A Magic Bullet to many problems in the game: provide enemy information at loadout

The more I think about it, the more it seems that providing enemy composition at loadout could instantly solve or alleviate a lot of the current problems and enormously facilitate weapon balance in the future. However, it could be tricky to implement.

So here are two things: problems it could solve and ideias to implement it without reducing the challenge

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Here are the problems it could solve:

Weapon diversity/balance:

• I believe the general power of weapons should be increased, but even in its current state we could see some weapons being more used an more successful if only we knew what kind of enemy we are gonna face. I can see myself picking a punisher plasma against bugs if we're gonna face hordes of bile spewers/nurses/hive defenders. Right now one the biggest offenders of weapon balance/pick rates is the necessity for flexibility. These makes some weapons so much more favored. More so on the bug front.

• Examples: I rarely pick anything other than Breaker Incendiary (shriekers and hunters) or Blitzer (stalkers) and that still leaves me open to spewers, so I compliment that with Autocannon. No matter the mission, that covers all bases for me. If I knew that a certain mission would be a hunter fest, I would leave the Plapper home and try something else. This is just my personal experience.

• This is less prevalent on the bot front, but I also think the bot front could use a bit less heterogeneous enemy composition, like suggest already on this sub. I would love to see a composition that forced me to go long range/snipe or close range unit spam or whatever. God I want to spend 30 min setting Berserkers on fire.

Armor and booster diversity:

• Same logic as weapons, but with the added caveat that they need to be reworked. Specially armor, It's clearly the biggest failure in this game. So much lost potential. But, for the future, more specialized armors could prove fun/useful if once we know of a particular enemy composition we are about to face. Can you imagine a world in which Hunters don't slow you and Spewers don't insta kill you regardless of armor level? In that world, we could see the prevalence of Scout Armor drop when facing slow but harder hitting enemies. Right now you need scout for bugs and that's it.

• Same applies to boosters, provided they buff some unused ones. But very specialized boosters could be pretty cool once the team know we are about to face a fuck ton of slows or flinches, for instante.

Eagle/Orbital/Sentry choice:

• If I knew we were gonna have just a fuck ton of Bile Titans, I would have picked one more anti-tank stratagem. And that would make Bile Titan less oppressive, and fighting hordes of them would be fun instead of annoying.

• I pick stratagems mostly based on bug/bots or mission type, so maybe they won't be too affected by enemy composition. But the positive effect on the weapons could spill to stratagems.

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How to implement without braking the game's challenge:

The last thing we want is a pasteurized experience. All missions should have diversity, but the prevalence should be communicated. Here is some ideias to implement:

• Simple texts, saying things like "expect many breaches and swarms of small creatures.". We would still get chargers, titan, occasional spewer to make sure you get fucked here and there.

• "It has been observed many terminid structures in the planet". Indicating spore, shriekers.

• "The bots on this planet are adopting an aggressive and fast approach" meaning berserkers, backpack dude, hulks, whatever

• Again, we should still see a variety of enemies in every mission.

• "Expect air-based defense". Meaning bring one of the 3 things that can deal with gunships. We don't know how many, and we could have a fuckton of them again, without it being impossible, just really fucked up

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Results: on mission loadout, you do the maths combining environment, mission type, enemy loadout, modifiers and suddenly you open the gates for diversity.

Overall, I don't know how hard it would be to implement it without allowing for players to "dodge" enemy types. Wr are Helldivers we must face whatever it comes at us. Maybe tie enemy comp to planet? Operation? IDK the salaried employees can figure this one out.