An In-Depth Guide to the Galactic War

Disclaimer: This is not a recommendation as the only or best way to play. This guide is only meant to spread awareness on the nuances of the Galactic War and its mechanics. All data and conclusions drawn from that data come from the official API. This guide is not endorsed by or related to Arrowhead Studios in any official capacity. Made by Imamudkip and Rawbeef

Table of Contents

 

Liberation Campaigns
Overview
Region HP bloat
Encirclement

Defense Campaigns
Overview

Gambits

Lesser used Campaign types

Regions
Overview

Key factors

Democracy Space Station
Movement and Voting
Tactical Actions
Funding Actions

Impact Multiplier

Damage

Overview
Relevant variables
IM breakpoints
Strategies for maximizing damage
Non-factors

References 
Important links & FAQ
Footnotes & Gallery

A large number of the claims made were tested on Arrowhead QA Dev APIs. These servers were selected for their complete lack of online players. All Dev APIs including the aforementioned have recently been fully secured by Arrowhead. This testing was done in September, and the information embargo is only now lifted after the security increase.


Liberation campaigns

Planets under the known type of “Liberation Campaign” are planets under enemy control that can be liberated at any time and have their base health value at 1 million health (HP). For this campaign type, health is regenerated at a steady rate set on a per planet basis by the Game Master, this is known as “Planetary Decay” or “Enemy Resistance”. It can be seen in game here[1].

Regions
[⌄] add their total combined health to the base 1 million health of the planet. For example, 1 city and 1 settlement would add to make the planet’s max health 1.5 million.  (Note that when regions are added to a planet they do not immediately regenerate the total region health in an instant, decay will regenerate the HP until it hits the new max HP of the planet). Additionally, regions are not required for a liberation campaign to have more than 1 million HP. This is seen with Hive Worlds and Magma Planets. Zagon Prime and the Magma Worlds sit at 2mil HP, with Omicron at 3mil. A planet may also have more additional HP than the sum of their regions, as seen on Cyberstan and rather oddly Matar Bay[20] (all as of writing). A side effect of the max health of planets no longer always being 1 million is that percentage-based values, like decay and planetary liberation rates can be misleading. For example, if Planet A has 1 million HP and Planet B has 2 million HP, a 1% decay on Planet A will be the same as 0.5% on Planet B. Planet max health cannot be seen in-game however it can be accessed through community tools like Helldivers Companion[w].

There is also a meta mechanic dubbed by the community as “Encirclement”. Encirclement is achieved when a liberation campaign has all its existing warp links connected to a Super Earth owned planet. Upon encirclement, a planet immediately receives -1%/1M decay. This means that the health of the planet will tick down at a steady rate regardless of any Helldiver activity. It is worth noting that Isolated Super Earth planets currently do not face any similar repercussions. Helldivers can warp to the defense of an isolated planet, and said defense will not suffer any debuffs
[21].


Defense (Event) campaigns

Defense campaigns are campaigns that are started by the Game Master at the time of their choosing. They also dictate the length and health of this campaign type. Note that this campaign type overrides the health of a regular planetary campaign. The health of this campaign has historically been displayed in “levels”[2] with each level being worth 50,000 HP. The uniqueness of this campaign type lies in the presence of a timer and a lack of decay (Regions notwithstanding[⌄]). The Helldivers must whittle down the health to 0 before the timer runs out. In the event that the timer runs out before the HP is reduced to 0, the defense is considered lost, and the owner of the planet is changed. The planet then becomes a liberation campaign with 0% progress.

An interesting quirk with defenses is that they do not generally have operation modifiers, however the Illuminate faction is an exception to this rule. This can be seen most easily by the presence of Leviathans on event campaigns.

Finally, there is a meta mechanic known to the community as a “Gambit”. The Gambit is an alternate way of winning a defense campaign. It involves capturing the planet that the defense is originating from[3]. If the campaign has multiple origin planets, the Helldivers must capture all origin planets to successfully Gambit the defense. If multiple defenses originate from a single planet, the successful liberation of that planet will result in the automatic completion of each connected defense. Gambits are high risk high reward, often being more difficult numerically than simply completing the defense as normal. Gambits currently like all other liberation campaigns, lack the Galactic War map beacon-like visual effect to indicate their importance.

Lesser used campaign types

There are also the High Priority Campaign (HPC), the Occupation campaign, the Attrition campaign types, and the Invasion campaign type.

“HPCs” are most often used for introducing special operation types. Such as Commando Operations, DSI operations, Gloom remix, or the several TCS based operation types. Typically decay starts at incredibly high values and slowly decreases as the campaign progresses. Though when HPCs were used to host Commando and DSI operations on the bot front, decay stayed mostly static (Mox, K, Fury, Clasa, Aesir Pass).

“Occupation” campaigns were used for “The Battle for Super Earth”. It is lost by losing every region
[⌄] on the planet. The Helldivers may not claim back regions once they are fully lost without a GM manually reactivating the region.

The “Attrition”  campaign was used just before the Battle for Super Earth as the Illuminate fleet approached. It involves multiple unwinnable defense events chained together as the Helldivers wear away its health-pool which carries over from planet to planet.

The “Invasion” campaign type was used by the Illuminate from their introduction until the end of Meridia’s movement. They are mostly identical to defense campaigns with a few exceptions. Invasions would usually last 12 hours[4], and generate “Dark Energy” which built into a meter for Meridia’s acceleration. Since Meridia was halted and the Great Host made their appearance, this campaign type has not been used. Note that the Eagle Storm[⌄] tactical action does not work on this campaign type.[5]

Regions


Regions, commonly referred to as Mega Cities or City Maps, are mini campaigns contained within their host planet. They have their own separate decay, and a player counter that tracks people with a region operation selected
[6]. This is in contrast to the standard player tracker that only checks for super destroyers over planets, making this one much more accurate (Note that on CA[w], the percentage listed for player count on the region summary is based on the percentage from the planet’s total, and not galaxy total).  Automaton built regions known as “Mega Factories” have also been located on Cyberstan. They follow slightly different rules, more on them in a later revision.

 

The particular key factors for regions are: Region size, the ‘Liberation Bomb’, ‘Damage duplication’, and Availability factor.  

 

Region size is a value that assigns the specific “Size name” that directly correlates to how much HP that region will have. The values are as follows: Settlements (100k HP), Towns (200k HP), Cities (400k HP), and Mega Cities (600k HP)[7]. Mega Factories also have region sizes. Class 1 (1mil), Class 2 (1.25mil), Class 3 (1.5mil) and Class 4 (2mil).

 

Upon completion, the HP of the region multiplied by 1.5 is directly reduced from the host planet’s HP pool. This will be referred to as a ‘Liberation Bomb’. As an example, Liberating a Mega City with 600k HP would award 900k damage to the main planet’s HP pool[8]. This typically means that unless the host planet has less HP remaining than the region, it is worth contributing to the liberation of the region.

 

‘Damage duplication’ is a simple one. Damage done to a region is mirrored on to the main planet’s HP pool. This however only affects Planetary Defense[^] campaigns, Liberation Campaigns[^] do not get this effect[9].

 

The Availability factor stat is a value that ranges from 0 to 1, that controls the progress in a campaign before a region opens up[7]. While the float value is tied to remaining planet HP, it is displayed in game and on 3rd party sites as percentage of campaign completion. This can be seen in the Region Icon’s placement along the bar, or the exact percentage value in the Planet’s Region details page. On Liberation Campaigns[^], Availability factor is tied to Helldiver progress on the planet. On Defense Campaigns[^], it is tied to enemy progress[10]. This means that the longer the defense timer runs for, the longer it will take for the region to become available, with Eagle Storm[⌄] completely halting progress towards unlocking them.

It is also of note that these factors can be changed at will by the Gamemaster. While Regionsize has to this point gone untouched, we’ve seen the values for Availabilityfactor change live, and the mechanics for the Liberation bomb and Damage mirroring be altered mid-MO/campaign. As such, what is documented here only represents the current state of the mechanics. It can and likely will be changed at some point in the future.


Any other particular interactions with specific campaign types were listed in their summaries in the above section

Democracy Space Station (DSS)


The Democracy Space Station (DSS) mechanics will be separated into 5
 categories: Movement and Voting, Heavy Ordnance Distribution (HOD), Eagle Storm (ES), Orbital Blockade (OB) and Action Funding. The DSS always has two permanently active passive effects. The first provides a -35% cooldown on mech stratagems, and the second claims to increase liberation damage by 10%, however this is non-functional.  

Movement and Voting: The DSS is moved every 4 hours to the highest voted planet on its “ballot” providing that the planet has an active campaign of any type. If not, it will go to the second most voted planet. Voting can be done at any time in a four-hour window prior to movement. Helldivers may only vote once every voting period. There is no rank-choice voting, and a Helldiver may only choose one planet. Once cast, there is no way to alter, rescind or otherwise change the vote. The vote count uses a raw number but is only displayed as percentages towards the player. The Game Master also has the ability to manually end the voting period, forcing a movement to the highest voted planet at the time the period was ended. Finally, there is a mechanic known as the “Auto-Move/Auto-Jump”. The Auto-Move happens when the planet the DSS is currently at has its campaign closed or is otherwise ended by success or failure. If this should happen the DSS will instantly move to the current planet with the most votes that has an active campaign.


Heavy Ordnance Distribution: This action works by triplicating a damage instance. This means that a mission that would have normally done 1 damage instead does 3, at the expense of further impacting the IM[⌄]. In essence, the more players are using the HOD boost the less it becomes worth. It also means that every planet outside the one the DSS is currently orbiting will have reduced liberation efficiency due to a lower IM. It is also important to note that despite what is said in the description in-game, HOD works on EVERY campaign type[11]. DSS Bombardment has the same effect.

Eagle Storm: This action pauses the active timer of a defense event campaign as long as the DSS is orbiting the planet with the action active[12] (does not work on invasions[^] [5]).

Orbital Blockade: The OB is a preemptive measure against enemy attacks. It prevents enemies from launching attacks from the planet that the DSS is currently orbiting. The OB does NOT have any effect on ongoing defense or event campaigns[^]. A common misconception is that the OB can be used to automatically stop an ongoing defense which is not true[13].


Funding: While it should seem straightforward, funding has multiple steps and the journey a sample takes after the Helldiver has donated it depends on the state of the DSS. Once donated, a sample is put into an invisible waiting pool, this pool then drains at a set maximum rate into the donation meter that’s actually visible to the player
[14]. Each action requires 86400 donation units worth of their respective donation material, be that samples or req slips. The fastest this pool can drain is 4.167% of the donation meter per hour (being 3600 units per hour, or 1 unit per second), meaning the minimum funding time for any tactical action is 24 hours. If a tactical action is active, the corresponding pool is closed for donations and cannot be donated to, until the action has finished its cooldown following its activation period. If ANY action is active, the donation pools of the non-activated actions assuming those actions are not on cooldown remain open, however they will not drain into the visible meter until after the active action ends. When an action is on cooldown only that respective action’s pool is closed, though it retains any donations that may have remained after its activation, thus allowing it to get a constant start to funding when next it comes off cooldown. The cooldowns are different depending on the action. The pool will always drain at the maximum rate of 1 donation unit per second. Every second that the pool is not feeding donation units into the meter is a second completely wasted and unrecoverable. The funding rate limit of 1 unit per second cannot be surpassed, and a bulk donation of multiple units at once would not make up for this lost time. Periods of low donations also cause the estimation for full funding both in game and on third party sites to become incredibly volatile, frequently shifting with the random intervals of donations coming in. This often causes the estimation to not be indicative of when funding will finish, and conclusions will have to be drawn off historical funding rates. 

Impact Multiplier (IM)


The Impact Multiplier is a scaling factor that applies to all damage done. It is related to the current population of the game essentially making it so that regardless of how many people are online playing, liberation stays at approximately the same rate. When there are more players online the IM goes lower, as people log off it goes higher.

The Impact Multiplier is calculated on a 30-minute window of data; this can be seen most clearly around times of server issues and the weekly steam maintenance.

The Impact Multiplier is NOT based on the TOTAL online player base. It is calculated based on the number of damage instances submitted in a rolling 30-minute window. This can be seen when HOD[^] comes online and the IM trends downwards as more operations are completed under HOD until it stabilizes[15]. Overall, this ensures that players who are AFK, not in mission, cancel their missions, fail their missions, or on inactive campaigns do not have a detrimental impact on the war effort as a whole.

Damage


Damage to planets is done through completing missions. These are known as Damage Instances. The result of a mission can be broken down into one of three categories: Completed, Failed, and Abandoned, with only the first resulting in a damage instance. As mentioned in the above IM paragraph, closing the application, cancelling your mission (via return to ship and other menu options), playing on an inactive campaign, or if the host leaves the mission for any length of time (including if they rejoin and regain control as the host), or failing the mission, will void your damage instance, doing no damage to the planet or the IM. HOWEVER, damage instances that round down to 0 damage, still do submit as a damage instance for the IM, and will henceforth be referred to as “dead instances”.

However there exists a silver lining to the issue of truncation, that being API tickspeed. The Helldivers 2 API’s Planet Damage/HP endpoint is only able to send out and receive updates every 10 seconds. What this means in practice is that all damage instances submitted within the same 10 second timeframe are added together before truncation takes effect. This is particularly helpful in times of extremely low IMs, such as after major updates. It allows high population planets to maintain a steady damage output despite the fact that many players are individually doing sub 1 damage, such as on Cyberstan.
As an example: 0.1+0.1+0.2+0.3+0.5+0.7+0.8+1.2+1.6. If each mission truncated separately, they would only do 2 damage. Instead, it does 4.5, truncated to 4 damage.


It also happens to be the case that decay truncates, and is counted in the same 10 second intervals as well. Despite being displayed in game and on many 3rd party websites as a percentage of the planet’s HP that decays per hour, the actual planetary regeneration stat is raw HP returns per second. Regen values were chosen specifically to try and create even looking numbers as decay per hour. But most numbers that are divisible by 1000 do not divide evenly by 3600, and therefore every relevant regen value has decimal points that get truncated, causing the real decay per hour to be lower than advertised
[Y].

Damage and Regen truncate separately. 4.5 - 2.7 = 4 - 2, equaling 2 not 1.8.

An important note is not to confuse the damage relevant Impact Multiplier stat[^] with the term “Impact”. Impact refers to the bunk “Squad Impact” stat shown in your after action report along with stuff like samples collected and XP earned before you return to the ship. While Squad Impact may directly display as damage done to the planet, this is a deception. Squad Impact has been known to be a meaningless stat since early in the game’s lifespan, and has no correlation to damage dealt[16].

In truth, there are only 2 variables within the player’s control that affect the damage of a mission. Operation Difficulty (D1-Trivial to D10-Super Helldive), and the Operation Completion Bonus. The Operation Completion Bonus is an increase to damage for missions that close out an operation. This includes missions that are the only one of its operation, being missions on D1-Trivial and D2-Easy. This change to the Galactic War was made in conjunction with the release of major update 1.003.000, on May 13th 2025. The next day at 11:42 am SEST (UTC+2), Community manager Bask put out an announcement on the Helldivers Official Discord revealing a brand new Galactic War System change[17]. Prior to this update, you had to complete an entire operation to submit a damage instance. The damage done across the entire operation would be added up and submitted all at once in a singular damage instance upon operation completion. Now instead, each mission of an operation submits an instance on its completion, with the final mission of the operation gaining a substantial bonus to its damage. OCB missions also have a minimum damage threshold of 1. This means at IMs where the mission would otherwise do 0 damage, it is always set to 1 damage. These two factors are why D1-2 missions are the best for damage, especially when playing at extremely low IMs. Additionally the minimum damage of the operation completion bonus allows D1-2 missions to often have more damage on average per mission than most other higher difficulties with more than one mission per operation, with the only consistent exception being D10 (outside of HOD[^] or major title updates nuking the IM).

A point not previously emphasized as a cornerstone of damage is speed. While the time

bonus is irrelevant, faster mission clears allow for more damage instances within a set frame of time. Trivial and Easy missions consistently put out damage, tying or outpacing D10s for damage per hour, and completely blow out every other difficulty for damage per hour. Even with damage per instance as your metric, D9s and below scale so poorly that Trivs and Easies can keep up here as well, as non-OCB missions often result in dead instances with 0 damage and hit to the IM.


IM breakpoints
Identifying at what IM values missions at particular difficulty levels will cease to do damage will help demonstrate the disparity between the polar ends of the difficulty scale. Given that OCB missions always provide minimum damage, they will not be mentioned in this excerpt. (The raw damage formula can be found via this reference[x])


D3 = IM 0.024971843

D7 = IM 0.014335124

D8 = IM 0.012665623

⁠D9 = IM 0.011183261

⁠D10 = IM 0.00979417

Focusing in on D7 breakpoint of 0.01433 (D7 being where we estimate a large portion of the playerbase to reside), the Impact modifier was below this breakpoint 73% of the time for the month of June. With D7 non-OCBs doing 0 damage, and OCBs doing 1 damage at that listed IM threshold, a D7 operation would provide 0.33 damage per mission. This is before accounting in uncompleted operations that never finish their OCB. Strictly as a 1-1 comparison, damage per mission on a Trivial is 3 times higher. Then when you get into the metric of damage per hour, not only are Trivial and Easy missions much faster to clear, they can also be done reliably by any solo player of any skill level. With all these factors combined, it leaves the polar ends of the difficulty chart as the only viable options for doing meaningful damage at common IM ranges.


Conclusions and strategies

 

As such, maximizing your hourly damage output can be described in these simple steps

Step 1) Play on the highest difficulty you can quickly and reliably clear  

Step 1a) If that is not Difficulty 10, default down to Difficulty 1 or 2  

Step 2) Prioritize completing main objectives quickly and ending the mission
Step 3) Quickly start another mission

Operation spamming may be unbearably tedious, however there lies a happy middle ground that still allows for a significant increase to efficiency while taking much less of a mental toll. One singular D1-D2 mission every session, or after every operation. That consistent damage in a tiny timeframe makes up for the missing damage of those playing on the middle difficulties often hitting zero damage per instance.

Despite all of this, it is important to remember one simple fact. Even if everyone trivial spammed and we all did more damage, Joel would just raise decay rates and defense levels. Same deal for if everyone stopped biomediving and focused on the current primary objective. It’s his game and we’re playing it. No point in losing sleep over it.

 

Non-factors

Lastly are the factors that were once believed to affect a player’s damage and contribution to a galactic war, and have since proven inconsequential. These are mainly reflected in actions that impact your “Influence” value
[18] per mission, which as shown in testing the value had no effect on damage output per mission/operation[19].

 

The following have influence values associated with their completion: Main objective types, Side objectives, nest/outposts/encampments, number of players extracted, and the time bonus. These actions all award XP and req slips upon their completion, and the Influence stat was often falsely attributed to XP earned[19]. The myth of XP resulting in damage also led to the incorrect belief that more players in the session upon mission completion resulted in more liberation due to more net XP being awarded from the mission, which is not the case. Player count per session has no positive effect on damage per instance. It was also believed that deaths (-2% per up to 10 deaths) would negatively impact your damage and therefore Influence value. Though it’s been found deaths had no associated Influence modifier, as such it’s been concluded that it either had its value removed, or never had one at all.

References

Here are some relevant links for high tier Helldivers 2 knowledge and information:

This guides’ FAQ:
(Here’s where I'd put my link. IF I HAD ONE!)

Helldivers 2 wiki:
https://helldivers.wiki.gg


HD2 Wiki discord:

https://discord.gg/yh35hSbVFv


Companion App:
https://helldiverscompanion.com

CA discord:

https://discord.gg/yXWzPxvZUW


H.O.W.L. Galactic War archive:

HOWL

Helldivers 2 War History Central:
https://crosswaveomega.github.io/helldiversplanettable/

Icdeadppl2’s liberation calculator (May be out of date, custom formulas used):
https://1drv.ms/x/s!Apv9xbniZUQuibJfm5KQ20NOMX1Q_g

Oh, and the Maincord link:
https://discord.gg/helldivers

Have fun

[1] In game screenshots of Liberation campaigns with listed “Enemy Resistance”.

[2] In game screenshots with Defense campaigns, and the listed defense level.

[3] The GameMaster calling for a gambit in game through the dispatch system.

[4] Screenshots of the Invasion campaign type, including exceptions to the typical 12 hour timer. (From CA and in game)

[5] Maincord “official” DSS guide claiming Eagle Storm’s effect only works on defenses

[6] CA screenshot of region player counters

[7] API screenshot of Regionsize and Availabilityfactor, shown up against an in-game screenshot

[8] Liberation bomb before and after screenshots

[9] Damage mirroring not working of lib campaigns evidence

So to actually dissect what’s being looked at here, we have a direct comparison of the Defense of Fort Union (Aug 29th-31st) and the Liberation of Karlia (Sep 26th-29th). The timeframe for each campaign that is being highlighted is when a region is open and being reclaimed. For Fort Union that was its “Maximum Security” Mega City “New Hope”, and for Karlia that would be its only City “Adnan”. What we’re looking at is the DMG/Player% stat, the middle-ish column of the data table. This stat is more often referred to as “Efficiency”, and it breaks down the hourly damage that 1% of the total online player count is doing. While the calculation has its flaws, it generally does a good job of representing how well Helldivers are doing on any particular campaign.

The point of interest here is the sheer percentage difference between the main planet and region efficiency for the defense campaign and liberation campaign. For the defense campaign, the planet’s efficiency is much closer to the regions than it is on the liberation campaign. This is caused by the damage done to regions on defense campaigns being mirrored onto the main planet, while this is not done for liberation campaigns

As a quick tangent, it was mentioned in the Regions overview that the player counter for regions only displays in mission divers, as opposed to the regular player counter that shows all divers with the application on, with their destroyers over that planet. That dead weight of AFK players is what causes region efficiency calcs to almost always be higher, because the calc for the main planet is artificially lowered.

[10] Availabilityfactor opening regions on defense campaigns.
(Note that our progress has not reached the 2nd Valmox region, or the 3rd and 4th Seyshel regions and yet they are open. This is because it’s controlled by enemy progress)

[11] Maincord “official” DSS guide claiming HOD works on all campaign types

[12] In game screenshot of Eagle Storm pausing defense timer
        Leftmost image of
Reference 2 and this

[13] Maincord “official” DSS guide claiming that Orbital Blockade does not autogambit

[14] CA screenshot of Action funding bars

[15] HOD nuking the IM (CA graph)

[16] Squad Impact being a false stat

This excerpt is from this wiki.gg article, which has been unofficially endorsed by Arrowhead. (This factoid is well known, and has been established since early on)

[17] This screenshot of the 1.003.00 Galactic War changes

[18] External link to influence page: (Under Construction, available soon)

[19] Source screenshots of Joel proxies claiming Influence is deprecated, and former CM Spitz claiming XP=liberation (debunked claim)

[20] Planets with over 1mil HP not having HP increases match with their region’s total HP, or not having regions at all

[21] Example, Alairt III as of 4pm PST 2/25/26.

[Y] True Decay Table

Intended raw HP regen per hour

Raw regen per second, pre truncation

Intended decay% of 1mil HP

Actual raw HP regen per hour

Raw HP regen per API tick

Intended to Actual, percentage disparity

1000*

0.2777777

0.1%

720

2

28% lower

2000*

0.5555555

0.2%

1800

5

10% lower

4000*

1.111111111

0.4%

3960

11

1% lower

5000

1.388888

0.5%

4680

13

0.64% lower

6000*

1.666666

0.6%

5760

16

0.04% lower

10000

2.7777777

1%

9720

27

0.028% lower

12500**

3.4722222

1.25%

12240

34

0.0208% lower

15000

4.1666666

1.5%

14760

41

0.016% lower

20000

5.5555555

2%

19800

55

0.01% lower

25000

6.944444

2.5%

24840

69

0.0064% lower

30000

8.333333

3%

29880

83

0.004% lower

40000

11.11111111

4%

39960

111

0.001% lower

50000

13.888888

5%

49680

138

0.0064% lower

*Are for 1% decay of their respective Super Earth built region size
**1% of Class 2 Mega Factories, at 1.25mil HP. Otherwise rare

[x] Damage Formula
Base Damage x Current IM = Damage

Yes that is it. It was that simple the entire time
So what is the base damage for each difficulty?
Here’s a chart (this is the damage at an IM of exactly 1)

Non-OCB

Base Damage

OCB

Base Damage

0 damage IM breakpoints (non-ocb)

Avg damage per mission of a full operation 

D1

N/A

136

N/A

136

D2

N/A

144

N/A

144

D3

40

160

0.025000

100

D4

44

176

0.022727

110

D5

50

200

0.020000

100

D6

58

232

0.017241

116

D7

67

268

0.014925

134

D8

77

308

0.012987

154

D9

89

356

0.011236

178

D10

102

408

0.009804

204


You may have noticed that the OCB damage increase is exactly 4x
There’s not really anything more to add to that, it’s just a 4x increase.
Finish your operations

An “IM breakpoint” means that a difficulty will do X damage up until the listed breakpoint
The listed 0 damage breakpoints means those instances are dead until they reach that IM

Underscoring of the numbers under the “0 damage IM breakpoints” column is meant to indicate a repeating decimal, as I do not know how actually annotate that correctly on google docs
The average damage per mission is for
full operations, and does not account for truncation
The lower the IM is, the worse and worse higher difficulties become, as more truncation happens

Here’s a screenshot of the IM as of 2/22/26, 1:20 AM PST, when I am literally writing this
Using the example IM of 0.014425, here is what some damage instances would look like
D10 non-OCB: 102 x 0.014425 = 1.47135, truncates to 1 damage
D10 OCB: 408 x 0.014425 = 5.8854, truncates to 5 damage
D7 non-OCB: 67 x 0.014425 = 0.966475,
truncates to 0 damage
D5 OCB: 200 x 0.014425 = 2.885, truncates to 2 damage
D2 OCB: 144 x 0.014425 = 2.0772, truncates to 2 damage

You get the idea. Plug in your own current IM and try it out yourself
Easily found on this Helldivers 2 Companion App page
here


But how can I test for these myself?
Full guide coming soon.
It won’t be 4 months this time, promise.

TLDR set up a damage tracker and submit instances on a low pop low decay planet/region. Pretty simple, just beware of false positives with other people playing at the same time as you.

Changelog

2/25/26 - Version 7 revisions:
Added Changelog
Added Damage Formula (Reference x)
Added explanation of planetary regen/decay truncation

Added references 20, 21, and Y
Added a cursory mention of Mega Factories (I’ll add a detailed mechanics explanation once we know they work like that for more than just Cyberstan)
Updated understanding of the Operation Completion Bonus
Updated understanding of AFK representation on regions
Updated understanding of mission instance non-submissions
Updated note on Siege Liberation regen override regen per hour (-5k -> -10k)