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PravitelIndependent games desk

Guide

How squads work in Enlisted

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By Richard Hill, editor and director of publicationPublished 7 min read

The squad, not the soldier, is the unit of play. Once that lands, most of the game’s other decisions stop looking arbitrary.

What a squad is

A squad is a group of soldiers you own, train and equip between battles, and then take into a battle as a unit. Wikipedia describes squads as holding between three and nine soldiers, with the number depending on the squad type. You control one of them directly. The rest are run by the game’s AI and follow the orders you give.

Three-panel diagram showing a squad of five with one player-controlled soldier in red and four AI soldiers in blue, control passing to the next soldier when the player’s soldier is killed, and a fresh squad deploying once the first is lost.
Figure 1. The loop that defines the game. Original diagram drawn for this guide.

What happens when you die

Not much, the first few times. Control passes to another soldier in the same squad, standing wherever that squad is. There is no respawn timer and no walk back from a spawn point. You are fighting again almost immediately, from roughly the position you were in.

What is expensive is running the squad out of soldiers. When the last one falls you go back to the deploy screen and bring on the next squad in your line-up. You have a limited number of those. Spend them badly and you spend the rest of the battle with nothing good left.

The rule that follows

Trading a soldier for a kill: usually fine. Trading a squad for a kill: almost always a loss, even when the scoreboard says otherwise.

What the AI will and will not do

Your AI soldiers follow, hold a position and shoot at what they can see. They are a resource that has to be positioned. They will not read the battle for you, they will not spot the flank, and they will stand in fire if you leave them in fire. Think of them less as teammates and more as the reason you can afford to be careless with your own life — and only your own life.

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Composition: what to bring

A line-up is a set of squads, and the mistake is to fill it with the squads that look strongest rather than the squads that cover the jobs.

A three-by-three grid of soldier roles grouped into front line in red (rifleman, assaulter, machine gunner), support in green (engineer, radio operator, mortarman) and specialist in blue (sniper, anti-tank gunner, vehicle crew), each with a one-line job description.
Figure 2. A selection of the roles. The Steam store page describes eighteen classes in total. Original diagram drawn for this guide.

Upgrading squads

What you earn in battle goes into weapons and equipment, soldier training and perks, and new squads and vehicles. Progression runs separately for each of the four nations, so switching nation means starting again.

A three-stage flow: pick one of four nations (USA, USSR, Germany, Japan); assemble a line-up of squads such as infantry, engineers and a vehicle crew; spend battle earnings on weapons, perks and new squads. A dashed arrow loops back from the third stage to the second.
Figure 3. Progression, after the December 2023 reorganisation into four nations. Original diagram drawn for this guide.

One counter-intuitive point: stronger squads meet stronger opposition. Upgrading at maximum speed makes the game harder, not easier. There is no penalty for taking it slowly.

Sources

Squad size, the December 2023 restructuring and the four nations come from the Wikipedia article “Enlisted (video game)” and the official Steam store page, consulted on 21 September 2026. Advice on composition is the editor’s judgement. Full sourcing 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 diagrams on this page are original SVGs drawn by the editorial team. They are schematic and contain 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.