How to Install Squad and Join a Server

The most important player in a Squad match is usually driving a truck.

Not shooting anybody. Driving a truck full of building materials from the main base to a patch of ground behind a hill, where a squad leader has put down a radio and is waiting for enough supplies to build somewhere for the team to spawn. If that truck arrives, the front line moves forward. If it does not, a hundred people spend the next fifteen minutes walking.

Squad is a hundred-player military shooter where logistics beats marksmanship, and understanding that before your first match will save you from the experience most new players have, which is dying repeatedly at the far end of a very long walk. Listings gather on the Squad hub.

The shape of a match

Fifty against fifty on maps measured in kilometres, fighting over a chain of capture points.

The points are taken in sequence — you cannot skip to the last one — so the match is a line that moves. Around that, the two teams are trying to solve the same problem: how to get people to the fighting without walking, and how to stop the other side doing the same.

Most game modes are variations on that. One randomises the order of the capture points each match, so the same map plays differently and nobody can rely on memorised positions. Another makes the fight asymmetric, with one side attacking a fixed set of objectives and the other holding. A third replaces capture points with hidden caches that the attacking side has to find and destroy, which turns the whole thing into a search problem.

Underneath all of them, the same truth holds. The team that controls where it can spawn controls the match.

Spawns are the resource

Two things let your team get back into the fight quickly, and both have to be created by players.

Rally points are the small ones. A squad leader places one, and that squad can spawn on it. They are limited, they are consumed, and they vanish if the enemy gets close. Placing a rally point at the right moment before an assault is the difference between an attack that continues after the first wave dies and one that ends there.

Forward bases are the real ones. A squad leader places a radio, a logistics truck brings construction supplies to it, and somebody builds a spawn point. Once it exists, the whole team can use it. Once the enemy finds it, they will dig it up.

That last part is why the good squads spend a lot of the match doing things that do not look like fighting. Driving supplies. Building fortifications. Walking a long way round to remove an enemy base that nobody else has noticed. A squad that never appears on the scoreboard and destroys three enemy spawn points has done more than the squad at the top of it.

Ammunition works the same way: a base runs out, and something has to drive more to it.

The kits, and which to take

Squads hold up to nine, and the kits available depend on how full the squad is — a squad of two cannot claim all the specialist equipment.

Squad leader is the role the game is built around. You get the tools that place spawns, and you get a radio channel to every other squad leader and to the commander. Nobody wants this job and the match is decided by whether somebody takes it.

The honest pitch for taking it: you do not need to be good at shooting. You need to say where your squad is going and listen to what the other leaders say. That is it. A squad leader who marks a target on the map and says "we are taking the north compound" is contributing more than the best rifleman on the server.

Rifleman is where to start, and it is not a filler role — riflemen carry ammunition that resupplies everybody else's specialist equipment.

Medic revives, and reviving is fast enough to matter mid-firefight. A squad without one bleeds out slowly across a match.

Crewman is required to operate armoured vehicles. A tank sitting in the main base because nobody took the kit is a common and painful sight. Similarly, helicopters need a pilot kit, and flying one badly wastes a substantial asset and several passengers.

Anti-tank, machine gunner, marksman and combat engineer are limited-availability kits that exist to solve specific problems. Take one when your squad needs it, not because it sounds appealing.

Talking is the mechanic

Squad has a squad channel, a leaders' channel and proximity voice, and the game does not work without them.

This is not an exaggeration or a preference. Without a squad leader on the leaders' channel, two squads will attack the same point and leave another undefended. Without squad voice, nobody knows where the fire is coming from. A silent player in a nine-person squad is functionally absent.

If you have no microphone, most well-run servers will not let you lead and some will not let you play at all. That policy is in the server rules and it is enforced.

Getting it

Squad is a paid game on Steam. Install it from your Library and expect a large download.

Hardware matters. The maps are enormous, the view distances are long, and there are a hundred players. The setting to protect is your ability to resolve a person at distance — dropping quality until infantry stop rendering properly saves frames and loses you the game.New to Steam? Our Steam guide covers the account and the settings worth changing on day one.

Run the tutorial. Then join a server as a rifleman in somebody else's squad, and spend an entire match doing what they say. Not leading, not taking a vehicle, not going off alone. One match of following instructions teaches more than five of experimenting.

Choosing a server

The in-game browser lists servers with region, population, current map and name, and you join from inside it.

What to read:

Region. Play near home. This is a game of long-range engagements and the difference distance makes is not subtle.

Whether it is licensed. Some servers operate under formal agreements with the developers that come with rules about administration and behaviour, and those tend to be the well-run ones with active admins. The listing will usually say.

The rules in the name and description. Common ones: microphone required for squad leaders, no one-person squads, no claiming a vehicle without the crew for it, restrictions during low population. These are enforced and being removed for breaking one is routine.

Seeding status. A server filling up from near-empty operates under a temporary agreement — fight only around one specified point, no vehicles, no heavy weapons — so that the small game stays playable until it becomes a real one. Ignoring seeding rules is the fastest way to get banned from a server you have just found.

Our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy covers spotting an actual community behind a listing, and how many slots a server should have explains why a hundred-player game has a much narrower usable range than you would think.

Listings collect on the Squad server list, queried directly rather than trusting a server's own claims.

Modded servers

Some servers run community modifications — additional factions, additional maps, altered rulesets. The game handles fetching what your client is missing, and the first join to one takes longer as a result.

Let it do that rather than assembling mod folders by hand. A client that almost matches the server is worse than one that does not match at all, because the failure is stranger.

The maps have shapes worth knowing

Rotations are built from a pool that ranges enormously in character, and the map decides what kind of match you are about to have.

The big ones — open ground measured in kilometres, with armour and helicopters — are where the logistics game is most obvious and where a bad first ten minutes costs you the match. Vehicles dominate, infantry need transport, and a squad on foot in the open is a target.

The small ones are close-quarters urban fighting where a tank is a liability in a narrow street and the whole match happens inside a few hundred metres. Hilly, forested maps sit between the two and turn into a fight over a handful of chokepoints.

Nothing you learn on one transfers cleanly to another, which is why the regulars on a server know the rotation and you do not.

Your first three matches

Set a low bar and clear it. That is genuinely the fastest route into this game.

Match one: say nothing and follow. Join an existing squad as a rifleman and stay within sight of your squad leader for the entire match. You will die. You will also see how a forward base gets built, what a logistics run looks like, and why everybody suddenly moved.

Match two: answer. Respond when your squad leader asks something. Report what you see. Resupply somebody with your ammunition bag. You are now doing the job.

Match three: pick a specialism. Take the medic kit, or ask to drive the logistics truck, or take the crewman seat with somebody who knows what they are doing. Choose one thing and be the person who does it.

What you should not do is create your own squad on your first evening. An empty squad led by a new player takes eight slots away from the team and produces nothing, and the admins on a well-run server will say so.

Problems

You spawned a kilometre from anything. Your team has no forward base near the fighting. Join a squad that is doing something about it rather than walking.

A squad leader removed you. Almost always no microphone, or taking a kit the squad needed for something else.

You cannot use the tank. You need the crewman kit, and the squad has to have enough people in it to unlock one.

Frame rate is poor. Expected in large fights. Reduce effects and shadows, not view distance.

Everything feels slow and nothing is happening. Give it a full match. Squad's pace is genuinely part of the design and the payoff is the twenty seconds where it is not slow at all.

The neighbours

Hell Let Loose is the closest comparison — the same fifty-a-side organisation applied to the Second World War, with a different balance between infantry and armour and a more rigid sector system. Squad 44 is the same lineage as this game taken back to that war, and the argument about which of the three does it best has been running for years.

Beyond the Wire applies the formula to the First World War. Arma 3 and Arma Reforger go further into simulation and further from a shooter, with communities running scheduled operations rather than continuous matches.

If the appeal is scale and coordination but the pace is too slow, Insurgency: Sandstorm keeps the lethality and drops the logistics entirely.

And if you end up running a server, our piece on why nobody joins your server is about the seeding problem from the other side — which in a game that needs eighty people before it is any good at all is most of the job.

<!-- joingg-footer -->

---

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 servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.