Guide

Getting started in Enlisted: what to do in your first hour

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By Richard Hill, editor and director of publicationPublished 21 September 20266 min read

Most of what goes wrong for a new player in Enlisted goes wrong before the shooting starts — in the nation you picked and the squads you brought. Five things to get right, in order.

1. Pick one nation and stay with it

Four nations are playable: the United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. Progression runs separately for each one. Splitting your first few hours across two nations does not give you two half-built armies; it gives you two armies that are both too weak to enjoy.

There is no “best” nation for a beginner, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. Pick the one whose theatre of the war you actually want to fight in. You will play more, and playing more is the whole mechanism of progression.

2. Put an engineer in the line-up

This is the single highest-value piece of advice on the page. The engineer builds rally points. A rally point near a contested objective means your squads arrive at the fight rather than walking to it across open ground. On maps with a long approach, one well-placed rally point swings the match more reliably than any weapon.

New players load up on assaulters, because automatic weapons feel powerful in the menu. Then they spend the match jogging. Bring the engineer.

3. Understand that you are a squad, not a soldier

You control one soldier directly; the rest of the squad is handled by the AI and follows your orders. When your soldier is killed, control passes to another soldier in the same squad, where the squad is standing — no respawn screen. Only when the whole squad is gone do you fall back to the deploy screen and bring on the next squad in your line-up.

Three-panel diagram. A squad of five deploys with one soldier under the player’s control in red and four AI soldiers in blue. When the player’s soldier is killed, control passes to the next soldier in the squad. When the whole squad is lost, the next squad deploys. — **Figure 1.** Dying costs you seconds. Losing a whole squad costs you a slot. Original diagram drawn for this guide.

The practical rule that follows: trading your soldier for a kill is often fine, and trading your whole squad for one kill almost never is.

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4. Play the objective, not the scoreboard

Battles are decided by capture points and by a reinforcement pool that runs down as soldiers are lost. A player who takes points and keeps their squads alive contributes more than a player with twice the kills who feeds squads into a doorway. Capture progress wins; kills near the point do not, by themselves.

If you are attacking: take the point in front of you, then move the line forward. If you are defending: cover the approaches rather than standing inside the objective, which is where defenders die.

5. Do not rush your upgrades

Stronger squads are matched against stronger opposition. Upgrading everything as fast as you can does not make the game easier — it moves you into harder company with the same skills you had yesterday. If the game suddenly gets brutal shortly after a big round of upgrades, that is what has happened, and the fix is practice rather than more upgrades.

What you can safely ignore at first

Tanks and aircraft. A vehicle crew is a squad, and it takes a slot that would otherwise hold infantry. Objectives are captured by infantry. Learn the ground game first.
Snipers. Effective on open maps, much weaker in the close street fighting that a lot of maps turn into.
Buying anything. The game is free, all four nations are open, and nothing is behind a paywall. Find out whether you like it before you spend. See what Enlisted costs.

Sources

Factual statements here about nations, classes and the free-to-play model come from the official Enlisted Steam store page and the Wikipedia article “Enlisted (video game)”, consulted on 21 September 2026. The tactical advice is the editor’s judgement, offered as opinion. The full sourcing is on the main explainer.

Where this guide is wrong

Live games change. Where this page and the game publisher’s own current information diverge, the publisher’s information prevails. Tell us at info@pravitel.online and we will log the correction on the corrections page.

The diagram on this page is an original SVG drawn by the editorial team. It is schematic and contains no material belonging to the game’s publisher.

Trademark notice. Enlisted is a trademark of its respective owner. Pravitel and Aurora Casket Company s.r.o. are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Darkflow Software, Gaijin Entertainment, Gaijin Network Ltd or any platform holder. Brand names are used for identification only.