This Isn’t Automaton Propaganda
When you’re playing higher difficulties in Helldivers 2 have you ever felt like you’re constantly overwhelmed? That the game is just throwing way too many big armored enemies at your squad to deal with, so you have to constantly run from objective to objective to survive?
The funny thing is, the reason your team is overwhelmed is precisely because you’re running away, especially against the Terminids. This is going to be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of Helldivers. But the reason why running away looks like a good idea is that very few people understand how the game’s patrol, alert, and enemy spawn system works, and it’s screwing everyone over.
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As great as Helldivers 2 is, it’s incredibly obtuse about many of its mechanics. To the extent that it’s nearly impossible to learn about them unless you’re specifically trying to do so and that leads to a lot of false information. I dove in to experiment with the system to figure out what makes it all tick.
I found that the key to playing Helldivers 2 at high levels falls into the following practices.
1: Remain undetected as much as possible.
2: Take out enemies before they can call in alerts if you can.
3: When an alert occurs (breach or dropship) stand your ground and clear it as fast as possible.
In most cases, if you run away during step three, you will now have an unending horde that only grows with time. I’m going to walk you through exactly why this is true, and how to handle it.
How Detection Actually Works
Many enemies in Helldivers 2 are painfully unaware. But in the chaos of a four-player squad, it’s nearly impossible to notice it. First of all, individual POI guards ignore noise almost entirely unless the noise is very close to them. If you have two POIs 50 meters apart. The guards at one will not notice you slaughtering the guards at the other unless a stray projectile or explosion lands too close to them.
In fact, I approached a small set of buildings that had a charger and a handful of Terminids. I called down a Gatling Sentry turret to prep for the fight when a patrol wandered in on me from behind.
My Gatling sentry and I dispatched the patrol only a few feet from the POI, and the guards were none the wiser. That said, Patrols are a little more noise-sensitive than POI guards.
The enemies in Helldiver’s 2 essentially have a detection radius around them. This radius varies a bit based on the enemy type, weather, where they are facing, and the day or night cycle. However, the radius is smaller if you’re crouching, and even smaller if you’re prone. If an enemy becomes aware of something, they extend that awareness to other enemies near them. When an enemy hears something, they will move to investigate the area, or even fire at the area the sound came from in the case of the automatons.
If you are behind cover, an enemy won’t see you, but they can still become “aware” of you. An aware enemy’s detection radius increases and they will try and seek you out and enter combat mode.
If an enemy becomes aware, and you are crouched or prone, you may still be outside of their radius, and they will investigate, but won’t always see you. If you’re behind an obstacle and they don’t have a line of sight toward you, they will investigate behind your cover, but they still won’t see you until they move there.
Making a distinction between awareness and actually seeing a Helldiver is important, because just like enemies spread their “awareness” to other nearby enemies. They also spread the concept of seeing a Helldiver, putting the whole group into combat mode. However, when it comes to the Terminids line of sight matters even in combat mode, but I’ll get to that later.
The important thing to understand is that enemies detect you in two primary ways. By seeing a Helldiver or an enemy that already sees a Helldiver enters the detection radius of another enemy that doesn’t see a Helldiver and alerts them.
This means that when you are sprinting away from one group of enemies. Not only are you alerting more “guards” and patrols as you run by. The enemies that see you, are alerting other enemies as they run by. Aggro spreads like a virus.
Try and think about how the Terminds fan out as they chase you. That is a moving tidal wave of enemies that are alerting every patrol and guard nearby as they give chase. Fun fact, this also makes Stalkers extremely dangerous. They have a massive detection radius that can spot you even while prone, and while they creep up on you, they alert everything they pass by.
Regardless, even if you somehow manage to avoid other unaware groups yourself as you run away, which is already nearly impossible as stray bullets and explosions are going to land near them or hit them, more are going to join the chase anyway as their allies run near them.
When it comes to the Terminids, it’s not uncommon for several nearby POIs to have a Charger. If two chargers come out of a breach, and you alert three others, the situation devolves into an unmanageable domino effect very quickly. Now imagine three other players on your team also alerting enemies the same way. It gets bad, fast.
You can actually break the line of sight and lose the horde altogether. But that’s a strategy that’s much more effective when playing solo than with a group. With a four-player squad, the moment you break the line of slight with a horde in combat mode, it will likely still see another member of your team and continue chasing. Every Charger that you ignore is added to your Charger debt, pay it off early or you’re going to suffer.
There are a couple of other obtuse concepts to keep in mind. Throwing a red stratagem beacon into a group of enemies immediately throws them into combat mode and reveals your exact location to them. If you are behind cover, they still won’t have a line of sight to you (this is important for the Terminids, I’ll get to it later).
Blue stratagems can trigger enemies’ awareness, and nearby patrols in particular will make a path toward them to investigate
The green defensive stratagems will also trigger an enemy’s combat mode, however, if you are hidden, it does not reveal YOUR location, only the stratagems, such as a sentry.
All of this rolls into the second piece of the FUBAR puzzle. The horde alert system.
Alerts and Patrols
When a bug screams and calls in a breach, or when a bot shoots a flare into the sky. I call this an alert. Either way, when an alert occurs a horde of enemies swarm in. There are two vital things to understand about this. The horde that comes out of these alerts is much smaller than you think they are, and once you get one, you are temporarily safe from another one.
First things first. A whole lot of players are assuming that the surrounding patrols and POI guards that join the fray during the alert, are from the actual alert. They aren’t, they are from you and your squadmates alerting nearby enemies or a patrol wandering in.
This is easiest to see with the bot dropships. If three dropships fly in, they drop a finite number of bots. Anything beyond that drop came from other groups alerted nearby.
Secondly. There is an invisible cooldown timer on alerts. For a certain time period after an alert is called, another one won’t be called. Bots won’t shoot flares, and bugs won’t scream. So you have two options, clear out the enemies before that cooldown timer is up, or run away.
If you run away, not only are you attracting more enemies as I previously described, you are allowing that alert cooldown to run out and screw you harder. If you are not fighting off your attackers, their numbers snowball even further because as soon as the alert cooldown ticks over, they will call in another alert.
There is a maximum number of enemies that can be spawned at a time, but that essentially means that when you’re running away, the ones you have picked off as you retreat will be replaced indefinitely, and you’re always facing the maximum number of enemies at once.
Patrols on the other hand stop you from gaming the system, so to speak. Patrols don’t actually come from bug nests or bot fabricators. They spawn out at the furthest reaches of your vision, you can actually see them pop into existence sometimes.
Patrols are not automatically aware of you, but they always attempt to walk near a player’s location, and especially objectives. This means that you can’t use knowledge of the game’s mechanics to essentially roll through a mission with no alerts at all, at least not without significant skill and teamwork.
Patrols make running away worse since the game is continually sending out groups specifically to find you, and if you’re already running away, that’s not hard to do. It leads to you getting hammered from multiple angles at once. The absolute worst tactical position to be in.
Let’s Talk Tactics
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about what you shouldn’t do. So let’s talk about some effective tactics to prevent a retreating domino effect. First things first. When you are under attack, buckle up and clear out the enemies.
I’m going to be talking about squad tactics here, because the more people you have, the easier it is for things to get out of hand by attracting additional groups of enemies.
When a Terminid breach occurs, the worst thing you can do as a squad is scatter. Move together to get an angle on the breach where the enemies have to come at you from a single direction and then dig in. Remember to crouch or even go prone at times for the massive boost in accuracy, and carefully use your stratagems, especially sentries to give you an edge.
One or more patrols will likely wander in during the alert. It’s important to keep an eye on your radar map so that you can see them coming and prepare for them. An entire squad rarely has to focus on a breach or set of drop ships, at least one person should be covering the team’s flanks from patrols so that you don’t get pincered.
You should be able to clear an entire wave in around 30 to 45 seconds like this, and you usually get to breathe for a bit afterward. A luxury you never get when constantly retreating.
However, sometimes things go wrong, and it’s during those times you have to stay the calmest. Maybe a charger breaks your front line, or you weren’t equipped well enough to swiftly drop armored enemies or to clear the swarms. If you need to kite enemies around you should do it alongside at least one other player so that you aren’t caught with your pants down each time you reload. You need to perform a slow fighting retreat within the same area you started the fight in until you thin out the enemy and ultimately clear them.
If you run in wide circles around the area, you’re going to attract everything nearby and get hit from multiple angles. Treat every engagement area as if it’s an arena with invisible barriers around it. Going outside that area is going to get you killed.
You also need to exercise your ABS, always, be, shooting. As you kite enemies around, you should be dropping them one by one as you do it. In addition to the fact that the enemies have to die to prevent more alerts, you’re teammates have to be able to count on the fact that you’re going to be shooting.
For example, if a teammate is being swarmed by Hunters and I come to their aid, I have to have 100% confidence that the moment they run past me, they are going to turn around and start shooting. If I had to reload and they instead kept running, I didn’t save a Helldiver’s life, I just traded mine for theirs.
If for some reason you can’t unleash a hailstorm of liberty together, you need to engage in a game of leapfrog. I shoot while you move past me, then you stop and shoot while I move past you, and so forth.
When it comes to Terminids, you can’t let the Chargers chase you around. If you’re running, you’re not shooting and your squad is getting scattered. When a Charger runs at you, either step aside or dive and shoot at the horde behind it. You have a few seconds before it turns around to Charger you again. This is incredibly important if you are one of the team members dedicated to horde clearing. If you’re getting chased in circles by a Charger, you aren’t keeping the swarm off your anti-armor-oriented teammates, and that means they can’t get the Charger off of you.
Finally, if a teammate goes down, don’t throw them three miles outside of the combat zone. They will likely land right on or near enemies standing guard at another POI and instantly trigger them.
Don’t throw them directly into the horde either (without consent), as that’s rude. The same goes for you, try to land your own Hellpod close to the conflict, not outside it where you have no idea what’s going to be near you when you land.
Prevention is the Best Medicine
While some alerts are inevitable, you can avoid a lot of them by using the knowledge of the enemy’s awareness and detection to your advantage. First up, when you’re traveling, you should have your radar map constantly open. It helps you avoid patrols and shows you where nearby groups of guards are sitting.
While at times you will need to crouch or crawl, you can actually sprint around quite effectively when you understand the enemy’s detection radius, assuming you aren’t already being chased.
Secondly, you can take down a lot of guard platoons and patrols before an alert is called, because there are some tricks that aren’t entirely obvious. Not all enemies call in alerts, most heavy bots don’t, and neither do chargers, titans, or bile bugs. Always aim for the small ones first.
You can use eagle strikes and orbitals on guard platoons, but you will rarely get one off on a patrol before it calls an alert. The exception is the eagle strafing strike because it hits fast. It won’t kill all of the enemies, but as I said, not all enemies can call in an alert.
Remember how I mentioned line of sight was really important for Terminids? An aware Terminid will not call in an alert if they don’t have a line of sight to a Helldiver, even if they are in combat mode. This is why sentries don’t trigger an alert unless an enemy also sees a Helldiver near one. So, you, for example, can pop a couple of bugs, and when its friends come running around a corner, tag them one by one, and no alert will be called.
Automatons are a bit different. They don’t need to see a Helldiver at all and will fire a flare as soon as they enter combat mode. However, bot drops tend to have far fewer enemies than a bug breach. This makes angles pretty important when starting your attack on an outpost or objective. And communication is pretty essential to a stealth attack as a group.
Finally, if you’re coming up on an objective with several POI’S nearby that have guards. Simply take them out quickly and quietly first, so if someone makes a mistake and runs too close to them, or drops a stratagem in the wrong place, you don’t alert them and get attacked from multiple angles at once.
The same rings true for nearby patrols. While you shouldn’t fight every patrol and should avoid them when you can. One wandering around an objective area is bound to enter the fight anyway, and likely flank you when they do. You may as well engage them first, even if they manage to call in an alert, you will have a brief respite from another one and should immediately clear the objective area afterward before another can be called.
When Should I Run Away?
Helldivers never retreat, they simply fight in another direction. That is to say, you should rarely run away. However, there are a few instances. If you are separated from your group, for example, you should run away to get back to them.
When playing solo, running away can work if you can break the line of sight from enemies, smoke really comes in handy for this. In fact, enemies that are called in via an alert will actually despawn if they can’t find a Helldiver for a while.
If you’re short on time and heading to evacuate you can retreat. The enemies are gonna keep coming once it’s called anyway. You should still be careful about how many armored enemies you are bringing in, however. In fact, against the Terminds, it’s better for one member of the team to perform the last-stand maneuver.
The Last Stand maneuver is where one Helldiver makes the ultimate sacrifice. If a horde has grown too big, or the group really needs to skidaddle somewhere else. One Helldiver can stay behind and take a last stand against the bugs while the other three run away. You simply fight and survive the overwhelming horde for as long as possible.
While the swarm is focused on you, the rest of the squad can break the line of sight between them. If you have survived long enough, your squad will be long gone when you die and when they call you back in, you will be with the squad again and the Terminids will be left behind and de-aggro.
As a general rule, the Automatons are easier to run away from than Terminid’s. Most of their units are a lot slower. If you have cleared out nearby enemies, and dropships fly in to drop off troops a fair distance away from you, you can sometimes dart away guerrilla warfare style and avoid a prolonged gunfight.
You can also briefly run away to a better defensive position, especially choke points, and then hunker down and take enemies on. Don’t just stand in the middle of an open field against the automatons, for example. When I’m saying don’t run away, I mean don’t run away from enemies the entire game from objective to objective. All you manage to do in those situations is lead enemies into even more enemies.
Dispense Some Liberty
Running away certainly seems like a good option, but the game’s systems work against you if you do. It makes sense when you look at what Helldivers presents to you.
Helldivers 2 gives you an entire category of stratagems dedicated to sentries, and the game makes it very clear that your accuracy is terrible on the move. You can land your shots the best when staying still, crouched, or even prone. The real meta tactic is to form up together and liberate your enemies with overwhelming firepower and glorious explosive ordinance.
Hopefully, these tips shine some light on some of the game’s more obscured systems and help you deliver more liberty to bot and bug alike!
For Super Earth!
Check out my Helldivers 2 Guide Part 2, or my review of Helldivers 2!
