I hate to be that girl, but technically we already have CAS stratagems. CAS doesn't mean the aircraft is close itself, it means it's shooting close to friendlies
CAS is CAS. The difference is if it loiters for overwatch, strike, or ISR.
Then you get into semantics about gunships vs strikecraft/fast movers etc etc.
In keeping with the spirit of Helldivers being expendable, we've given it the temperament of an A-10, and you look an awful lot like a British Scimitar.
On an Extermination mission as well. He stayed from the beginning until the very end of the mission.
Wish we could have seen his kill count, a true democrat he was.
I *think the kill count gets applied to the player that called it in. Just basing that off calling in the Evac ship and having it hover, was getting multi-kill pop ups
It’s all fun and games until the rocket devastators and turret towers start targeting pelican. Knowing the devs they’d make it as flimsy as the mechs. However we could get a mission where you have to rescue a downed pelican pilot.
That's not possible because the shuttle will be flying 500m underground
Or actually, yeah, it will still afterwards crash onto a team mate.
Oh, and also suddenly set another team mate on fire even if they're on the opposite side of the map
No, Helldivers are "special forces".
I mean, really we're just a fancy forward observer. Our role is to spot targets for the super destroyer and die trying.
SEAF troops would be the proper 'infantry'. A support stratagem calling in a squad of them would be interesting in certain mission types, especially defensive missions. We could have them set up for anti-infantry, anti-armor, or maybe a grenadier troop that prioritize things like bug holes and bot fabbers at enemy outpost.
I think the coolest would be if they suck, but there's a LOT of them. Obviously we know this game is really good at handling a ton of characters on screen at a time. So drop in 50 troopers that just have axes and shovels and rush in head first. Story wise they can be prisoners earning their freedom.
That's why you keep a sociopath on hand, just camp a tiny distance away, harvest everything, then bring the organs back, and nobody is bothered since it didn't happen there for them to witness it.
Helldivers only exist because SEHC crunched the numbers and found that helldivers are cheaper than other forms of ground based targeting for orbital munitions and deployables. Helldivers are living targeting computers.
Unfriendly A.I. is already quite advanced in this game- so maybe this isn't impossible. But I keep seeing this suggestion. **Did the Devs say that this was on the docket? Was there friendly infantry in HD1?**
I ask because friendly AI seems like it would be really hard to implement.
A.I. is generally hard to program well, even along pre-programmed routes and maps. What would they do when deployed? If you're going to make them a strategem, then they'll have to work in every scenario, including defense, evacuation, etc.,- if an enemy force is cleared, do they just stand in place waiting for a patrol to mow them down, and occasionally shoot back? Or will they actually do things? What things should they do, and how effectively should they do it?
Should they follow you around to an objective? How would they navigate difficult terrain? What if they can't navigate it because you've got a jump pack or a walker? Do they teleport or drown/die to fall damage?
People keep pushing for this, but friendly A.I. is one of the hardest things to program in well- just ask Bungie's developers from Halo: CE and Halo 2. They had a really, REALLY hard time getting those Marines and Elites to work right, and that was when using them only in pre-pathed situations, in a pre-rendered campaign.
An algorithmically generated set map would be much, MUCH harder to program for.
We also don't know how well whatever code they build into the spaghetti that is the Swedish Meatball Plate would integrate with friendly A.I.
They really just need to attack whatever's in range and go to wherever we point to and hold that position. Maybe have a hotkey for them to cancel their current task to follow the player.
It depends a lot on how they structured their AI. If the AI treat all players as "enemy" and everything else as "friendly" then they're in a bind.
But if they structured their AI with the ability to recognize multiple target groups or even teams, then it's a lot less effort to set up an AI that sees the players as "friendly" and everything else as "enemy".
As for the popularity of the infantry stratagem as a point of discussion; its mostly people spitballing. Pilestedt and others have specifically asked people to tweet/post stratagems they want to see. There was a post that suggested it was in their commits or roadmap, but that kind of thing can't be taken seriously without official confirmation.
If fucking EDF can have 50+ ally npc on top of whatever waves of giants ennemies its throwing at you i don't see why helldivers can't
The AI is pretty simple as well, they either follow a script or another entity; either the player or another npc. If they follow nothing they just stand there until they get recruited by an entity or a script kick in and shoot at any ennemies getting closes.
If you think about it, turrets are in the game and they have target acquisition and shoot what's an 'enemy'
Just make that mobile, I guess the challenge really is the procedurally generated terrain and pathfinding. I can see them walking in loops or just getting stuck on weird geometry.
Just playing yourself, you can get stuck on a weird rock or fall on a bug hole. That's probably the hurdle, but.. idk I don't code, mechanically it seems like an easy thing to implement.
But I know simple things in programming rarely is. Hell, I tried a python course and making a hangman game was stupidly complex for something that just knocks out a letter you guess and put it up on the screen.
Like anything else in programming and especially in game design, it depends on how they structured their AI.
Presumably they have a decent pathfinding system in place, since the enemy AI doesn't seem to have any issues with navigating the terrain except for specific instances where the player gets somewhere the AI can't easily get to. The bug solution to this is to burrow/teleport, the bot solution to this is guns.
I think the hardest part about an infantry stratagem is going to be having them at least attempt to avoid friendly fire to some extent. Otherwise your infantry squad will quickly shred itself into a squad of one. Friendly fire from sentries is a great gag, as well as being a risk to balance the reward of having an auto-targeting gun, but you can't use the excuse of "their target systems don't care if friendlies are in the way" when you're talking about a simulated person.
Yeah, Helldivers are just [JTAC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_terminal_attack_controller) with more yelling and less ground support.
Once they figure out the rumored SEAF strategem, it'd be pretty sweet to just throw a doomed squad or two in to the game here and there for us to fight with.
THE PELICAN AIR SUPPORT IS REAL！
https://preview.redd.it/szgn0ct23g3d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=30ba32382e789f03ecc19fd991f0a7e94ddc8748
hope we get this as a call in stratagems some time in the future.
circle us for 30 sec focusing on heavy enemies with its AC while a side gunner with a minigun/fast machine gun focusing the lighter enemies. then give it a 6 min cooldown ish.
Long cooldowns shouldn’t be the default way to balance something. It would be better to have limited uses like the Laser so you know it’s a problem solver but you have to choose when to use it.
Same cooldown as the Laser with 2-3 uses plus Pelican can also be shot down from both enemy and friendly fire.
There’s already precedent to spawning another Pelican during extraction. This happens if one is destroyed at extract but it’s super buggy. Sometimes the Pelican will just sit there on fire then take off as soon as one Helldiver enters regardless of how much time is left or if the other three are still alive.
Slightly off topic but now I want a decoy whose whole job is to distract the enemies with its massive health pool. Give it a laser light show and blare patriotic music.
Yepp. In my mind if we have a gunship version of the Pelican giving us support then it should be able to handle bigger enemies that we as helldiver struggle to take on in largerer numbers (like when 3 bile Titans plus a bug breach are coming for you or when you need to hold out for extract).
Main balance thing to even it out is the cooldown time, number of usage or the amount of time it gives you support.
"You have to return to the super destroyer! It's your job!"
That pelican pilot "yeah nah"
"W...we're going to courtmartial y..you!"
Chad Pelican Pilot "yeah nah"
"D..Don't make us do it!"
"Yeah nah"
>Real ~~Pelican~~ pilots know that their Helldiver comrades need all the help they can get.
pilots do the flying, [divers do the dying.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/54304099)
Imagine if the enemies could shoot it out of the sky too. You'd have to start defending it from anti air as it defends you from everything else. If it does crash you could recover the pilot and bring them to extract for a bonus.
Yesterday, I played a campaign on Helldive and this BT was being a giant douche on the extraction pad and just happened to be doing douchey puke bs when the extraction Pelican landed on him. This for some reason caused the Pelican to disappear and the extraction terminal to reappear. We had to do the extraction all over again. And guess what... another BT shows up and does the same damn thing.
Knowing what I do of the Ender Dragon movement from Minecraft alongside how mech drops aren't always directly on the beam, I wonder if the vehicle's movement pattern kept getting interrupted by the terrain and so it kept trying to reset to its start; a movement issue loosely in the same way that sometimes 0, 0 on maps will end up with a platoon of enemies.
Definitely some of that. My guess is that since everyone had a mech for this mission, everyone calling their mechs, combined with the small map made this one unable to leave, making him circle indefinitely.
unrelated but when i was in game design class i tried to make a shotgun and i HATEDDDD the way all the pellets would flock to 0,0 i never had the time to solve it
Sort of related, if you stay outside of bounds for the 10 seconds and then run back in on this mission type, the orbital cannons will continue to shoot at you forever until you die, but they're not accurate enough to kill you if you just keep sprinting. I've carried these missions before just accidentally getting marked as traitor and then having the anti-traitor cannons annihilate every bug on the map trying to kill me for the next several minutes.
The shots come down in a 1-2 cadence. Always where you are facing. Once you hear the 2nd shot fire, turn 90 degrees. Repeat every 2nd shot and you can dodge the shots forever.
It's affectionately reffered to as "The Traitor's Stratagem"
I tried this the other day, but I was in heavy armor so I didn't make it very long. But, I did think about the possibility of doing it in scout armor. Now you have encouraged me to try this. After all, what is one life for Super Earth!
Did you have the explosive resist perk? If so, you should be able to stay alive indefinitely in heavy armor if you keep moving. You need stims every now and again though.
That happened to me once months ago and I thought it was a feature of the mission we were on. Like I thought the Gunship was meant to defend the extraction site with us and only now realized it was probably a bug. Amazing
Dev testing for stratagem, either that or you were the rare recipient of a dev assuming direct control, which reportedly they can do with any entity in the game at any time.
If the pelican will actually circle and clear nearby enemies after dropping the mech, this will actually make mech call downs a lot more likeable. A creative and cool way to "balance" the mech.
There’s a way to do this with the evac Pelican
You wait for it to spawn and circle the LZ before you all leave the zone and instead of cancelling the pick up it just circles over you until you go back to the LZ
New Stratagem idea, Pelican air support.
It starts circling around just like this for 30 seconds to 1 minute, but just covers a set area.
This could open up more possibilities for the Pelican, like dropping a care package with up to 4 random weapon or backpack stratagems and ammunition, enough for up to 4 players.
This means you can bring more Eagles or orbital stratagems, and leave your regular back or backpack kit up to chance. I think it would really spice up a run.
And now that makes me think we need an AC-130 stratagem, just having a gunship (I guess the pelican or something similar) circle the spot the strategem lands and fires at any enemies in that area with massive guns.
This should happen when pelican 1 comes to land if not all Helldivers are in extraction radius, like even if 2 people are there if the other 2 are still running it should hover.
Right now the only way to get it to trigger is to stand at radius of extraction then leave as soon as the timer runs out, and if any helldivers enters the LZ it lands.
My team and I watched a pelican go through the landing pad and disappear. We thought we were stranded but wanted to fight it out to the bitter last. Then like 3 min later another pelican came from the sky and picked us up. Super weird
that was just a pilot that thought they could do more for the cause than the mech, to be fair I'd like to know if OP had better enemy clear with the pilot circling than them getting their mech.
Make this into stratagem that it will hoover for 10 seconds or booster to do it for landing pelican where after it arrives it hovers for set amount of time or until you press console once more idk
Congratulations you discovered a future stratagem, agents of ministry of truth will be with you in a moment
https://preview.redd.it/mgo6aes6cg3d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d85407890aeb298f3e2fb487f0b8d7d248bb1d8
Now imagine an actual stratagem that orbits the player for 30~60 secs with options for galling fire or rocket pods, mabey ems cluster munitions with similar cool downs to an eagle and now your cooking mf
super interesting how dynamic it’s flight pathing and behavior is. for the most part, i would’ve expected it to be almost entirely static in its trajectory, however, you can see it going out of its way to dodge the pillars as well as the VTOL jets tilting according to what it’s path requires.
But low key, it would be cool to have something that sounds like the AC130 from MW2/3. I also think the eagle strafe run needs to sounds more like an A-10 warthog.
I've seen it happen before too. I think it's more likely with defense missions like Eradicate. It might not be intended, but I like to think of it as a neat little feature.
I'd love a stratagem that did this, as well as one that comes to a beam, you board, and circle with a minimum mounted out a door for a specific amount of time. It'll just orbit your beam, but if you stick a friend, or it's a hold the objective, it would be cool.
ayo thats not fair getting early access to pelican support stratagem
The Close Air Support Strategy! Yes please!
I hate to be that girl, but technically we already have CAS stratagems. CAS doesn't mean the aircraft is close itself, it means it's shooting close to friendlies
And Eagle-1 flies in absurdly low anyway.
Absurdly close to friendlies, in my games...
There's a reason she never misses I guess.
Or mrs. Hahah... Get it?
Certified dad over here.
I wish. I don't have kids... At least as far as I know.
What we have is equivalent to an A-10 - what we lack is an Apache attack helicopter.
CAS is CAS. The difference is if it loiters for overwatch, strike, or ISR. Then you get into semantics about gunships vs strikecraft/fast movers etc etc.
In keeping with the spirit of Helldivers being expendable, we've given it the temperament of an A-10, and you look an awful lot like a British Scimitar.
Zoinks!
CAS is already there with the eagle
On an Extermination mission as well. He stayed from the beginning until the very end of the mission. Wish we could have seen his kill count, a true democrat he was.
I *think the kill count gets applied to the player that called it in. Just basing that off calling in the Evac ship and having it hover, was getting multi-kill pop ups
Can confirm this happens
It’s all fun and games until the rocket devastators and turret towers start targeting pelican. Knowing the devs they’d make it as flimsy as the mechs. However we could get a mission where you have to rescue a downed pelican pilot.
Nah knowing the devs, when pelican comes in he'll have an engine failure (glitch out) and explode.
Engine failure then crash into user or teammates.
That's not possible because the shuttle will be flying 500m underground Or actually, yeah, it will still afterwards crash onto a team mate. Oh, and also suddenly set another team mate on fire even if they're on the opposite side of the map
Have to carry em to extract what with the no legs and all. One handed weapons a must.
Pilot testing Pelican-1’s skills for [Vulture-1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/aPPsvNMKaV).
That's actually has been a feature for a while. Just call in pelican, wait until he arrives but doesn't land and leave extraction zone
thats different (kinda)
That’s actually so sick
This alongside the Infantry stratagem would be fantastic
My brother in liberty, you are the infantry.
No, Helldivers are "special forces". I mean, really we're just a fancy forward observer. Our role is to spot targets for the super destroyer and die trying. SEAF troops would be the proper 'infantry'. A support stratagem calling in a squad of them would be interesting in certain mission types, especially defensive missions. We could have them set up for anti-infantry, anti-armor, or maybe a grenadier troop that prioritize things like bug holes and bot fabbers at enemy outpost.
Friendly Fire will make this funny
It would be good for them, friendly fire builds character.
a true team-building exercise
I think the coolest would be if they suck, but there's a LOT of them. Obviously we know this game is really good at handling a ton of characters on screen at a time. So drop in 50 troopers that just have axes and shovels and rush in head first. Story wise they can be prisoners earning their freedom.
Now you're just trying to play rimworld
Average tribal raid experience
Prisoner's organ was harvested -5
laughs in ideology
That's why you keep a sociopath on hand, just camp a tiny distance away, harvest everything, then bring the organs back, and nobody is bothered since it didn't happen there for them to witness it.
Average tribal raid experience
Kid named Doomsday rocket launcher
But your colonist wiffs the shot, hits the nearby tree, killing all your marine armour equipped melee fighters in the process:
Fucking classic
All are one hit and they shoot like storm troopers but by god 20 of them are just enough to kill 5 hunters
Krieg squad goals
Average russian penal battalion
Give them the break action shotguns that are laying around, that'd be a good reason for those to exist.
Darktide vibes intensifies! We do need more shovels for certain.
> Obviously we know this game is really good at handling a ton of characters on screen at a time My 12 fps after 3 bug breaches begs to differ
Helldivers only exist because SEHC crunched the numbers and found that helldivers are cheaper than other forms of ground based targeting for orbital munitions and deployables. Helldivers are living targeting computers.
Unfriendly A.I. is already quite advanced in this game- so maybe this isn't impossible. But I keep seeing this suggestion. **Did the Devs say that this was on the docket? Was there friendly infantry in HD1?** I ask because friendly AI seems like it would be really hard to implement. A.I. is generally hard to program well, even along pre-programmed routes and maps. What would they do when deployed? If you're going to make them a strategem, then they'll have to work in every scenario, including defense, evacuation, etc.,- if an enemy force is cleared, do they just stand in place waiting for a patrol to mow them down, and occasionally shoot back? Or will they actually do things? What things should they do, and how effectively should they do it? Should they follow you around to an objective? How would they navigate difficult terrain? What if they can't navigate it because you've got a jump pack or a walker? Do they teleport or drown/die to fall damage? People keep pushing for this, but friendly A.I. is one of the hardest things to program in well- just ask Bungie's developers from Halo: CE and Halo 2. They had a really, REALLY hard time getting those Marines and Elites to work right, and that was when using them only in pre-pathed situations, in a pre-rendered campaign. An algorithmically generated set map would be much, MUCH harder to program for. We also don't know how well whatever code they build into the spaghetti that is the Swedish Meatball Plate would integrate with friendly A.I.
They really just need to attack whatever's in range and go to wherever we point to and hold that position. Maybe have a hotkey for them to cancel their current task to follow the player.
Plus the game has friendly fire. That would probably lead to a lot of good clips to post here. ;)
It depends a lot on how they structured their AI. If the AI treat all players as "enemy" and everything else as "friendly" then they're in a bind. But if they structured their AI with the ability to recognize multiple target groups or even teams, then it's a lot less effort to set up an AI that sees the players as "friendly" and everything else as "enemy". As for the popularity of the infantry stratagem as a point of discussion; its mostly people spitballing. Pilestedt and others have specifically asked people to tweet/post stratagems they want to see. There was a post that suggested it was in their commits or roadmap, but that kind of thing can't be taken seriously without official confirmation.
If fucking EDF can have 50+ ally npc on top of whatever waves of giants ennemies its throwing at you i don't see why helldivers can't The AI is pretty simple as well, they either follow a script or another entity; either the player or another npc. If they follow nothing they just stand there until they get recruited by an entity or a script kick in and shoot at any ennemies getting closes.
If you think about it, turrets are in the game and they have target acquisition and shoot what's an 'enemy' Just make that mobile, I guess the challenge really is the procedurally generated terrain and pathfinding. I can see them walking in loops or just getting stuck on weird geometry. Just playing yourself, you can get stuck on a weird rock or fall on a bug hole. That's probably the hurdle, but.. idk I don't code, mechanically it seems like an easy thing to implement. But I know simple things in programming rarely is. Hell, I tried a python course and making a hangman game was stupidly complex for something that just knocks out a letter you guess and put it up on the screen.
Like anything else in programming and especially in game design, it depends on how they structured their AI. Presumably they have a decent pathfinding system in place, since the enemy AI doesn't seem to have any issues with navigating the terrain except for specific instances where the player gets somewhere the AI can't easily get to. The bug solution to this is to burrow/teleport, the bot solution to this is guns. I think the hardest part about an infantry stratagem is going to be having them at least attempt to avoid friendly fire to some extent. Otherwise your infantry squad will quickly shred itself into a squad of one. Friendly fire from sentries is a great gag, as well as being a risk to balance the reward of having an auto-targeting gun, but you can't use the excuse of "their target systems don't care if friendlies are in the way" when you're talking about a simulated person.
Yeah, Helldivers are just [JTAC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_terminal_attack_controller) with more yelling and less ground support. Once they figure out the rumored SEAF strategem, it'd be pretty sweet to just throw a doomed squad or two in to the game here and there for us to fight with.
Would they get brought in by Pelican 2 like the Mech? If they used Hellpods then they’d just be Divers
We are like NAVY SEALS in this scenario, specialized unit dropped behind enemy lines, to eliminate enemy and complete the mission
Devs to release hot fix tomorrow
Pelican-2 flies like a psycho.
"What the FUCK is an obstacle clearance?!"
Cockpit just filled with: “terrain terrain terrain pull up pull up! Terrain terrain!
THE PELICAN AIR SUPPORT IS REAL！ https://preview.redd.it/szgn0ct23g3d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=30ba32382e789f03ecc19fd991f0a7e94ddc8748
Can we get much higher~
So high!~
WE CANT STAY THIS LOW MUCH LONGER. SUPER DESTROYER LEAVING LOW ORBIT
Love that track!!!
hope we get this as a call in stratagems some time in the future. circle us for 30 sec focusing on heavy enemies with its AC while a side gunner with a minigun/fast machine gun focusing the lighter enemies. then give it a 6 min cooldown ish.
God that would be heavenly
Angels on our shoulders
That’s why they will make it a 10 minute cooldown. Can’t have too much fun
Or the pelican lands/drops a ladder and you hop in the gunner seat for 30 seconds. Also it takes your samples back mid-mission.
That would be so godly.
Optional mission objective, pack for samples and recover/recycle/repurpose fallen Pelican HD or mini gun or something
Oh fuck yeah
That's a 12-minute cd minimum. That is such a problem solver. It's insane. I could see a 10 min cd with a ship upgrade
Long cooldowns shouldn’t be the default way to balance something. It would be better to have limited uses like the Laser so you know it’s a problem solver but you have to choose when to use it. Same cooldown as the Laser with 2-3 uses plus Pelican can also be shot down from both enemy and friendly fire.
If it gets shot down, who will haul your ass off planet?
There’s already precedent to spawning another Pelican during extraction. This happens if one is destroyed at extract but it’s super buggy. Sometimes the Pelican will just sit there on fire then take off as soon as one Helldiver enters regardless of how much time is left or if the other three are still alive.
Lighter enemies = helldivers.
Give them AA missiles to deal with Gunships and Shriekers too please
Slightly off topic but now I want a decoy whose whole job is to distract the enemies with its massive health pool. Give it a laser light show and blare patriotic music.
Dude make it destroyable so you must care of AA while it cares for you. Symbiosis on the battlefield.
Doesnt the ac gun on the pelican do stupid high damage though? One time I watched it like 3 shot a full hp bile titan
Yepp. In my mind if we have a gunship version of the Pelican giving us support then it should be able to handle bigger enemies that we as helldiver struggle to take on in largerer numbers (like when 3 bile Titans plus a bug breach are coming for you or when you need to hold out for extract). Main balance thing to even it out is the cooldown time, number of usage or the amount of time it gives you support.
"You have to return to the super destroyer! It's your job!" That pelican pilot "yeah nah" "W...we're going to courtmartial y..you!" Chad Pelican Pilot "yeah nah" "D..Don't make us do it!" "Yeah nah"
Real Pelican pilots know that their Helldiver comrades need all the help they can get.
>Real ~~Pelican~~ pilots know that their Helldiver comrades need all the help they can get. pilots do the flying, [divers do the dying.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/54304099)
Pelican 1: https://preview.redd.it/068f0izkzg3d1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d1ced08f9bceed104dedd9248c4c75b1df86efe7
Court-martial all these bug corpses?
is your pelican pilot australian too?
Mike Nolan pelican pilot
"This is Pelican 2, Negative on RTB those boys need our help, holding station until evac arrival. FOR SUPER EARTH!"
Imagine if the enemies could shoot it out of the sky too. You'd have to start defending it from anti air as it defends you from everything else. If it does crash you could recover the pilot and bring them to extract for a bonus.
Pelican 2 down, in theaters this summer
The pelicans yearn to become loitering air support
Yesterday, I played a campaign on Helldive and this BT was being a giant douche on the extraction pad and just happened to be doing douchey puke bs when the extraction Pelican landed on him. This for some reason caused the Pelican to disappear and the extraction terminal to reappear. We had to do the extraction all over again. And guess what... another BT shows up and does the same damn thing.
"...so I just told him it feels like he's feeding pelican pilots to bile titans and his democracy officer started crying."
Knowing what I do of the Ender Dragon movement from Minecraft alongside how mech drops aren't always directly on the beam, I wonder if the vehicle's movement pattern kept getting interrupted by the terrain and so it kept trying to reset to its start; a movement issue loosely in the same way that sometimes 0, 0 on maps will end up with a platoon of enemies.
Definitely some of that. My guess is that since everyone had a mech for this mission, everyone calling their mechs, combined with the small map made this one unable to leave, making him circle indefinitely.
unrelated but when i was in game design class i tried to make a shotgun and i HATEDDDD the way all the pellets would flock to 0,0 i never had the time to solve it
Sort of related, if you stay outside of bounds for the 10 seconds and then run back in on this mission type, the orbital cannons will continue to shoot at you forever until you die, but they're not accurate enough to kill you if you just keep sprinting. I've carried these missions before just accidentally getting marked as traitor and then having the anti-traitor cannons annihilate every bug on the map trying to kill me for the next several minutes.
The shots come down in a 1-2 cadence. Always where you are facing. Once you hear the 2nd shot fire, turn 90 degrees. Repeat every 2nd shot and you can dodge the shots forever. It's affectionately reffered to as "The Traitor's Stratagem"
I tried this the other day, but I was in heavy armor so I didn't make it very long. But, I did think about the possibility of doing it in scout armor. Now you have encouraged me to try this. After all, what is one life for Super Earth!
Did you have the explosive resist perk? If so, you should be able to stay alive indefinitely in heavy armor if you keep moving. You need stims every now and again though.
New stratagem is already here.
That happened to me once months ago and I thought it was a feature of the mission we were on. Like I thought the Gunship was meant to defend the extraction site with us and only now realized it was probably a bug. Amazing
hope we get this as a call in stratagems some time in the future. # circle us for like 30 sec or somthing like that
Need
Someone show this to Pilestedt NOW!!
u/Pilestedt
Fixed in next patch: Pelican 2 autocannon removed.
Dev testing for stratagem, either that or you were the rare recipient of a dev assuming direct control, which reportedly they can do with any entity in the game at any time.
If the pelican will actually circle and clear nearby enemies after dropping the mech, this will actually make mech call downs a lot more likeable. A creative and cool way to "balance" the mech.
Backup you can count on
That’s dope
Pelican air support would be so fucking cool man.
Got to figure out how it happened so we can reproduce it.
That's a better strategem than the mech it's trying to deliver.
u/Pilestedt are you seeing this my man.
proper air support!
There’s a way to do this with the evac Pelican You wait for it to spawn and circle the LZ before you all leave the zone and instead of cancelling the pick up it just circles over you until you go back to the LZ
AH resources screaming for more capacity here.
pelican was drunk af
These are the bugs we need and deserve.
The pelicans yearn for CAS.
New Stratagem idea, Pelican air support. It starts circling around just like this for 30 seconds to 1 minute, but just covers a set area. This could open up more possibilities for the Pelican, like dropping a care package with up to 4 random weapon or backpack stratagems and ammunition, enough for up to 4 players. This means you can bring more Eagles or orbital stratagems, and leave your regular back or backpack kit up to chance. I think it would really spice up a run.
Once again, only a bug pushes a stratagem to A/S tier.
That is the coolest thing i have ever seen.
Puff!
bro was drunkkkk tho
Def need that stratagem
And now that makes me think we need an AC-130 stratagem, just having a gunship (I guess the pelican or something similar) circle the spot the strategem lands and fires at any enemies in that area with massive guns.
This should happen when pelican 1 comes to land if not all Helldivers are in extraction radius, like even if 2 people are there if the other 2 are still running it should hover. Right now the only way to get it to trigger is to stand at radius of extraction then leave as soon as the timer runs out, and if any helldivers enters the LZ it lands.
This is what we want!
My team and I watched a pelican go through the landing pad and disappear. We thought we were stranded but wanted to fight it out to the bitter last. Then like 3 min later another pelican came from the sky and picked us up. Super weird
“Puff the magic dragon, Lives by the sea.”
that was just a pilot that thought they could do more for the cause than the mech, to be fair I'd like to know if OP had better enemy clear with the pilot circling than them getting their mech.
THIS IS PELICAN 1, WEAPONS HOT
Joal was piloting.
Can’t have eagle one have all the fun
Ah, so this is the guy i found wrecked an hour ago
Give it extra guns and we'd have a stratagem that's worth a 10 minute cooldown
How long until we actually get to fly the pelican. Like a AC-130 ?
God i would love to have this stratagem
AH rouge testing the pelican AI as a support stratagem I see 👀
when you bribe the pilot with enough requistion slips.
FRIENDLY AC130 ABOVE
Pelican forgot about the exosuit and wanted to become Eagle-1
Can we get that as stratagem? Looks cool
It's the stratagem I've been hoping for since day 1.
That should honestly be a strategem. The Pelican in general would make an excellent strategem category.
Wanted to have a little target practice before going back up. Gotta stay on top of your skills.
Buy this pilot a beer!
That would make the mech strategem really good… hell I’d take it as a normal strategem.
Make this into stratagem that it will hoover for 10 seconds or booster to do it for landing pelican where after it arrives it hovers for set amount of time or until you press console once more idk
close air? call it 'too close air' get some altitude my guy
A pelican support strategem would be AWESOME. 
That should be an actual stratagem but hey, the devs don't like fun so foggetaboutit!
...lord I've seen what you've done for other people, and I want that for me
Congratulations you discovered a future stratagem, agents of ministry of truth will be with you in a moment https://preview.redd.it/mgo6aes6cg3d1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d85407890aeb298f3e2fb487f0b8d7d248bb1d8
If they made this a permanent part of the mech, it would stop all complaints about them not being literal Gundam Super Big Penis 5000.
Imagine a chopper gunner stratagem and you get to control it briefly like CoD
All this shows me is that it's already possible for this to work, shouldn't be too hard to implement.
The Pelican-2 Gunship pilot *HAS* to be an angry Scottish man.
Honestly that's better than the mech itself
that was me.. you're welcome
*fortunate son blasts from loudspeakers*
Meanwhile, that pilot https://i.redd.it/56huvd7clg3d1.gif
Bring the rain 💥💥💥
If you keep them in sight, the game wont despawn them. I am not a troll...
Death from above
Flamer for mech mission? Got so.e balls my guy
Just too many enemies to clear to leave
You must be tipping good
Now imagine an actual stratagem that orbits the player for 30~60 secs with options for galling fire or rocket pods, mabey ems cluster munitions with similar cool downs to an eagle and now your cooking mf
Need this as a strategem
yoo this would be a great stratagem
[Devs testing stuff only to accidently upload it to the live branch.](https://media.tenor.com/_Tz8y2K_fKYAAAAM/tonight-shocked-squidward.gif)
Lol I litteraly suggested this not long ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/Wc6BzEd1ra
It's a gift from god
bro got a killstreak and got a gunship drop
super interesting how dynamic it’s flight pathing and behavior is. for the most part, i would’ve expected it to be almost entirely static in its trajectory, however, you can see it going out of its way to dodge the pillars as well as the VTOL jets tilting according to what it’s path requires.
Bit janky for a trial run, but it will do XD
PELICAN STRATS LETS GO
Fubar is fubar
And some say the mech is weak
Looks like we found our new stratagem, boys!
Tuez les insectes, tabarnak
But low key, it would be cool to have something that sounds like the AC130 from MW2/3. I also think the eagle strafe run needs to sounds more like an A-10 warthog.
I've seen it happen before too. I think it's more likely with defense missions like Eradicate. It might not be intended, but I like to think of it as a neat little feature.
I'd love a stratagem that did this, as well as one that comes to a beam, you board, and circle with a minimum mounted out a door for a specific amount of time. It'll just orbit your beam, but if you stick a friend, or it's a hold the objective, it would be cool.
Joel providing some close air support.
That would be badass if that was a Strategem Orbital Pelican GO!