Guide › The squad system explained
The squad system explained
The single mechanic that makes Enlisted play unlike any other WWII shooter — and the one most new players misunderstand.
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The one-sentence version
You bring a squad of roughly three to nine soldiers into the match, you personally play one of them, the rest are AI who follow you and fight on their own, and when your soldier is killed you take over the next one in that squad rather than returning to a spawn screen.
Why that changes how the game feels
In a conventional shooter, dying is a hard stop: you watch a timer, you respawn at a base, you walk back. In Enlisted, dying is usually a seat change. Your squad is still standing where you left it, still holding the angle it was holding, and you resume from inside it.
Three consequences follow, and they are worth internalising early:
- Position is worth more than aim. A squad placed in good cover near the objective keeps applying pressure through several of your own deaths. A squad walked into the open evaporates regardless of how well you shoot.
- Trading badly is expensive. Losing three soldiers to win one duel costs you most of a squad. Experienced players disengage far more readily than new ones.
- Your line-up is a pre-match decision. Which squads you bring, and how each is equipped, is settled before anyone fires a shot.
Building a line-up
You take several squads into a match and switch between them as each is exhausted. A line-up that is all riflemen has no answer to armour; a line-up that is all tanks cannot hold a capture point, because points are taken by infantry standing on them. The general shape most players converge on is: something that holds ground, something that builds, something that answers vehicles, and something that moves.
| Role in the line-up | Why you want it |
|---|---|
| A squad that holds ground | Capture points are taken by bodies standing on them. Riflemen and assaulters do this. |
| An engineer squad | Rally points, cover, ammunition. The most reliable way for a new player to help the team. |
| An anti-tank answer | Armour turns up often enough that having no reply means being pushed off a point. |
| Something mobile | An APC used as a forward spawn, or a motorcycle, changes how fast your team can re-engage. |
Controlling the AI
Your squadmates follow your position by default and engage targets on their own. You can order them to hold a position instead, which matters more than it sounds: a squad told to hold inside a building becomes a garrison that keeps shooting while you push forward with the soldier you are controlling. You can also switch control to any squadmate directly, which is how you get a sniper's scope or a machine gunner's field of fire without waiting to die first.
The AI is competent at holding and shooting and poor at initiative. Treat it as a fire team you are positioning, not as teammates who will solve a problem for you.
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Common misunderstandings
“It's a bot shooter, so the enemies are AI too.”
No. The other squads on the field belong to other human players, each commanding their own AI. You are fighting people who are, like you, one soldier in a squad of their own.
“So one good player carries the whole team.”
Less than in a conventional shooter, because everyone brings a squad and objectives are captured by presence over time rather than by kills. That is a design intention rather than a guarantee, and we would not claim it always works out that way in practice.
“I should keep switching soldiers to stay alive.”
Switching does not heal or reset anything for the squad as a whole; it just moves your control. The squad still dies soldier by soldier. Switching is a positioning tool, not an escape.
Where to go next
- Beginner's guide — the practical first-hours version.
- Soldier classes in the main guide.
- Glossary if a term here was unfamiliar.
Sources for this page are listed in the main guide. Where this page and the game publisher's own current information diverge, the publisher's information prevails. Diagrams are original artwork produced for this site.