Looking for a quick way to level up your Helldivers 2 character and farm some Medals for your Warbond? Though we've vanquished the bugs and the construction of a containment area is underway, there's now a new problem for Super Earth—murderous armies of Automatons are invading the fringe colonies, looking to kill all humans. Just another day for a Helldiver.
The new Automaton defence missions come in three different flavours; Retrieve Essential Personnel, Launch ICBM, and the one we're going to talk about here, Eradicate Automaton Forces. This mission type is very similar to the Eradicate Terminid Swarm mission; it takes place in a small area, and the only objective required to complete it is killing enemies, namely Automatons.
It does have a couple of key differences, though:
- It takes place in an incredibly easy-to-defend fort.
- The bots arrive in dropships, allowing you to shoot or airstrike them as they drop around the fort, or set up turrets to bombard and choke point them as they try to get in.
The Mortar Sentry in-particular is an absurdly good Stratagem here, since it rains destruction down on the enemies arriving all around. To put it in perspective, I was running this mission on Extreme difficulty primarily using the Mortar Sentry, Eagle Cluster Bomb, and Grenade Launcher, and every time I completed the mission in 3-5 minutes. On Extreme that's 500 XP and five Medals for a few minutes work. You can find Operations that contain multiple Eradicate Automaton Forces missions, too, meaning that you can get a further seven Medals if you complete the next in the Operation.
You might be a little hesitant due to the Extreme difficulty, but this is genuinely one of the fastest and easiest mission types I've come across in 60 hours of Helldivers 2, and it seems to be temporary while the Automaton invasion is happening. The key elements required to take down those 150 bots quickly are just sentries like the Gatling and Mortar that are available early on, as well as the Eagle Cluster Bomb or similar anti-swarm airstrikes, and the Grenade Launcher, since you can just fire it into groups for easy kills. You can even set up an Autocannon Sentry and actually destroy some of the arriving dropships if you want.
I was farming these missions last night for the Medals and got absolutely loads in a very short space of time. The best bit is quite a few other players are doing this, too, so even if you're low level, there'll likely be people on your team with the best Stratagems for the job. If you have a high level player friend, then one Stratagem that will speed things up even more is the EMS Mortar, which slows enemies it strikes. Combine this with a regular Mortar Sentry and you have an effective 1-2 punch where they get slowed and caught in the second Mortar's blast.
It's a bit strange that the Eradicate Automatons mission is so easy compared to the Retrieve Essential Personnel, which is honestly pretty hellish on the higher difficulties. I reckon it's because the fort-based map for the Eradicate Automatons mission is just so defensible and plays to the strength of certain key Stratagems like airstrikes and the Mortar Sentry.
Also remember that you can turn it down to Hard if you've nervous about Extreme, since this mission type appears in multiple difficulties, though you will get slightly fewer Medals. Things can get a little spicy if you let the Automatons into the actual centre section of the fort, but it's easy enough to make sure 90% of them never do while turrets and airstrikes rack up the kills you need.
