Less than three days remain on Helldivers 2’s latest major order, and the projections are grim.
Super Earth has tasked the community with successfully defending 10 planets from enemy takeover, but over the weekend, we barely managed three. With a handful of new defense missions opening just hours ago, it’s looking like this major order might be a wash.
To be fair, the deck was stacked once morest us from the start. The community has racked up a handful of impressive collective milestones these last few months—the unexpectedly quick liberation of Tien Kwan, The Battle of Malevelon Creek, pulverizing two billion bugs in just over 12 hours—but we have a blind spot. We’re very good at tackling simple, focused goals in record time, but historically bad at coordinating when there are multiple targets on the board. Arrowhead knows this, and is exploiting it.
It’s a roadblock that’s come up before: When there are too many planets to defend (or attack), no one planet gets enough active players to liberate in time. A planet with just hours left on its defense timer will sometimes go ignored by 200,000+ players fighting on less urgent, or strategically irrelevant planets.
While most Helldivers 2 players don’t think regarding a major order beyond a brief popup window when they succeed, failed milestones are deeply felt by the small community of strategists on Reddit and Discord. It’s in these public chat rooms and threads where fans study a fan-made galaxy map (the full map that shows important supply lines hidden in-game) and formulate plans to complete major orders.
Recently, that collective effort spawned the Martale Gambit, a clever plan to cut off supply lines from Charon Prime by first capturing its neighbor, Martale. Nothing like it had been attempted—it was so unorthodox that game master Joel himself had to promise to honor the gambit by manually liberating Charon early if the time came. The community did its best to spread the word and get as many divers as possible onto Martale over the next 12 hours, but unfortunately, the planet fell at just over 90% liberation.
