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Enlisted for beginners: what to do in your first hour

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The tutorial teaches you which button throws a grenade. It does not teach you that you are commanding a squad, that your squads are finite, or that the quiet player building a hut behind a wall is doing more for the team than you are. Here is the hour nobody walks you through.

The one-paragraph version

Take an engineer squad. Build a rally point behind cover near the objective before you need it. Move with your AI soldiers instead of sprinting ahead of them. Expect to lose soldiers — that is normal and cheap. Do not expect to lose whole squads — that is what actually loses rounds.

Before you queue

Two settings are worth finding before your first match rather than during it: your squad order (which squad deploys first) and your control scheme for issuing orders to AI soldiers. You will use both constantly, and hunting for them mid-round is how the round gets away from you.

If you are on PC, expect to create or link a publisher account even if you installed through Steam. Progression lives on that account.

One thing to decide before you sink time in: progress does not transfer between platforms. Cross-play works, so you can play with friends elsewhere, but if you start on console and later move to PC you start again. Pick the platform you actually intend to keep playing on.

Building a first lineup

Diagram: a grid of twelve squad types available in Enlisted, including riflemen, assaulters, engineers, snipers, machine gunners, anti-tank, mortars, flamethrowers, radio operators, tank crews, aircraft crews and paratroopers, with a note that availability depends on faction and battle rating.
Original diagram. Your lineup is a set of these, not a loadout. A first lineup wants breadth, not a favourite.

A lineup is the set of squads you bring into a match and deploy one after another. A reasonable first lineup is boring on purpose:

Snipers are the classic new-player trap: a small squad, a slow weapon, and no contribution to the capture. Take one later, when you want one rather than because it looks cool.

Your first match, minute by minute

Diagram: one human player controls a squad. One soldier is directly controlled, the others are run by the game's AI. When the controlled soldier is killed, control passes to the next soldier in the same squad; a new squad is deployed only when the whole squad is lost.
Original diagram. The cycle that governs your first match. Deaths pass control to the next soldier; only losing the whole squad puts you back at the deploy screen.
  1. Find out which side you are on. Attacker or defender changes everything — see game modes. Attackers must move; defenders can afford not to.
  2. Deploy your engineer and look for a wall. You want somewhere near the objective, out of line of sight from it, and not on the obvious path. Build there.
  3. Order your squad before you move. AI soldiers left on default behaviour will follow you into the open. Telling them to hold a position covers an approach for free.
  4. Walk onto the point with your squad, not ahead of it. The soldiers behind you are your next four lives. Sprinting ahead spends them for nothing.
  5. When you die, keep going. Control passes to the next soldier. There is no queue. The instinct to stop and wait is the single most common new-player reflex and there is nothing to wait for.
  6. When the squad is spent, change squad. The deploy screen is a decision, not a formality — pick the squad the objective needs now, not the next one in the list.
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Five mistakes that cost whole squads

Common early mistakes and what to do instead.
MistakeWhat it costsDo this instead
Sprinting ahead of your AI soldiersYou die first and your squad arrives one at a time, into a fight they loseMove at squad pace; let them arrive with you
Building the rally point in the openThe build is wasted and you have told the enemy where you deployBuild behind cover, off the obvious approach
Killing defenders but never standing on the pointThe round clock runs out and the capture never progressesGet a body inside the zone, then fight
Ignoring an enemy tankOne vehicle stalls an entire attackCarry an anti-tank answer, or make sure somebody does
Treating a death as a round-ending eventYou stop playing for no reasonCarry on as the next soldier immediately

Battle rating discipline

Diagram: on the left, a ladder of battle rating bands from early equipment at the bottom to late-war equipment at the top, with matchmaking pairing players in the same band. On the right, a four-step loop: play a match, earn progress, unlock squads and gear, battle rating rises.
Original diagram. Unlocking better equipment raises your battle rating, which raises the standard of your opponents. Progress is not the same as easier games.

Since the late-2023 relaunch, the campaigns are merged into four countries — the USA, Germany, the USSR and Japan — and progression runs through branching research trees, so you pick what to unlock. The matchmaker looks at the rating of the equipment your active squads carry and tries to put you with players carrying equipment of similar rating.

New players often assume that unlocking better gear will make matches easier. It does the opposite: it moves you up to face people with equally good gear, who have usually played longer.

There is nothing wrong with deliberately keeping a lower-rated lineup while you learn. A lot of experienced players stay low on purpose because they prefer the matches. Just be aware that mixing one very advanced squad into an otherwise early lineup can pull your whole lineup up a band.

Where to go next

What this page does not claim. No timings, no capture durations, no build costs, no squad-size numbers, no battle-rating numbers and no prices. Those change between updates, and a confidently wrong number is worse than an honest gap. In case of divergence, the publisher’s own information prevails.

Published 21 September 2026 by William Cooper for BRIGÁDA 972 s.r.o.. Diagrams are original work. zlatina.online is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Darkflow Software or Gaijin Entertainment. Report an error.