How to Install Squad 44 (Post Scriptum) and Join a Server

The most important vehicle in Squad 44 is a lorry. Not a tank — a lorry, full of building supplies, being driven very slowly along a road by somebody who volunteered to spend eight minutes of a ninety-minute match doing haulage.

Without that lorry the team has no forward base. Without a forward base, everyone respawns at the map edge and walks for four minutes to reach a fight that will be over when they arrive. The person driving it will finish the round with two kills and will have contributed more than anyone on the scoreboard.

That is the game. It was called Post Scriptum when it launched, it was renamed Squad 44, and it takes the engine and the design language of Squad and points them at the Second World War. Listings collect on the Squad 44 hub.

What you are signing up for

This is a large-scale infantry game with vehicles, run in two teams built out of small squads, on maps measured in square kilometres. A round runs somewhere around an hour and a half. Your personal kill count for that round will be single digits and that is normal.

The things it does not have are as defining as the things it does.

No enemy markers. Nothing on your screen tells you where the other team is. There is no killcam, no hit indicator that reveals a direction, no red dots. If you want to know where the enemy is, someone has to look and then say so out loud.

No respawn where you fell. You come back at a rally point your squad leader placed, or at a forward base your team built, or at the main base which is a long way away. Losing your team's forward positions is how a round is actually lost.

Voice is the interface. Local voice reaches people near you. Squad voice reaches your eight or nine squadmates. Command voice connects squad leaders to each other. Nearly everything useful in the game happens on one of those three channels, and a player with no microphone is playing a substantially smaller game.

Weapons behave like weapons. Bolt-action rifles, no crosshair on many of them, real bullet drop. Armour that penetrates or does not, depending on where you hit it and what you fired.

The theatres

The game's original content was built around Operation Market Garden — British airborne forces and German defenders, the bridges, the Dutch farmland, the specific and unglamorous business of a plan going wrong. Later content moved to Normandy and beyond, adding factions and a different flavour of fighting.

Maps are built from real places rather than from arena design principles, which means they contain long stretches where nothing happens and a handful of places where everything does. Learning which is which is most of what improving at this game consists of.

Roles, and the ones nobody wants

Squads are built from limited roles, and a squad that picks badly is a squad that cannot function.

Squad leader is the job the game is designed around. They place rally points, request supplies, build the forward bases, and talk to the other squad leaders. A squad with a leader who does none of that is nine people wandering. A squad with a good one is a unit.

It is also the role that new players avoid, understandably, and that servers most often have rules about — many require a working microphone before you may lead.

Medic keeps people upright, and in a game where reaching the fight takes four minutes, keeping someone alive is worth several kills.

Rifleman carries the ammunition everyone else runs out of. Unglamorous and constantly needed.

Anti-tank exists because armour exists, and a team without it loses to a single well-crewed tank.

Crew roles operate the vehicles. A tank is not a one-person weapon here — it wants a driver and a gunner who talk to each other, and a lone tanker is a slow-moving present for the other team.

Logistics is not a role so much as a job somebody has to take. It is the lorry.

Getting the game

Squad 44 is on Steam. What it costs, and whether it costs anything at all, has changed during its life — the game has been repositioned since launch and I am not going to give you a price that may be wrong by the time you read this. Check the store page.

It is a large download and it runs on Unreal, so expect the first launch to spend a while on shaders.New to Steam? Our Steam guide covers the account and the settings worth changing on day one.

Before your first match, do two things. Set your voice input and test it, because you will need it within five minutes. And spend a moment in the settings on audio rather than graphics — hearing where a shot came from is more useful in this game than seeing anything at all.

Finding a server, and why it matters more here

Squad 44 uses an in-game server browser. There is no matchmaking, and the server you pick determines the quality of your evening far more than in a game with round-based matchmaking, because you are committing to ninety minutes with the same hundred people.

What to filter and read:

Region first. A round is long and a bad ping is a long time to live with. Where a server is hosted covers why this matters more than raw distance suggests.

Player count, carefully. A near-full server is a live round. A server at a low count may be seeding, which is a specific and important thing — see below.

The server's name and rules. Communities running these servers enforce rules that shape the whole experience: whether squads must be led by someone with a microphone, whether solo squads are allowed, whether asset-claiming for vehicles is enforced, how seeding is conducted. These are not decoration. Getting removed for a rule you did not read is the most common bad first experience in this genre.

Whether there is a community attached. A server with a Discord and named administrators behaves differently from an unattended box. What makes a server listing trustworthy goes through the signals worth looking for.

Seeding, explained

This is the part that confuses everyone new to the genre, and it is the mechanism that keeps large-player-count games alive.

A server with twelve people on it cannot play a real round — the maps are too big. So communities run a seeding ruleset instead: a small map, an agreed set of restrictions, and an understanding that everyone is there to fill the server rather than to win. Rules during seeding are strict and specific, often to the point of naming which capture points may be attacked.

When the count reaches a threshold, the server switches to a real map and the actual game begins.

If you join a low-population server and find people fighting in a peculiar, restricted way, you have joined a seed. Read the rules message, follow it, and stay — twenty minutes later you will be in a full round. Seeders are how these servers exist at all, and communities notice who turns up early.

Joining a specific server

The browser is the mechanism. Find the server, join, and if it is full you will be placed in a queue that moves — leaving and rejoining puts you at the back, so do not.

Favourite the servers you like. This is a game where you are effectively choosing a community rather than a match, and the value compounds: the same squad leaders, the same admins, the same standards every evening. A short favourites list checked at the times you actually play is worth more than the entire browser.

Where a community publishes a direct address for their server, use the whole thing including the port. Hosts running several servers on one machine give each a different one, and an address without a port is the standard reason a direct join does nothing.

Armour is not a power-up

Tanks in this game are not the thing you unlock for doing well. They are a separate discipline with its own crew, and joining one uninvited is the fastest way to be told off by strangers.

A tank wants a driver and a gunner at minimum, and they need to be talking constantly, because the driver cannot see what the gunner is aiming at and the gunner cannot see what the driver is about to reverse into. A vehicle crewed by one person is slow and blind, and about to be destroyed by an infantryman with a launcher who got within thirty metres.

Armour also behaves like armour. Where you hit a tank matters, and so does the angle, and so does what you loaded. A shot that would kill from the side does nothing from the front. Learning which of your rounds is for vehicles and which is for everything else is the first thing a new crew gets wrong.

The counter-argument to armour is rarely another tank. It is an infantry team that spots it early, tells everyone, and gets someone with a launcher into a hedgerow beside the road it has to use. That is a plan requiring four people to talk to each other, which is the whole game in miniature.

Your first three rounds

Join a squad immediately. Do not play solo. The game gives you almost nothing on your own and squadmates will tell you where to go.

Say hello and say you are new. This community is unusually good about it. Most squad leaders would rather have a new player who follows instructions than a veteran who does not.

Follow your squad leader physically. Not roughly, not eventually — stay with them. Wandering off is how you die alone in a field a long way from anything.

Do not lead on your first night. Learn what a good one does first.

Expect to be bored occasionally. The quiet stretches are the price of the loud ones, and the game is honest about that trade from the first minute.

Problems

No servers in the browser. Clear the filters completely and refresh. Filter state persists between sessions.

Kicked shortly after joining. Almost always a server rule — no microphone as a squad leader, a role you claimed that was reserved, or joining a seed and playing it as a normal round. The kick message says which.

Poor performance. Large maps with a hundred players are demanding, and the settings that matter are view distance and shadows rather than texture quality.

You cannot hear anyone. Voice device settings. Check them in the game rather than assuming your operating system default is what the game picked.

The neighbours

Squad is the modern-setting original and the larger game by a distance. Everything you learn here transfers, and its server culture is the same one.

Hell Let Loose is the direct competitor for WWII at this scale, with a different structure and a considerably larger population — if the number of people online matters most to you, that is the honest recommendation. Beyond the Wire took the same engine to the First World War.

Further out, Red Orchestra 2 and Rising Storm 2 are the previous generation of this idea and both still have devoted communities, and ARMA 3 is where you go when even this is not enough simulation for you.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Squad 44 (Post Scriptum) servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.