Helldivers 2 Automatons: The Faction That Shoots Back

The unit list

Troopers and Raiders are the line infantry. Individually weak, dangerous in numbers, and they shoot. Berserkers are melee shock troops: fast, and they ignore the usual response of backing away because they close faster than you retreat. Devastators come in variants — heavy machine gun and rocket — and they are the walls of a bot position. The rocket variant is the one that kills you while you deal with something else. Scout Striders are fast walkers that spot you and call. Killing them before the flare is the single most valuable thing you can do in a bot mission. Hulks are the armoured elite, and the answer is a specific one rather than more bullets. There is a dedicated Hulk counter page for the angles. Tanks and Factory Striders are the heavy armour. Both demand anti-tank, and both punish the squad that spent its stratagems on infantry — see the Tank and Factory Strider pages. Gunships fly, strafe, and cannot be ignored. They are the reason a bot mission can go wrong after you have already won the ground fight. Turrets, mortars, and bunkers are structures: they do not chase, they deny. A mortar emplacement behind a ridge will kill your squad without ever appearing on screen.

The drop is the bot equivalent of a breach

Bots call reinforcement with a flare, and the flare takes a moment to fire. That window is the whole tactical layer: kill the caller before it finishes, and the fight stays at the size you found it. Miss it, and a dropship arrives with a fresh squad. This is why target priority is tighter against bots than against bugs. The correct first shot is almost always the unit that has spotted you and is about to call.

Cover discipline

Bots fire in arcs and volumes. Standing behind a rock works. Standing next to a rock does not, because the shots come around it. Crouching reduces your profile, and prone behind low cover is often the difference between a fight and a death. The habit that transfers: fight from cover to cover, and never cross open ground while a Devastator is alive and facing that direction. The durable damage page explains why some shots seem to do nothing to armour, and the armour values page gives the numbers behind the prioritisation.

What to bring

High armour penetration, anti-tank, and something that kills gunships. Bots reward precision and punish volume, so a support weapon that hits one target hard beats a wide spray — the support weapon page sorts them by that job. The difficulty page explains where bot patrol density becomes the real constraint.