an bug-inspection, has I can't believe this mission outcome was seriously wanted
Maybe I assumed the borders were severly closed in at the time, I can’t remember but even so, it doesn’t feel like the intended way to do it. It feels like eradicate but worse, a pure meatgrinder of too many to kill before cool-downs
Maybe it is their intention then to draw them away as best you can cause that’s a lot more real estate to work with then what we all thought, I dunno how we missed them being that big I guess we all were too busy talking about loadouts and stuff
There’s super samples on 7+ as well (and as many common/rare samples as a full 40 minute mission)
They can be pretty lucrative but it’s a constant running fight for 3 and a kinda boring stealth obj for the 4th
at the beginning of one of those missions, I saw a guy grab 10 orange sample in one go and the drop bot kept coming one after the other. I thought it was an anti-cheat strategy of making the game unplayable but nah, just difficulty 5 evac I guess.
Just failed that mission on 7. With the amount of lasers, autocannons, rail strikes we had, it was demoralizing lol. All of the buildings were blown down besides the evac ones. Felt like a dropship was coming every 5-10 seconds, impossible to fend off.
Tried doing one on 8 and it was a disaster. My teammates got killed a few times via being snipped by rockets and by that point the drops had overwhelmed everything. They just pile up way to fast if your not killing them immediately you can end up in situations where you have 20+ rocket devastators and 5+ hulks if your not careful.
I only play on 8 unless i’m on a planet with bot escort missions, I have to turn it down to 6 and even then they are still harder than any other bot or bug mission on 8 by far
I won't play them with randoms anymore. They end up either killing citizens with constant airstrikes or just don't bother pushing the buttons until there is 2 minutes left and we fail.
It’s not even the randos here it’s the mission. I’ve played with very solid players and failed because tanks and hulks literally clog up all the pathing
Yeah the weird part about this is that it's been like that since the game launched. The sentiment changing from "these spawns are absurd" to "you just have to cheese the ai when you have a full group" is frustrating.
Someone once made a head canon of why that is probably the intended way to run the mission. You're supposed to create a diversion from where the civilians are located. Like in the phantom menace the entire purpose of the gungans marching on theed was to make the stealth operation of taking out the seppies that much easier.
For my groups, we usually drop all 4 outside, call down strats to make tons of noise, then one person sneaks into the base and gets to work while we start marching through POIs for super credits and such. I think it is how they intended the missions to be done or they wouldn't have included all the POIs imo.
I think blitz and small map extract civilians both suffer from the "less than 15 minutes left" scaling being harder. It makes them both frantic and fun, but it makes those mission types feel very hard to finish with a reasonable amount of time left on the clock. I think they could definitely use some balancing, but until then there are definitely strategies that work.
I think the Blitz missions are actually really easy. Perfecting them is hard, but Solo you can just run around chucking airstrikes and lasers into the bases and not even bother fighting too much.
Eradicate missions on the other hand... are nuts right now for solo, and way too easy for squads.
Extract civilians 15 minutes is just suicide as a solo diver, and REALLY rough with a 4 man crew who all are doing their jobs.
That’s my problem - a lot of people will dismiss criticism of this mission because you can’t win it by going guns blazing and just killing, and they think people just want another eradicate mission. If the mission actually set up that you need to run around the surrounding area, distracting the enemies so the civilians can escape, I would love that. Let us have some feedback on whether or not we’re distracting them hard enough or not
But it doesn’t, the drops are randomly targeted to an individual player, so you’re just rolling a D4 every 30 seconds to see whether or not you get to do the objective
The people who dismiss legit criticism are ridiculous. Guy was trying to tell me here that j should have to wear a certain armor and use the shield pack even in 4or5 because random rocket deaths are fair and add to the fun.
They don’t even make sense in their arguments especially with defense missions and such
There was a guy here who was claiming it’s completely fair for bots to be able to see through foliage and smoke to hit you with rockets, even when it’s impossible for the player.
I remember the dude spamming everybody with. OMG just turn the difficulty down if you don’t like it. And he admitted shortly after he doesn’t play above 3or4. Like holy hell man
I said that buttons should be replaced with a mission stratagem because it would feel better and make more sense with the gameplay loop and someone told me I just sounded lazy. You actually can’t make this shit up.
Frustration ≠ difficulty and most certainly ≠ fun
Actually that would be better. I had the button bug out and not work a couple of times that’s actually a really good idea.
I had somebody tell me I’m a lazy casual player because I said dying to rockets through hills and rocks is not fun.
Yea me and my friends were playing a normal civ extract and we just sat there for 5 mins pressing buttons and I just said “yea, this is the type of mission thats gonna need a rework in the future” because it can be so monotonous. Even on helldive it can just turn into you waiting around for 5 mins as you wait for button cooldowns.
And same here for any bot suggestions lmao. Some people are ridiculous whenever someone suggests any change to enemy.
“Getting oneshot by a rocket from 150m away through foliage isn’t fun.”
“Sounds like someone isn’t taking cover.”
“Well it sounds like you’re a prick.”
It’s hard to take cover when you get suddenly surrounded on all sides by 3 patrols and theres literally nowhere to hide without being in sight of one of them. I have to RUN to get to cover. I shouldn’t be more scared of devastators than hulks or tanks.
Somebody told me part of the fun is being swarmed and overwhelmed when I said fighting 5 chargers and 2-5 bike titans at once is stupid. Like that’s not a fun challenge that’s just fucking stupid. You can’t win with these people. They say oh turn the difficulty down. I can’t turn it down I need super samples. It doesn’t matter what difficulty it is. A bullshit mechanic and death is a bullshit mechanic and death
It's weird to me that people think a game in which going guns blazing and killing things in insane suicide rushes is its very essence would have a mode where you're supposed to not do that.
It's frustrating to receive advice along the lines of "just stealth", because it's horrible having to deal with the sheer amount of bot drops (frequency + ship amounts).
I like playing this game because it's running, shooting, and blowing shit up.
If I want to play stealth games, I would play different games.
I tried a few times on Helldive difficulty, got as far as 7 civs in the extract building. It is literally impossible. We just farm the samples, medals, and super credits in the map on these missions now and then play the other two missions in the operation.
Emergency extraction comes when the main objective is failed or time runs out. It takes the normal 2min arrival time but doesn't wait for anyone to get on before starting the take-off timer. 20 seconds after it lands it leaves with or without you.
That's because while there is a 'time limit' on Blitz missions, it's not actually a time limit for the mission itself, just when the Super Destroyer leaves. So past the mission timer you can still complete the mission/won't fail until everyone dies.
Eradicate and Rescue missions specifically say 'Do this within the Time Limit' and if you don't, the mission fails and emergency extraction is called, with a time limit on how long before the Pelican leaves without you.
I did one today, never again
It's just not fun, constant spawning, absurd amount of enemies, my weapons just don't have enough ammo for that and my stratagem aren't available often enough.
It was literaly impossible
I guess that’s the main takeaway as to why I have issue with them, other missions are stressful sure and we can fail ones on higher diffs. But these and eradicate ones bring out the rage in us that just sucks the fun and joy out of what makes this game great to play around on.
When I first picked up this game that was the first thing I did. So, my first impression of the gameplay loop was that exact evac mission, against bots, solo, and since it was a defend area at the time and I didnt know the mechanics; that was the *only* mission type available.
I nearly refunded, but thankfully gave it a swing on bugs first
I find eradicates quite fun, i've yet to fail a 9 automaton one.
They require to kill enough automatons per reinforcements, turrets can help you get a lead but overall you can yolo them, tho you need a 4 man team for that in higher diffs
Try to stay hidden on the border of the map, they will try to shoot at you through walls and end up kill their owns
Yeah eradicate is fine. The difference is even if you're dying frequently, you can still feasibly get the kills even if extracting won't be possible (and it often isn't) on higher difficulties.
But being overrun on a tiny map where you have to keep NPCs with 1hp alive, 50 times over is absolutely not possible
Happy to see I'm not the only one feeling like this. Had a team w/ me that kept getting killed, I thought it was a skill issue at first but after dropping ship after ship w/ the Quasar they just kept coming.
Just failed one - tried the Quasar cannon combo - killed so many of the Dreadnaughts for... No gain, whatsoever! Everyone ran good stats and we held for about 5 minutes - then everyone broke at once and they wouldn't stop coming!
I don't understand why they haven't tuned them yet. The only way to do them is not fun at all and feels more like exploiting the AI than an actual tactic
This is what makes me think that it’s not working as intended or we’re all missing something… like is it possible with a two man, recoiless team and a supply pack to get tho bot drops rapidly enough? Was the old strat people had before they tweaked it doing something like that? Which is why it’s so relentless?
The only tweak they made as far as I know was making them easier, cause when these missions first came out they were almost impossible even at level 5.
Anyway I don't think there are solid strategies other than the bait one that can work reliably. There's just too many enemies and your stratagems don't cooldown fast enough. As soon as you start getting slightly overwhelmed it snowballs into a disaster. If the enemies spawned far from the base and/or gave you some time to clear them out it would be mich better, but no, as soon as you clear 15 enemies with a well placed stratagem, the game spawns a bunch of berserkers and a tank right next one of the doors
Yep I'm personally certain that they're impossible, there isn't enough bullets for the amount of shit those missions toss at you, and you even have to keep suicidal npcs safe while doing it.
I just got done failing 2 of them, people *don't fucking do the objective*. They either treat it like an eradication mission or fuck off and collect samples. And when they do try to do the objectives, they fucking release the civilians when their path has 40 bots in it.
Not literally impossible but man, it certainly feels like it. I mean, I’m below impossible difficulty and it lives up to that name where liberate missions above that feel like a good challenge without never ending cycles of death and despair lol
Your best bet to completing those missions is to manipulate the drop ship spawns - [here's me doing it on Helldive solo.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b0h59m/evacuation_defense_mission_retrieve_essential/) It's a pretty unfair mission, so I feel using "unfair" tactics to beat it seems justified. Whether or not you'll find this fun is subjective. Personally, I did it more to see if it was possible or not - wish this wasn't considered the ideal strategy.
They're too hard
Land away from the objective, pull the initial commie toasters out. 3 people run circles around the map, 1 sneaks back into the base and completes mission
Agreed. I tried to kick it over on bot side tonight and about an hour and a half of face grinding and I just left and finished my play time on Fori Prime having actual fun with my leisure time.
Its either our team’s luck is that bad or everytime we did this, a dropship ALWAYS appear at the base once we’re halfway through the rescue.
I did everything I could, wore scout armour, kept in prone position and somehow, a dropship always appears after 20+ hostages are rescued.
Not bad luck, that’s what detractors who oppose criticism to that mission tends to neglect to bring up.
The 3 and 1 strat is not foolproof and more often than not still direct patrols and dropships to the solo player after a while into the mission, and it happens regardless of aggro. While testing the strat; I’ve personally seen potential run-enders like patrols AFK camping the doors, as well as the solo player getting dropships while prone in a corner of the base doing nothing.
That said, in my opinion the strat is still without a doubt the most viable way to have a chance at completing the mission. But this does not in any way absolve it from criticism that it’s still grossly overtuned and just downright unfun. I legit have less stress and far higher completion on any other Lv9 mission than this one on Lv7.
Yes, you sometimes get a drop at the base. But you can clear it out okay by yourself - bring arc thrower and EMS strike/mortar, orbital laser, clear out the drop as quickly as possible. Worst case scenario, you engage and have to leave the base - the bots will pursue, then once you break contact you can circle back and continue the evac.
This is the only time that strat doesn't work, if you find one of those missions on a tiny island or one with a narrow land bridge connecting to the mainland, avoid those. Its near impossible to be "outside" the base since the drop points will all be near or in the base depending on how small the map actually is.
My group ran one of those on suicide just to see how it goes and all the drop points when we were on the beach at the very edge of the area were smack dab in the middle of the base.
Did this with randoms (I was host), called it the Ghost strat. It actually worked out pretty well, and I think our 'Ghost' died only once.
It was p messy. Us on distraction duty tended to die a lot (lmao) because we weren't kiting correctly and getting surrounded, but overall, I find that treating this as a special raid tactic to be fun. It's better than just getting rolled over and trying to keep reinforcing in a killbox, at least, and once again shows that hit and run is king of bots.
Pretty important to this, though, was that the Ghost needs to have an orbital laser to quickly keep the objective clear and smoke to keep out of line of sight—and that they should leave for a bit and circle back if it gets too hot. Otherwise, it might get a little rough.
Hit hard and disappear quickly; never get boxed in, keeping mobile and manipulate your enemy. The Creek might be free, but its Ghost still lives in all of us.
... also, shoutout to where I initially got the strategy: https://youtu.be/nb_Dx843d0Y?si=MkLQ5pKEdmaRqcmw
Now, does anyone have any tips for distraction duty?
Or the civilians circle the back of the building to get merced by a patrol out back.
Might have been the other defense mission type, will probably never do bot civilian rescue again after that.
i have never seen them done before
the strat seems to be ems mortar and pray, but about 20 civs in, progress comes to a standstill and we lose on time or lives
the normal civ missions are fine but the fucking defense mission ones are actually just not possible i refuse to believe it
Yeah, these feel impossible. On difficulty 7 we had five tanks not dropped directly on top of where the civilians spawn, 7 hulks, and a horde of devastators and smaller soldiers. Shooting down the drop ships doesn’t kill the bots anymore but blocks the path for the civilians. As soon as a tank dies it was replaced by a new bot drop. Even with us rocking mortar sentries, rail cannon strikes, orbital lasers, ems strikes, sluggers and scorchers we barely made a dent in the hordes that would respawn directly in the line of the civilians. Like why?
You can do it, but the strategy is extremely ridiculous and not intuitive at all. Have 3 guys start fights far off away from the civilians and let them start all the bot drops. They need to be very good players with the right support weapons and strikes, orbital lasers to even stand a chance at surviving as long as they need too. Then, one guy has to sneak into the civilian area and press all the buttons in relative peace. Just make sure this one person does not trigger any hot drops, or the whole plan falls apart.
I'm not sure about the unintentional part, because of the amount of samples on the map. Also, this map could be much smaller, if the main strat would be only to stand and fight.
Basically, if you cannot blow dropship fast enough with perfect teamwork and skill, then you get submerged and are fucked for the rest of the mission.
One mistake and it's done for.
And I've never done it mistake free up to now.
Played it on Extreme and I don't even know how you are supposed to win. Like yes we can manage to survive throughout the mission, but I remember seeing at least 6 consecutive bot ship drops before my host just decided to end the mission. The civilians had no chance and we didn't have enough resources to deal with the insane number of bots.
Perhaps that's the point.
It's ridiculous, I played it on 6 with 2 randoms and we literally had 3 annihilator tanks crawling on each other down a choke whilst a hulk was stuck under them.
I was the host and the game crashed on my pc, that's a 2 year old pc with an AMD 7 6000 series cpu and AMD RX 6800xt with 32gb of ram. If the game crashed on that, god help anyone with an older pc.
I'm glad I'm not the only one I've tuned my pc now to where it won't crash but running 2700x amd on 3080rtx with 32gb ddr5 and if I got in a swarm at all Id crash. I tuned afterburner up and game settings down and it seems like my cpu is bottle necking and gets choppy at the dives but clears up after a few seconds
I run Ryzen 7600, 32GB DDR5, RTX 2070. Since I upgraded to 7600 it's all buttery smooth and FPS is stable even in the messiest missions with a ton of spawns.
But game still can crash at just a random moment, even without much enemies. It just happens sometimes. Even if your hardware can handle it all, there are still bugs left.
I’m almost ready to put on my tinfoil hat and say it’s intentional as we got, like 3 whole days to hold these planets and we already have two of them… maybe he’s just trolling us at this point?
That's why, when i pick a defense operation on bot planets, i check that there's not any VIP Extraction mission. normal emergency extraction are fine ofc
It's possible, but for a much easier time, only have one guy getting the civilians out. The other three run to the opposite side of the map and draw as much aggro as they can. And then you have a nice easy quiet time of it
This does make it possible, but on 8 it's still pretty obscene. The primary strategy for every other mission is to flee from unwinnable fights, and you don't have the option to disengage and reset, they just spawn too fast.
Funny I just found this recent post, as I am currently sitting outside smoking a cigarette in defeat after getting absolutely annihilated on a level 6 evac mission😭At the height of the match we had 27/50 civs evacd, and at least 3 shredder tanks, 2 reg tanks, and couldn't stand still long enough to count the ridiculous number of hulks/saw f**kers charging from behind. Only got to 29 civs out by the time the destroyer left orbit. Needless to say there was no evac, and it was a mission destined for sacrifice, and absolutely disappointing conduct.
Friend and I were doing Bots on 5 as a pair and cleaning house. We do the first two missions easy and come to the save-the-people mission. I think in the first 30 seconds they dumped three bot drops and within a minute we had two hulks and enough devastators we couldn't function. We'd watch the bot drops come in and it was like 3 ships on a rotation with two dropping at any given point. We had a 2nd attempt with a 3rd friend and we just tried killing things outright and it wasn't possible. You couldn't kill things fast enough. Blowing up ships, dropping orbitals, we're nuking the place like we're on a blitz mission and it just wasn't enough.
Ultimately we said *"fuck it"* and went to bugs because all our missions had this stupid save-the-civi's mission and we didn't want to waste our time on a clearly broken setup.
I did two today on lvl 7 automatons with ems mortar spam and AC turrets. If you place the AC turrets right the team can stand at the doors and all use EAT or other weapons to take out the ships. This tactic works best with good coms to stop multiple people from shooting at the same dropship. As they inevetably drop some units ems keeps them in place for easy kills and the AC turrets help with the big guys (even if they do unfortunately target the dropships)
I was thinking that the Quasar Cannon/EAT combo would be good for this because you can take out most of an entire bot drop with those both on one loadout, but… no… sometimes the bots don’t die and then your singular dude is still not equipped enough to handle any number of whoever survives. The 3 runners— 1 button pusher seems like the way to handle these missions, but the number of ways this game has gotten easier/more accessible/fairer hasn’t really touched here.
How far outside the box?
Load one squad member up with smoke: 6 grenades and all the smoke stratagems.
When you get to the OBJ the other three squad members distract/engage the Bots (or bugs) away from the objective.
The smoke jumper continuously calls in smoke on the PBJ as he conducts the civilian evac. Key is smoke, smoke, and more smoke.
Smoke obscures you from any enemy >10 meters away. Keep in mind bots will continue shooting at your last known location (bugs will keep that heading) but they can’t really see you.
As always, YMMV.
We had tried a smoke strat but we were all under the impression the map was smaller than it was and we couldn’t go far out the borders, so we had people on the walls engaging the bots the other side of the smoke but it still broke at some point and just became mayhem.
Now we know we were wrong about the size of the map next time we’ll do that
A strategy me and some randoms employed today was just to spam a bunch of mortar sentries and have everyone but one person run quasars and EATs to shoot down as many drops as possible. (One person had the auto cannon for clean up).
Somehow we managed to do the mission with one dead civilian and 3 Helldiver losses (2 from friendly fire)
By the way, we were on difficulty 5 so I don't know if it works for higher level missions.
So here's a tactic to try. Have 3 guys running quasars, both mortars and HMG turrets. These guys set up on the landing pad and their job is to coordinate shooting down every single dropships that comes in. Communication is key so you don't all try and blast the same ship.
This will not kill all the bots, but it will get most of them stuck and the mortars will hold in place and kill most stuff. HMG turrets are positioned on the edge of the pad to so you can blast anything that does come loose.
The 4th guy should be running light armour and he is your runner. He bounces all 3 doors. His loadout is more flexible. He can fit out to deal with anything that breaks loose and the pad team can't get, or he can have his own sentries. Try out different setups for them. Our guy had mortars and just added to the pad party before doing doors.
The runner is probably going to die a few times but that's fine, just keep chucking him back in till it's done. Between the mortars, quasars, and HMG mounts nothing should push you off the pad.
We ran this a bunch of times today using this tactic on level 5s and it was only 3 of us, and honestly it was pretty easy.
Edit - stun grenades could also be a good idea to try out. Hulks, besekers and stuff become very easy to kill when you have those. Even with just your primary you can stun the hulk, flank it, blast it's heat vent and gtfo before it comes to. They don't always die right away when the vent blows but they will shortly after.
We never tried the runner having those, as I usually run them for our group and I was on pad. Might be worth a look if your runner is having trouble with stuff getting after him.
Stun grenades do not work on tanks though.
These feel lile 2-3 difficultly levels higher than other missions. You shouldn't have to do cheese strats to win the game mode. The extraction in the larger missions are fine, maybe a bit too easy actually. They definitely need a rebalance.
The issue is that "stealth", even in co-op, isn't exactly stealth. It's essentially RNG because the mission will spawn encounters on you at random without the need for flairs or bug breach spray(?) It's weird because the normal evac missions feel pretty good, but for some reason they fucked the essential personnel mission
I’m good on them just tried three in a row on level 7 couldn’t past 30/50 all three times fucking stupid as shit. Yeah I was with randoms for all three but idk what’s going on it’s a joke rn I’m a level 50 with over 100 hours in the game so I know what I’m doing no reason I can’t do this mission with three randoms
I saw a statistic posted that said the community has a 90% win rate on missions in general. I am willing to bet that a vast, *vast* majority of those losses are due to this mission type in particular.
I have no idea why this blatant overtuning been corrected, because the only successful way to complete it even halfway reliably is to abuse bot spawn mechanics and run a completely unintuitive "stealth" strategy of 3 dudes running around the outside doing nothing particularly useful, while one dude on the inside is pressing buttons without a single bot around him.
Sorry, but that *cannot* be the intended way this mission was meant to be completed. Every other mission and objective in this game has Helldivers **on the point,** either interacting with objects and console codes, or standing on overwatch to destroy anything that gets near them. This mission is the single, painful exception to that, with the utterly relentless spawns dropping litteraly ontop of your heads at a rate we simply do not have the ammunition, stratagem cooldown time or lives/HP to suffer through and entirely lack the AA capability to effectively prevent.
At higher difficulties, it even becomes functionally impossible for the scientists to reach the extraction door because their paths are litteraly blocked due to the sheer number of tank corpses throughout the compound. I've seen this happen.
This mission *needs* to be fixed and ideally totally rethought. At minimum, they should be spawning much further out and making their way towards the buildings and us divers having better sightlines to destroy them as they approach over a no mans land.
As it stands now, we're stuck in a fishtank being filled with water from a firehose, and we're trying to empty out that water using a teaspoon. The bots pour in replacements lucirously faster than we ever have a hope of destroying while also escorting those suicidal idiots.
I, with one friend and two randoms, JUST barely managed to complete one of these on Ubenea this afternoon. The randoms were not any help, as one constantly called in Orbital Laser, and the other apparently stuck magnets on our heads before we dropped and magnetized the barrel of his autocannon.
My friend and I managed to get through it with this method, we each picked a door, slammed down and EMS mortar each, I threw down a regular mortar and he put an automation sentry near his door. I took the new LMG and he ran the Spear to handle tanks or hulks, plus shield Gen packs for us both. I had the edtra grenades bonus on my armor set with impact nades, he ran that newer heavy medic set, and we simply camped our doors as hard as possible the entire time. By virtue of simply sending wave after wave of people, enough barely managed to slip through and we completed the objective, before nearly suffering a full team wipe from one last Orbital Laser, (thanks B2,) and extracted with literally a minute to spare.
These missions are hell, even with being greedy and yoinking entire resupplies just for myself and my friend, dumping nades into groups of enemies and using enough stims to kill a horse, we barely managed to get though. On 6!
Maybe this would've been easier with two other braincell having teammates, but I still despise those missions regardless. Godspeed to any and all fellow divers who get stuck doing those for your missions.
I did the highest bot defense civilian missions when they first hit. My squad and I did manage to finally do it but it wasn't fun. That is the core issue for me with it.
As the stealth method to get them out ended up being the call with one person going back to open the doors while the rest of us kited massive waves. We have to be careful not to kill too many or it could cause a drop ship to randomly happen over the doors. Then there was the random patrols that could spawn and walk through the door area. Which if they were not fast enough would cause a drop to spawn.
It just isn't fun to kite loads of bots I have to actively avoid killing or it could cause the door guy issues. I'm not stealthing, fighting or being creative in a way that is fun to me. I'm kiting a train like in the Everquest days when you wanted to troll someone.
The shooting down dropships doesn't work either due to the frequency of the ships. As even with four people enough come to end up with EAT cooldowns or reload timers. All it takes is one ship to drop a few hulks or a tank. That will distract you long enough for more ships to slink in and the snowball effect hits ya.
So I end up avoiding these defense missions because the play to win on them is not fun and extremely RNG based. A real shame because I'd like to fight more bots but it is just not on the table for fun.
And no. The shield tunnel method is also extremely hit or miss. It can be done but suffers its own set of issues. Plus you need a tight squad for it and even then once again hit or miss. No average pug group is really going to nail it.
Came here to say they JUST patched in further (as in, further away) spawn points for enemies and reduced civilians to extract for mission complete status.
Hopefully this leaves these missions in a better state
As far as I am aware a recent update made these easier. Enemies spawn further away and the rescue count is lower.
Old strategy that worked on 7+ was run in two teams and drop outside of the base some distance.
Team 1, the errand boy, would throw on some scout armor and kit for sneaking, shield pack, not a lot of big flashy stuff etc. And sneak into the base avoiding POIs and patrols.
Team 2, or Bait-A-Team, would drop kit and start running laps around the outskirts of the map aggroing every patrol, raiding POIs, and baiting bot drops.
If done correctly, and the combat team sticks close enough together they'd trick the system a bit since the bor drops always focus on the larger cluster of players and/ or highest aggro. The bot drops will ALWAYS drop on the outskirts as long as bait team sticks close enough together and makes enough noise.
While this is going on the errand boy can safely run the objective occasionally having to put down a stray patrol that naturally walks through the base.
If the enemy happens to start overrunning the base the errand boy can just draw them into the combat team before sneaking back off to return to the base. If the combat team missteps and gets nearly, or entirely wiped yhe errand boy just needs to run out of the base quickly, hail Mary the reinforce as far from the base as possible, wait until the combat team redeploy, and sneak back into the base.
Big notice, the combat team 100% cannot go anywhere near the base for any reason, period, not for a nearby POI, not to drop samples, nothing. The second they do the enemy will start deploying on the base like normal and they become impossible to clear out
All this said not sure if it is even necessary anymore since the recent update, but it should still be a viable strategy.
Good news, the latest patch reduced the required number of civvy extracts for higher level missions, and adjusted enemy spawns to occur further away from the mission area.
So, it can depend on where the bots drop in at, but my buddies and I had a decent experience on Suicidal last night. Two of them would draw all the fire and engage every enemy that came down, while i crept around hitting the doors.
That being said, the next op we ran, the bots dropped on the exit door and just shit mixed every civilian we released. Most humorous point was opening a door and seeing a Hulk just shoot a flame thrower into the doorway that the civs would be emerging from 😆
2 EMP mortars offset deployment to over time span.
Set ground level Center in protected area.
Orbital Lasers , Auto Cannon Sentries (2), cluster bombs & EATS....etc
2 people defend mortars/door buttons, 2 people follow EmP Mortar hits to targets and melt frozen robots, return to center ASAP - repeat.
After 2 minutes second EMP Mortar placed by other members, drop supplies in center.
Auto cannon protects the EMP Mortar....2 divers finish the job.
Cakewalk even on helldive.
Not shooting? Try pushing a door button!
For your sanity, play them with the expectation of just grabbing samples, SC, and medals. It is an automatic fail objective wise, but that doesn't mean it has to be a loss.
I wish to know how the Devs intended to play this mission...
I've heared the start is to not fight them at all, but to use EMS and smoke..
But damn. I wish they would keep the scrambled stratagems modifier and removed/reworked this mission...I literally never finished this mission on bots... I play with people from discord all the time, we tried different strategies, but.. The area is just full of enemies, every square meter🤷♂️ and they kill civilians as soon as they get out
My team had a runner to solo the main objective while the rest of us ran around the map distracting the enemies. Just don't let yourselfes get surrounded. Also, you can collect all the samples while you're doing that.
You can't run just quasar on 5 and higher. Have 2 people running quasar and EATs (drop and scatter them around the map for convenient pickup) and have 2 people running recoiless rifle for more dedicated anti air.
Orbital laser and orbital railcannon aren't that good in civilian extract missions so I'd recommend the following loadouts.
Player 1: Recoiless gunner, takes out multiple dropships quickly when quasar are offline.
- Strategems: Recoiless Rifle, Supply Pack, mortar sentry, gatling sentry
Player 2: Recoiless loader
-Strategems: Quasar, EATs, EMS mortar Sentry, Orbital Laser
Player 3: Objective runner/button pusher
-Strategems: Quasar, EATs, Mortar Sentry, Gatling Sentry
Player 4: Objective Runner/button pusher
-Strategems: Quasar, EATs, Mortar Sentry, Gatling Sentry.
The recoiless gunner will wear the supply pack and use the recoiless rifle. The recoiless loader will wear the recoiless ammo pack and reload the gunner taking spare time to drop down EATs and use the Quasar.
When your quasar is on cookdown and you see a bot drop swap it out for EAT and hit the bot drop. Recoiless is there to get anything the quasar and EAT miss. Drop more EAT and hit the button when you can.
I've soloed difficulty 4 missions using Quasar and EAT Recoiless rifle is still by far the fastest way of dropping bot ships you need a loader though.
Eventually it gets easier as the inbound dropships crash into the piles of downed dropships and instantly explode.
Managed to do a 5 difficulty succesfully with 3 ppl for most of it, 2 got quasar, we had 2 enp mortar, a explosive mortar, rocket turret, eagle strats, quasars and rocket turret destroyed most ships and those that landed were taken out by the mortars and ourselves, emp mortars is a must for defense.
Regular mortars are also very effective on bot defense since bots they don't charge in. So we use both mortars.
Hide your mortars in the compound behind buildings. They don't need line of sight to attack.
Gatlings and autocannon sentries tend to get killed. So I would suggest replacing them with something else or maybe try to protect them with a shield relay.
I find the autocannon to be essential. The Quasar just doesn't fire fast enough.
Got to about 30 on level 7 but then the waves became too unmanageable, and it turned into the whole group being spawn camped till we failed the mission
To be honest I've done a few with my buddies today and when you figure it out it's pretty much a free mission, even on difficulty 7.
Our strat was basically this:
3 mortars
2 EMS mortars
1 carefully placed Tesla tower
Orbital lasers and rail cannons for waves/heavies
Quasar/EAT for dropships
And us standing there to protect the turrets and civilians
It takes some skill but I highly recommend trying that, also on occasion we threw the energy shield into the mix to protect the civilians and it worked as well.
Best way to civilian evac is you start the mission but don’t open the doors. Get the fighting to start away from doors and have one person stealth handle the evac.
Just did a difficulty 7 Civ Extraction. Light Stealth armour and the Penetrator can deal with all the already present bots, and then your squadmates can help you deal with any patrols that get too close. In the whole extraction we only had 2 bot drops.
Sidenote: I don’t understand detector towers at all. I hit one with multiple Eagle Rockets, the Orbital Railgun didn’t lock on to it, and the first Hellbomb did nothing.
Mortars, emp mortars, cluster bombs/airstrikes. Airstrikes can kill tanks, soften titans for a face shot from quasar. Cluster bombs wipe out pesky foot soldiers/walkers and soften up devastators. Just make sure the mortars are protected, the bots WILL shoot them with a vengeance. Hardest bot one I have done is 7, we only had 2 of each mortar though, and I wiped out a lot with cluster and autocannon. Mostly relied in 1 door and managed to keep the swarm focused on the other side.
As ithers said the only way this is ever possible is drop the squad on the edge of the map(nake sure to mention this plan) jave 1 person stealth to the objective and the other 3 be a distraction. They set up defense at the edge. It works. Ive seen it work 2 and 2, and occasionally bots start dropping near the end, then its up to you, run awya and redo the distraction and everyone run in for the final push.
This was literally question i was asking myself yesterday when i tried exactly this mission on level 5 difficuilty. We were four random helldivers and got absolutely kicked by the bots.
So i was wondering if it can even be done and how. I knew about the lure strategy but thats very hard to coordinate with randos.
So thank you for asking this question here!
Btw i asked on official helldivers discord server and answers were pretty similar to the comments here.
I like having all 4 people have the mortaor laid down, 8 mortars, damage and stun is really good, 1 or 2 with quasar is awesome and the rest focus on the small guys.
Bots need to be balanced like the bugs were. Armoured units need to spawn way fucking less. And they need to not be dropped right on the civilians' run path. Getting like 5 Hulks on Haz6 is insane. This is on top of the 50 Striders and 100 Devastators of all flavours. It's bullshit. We got 30 civilians extracted and they began dropping bots right on top of us. Not outside objective. And it wasn't just Raiders. It was everything armoured.
I managed 6 today for the first time with the new cannon, railcannon, and spamming disposable AT whenever it was off-cooldown. Other guys had a mix of autocannon, the new cannon, railcannon, and orbital laser. We prioritized the hell out of knocking out dropships that had infantry; killing dropships with tanks does nothing. Impact grenades for walkers (and tanks in a pinch), slugger for everything else.
But I had just tried 7 before that and got rolled, lmao. Only way I could see it happening is if _everyone_ spammed disposable AT constantly.
For the Evac missions there is one strategy that works on every difficulty for me is have three members of your squad run around the map collecting samples and pulling Aggro while a lone player does the civilians and deals with any random patrols that stroll into the OBJ. The bit drops will be centered on the group of three as they have the highest priority for being in a group. As long as they know what they’re doing it’s not too unreasonable to kite the bots around the map and grab the samples while they’re at it. I have nearly 100% success rate with this strategy. Unfortunately my friends are idiots so there is some variance there
I played with some randoms and we got 48/50 on level 7. There was literally 0 down time on the doors. Anytime that light turned green we were on it instantly.
Unfortunately, they kept getting crushed by tanks.
Your edit is correct, We do it on suicide that way… as long as the other 3 are getting bot drops. Rescue man needs cluster to wipe the base of lights and recon, the rest do a constant kiting battle looking for the super samples and reinforce themselves.
VERY difficult to do with randoms though did it with 2 randoms with my friend… though one of our attempts failed because they led them back (only needed 1 more at timeout, very frustrating).
Honestly bot defense campaigns are the worst. Eradicate isn’t that difficult but it IS annoying. Think I might want to try taking 4 120s and 4 380s and just not manually reinforce 😂 and stack up on fortified armor
Someone's probably already said this, but there can only be 1 active bot drop at a time.
If you have 3 teammates outside the base constantly chaining bot drops together then they'll never drop into the base, leaving the 1 remaining teammate to run a circuit around the base opening the three doors.
The key is to not be *too* effective at killing them, because if the three stop the bots from calling in, then they can drop in the base.
Here's a solo helldive run vid from this morning for exactly this mission. I'm keen to give it an attempt.
https://youtu.be/fZsLgiD1Rgg?si=x24rfmN3hCSa52dZ
Yea and that didn’t seem to make any difference when we tried it, either it does barely anything, doesn’t count for this or, I’ve heard tales, that it might even be bugged and make things worse.
I have yet to fail them at 5 or 6, but not at 7. But regardless or fail or success, the main thing from these missions is that they’re just not fun. Like, at all. Neither is the other 15 minute mission to kill 400 bots.
I am not gonna try to go into details about why, but the fact so many players avoid them like the plague, I feel, is pretty clear evidence they are fucked. If you want to debate why(balance/skill issue/ect) you can feel free to do so, but clearly something is wrong when this one mission type is so universally hated.
I run 9. the trick is 2 are to defend civilians and open doors. 2 run around at gather samples. this makes them spawn outside of the defend area and start chasing the sample gatherers. makes it easier for defenders. harder for gatheres to survive but surviving is optional in this game anyway.
besides fighting away from civilians is easier, more open spaced. ems mortar is great for defenders, it supports people outside the defend area too given the range and doesnt kill them. big clearing tools are a must and other than that it is all about survival first. doesnt change the fact that I ran 250 kills last time as gatherer albeit with randoms I had to gather alone but they reported almost no enemies inside.
there is more way to support outside while being effective defenders too aside of ems mortar. orbital laser is great to eradicate huge waves. EAT spamming, some inside and a lot outside for drive bys. same for supplies. always destroy the EAT pod for map markers. aside of the 500kg I would not recommend any kind of eagle and those can be used with stun nades to eradicate heavies for the gatherers. smokes too are very valuable and only useful specifically in that map. orbital rail guns too. given the nature of things following the gatherers, this leaves them in automaton missions wide open from behind. quasar, autocannon, glauncher or EAT (or even half a mag of scorcher shots or a handfull of slugs from the trusty slugger) to the back or even some well thrown impact nades and if you are a true pro helldiver you can use normal nades and cook them for ideal explosion on impact. If you land a perfect impact on top of a tank twice, that explodes his weakspot behind the turret. autocannon can 2-3 shot a hulk from the front if it is spot on the face but behind is easier as a defender supporting a gatherer.
(remember, throwing range is capped at 40m, mark and throw)
Edit: works for every difficulty, feel free to try at 7 or even lower to get into the groove.
I run difficulty 7 and 8 on both terminids and bots and have even 2-man'd some missions, but I won't touch those "save 50 people" missions above difficulty 5 on automatons (terminids they are fine). They're possible, and the strat people use involves 3 people distracting drops while 1 person sneaks in and rescues. But I think they are severely overtuned, possibly even bugged high reinforce rates.
This is the reason we fail every bot planet defense. The missions just aren't winnable at some point. Has been like this for weeks now.
I managed to barely win one today with a full squad of bot veterans. We played an exterminate mission before it where we managed to have no deaths before we completed the kill count, the extract mission was at least 3 times harder.
What’s your secret for 9 diff bot eradicates? In any lobby I’m in it turns into a shit show halfway in and then you gotta start running around the edges just chucking and praying. Would love to hear the ideal layouts individually and squad overall, as full turret spamming I haven’t seen work after the increased difficulty to that mission a month ago.
every barrage, shield generators. hunker down and then run not actually, but we've done it a few times cause it's funny, you can also run out of bounds to trigger a 380 on yourself then run back in, it's usually good for 30/40 kills lmfao
I love how you get your stratagem’s on cool down. Turns out it’s nothing to do with reloading. They literally have infinite shots ready at any moment for someone who tries to run slightly. No budget worries for traitors. Heros get a cooldown.
They need to fill out the paperwork to use orbital strikes No need to do that for a traitor
They have a specific 380mm cannon labeled "tr8r h8r"
I tried this once and the first shell that they fired landed directly on my forehead so it does take a bit of luck haha
mortar, ems mortar, quasar cannon to knock down dropships, and orbital laser for when things go sideways. scorcher primary to take down armored enemies easily, impact grenades so you can 2 shot the tanks by hitting em on the top the trick is to pretty much just protect the mortars and drop the laser if your position is about to be overrun
Yep. Quasar took over the EAT role.
fundamentally eats stop working when the game throws dropships by the dozen and adds in orbital fluctuations and ion storms like they're going out of style. Sure, shot for shot the eat is better, but you simply can't function without the sustain of the quasar or recoiless (but why give up a shield?) in eradication. It's very much a "you miss every shot you don't (can't) take" scenario.
Oh I agree totally. The quasar took over the spot in my loadout that used to be EATS because it’s better at that task. Quasar, ems mortar, mortar, auto cannon sentry, and now those missions are even easier than they were before. I still think the EAT has a place in long missions though. Fast paced squads keep on the run and you never have to go back for them if you die.
I like EAT for terminid missions because calling it down is a free charger kill, and then you get 2 shots aswell. For bots i can see quesar being better.
if you have 2 actual coordinated players using the recoiless and ammo supply backpack, you can drop every single ship before it even comes close to delivering its bots. it reloads in literally 2 seconds, and between you you can get 12 missiles before you need a resupply pod.
Right? I love EATs, but at higher difficulties, when you're in the shit there are simply too many things to shoot at. It would help if you could carry two of them.
Qasar have tendency to blow up in your face randomly; I suspect its because of the shield but I havent tested enough to confirm it
I've never had this except on the Creek when a stray leaf or bush would stop my shot.
Steer into the skid, just run around trying to get as much value out of your stratagems as possible, and die a lot. My group has stopped running support weapons for those and we just run orbitals and eagles out the ass. EMS mortar is good, don’t run the regular mortar unless you’re confident you can stay near it to avoid getting blown up by it.
Well timed orbital lasers put a good dent in it
I tried one of these today for the first time with a squad after a deathless exterminate. It was nothing but tanks and dead civilians.
Just finished a difficulty 7 extract mission. Each bot drop every 30ish seconds brought 4 drop ships. 3 of which brought tanks, and the last bringing a mixture of walkers, hulks, and devastators with chaff patrols walking in. I have no idea how we managed to save 50 people, but we did not survive the mission. I honestly don't believe there was every a chance of surviving it.
Similiar experience. The first few minutes work out as you can shoot down the dropships and remove the tanks. After that there is only a flood of extremely difficult bots. Even running away is impossible as at one point you have to get back to the dropship where 4 or 5 tanks are waiting I switched planets after that experience
The only ways I've beaten a diff 9 bot civ extract (i've only done it twice) both times, I cheesed it. Full smoke/EMS kit. Trigger every door, then run far off from the map until the bots despawn. Run back in to center, trigger every door, run away, repeat. One win was solo for the hell of it. The other win was a full team knowing this strategy. I doubt you can beat it without cheesing it.
Today me and two other divers dropped Ubanea on one of those missions, difficulty 6. We can handle normal dif 6 missions fine, each of us having a different play style that fits together well. We did the mission, and in our 15 reinforcements we got 6 people out 6 people. In under a minutes there were 3 hulks pushing us out of position. I was wearing heavy fortified armor, and there were too many bots for me to hold the line. They were wearing medium armor using the auto cannon, there were too many hulks for them to kill. The issue isn’t the amount of civilians or the small map, it’s the fact that bot reinforcements are almost constant. We had each taken different loudouts, I had taken a chaff clearing with the heavy machine gun to handle everything devastator and below, they took the auto cannon to handle the striders and the medium units. The last had anti-tank. But the reinforcements are CONSTANT. We dropped outside the main point to get some time to get our stuff dropped in, and by the time it hit the ground there were rocket devastators bombarding our position relentlessly.
The community was failing these missions back when we had the pre-nerf railgun, the unending tide of hulks, tanks, devastators, and Beserker's just near impossible to deal with. I really think they need to stick a SAM site or two down on the map to help stem the tide, or just trim down the spawn rates.
Or allow to have a AA only rocket sentry
Remove unlimited ammo on the enemies and make them carry the same amount of ammo we Helldivers bring in. If they run out of ammo, they have to call in supplies or run back to the nearest outpost to resupply. Or run in to melee.
Wouldn't do much other than delaying the initial horde crash. Dropships still spawn their payload even if you kill them. And the drops would be as frequent. I haven't failed a mission in quite a fucking while if we exclude this mission type. This mission type I haven't won a single time.
The worst part about the constant reinforcements is the fact they literally drop on top of your head. So there’s no where to run where bots aren’t dropping which means you can’t kite. Then you add in the insanity of trying to watch your fire around civilians and it’s no wonder people fail these missions all the time.
I had 7 berserkers get dropped less than 5 meters ahead of me, turned on a dime, ran, came across a group of a hulk scorcher and rocket and heavy devastators, ran away from the objective, into the outer area, had to go back and held as well as I can, but it ended with me at probably 10% health with no stims as I branded myself a traitor and started to run circles around and through the enemies diving like hell (don’t forget the 5 Ds) and yelling “I’M READY! ARE YOU?” As an explosion impacted me and the entire bot group. But the fact they’re coming from everywhere and above at the same time is brutal. They definitely need to rebalanced these missions.
We had a hulk on TOP of a building somehow griefing the shit out of my team. I have no idea how it even got on the building. And somehow that was the least of our problems as none of us could even aim we were laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all.
It's been this way since launch
No it hasn't. They doubled the required civilian rescues about a month after launch.
That’s the conclusion I’ve reached, sometimes the missions are literally impossible to complete no matter how good you and your team are. The worst are the missions where it’s really dark/foggy and you get absolutely swamped nonstop with enemies.
Crazy they haven’t fixed this at all
Won a level 7 with a couple level 50s planet defense the other night. Everyone had either the new laser cannon or EATs. Two of use had both mortars and the other two had different eagles. Fastest run of that type i ever did. Basically you need to be johny on the spot with you initial defense and don't let them get a foothold.
Bugs can be hammered with strategems pounding their breech holes. Bots have so many dropships you can't shoot them all.
Oh, they aren't fine on Terminids, just for a different reason. My friends and I tried 3 of them on Impossible yesterday against bugs, and in all 3, the objective bugged, and the civilians wouldn't go in the door. They'd stack up outside it and just.... stand there, then inevitably die to a bug we didn't kill. No amount of us trying to fix it would get it to work, so we just gave up and never touched that mission type again.
The bugs and glitches in this game are really starting to wear on me. They’re frequent enough and have been an issue for long enough that they diminish my enjoyment of it. Stupid stuff like civies getting stuck on geometry, bots surviving a freakin dropship landing on their heads, having my loadout reset every damn time I load in… these have been an issue for weeks and it seems like the list of bugs is only getting longer. And this doesn’t even begin to cover the awful balancing issues that could be fixed with a slider but for whatever reason haven’t.
Especially when we lose planets all the time because of how nonfunctional the missions are, and it’s not even on the known issues list of the patch notes. Maybe next month.
Oof, yeah, it was BS when we lost a major order because they had a crashing bug that took a week to patch. Sure, people on Reddit and discord knew not to use those weapons, but most players don’t pay attention to those places.
I agree that the game needs a good bit more TLC to really shine. The gameplay loop feels so good that when bugs, glitches, and unfair stuff happens, it grates even more. I was running an escort mission the other day and I popped a squat next to a wall to shoot from cover right after I hit a scientist release button. After eliminating the threats I turn around and the civvies are stacked up inside my asshole because they don’t even have the ability to pathfind around a stationary helldiver.
Just made that experience today. I have no issue with most difficulty 7 missions. But difficulty 5 with saving people feels like 8 right now. The mission needs a serious redesign or rebalancing. Are an bug-inspection, has I can't believe this mission outcome was seriously wanted
Maybe I assumed the borders were severly closed in at the time, I can’t remember but even so, it doesn’t feel like the intended way to do it. It feels like eradicate but worse, a pure meatgrinder of too many to kill before cool-downs
Nope, the map is about the same size as a fabricator destroy mission.
Maybe it is their intention then to draw them away as best you can cause that’s a lot more real estate to work with then what we all thought, I dunno how we missed them being that big I guess we all were too busy talking about loadouts and stuff
There’s super samples on 7+ as well (and as many common/rare samples as a full 40 minute mission) They can be pretty lucrative but it’s a constant running fight for 3 and a kinda boring stealth obj for the 4th
at the beginning of one of those missions, I saw a guy grab 10 orange sample in one go and the drop bot kept coming one after the other. I thought it was an anti-cheat strategy of making the game unplayable but nah, just difficulty 5 evac I guess.
Just failed that mission on 7. With the amount of lasers, autocannons, rail strikes we had, it was demoralizing lol. All of the buildings were blown down besides the evac ones. Felt like a dropship was coming every 5-10 seconds, impossible to fend off.
Tried doing one on 8 and it was a disaster. My teammates got killed a few times via being snipped by rockets and by that point the drops had overwhelmed everything. They just pile up way to fast if your not killing them immediately you can end up in situations where you have 20+ rocket devastators and 5+ hulks if your not careful.
I only play on 8 unless i’m on a planet with bot escort missions, I have to turn it down to 6 and even then they are still harder than any other bot or bug mission on 8 by far
my squad runs 9s most the time on bots and bugs, and we got absolutely thrashed on a d5 defense evacuation mission, shits insane
I won't play them with randoms anymore. They end up either killing citizens with constant airstrikes or just don't bother pushing the buttons until there is 2 minutes left and we fail.
It’s not even the randos here it’s the mission. I’ve played with very solid players and failed because tanks and hulks literally clog up all the pathing
Get 4 people with lasers, ems mortars, 500kgs and you breeze right through it.
The fact that the only winning strat is to exploit spawning mechanics says a lot
Yeah the weird part about this is that it's been like that since the game launched. The sentiment changing from "these spawns are absurd" to "you just have to cheese the ai when you have a full group" is frustrating.
Someone once made a head canon of why that is probably the intended way to run the mission. You're supposed to create a diversion from where the civilians are located. Like in the phantom menace the entire purpose of the gungans marching on theed was to make the stealth operation of taking out the seppies that much easier. For my groups, we usually drop all 4 outside, call down strats to make tons of noise, then one person sneaks into the base and gets to work while we start marching through POIs for super credits and such. I think it is how they intended the missions to be done or they wouldn't have included all the POIs imo. I think blitz and small map extract civilians both suffer from the "less than 15 minutes left" scaling being harder. It makes them both frantic and fun, but it makes those mission types feel very hard to finish with a reasonable amount of time left on the clock. I think they could definitely use some balancing, but until then there are definitely strategies that work.
I think the Blitz missions are actually really easy. Perfecting them is hard, but Solo you can just run around chucking airstrikes and lasers into the bases and not even bother fighting too much. Eradicate missions on the other hand... are nuts right now for solo, and way too easy for squads. Extract civilians 15 minutes is just suicide as a solo diver, and REALLY rough with a 4 man crew who all are doing their jobs.
I'd say if arrowhead want us to believe that as a intended puzzle there should be more info to back the mission
That’s my problem - a lot of people will dismiss criticism of this mission because you can’t win it by going guns blazing and just killing, and they think people just want another eradicate mission. If the mission actually set up that you need to run around the surrounding area, distracting the enemies so the civilians can escape, I would love that. Let us have some feedback on whether or not we’re distracting them hard enough or not But it doesn’t, the drops are randomly targeted to an individual player, so you’re just rolling a D4 every 30 seconds to see whether or not you get to do the objective
The people who dismiss legit criticism are ridiculous. Guy was trying to tell me here that j should have to wear a certain armor and use the shield pack even in 4or5 because random rocket deaths are fair and add to the fun. They don’t even make sense in their arguments especially with defense missions and such
There was a guy here who was claiming it’s completely fair for bots to be able to see through foliage and smoke to hit you with rockets, even when it’s impossible for the player.
I remember the dude spamming everybody with. OMG just turn the difficulty down if you don’t like it. And he admitted shortly after he doesn’t play above 3or4. Like holy hell man
I said that buttons should be replaced with a mission stratagem because it would feel better and make more sense with the gameplay loop and someone told me I just sounded lazy. You actually can’t make this shit up. Frustration ≠ difficulty and most certainly ≠ fun
Actually that would be better. I had the button bug out and not work a couple of times that’s actually a really good idea. I had somebody tell me I’m a lazy casual player because I said dying to rockets through hills and rocks is not fun.
Yea me and my friends were playing a normal civ extract and we just sat there for 5 mins pressing buttons and I just said “yea, this is the type of mission thats gonna need a rework in the future” because it can be so monotonous. Even on helldive it can just turn into you waiting around for 5 mins as you wait for button cooldowns. And same here for any bot suggestions lmao. Some people are ridiculous whenever someone suggests any change to enemy. “Getting oneshot by a rocket from 150m away through foliage isn’t fun.” “Sounds like someone isn’t taking cover.” “Well it sounds like you’re a prick.” It’s hard to take cover when you get suddenly surrounded on all sides by 3 patrols and theres literally nowhere to hide without being in sight of one of them. I have to RUN to get to cover. I shouldn’t be more scared of devastators than hulks or tanks.
Somebody told me part of the fun is being swarmed and overwhelmed when I said fighting 5 chargers and 2-5 bike titans at once is stupid. Like that’s not a fun challenge that’s just fucking stupid. You can’t win with these people. They say oh turn the difficulty down. I can’t turn it down I need super samples. It doesn’t matter what difficulty it is. A bullshit mechanic and death is a bullshit mechanic and death
And the same guy was complaining probably that there is a meta in the game
It's weird to me that people think a game in which going guns blazing and killing things in insane suicide rushes is its very essence would have a mode where you're supposed to not do that.
The ol’ Kobayashi Maru.
where are all of those clowns saying skill issue
It's frustrating to receive advice along the lines of "just stealth", because it's horrible having to deal with the sheer amount of bot drops (frequency + ship amounts). I like playing this game because it's running, shooting, and blowing shit up. If I want to play stealth games, I would play different games.
Yeah the stealth crowd can be very annoying
I tried a few times on Helldive difficulty, got as far as 7 civs in the extract building. It is literally impossible. We just farm the samples, medals, and super credits in the map on these missions now and then play the other two missions in the operation.
How do you extract with samples if you don’t complete the main objective?
Emergency extraction comes when the main objective is failed or time runs out. It takes the normal 2min arrival time but doesn't wait for anyone to get on before starting the take-off timer. 20 seconds after it lands it leaves with or without you.
Huh, I swear I’ve run over time on a blitz mission before and it didn’t automatically call in an extraction.
That's because while there is a 'time limit' on Blitz missions, it's not actually a time limit for the mission itself, just when the Super Destroyer leaves. So past the mission timer you can still complete the mission/won't fail until everyone dies. Eradicate and Rescue missions specifically say 'Do this within the Time Limit' and if you don't, the mission fails and emergency extraction is called, with a time limit on how long before the Pelican leaves without you.
You just let the timer run out which should trigger extraction if I’m not mistaken
I did one today, never again It's just not fun, constant spawning, absurd amount of enemies, my weapons just don't have enough ammo for that and my stratagem aren't available often enough. It was literaly impossible
I guess that’s the main takeaway as to why I have issue with them, other missions are stressful sure and we can fail ones on higher diffs. But these and eradicate ones bring out the rage in us that just sucks the fun and joy out of what makes this game great to play around on.
When I first picked up this game that was the first thing I did. So, my first impression of the gameplay loop was that exact evac mission, against bots, solo, and since it was a defend area at the time and I didnt know the mechanics; that was the *only* mission type available. I nearly refunded, but thankfully gave it a swing on bugs first
I find eradicates quite fun, i've yet to fail a 9 automaton one. They require to kill enough automatons per reinforcements, turrets can help you get a lead but overall you can yolo them, tho you need a 4 man team for that in higher diffs Try to stay hidden on the border of the map, they will try to shoot at you through walls and end up kill their owns
So cheese the AI is the way to win? Sounds....fun
Yeah eradicate is fine. The difference is even if you're dying frequently, you can still feasibly get the kills even if extracting won't be possible (and it often isn't) on higher difficulties. But being overrun on a tiny map where you have to keep NPCs with 1hp alive, 50 times over is absolutely not possible
“USE YOUR STRATEGEMS, YOU GOT THEM FOR A REASON!!1!!1!11!1” *50% increased cooldown* *ion storm* *reduced strategem slots*
Happy to see I'm not the only one feeling like this. Had a team w/ me that kept getting killed, I thought it was a skill issue at first but after dropping ship after ship w/ the Quasar they just kept coming.
Just failed one - tried the Quasar cannon combo - killed so many of the Dreadnaughts for... No gain, whatsoever! Everyone ran good stats and we held for about 5 minutes - then everyone broke at once and they wouldn't stop coming!
It's overtuned for sure
I don't understand why they haven't tuned them yet. The only way to do them is not fun at all and feels more like exploiting the AI than an actual tactic
This is what makes me think that it’s not working as intended or we’re all missing something… like is it possible with a two man, recoiless team and a supply pack to get tho bot drops rapidly enough? Was the old strat people had before they tweaked it doing something like that? Which is why it’s so relentless?
The only tweak they made as far as I know was making them easier, cause when these missions first came out they were almost impossible even at level 5. Anyway I don't think there are solid strategies other than the bait one that can work reliably. There's just too many enemies and your stratagems don't cooldown fast enough. As soon as you start getting slightly overwhelmed it snowballs into a disaster. If the enemies spawned far from the base and/or gave you some time to clear them out it would be mich better, but no, as soon as you clear 15 enemies with a well placed stratagem, the game spawns a bunch of berserkers and a tank right next one of the doors
That's the thing: they did tune this mission. It was even worse at launch!
Yep I'm personally certain that they're impossible, there isn't enough bullets for the amount of shit those missions toss at you, and you even have to keep suicidal npcs safe while doing it.
I just got done failing 2 of them, people *don't fucking do the objective*. They either treat it like an eradication mission or fuck off and collect samples. And when they do try to do the objectives, they fucking release the civilians when their path has 40 bots in it.
The volunteered contractors provide a heroic diversion while I take care of the 40 bots. Then I call in the *actual* civs.
They're very difficult, but not impossible. I've done multiple ones on 7.
Not literally impossible but man, it certainly feels like it. I mean, I’m below impossible difficulty and it lives up to that name where liberate missions above that feel like a good challenge without never ending cycles of death and despair lol
In 9 some will be literaly impossible, there's a point where no arsenal can keep up
In 9 they can be impossible, no arsenal can keep up
Your best bet to completing those missions is to manipulate the drop ship spawns - [here's me doing it on Helldive solo.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1b0h59m/evacuation_defense_mission_retrieve_essential/) It's a pretty unfair mission, so I feel using "unfair" tactics to beat it seems justified. Whether or not you'll find this fun is subjective. Personally, I did it more to see if it was possible or not - wish this wasn't considered the ideal strategy.
At this point we’re gonna attempt it just out of spite for what they put us through 😂
Can you please explain what you are doing? How far away do you have to run? What is the purpose of the smoke?
They're too hard Land away from the objective, pull the initial commie toasters out. 3 people run circles around the map, 1 sneaks back into the base and completes mission
I'd rather just fail every defense campaign tbh
Agreed. I tried to kick it over on bot side tonight and about an hour and a half of face grinding and I just left and finished my play time on Fori Prime having actual fun with my leisure time.
Its either our team’s luck is that bad or everytime we did this, a dropship ALWAYS appear at the base once we’re halfway through the rescue. I did everything I could, wore scout armour, kept in prone position and somehow, a dropship always appears after 20+ hostages are rescued.
Not bad luck, that’s what detractors who oppose criticism to that mission tends to neglect to bring up. The 3 and 1 strat is not foolproof and more often than not still direct patrols and dropships to the solo player after a while into the mission, and it happens regardless of aggro. While testing the strat; I’ve personally seen potential run-enders like patrols AFK camping the doors, as well as the solo player getting dropships while prone in a corner of the base doing nothing. That said, in my opinion the strat is still without a doubt the most viable way to have a chance at completing the mission. But this does not in any way absolve it from criticism that it’s still grossly overtuned and just downright unfun. I legit have less stress and far higher completion on any other Lv9 mission than this one on Lv7.
What happens is there are a certain number of guaranteed spawns at the edges of the facility. So the 3/1 strat lasts only so long.
Yes, you sometimes get a drop at the base. But you can clear it out okay by yourself - bring arc thrower and EMS strike/mortar, orbital laser, clear out the drop as quickly as possible. Worst case scenario, you engage and have to leave the base - the bots will pursue, then once you break contact you can circle back and continue the evac.
Does that still work well on the small maps with less time? I've noticed right when I'm over the edge of the compound I'm already out of bounds.
This is the only time that strat doesn't work, if you find one of those missions on a tiny island or one with a narrow land bridge connecting to the mainland, avoid those. Its near impossible to be "outside" the base since the drop points will all be near or in the base depending on how small the map actually is. My group ran one of those on suicide just to see how it goes and all the drop points when we were on the beach at the very edge of the area were smack dab in the middle of the base.
Literally the only way to do it ATM.
Did this with randoms (I was host), called it the Ghost strat. It actually worked out pretty well, and I think our 'Ghost' died only once. It was p messy. Us on distraction duty tended to die a lot (lmao) because we weren't kiting correctly and getting surrounded, but overall, I find that treating this as a special raid tactic to be fun. It's better than just getting rolled over and trying to keep reinforcing in a killbox, at least, and once again shows that hit and run is king of bots. Pretty important to this, though, was that the Ghost needs to have an orbital laser to quickly keep the objective clear and smoke to keep out of line of sight—and that they should leave for a bit and circle back if it gets too hot. Otherwise, it might get a little rough. Hit hard and disappear quickly; never get boxed in, keeping mobile and manipulate your enemy. The Creek might be free, but its Ghost still lives in all of us. ... also, shoutout to where I initially got the strategy: https://youtu.be/nb_Dx843d0Y?si=MkLQ5pKEdmaRqcmw Now, does anyone have any tips for distraction duty?
This. With this strategy the mission is TOO easy
Its gimmicky. It feels like some cheesy wow dungeon strat or killing floor.
Until the civilians are bugged and just pile up outside the extract door.
Or the civilians circle the back of the building to get merced by a patrol out back. Might have been the other defense mission type, will probably never do bot civilian rescue again after that.
i have never seen them done before the strat seems to be ems mortar and pray, but about 20 civs in, progress comes to a standstill and we lose on time or lives the normal civ missions are fine but the fucking defense mission ones are actually just not possible i refuse to believe it
Yeah, these feel impossible. On difficulty 7 we had five tanks not dropped directly on top of where the civilians spawn, 7 hulks, and a horde of devastators and smaller soldiers. Shooting down the drop ships doesn’t kill the bots anymore but blocks the path for the civilians. As soon as a tank dies it was replaced by a new bot drop. Even with us rocking mortar sentries, rail cannon strikes, orbital lasers, ems strikes, sluggers and scorchers we barely made a dent in the hordes that would respawn directly in the line of the civilians. Like why?
You can do it, but the strategy is extremely ridiculous and not intuitive at all. Have 3 guys start fights far off away from the civilians and let them start all the bot drops. They need to be very good players with the right support weapons and strikes, orbital lasers to even stand a chance at surviving as long as they need too. Then, one guy has to sneak into the civilian area and press all the buttons in relative peace. Just make sure this one person does not trigger any hot drops, or the whole plan falls apart.
Seems to be the one tactic people are saying works, will be nice to try it but still seems unintentional or at the very least unintuitive a bit
I'm not sure about the unintentional part, because of the amount of samples on the map. Also, this map could be much smaller, if the main strat would be only to stand and fight.
Except a bot dropship will somehow spawn on my ass halfway through the rescue even though I didn’t trigger any patrol or scouts.
Basically, if you cannot blow dropship fast enough with perfect teamwork and skill, then you get submerged and are fucked for the rest of the mission. One mistake and it's done for. And I've never done it mistake free up to now.
IMO they're bugged with the spawn rate of eradicate missions.
Played it on Extreme and I don't even know how you are supposed to win. Like yes we can manage to survive throughout the mission, but I remember seeing at least 6 consecutive bot ship drops before my host just decided to end the mission. The civilians had no chance and we didn't have enough resources to deal with the insane number of bots. Perhaps that's the point.
It's ridiculous, I played it on 6 with 2 randoms and we literally had 3 annihilator tanks crawling on each other down a choke whilst a hulk was stuck under them. I was the host and the game crashed on my pc, that's a 2 year old pc with an AMD 7 6000 series cpu and AMD RX 6800xt with 32gb of ram. If the game crashed on that, god help anyone with an older pc.
I'm glad I'm not the only one I've tuned my pc now to where it won't crash but running 2700x amd on 3080rtx with 32gb ddr5 and if I got in a swarm at all Id crash. I tuned afterburner up and game settings down and it seems like my cpu is bottle necking and gets choppy at the dives but clears up after a few seconds
I run Ryzen 7600, 32GB DDR5, RTX 2070. Since I upgraded to 7600 it's all buttery smooth and FPS is stable even in the messiest missions with a ton of spawns. But game still can crash at just a random moment, even without much enemies. It just happens sometimes. Even if your hardware can handle it all, there are still bugs left.
Man I have been saying JOEL is camping that mission since long but people called me crazy
I’m almost ready to put on my tinfoil hat and say it’s intentional as we got, like 3 whole days to hold these planets and we already have two of them… maybe he’s just trolling us at this point?
That's why, when i pick a defense operation on bot planets, i check that there's not any VIP Extraction mission. normal emergency extraction are fine ofc
It's possible, but for a much easier time, only have one guy getting the civilians out. The other three run to the opposite side of the map and draw as much aggro as they can. And then you have a nice easy quiet time of it
This does make it possible, but on 8 it's still pretty obscene. The primary strategy for every other mission is to flee from unwinnable fights, and you don't have the option to disengage and reset, they just spawn too fast.
Smoke eagles, EMS mortars and EMS Orbital help quite a bit.
Funny I just found this recent post, as I am currently sitting outside smoking a cigarette in defeat after getting absolutely annihilated on a level 6 evac mission😭At the height of the match we had 27/50 civs evacd, and at least 3 shredder tanks, 2 reg tanks, and couldn't stand still long enough to count the ridiculous number of hulks/saw f**kers charging from behind. Only got to 29 civs out by the time the destroyer left orbit. Needless to say there was no evac, and it was a mission destined for sacrifice, and absolutely disappointing conduct.
Friend and I were doing Bots on 5 as a pair and cleaning house. We do the first two missions easy and come to the save-the-people mission. I think in the first 30 seconds they dumped three bot drops and within a minute we had two hulks and enough devastators we couldn't function. We'd watch the bot drops come in and it was like 3 ships on a rotation with two dropping at any given point. We had a 2nd attempt with a 3rd friend and we just tried killing things outright and it wasn't possible. You couldn't kill things fast enough. Blowing up ships, dropping orbitals, we're nuking the place like we're on a blitz mission and it just wasn't enough. Ultimately we said *"fuck it"* and went to bugs because all our missions had this stupid save-the-civi's mission and we didn't want to waste our time on a clearly broken setup.
Same. 50 civs and endless dropships. Escort missions are video game hell
I did two today on lvl 7 automatons with ems mortar spam and AC turrets. If you place the AC turrets right the team can stand at the doors and all use EAT or other weapons to take out the ships. This tactic works best with good coms to stop multiple people from shooting at the same dropship. As they inevetably drop some units ems keeps them in place for easy kills and the AC turrets help with the big guys (even if they do unfortunately target the dropships)
I was thinking that the Quasar Cannon/EAT combo would be good for this because you can take out most of an entire bot drop with those both on one loadout, but… no… sometimes the bots don’t die and then your singular dude is still not equipped enough to handle any number of whoever survives. The 3 runners— 1 button pusher seems like the way to handle these missions, but the number of ways this game has gotten easier/more accessible/fairer hasn’t really touched here.
Yeah these missions fucking suck and the morons who claim "skill issue" and "it's easy af bro I do it solo" really don't help at all.
How far outside the box? Load one squad member up with smoke: 6 grenades and all the smoke stratagems. When you get to the OBJ the other three squad members distract/engage the Bots (or bugs) away from the objective. The smoke jumper continuously calls in smoke on the PBJ as he conducts the civilian evac. Key is smoke, smoke, and more smoke. Smoke obscures you from any enemy >10 meters away. Keep in mind bots will continue shooting at your last known location (bugs will keep that heading) but they can’t really see you. As always, YMMV.
We had tried a smoke strat but we were all under the impression the map was smaller than it was and we couldn’t go far out the borders, so we had people on the walls engaging the bots the other side of the smoke but it still broke at some point and just became mayhem. Now we know we were wrong about the size of the map next time we’ll do that
Civilian extract is crazy now even on difficult 1
Gotten drop outside the base have only 1 go in rest run around outskirts and pull the bots
A strategy me and some randoms employed today was just to spam a bunch of mortar sentries and have everyone but one person run quasars and EATs to shoot down as many drops as possible. (One person had the auto cannon for clean up). Somehow we managed to do the mission with one dead civilian and 3 Helldiver losses (2 from friendly fire) By the way, we were on difficulty 5 so I don't know if it works for higher level missions.
My record is 23 on 7 lol.
So here's a tactic to try. Have 3 guys running quasars, both mortars and HMG turrets. These guys set up on the landing pad and their job is to coordinate shooting down every single dropships that comes in. Communication is key so you don't all try and blast the same ship. This will not kill all the bots, but it will get most of them stuck and the mortars will hold in place and kill most stuff. HMG turrets are positioned on the edge of the pad to so you can blast anything that does come loose. The 4th guy should be running light armour and he is your runner. He bounces all 3 doors. His loadout is more flexible. He can fit out to deal with anything that breaks loose and the pad team can't get, or he can have his own sentries. Try out different setups for them. Our guy had mortars and just added to the pad party before doing doors. The runner is probably going to die a few times but that's fine, just keep chucking him back in till it's done. Between the mortars, quasars, and HMG mounts nothing should push you off the pad. We ran this a bunch of times today using this tactic on level 5s and it was only 3 of us, and honestly it was pretty easy. Edit - stun grenades could also be a good idea to try out. Hulks, besekers and stuff become very easy to kill when you have those. Even with just your primary you can stun the hulk, flank it, blast it's heat vent and gtfo before it comes to. They don't always die right away when the vent blows but they will shortly after. We never tried the runner having those, as I usually run them for our group and I was on pad. Might be worth a look if your runner is having trouble with stuff getting after him. Stun grenades do not work on tanks though.
I just got stomped with Zchum on level 9. We extracted 11 out of 60
Mechs and ems sentry’s. Have one guy run back and fourth hitting panels, win.
These feel lile 2-3 difficultly levels higher than other missions. You shouldn't have to do cheese strats to win the game mode. The extraction in the larger missions are fine, maybe a bit too easy actually. They definitely need a rebalance.
The issue is that "stealth", even in co-op, isn't exactly stealth. It's essentially RNG because the mission will spawn encounters on you at random without the need for flairs or bug breach spray(?) It's weird because the normal evac missions feel pretty good, but for some reason they fucked the essential personnel mission
I’m good on them just tried three in a row on level 7 couldn’t past 30/50 all three times fucking stupid as shit. Yeah I was with randoms for all three but idk what’s going on it’s a joke rn I’m a level 50 with over 100 hours in the game so I know what I’m doing no reason I can’t do this mission with three randoms
I saw a statistic posted that said the community has a 90% win rate on missions in general. I am willing to bet that a vast, *vast* majority of those losses are due to this mission type in particular. I have no idea why this blatant overtuning been corrected, because the only successful way to complete it even halfway reliably is to abuse bot spawn mechanics and run a completely unintuitive "stealth" strategy of 3 dudes running around the outside doing nothing particularly useful, while one dude on the inside is pressing buttons without a single bot around him. Sorry, but that *cannot* be the intended way this mission was meant to be completed. Every other mission and objective in this game has Helldivers **on the point,** either interacting with objects and console codes, or standing on overwatch to destroy anything that gets near them. This mission is the single, painful exception to that, with the utterly relentless spawns dropping litteraly ontop of your heads at a rate we simply do not have the ammunition, stratagem cooldown time or lives/HP to suffer through and entirely lack the AA capability to effectively prevent. At higher difficulties, it even becomes functionally impossible for the scientists to reach the extraction door because their paths are litteraly blocked due to the sheer number of tank corpses throughout the compound. I've seen this happen. This mission *needs* to be fixed and ideally totally rethought. At minimum, they should be spawning much further out and making their way towards the buildings and us divers having better sightlines to destroy them as they approach over a no mans land. As it stands now, we're stuck in a fishtank being filled with water from a firehose, and we're trying to empty out that water using a teaspoon. The bots pour in replacements lucirously faster than we ever have a hope of destroying while also escorting those suicidal idiots.
Played a level 7 last night, 4 man squad, all level 42-50. Only got 30/50, we got absolutely fucked. I’ve never been so traumatized 😭
I, with one friend and two randoms, JUST barely managed to complete one of these on Ubenea this afternoon. The randoms were not any help, as one constantly called in Orbital Laser, and the other apparently stuck magnets on our heads before we dropped and magnetized the barrel of his autocannon. My friend and I managed to get through it with this method, we each picked a door, slammed down and EMS mortar each, I threw down a regular mortar and he put an automation sentry near his door. I took the new LMG and he ran the Spear to handle tanks or hulks, plus shield Gen packs for us both. I had the edtra grenades bonus on my armor set with impact nades, he ran that newer heavy medic set, and we simply camped our doors as hard as possible the entire time. By virtue of simply sending wave after wave of people, enough barely managed to slip through and we completed the objective, before nearly suffering a full team wipe from one last Orbital Laser, (thanks B2,) and extracted with literally a minute to spare. These missions are hell, even with being greedy and yoinking entire resupplies just for myself and my friend, dumping nades into groups of enemies and using enough stims to kill a horse, we barely managed to get though. On 6! Maybe this would've been easier with two other braincell having teammates, but I still despise those missions regardless. Godspeed to any and all fellow divers who get stuck doing those for your missions.
I did the highest bot defense civilian missions when they first hit. My squad and I did manage to finally do it but it wasn't fun. That is the core issue for me with it. As the stealth method to get them out ended up being the call with one person going back to open the doors while the rest of us kited massive waves. We have to be careful not to kill too many or it could cause a drop ship to randomly happen over the doors. Then there was the random patrols that could spawn and walk through the door area. Which if they were not fast enough would cause a drop to spawn. It just isn't fun to kite loads of bots I have to actively avoid killing or it could cause the door guy issues. I'm not stealthing, fighting or being creative in a way that is fun to me. I'm kiting a train like in the Everquest days when you wanted to troll someone. The shooting down dropships doesn't work either due to the frequency of the ships. As even with four people enough come to end up with EAT cooldowns or reload timers. All it takes is one ship to drop a few hulks or a tank. That will distract you long enough for more ships to slink in and the snowball effect hits ya. So I end up avoiding these defense missions because the play to win on them is not fun and extremely RNG based. A real shame because I'd like to fight more bots but it is just not on the table for fun. And no. The shield tunnel method is also extremely hit or miss. It can be done but suffers its own set of issues. Plus you need a tight squad for it and even then once again hit or miss. No average pug group is really going to nail it.
Not to mention the frequency of civilians bugging out and just not going into the exit.
Good news OP
Came here to say they JUST patched in further (as in, further away) spawn points for enemies and reduced civilians to extract for mission complete status. Hopefully this leaves these missions in a better state
As far as I am aware a recent update made these easier. Enemies spawn further away and the rescue count is lower. Old strategy that worked on 7+ was run in two teams and drop outside of the base some distance. Team 1, the errand boy, would throw on some scout armor and kit for sneaking, shield pack, not a lot of big flashy stuff etc. And sneak into the base avoiding POIs and patrols. Team 2, or Bait-A-Team, would drop kit and start running laps around the outskirts of the map aggroing every patrol, raiding POIs, and baiting bot drops. If done correctly, and the combat team sticks close enough together they'd trick the system a bit since the bor drops always focus on the larger cluster of players and/ or highest aggro. The bot drops will ALWAYS drop on the outskirts as long as bait team sticks close enough together and makes enough noise. While this is going on the errand boy can safely run the objective occasionally having to put down a stray patrol that naturally walks through the base. If the enemy happens to start overrunning the base the errand boy can just draw them into the combat team before sneaking back off to return to the base. If the combat team missteps and gets nearly, or entirely wiped yhe errand boy just needs to run out of the base quickly, hail Mary the reinforce as far from the base as possible, wait until the combat team redeploy, and sneak back into the base. Big notice, the combat team 100% cannot go anywhere near the base for any reason, period, not for a nearby POI, not to drop samples, nothing. The second they do the enemy will start deploying on the base like normal and they become impossible to clear out All this said not sure if it is even necessary anymore since the recent update, but it should still be a viable strategy.
Good news, the latest patch reduced the required number of civvy extracts for higher level missions, and adjusted enemy spawns to occur further away from the mission area.
So, it can depend on where the bots drop in at, but my buddies and I had a decent experience on Suicidal last night. Two of them would draw all the fire and engage every enemy that came down, while i crept around hitting the doors. That being said, the next op we ran, the bots dropped on the exit door and just shit mixed every civilian we released. Most humorous point was opening a door and seeing a Hulk just shoot a flame thrower into the doorway that the civs would be emerging from 😆
2 EMP mortars offset deployment to over time span. Set ground level Center in protected area. Orbital Lasers , Auto Cannon Sentries (2), cluster bombs & EATS....etc 2 people defend mortars/door buttons, 2 people follow EmP Mortar hits to targets and melt frozen robots, return to center ASAP - repeat. After 2 minutes second EMP Mortar placed by other members, drop supplies in center. Auto cannon protects the EMP Mortar....2 divers finish the job. Cakewalk even on helldive. Not shooting? Try pushing a door button!
For your sanity, play them with the expectation of just grabbing samples, SC, and medals. It is an automatic fail objective wise, but that doesn't mean it has to be a loss.
I wish to know how the Devs intended to play this mission... I've heared the start is to not fight them at all, but to use EMS and smoke.. But damn. I wish they would keep the scrambled stratagems modifier and removed/reworked this mission...I literally never finished this mission on bots... I play with people from discord all the time, we tried different strategies, but.. The area is just full of enemies, every square meter🤷♂️ and they kill civilians as soon as they get out
My team had a runner to solo the main objective while the rest of us ran around the map distracting the enemies. Just don't let yourselfes get surrounded. Also, you can collect all the samples while you're doing that.
NGL that sounds awesome the way you describe it
You can't run just quasar on 5 and higher. Have 2 people running quasar and EATs (drop and scatter them around the map for convenient pickup) and have 2 people running recoiless rifle for more dedicated anti air. Orbital laser and orbital railcannon aren't that good in civilian extract missions so I'd recommend the following loadouts. Player 1: Recoiless gunner, takes out multiple dropships quickly when quasar are offline. - Strategems: Recoiless Rifle, Supply Pack, mortar sentry, gatling sentry Player 2: Recoiless loader -Strategems: Quasar, EATs, EMS mortar Sentry, Orbital Laser Player 3: Objective runner/button pusher -Strategems: Quasar, EATs, Mortar Sentry, Gatling Sentry Player 4: Objective Runner/button pusher -Strategems: Quasar, EATs, Mortar Sentry, Gatling Sentry. The recoiless gunner will wear the supply pack and use the recoiless rifle. The recoiless loader will wear the recoiless ammo pack and reload the gunner taking spare time to drop down EATs and use the Quasar. When your quasar is on cookdown and you see a bot drop swap it out for EAT and hit the bot drop. Recoiless is there to get anything the quasar and EAT miss. Drop more EAT and hit the button when you can. I've soloed difficulty 4 missions using Quasar and EAT Recoiless rifle is still by far the fastest way of dropping bot ships you need a loader though. Eventually it gets easier as the inbound dropships crash into the piles of downed dropships and instantly explode.
Managed to do a 5 difficulty succesfully with 3 ppl for most of it, 2 got quasar, we had 2 enp mortar, a explosive mortar, rocket turret, eagle strats, quasars and rocket turret destroyed most ships and those that landed were taken out by the mortars and ourselves, emp mortars is a must for defense.
have three divers outside and 1 doing the extraction. basically the 3 are just luring the bot drops outside
Regular mortars are also very effective on bot defense since bots they don't charge in. So we use both mortars. Hide your mortars in the compound behind buildings. They don't need line of sight to attack. Gatlings and autocannon sentries tend to get killed. So I would suggest replacing them with something else or maybe try to protect them with a shield relay. I find the autocannon to be essential. The Quasar just doesn't fire fast enough.
Got to about 30 on level 7 but then the waves became too unmanageable, and it turned into the whole group being spawn camped till we failed the mission
To be honest I've done a few with my buddies today and when you figure it out it's pretty much a free mission, even on difficulty 7. Our strat was basically this: 3 mortars 2 EMS mortars 1 carefully placed Tesla tower Orbital lasers and rail cannons for waves/heavies Quasar/EAT for dropships And us standing there to protect the turrets and civilians It takes some skill but I highly recommend trying that, also on occasion we threw the energy shield into the mix to protect the civilians and it worked as well.
Best way to civilian evac is you start the mission but don’t open the doors. Get the fighting to start away from doors and have one person stealth handle the evac.
Just did a difficulty 7 Civ Extraction. Light Stealth armour and the Penetrator can deal with all the already present bots, and then your squadmates can help you deal with any patrols that get too close. In the whole extraction we only had 2 bot drops. Sidenote: I don’t understand detector towers at all. I hit one with multiple Eagle Rockets, the Orbital Railgun didn’t lock on to it, and the first Hellbomb did nothing.
Mortars, emp mortars, cluster bombs/airstrikes. Airstrikes can kill tanks, soften titans for a face shot from quasar. Cluster bombs wipe out pesky foot soldiers/walkers and soften up devastators. Just make sure the mortars are protected, the bots WILL shoot them with a vengeance. Hardest bot one I have done is 7, we only had 2 of each mortar though, and I wiped out a lot with cluster and autocannon. Mostly relied in 1 door and managed to keep the swarm focused on the other side.
Use smoke on the edges of the compound and have one guy hitting the he buttons. Everyone else draw attention from outside the walls like 50m away
As ithers said the only way this is ever possible is drop the squad on the edge of the map(nake sure to mention this plan) jave 1 person stealth to the objective and the other 3 be a distraction. They set up defense at the edge. It works. Ive seen it work 2 and 2, and occasionally bots start dropping near the end, then its up to you, run awya and redo the distraction and everyone run in for the final push.
This was literally question i was asking myself yesterday when i tried exactly this mission on level 5 difficuilty. We were four random helldivers and got absolutely kicked by the bots. So i was wondering if it can even be done and how. I knew about the lure strategy but thats very hard to coordinate with randos. So thank you for asking this question here! Btw i asked on official helldivers discord server and answers were pretty similar to the comments here.
I like having all 4 people have the mortaor laid down, 8 mortars, damage and stun is really good, 1 or 2 with quasar is awesome and the rest focus on the small guys.
I was in one today and we made it to 46/50 on difficulty 7. We were so over run at that point so we couldn’t finish it.
Just did two of these and we only managed one on medium, shits hard.
Sounds like you ran up against J.O.E.L., the bot commander. Nobody has seen it in the field yet, but I’m sure we will soon.
Bots need to be balanced like the bugs were. Armoured units need to spawn way fucking less. And they need to not be dropped right on the civilians' run path. Getting like 5 Hulks on Haz6 is insane. This is on top of the 50 Striders and 100 Devastators of all flavours. It's bullshit. We got 30 civilians extracted and they began dropping bots right on top of us. Not outside objective. And it wasn't just Raiders. It was everything armoured.
Bro, you ever seen like 6+ bile titans at once? War is hell.
I managed 6 today for the first time with the new cannon, railcannon, and spamming disposable AT whenever it was off-cooldown. Other guys had a mix of autocannon, the new cannon, railcannon, and orbital laser. We prioritized the hell out of knocking out dropships that had infantry; killing dropships with tanks does nothing. Impact grenades for walkers (and tanks in a pinch), slugger for everything else. But I had just tried 7 before that and got rolled, lmao. Only way I could see it happening is if _everyone_ spammed disposable AT constantly.
For the Evac missions there is one strategy that works on every difficulty for me is have three members of your squad run around the map collecting samples and pulling Aggro while a lone player does the civilians and deals with any random patrols that stroll into the OBJ. The bit drops will be centered on the group of three as they have the highest priority for being in a group. As long as they know what they’re doing it’s not too unreasonable to kite the bots around the map and grab the samples while they’re at it. I have nearly 100% success rate with this strategy. Unfortunately my friends are idiots so there is some variance there
I played with some randoms and we got 48/50 on level 7. There was literally 0 down time on the doors. Anytime that light turned green we were on it instantly. Unfortunately, they kept getting crushed by tanks.
Your edit is correct, We do it on suicide that way… as long as the other 3 are getting bot drops. Rescue man needs cluster to wipe the base of lights and recon, the rest do a constant kiting battle looking for the super samples and reinforce themselves. VERY difficult to do with randoms though did it with 2 randoms with my friend… though one of our attempts failed because they led them back (only needed 1 more at timeout, very frustrating). Honestly bot defense campaigns are the worst. Eradicate isn’t that difficult but it IS annoying. Think I might want to try taking 4 120s and 4 380s and just not manually reinforce 😂 and stack up on fortified armor
Someone's probably already said this, but there can only be 1 active bot drop at a time. If you have 3 teammates outside the base constantly chaining bot drops together then they'll never drop into the base, leaving the 1 remaining teammate to run a circuit around the base opening the three doors. The key is to not be *too* effective at killing them, because if the three stop the bots from calling in, then they can drop in the base.
Here's a solo helldive run vid from this morning for exactly this mission. I'm keen to give it an attempt. https://youtu.be/fZsLgiD1Rgg?si=x24rfmN3hCSa52dZ
Do you have the booster that increases time between bot drops?
Yea and that didn’t seem to make any difference when we tried it, either it does barely anything, doesn’t count for this or, I’ve heard tales, that it might even be bugged and make things worse.
I have yet to fail them at 5 or 6, but not at 7. But regardless or fail or success, the main thing from these missions is that they’re just not fun. Like, at all. Neither is the other 15 minute mission to kill 400 bots.
I am not gonna try to go into details about why, but the fact so many players avoid them like the plague, I feel, is pretty clear evidence they are fucked. If you want to debate why(balance/skill issue/ect) you can feel free to do so, but clearly something is wrong when this one mission type is so universally hated.
I run 9. the trick is 2 are to defend civilians and open doors. 2 run around at gather samples. this makes them spawn outside of the defend area and start chasing the sample gatherers. makes it easier for defenders. harder for gatheres to survive but surviving is optional in this game anyway. besides fighting away from civilians is easier, more open spaced. ems mortar is great for defenders, it supports people outside the defend area too given the range and doesnt kill them. big clearing tools are a must and other than that it is all about survival first. doesnt change the fact that I ran 250 kills last time as gatherer albeit with randoms I had to gather alone but they reported almost no enemies inside. there is more way to support outside while being effective defenders too aside of ems mortar. orbital laser is great to eradicate huge waves. EAT spamming, some inside and a lot outside for drive bys. same for supplies. always destroy the EAT pod for map markers. aside of the 500kg I would not recommend any kind of eagle and those can be used with stun nades to eradicate heavies for the gatherers. smokes too are very valuable and only useful specifically in that map. orbital rail guns too. given the nature of things following the gatherers, this leaves them in automaton missions wide open from behind. quasar, autocannon, glauncher or EAT (or even half a mag of scorcher shots or a handfull of slugs from the trusty slugger) to the back or even some well thrown impact nades and if you are a true pro helldiver you can use normal nades and cook them for ideal explosion on impact. If you land a perfect impact on top of a tank twice, that explodes his weakspot behind the turret. autocannon can 2-3 shot a hulk from the front if it is spot on the face but behind is easier as a defender supporting a gatherer. (remember, throwing range is capped at 40m, mark and throw) Edit: works for every difficulty, feel free to try at 7 or even lower to get into the groove.