Every fan knows that Helldivers 2 takes patriotism to the extreme at every given opportunity. Citizens have had their Procreation Permits revoked and must even pay through the nose to have the remains of loved ones shipped back from alien worlds. It’s all satire that pokes fun at modern society.
However, developer Arrowhead Game Studios has revealed another tidbit of Helldivers 2 lore. It explained that every Stratagem we use in a mission costs more than the average Super Citizen’s annual income. When I read this on Twitter, it felt pretty shocking, as shocking as it can be considering this is a fictional universe we’re talking about, because I know how much we, as a community, spam Stratagems.
Stratagems are the support weapons players call into battle in every mission in Helldivers 2. They’re how you access Exosuits, Flamethrowers, and Minefields, resupply your ammunition, or call reinforcements when one of your squad perishes.
Each time I drop into a mission, every player quickly clears out the nearby enemies and then calls down at least four Stratagems. This is how we stock up for the mission ahead, grabbing a heavy weapon, a backpack, a few grenades, and maybe even launching a Precision Orbital Strike to destroy a bug hole around the corner. With four players doing this, that’s 16 Super Citizen’s annual incomes spent within one or two minutes of landing on an alien world to massacre bugs and bots.
Players use a prolific number of Stratagems throughout a mission as well because they’re incredibly useful. Eagle Air Strikes clear out enemies in a pinch, while a 500 KG Bomb will annihilate everything in its radius. And, of course, we all need a fresh supply of ammo every five minutes or so.
This makes the cost of each mission with a full squad astronomical. This does not even count the new heavy weapons and explosive Strategums that get called in during extraction, some of which are just for show. It’s hard to quantify how much a single mission costs Super Earth, but I wanted to give it a go.
Say the average annual income for a Super Earth citizen is 50,000 Super Credits. Based on how much the items in the Superstore cost, this seems like a fair estimate. If every Stratagem costs this much, players burn through 800,000 Super Credits within two minutes after landing on a planet. I’d push this up to 1 million on higher difficulties to allow for four reinforcements.
In real life, the rough average cost of producing a tank is $10 million. This is based on General Dynamics’s cost of the Abrams tank. I’ll admit that’s a lot more than the average American’s annual income by a considerable margin, but those tanks have just as much longevity as the Exosuits in Helldivers 2. What Super Earth has done is scale up our tank production to the point where it’s become more cost-effective to overproduce weapons and throw them at Terminids and Automatons because, more likely than not, that’ll help us gain a few inches of ground on an alien world.
What I find interesting about this economic morsel from Arrowhead Game Studios is that it demonstrates how vast Super Earth’s colonies are and how far the human race has spread in the galaxy by 2184. War is the economy; that’s never been clearer. If the Second Galactic War ended tomorrow, every business on every Super Earth colony would collapse because they’re all providing some sort of facility or product for Helldivers.
To reach this point, though, the human race has colonized hundreds of worlds and successfully filled them with the suburban streets we’ve seen in the Helldivers 2 intro cinematic. Row upon row of homes on far-off worlds are filled with loyal citizens fueling the war effort.
I can’t help thinking that if we were a bit more sparing with our Stratagems, that growth wouldn’t need to be quite so aggressive. Maybe if we weren’t constantly fighting for more territory to fight even more alien bugs and twisted machines, we wouldn’t have two enemy factions fighting us just as ferociously.
