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Enlisted beginner's guide: your first hours

What to do, in what order, and what to ignore until you know whether the game suits you.

By Elizabeth Martin, responsible editor · Published 23 September 2026 · Last reviewed 23 September 2026 · Editorial policy

Enlisted does a poor job of explaining its own structure to a new player. This page is the short version of what we wish someone had told us: five decisions that matter, and the common mistakes that follow from not knowing about them.

1. Choose one nation and stay with it

Progress in Enlisted belongs to a nation — USA, Germany, USSR or Japan — not to a campaign or a map. Research, squads and equipment all sit inside one national tree. Spreading your first twenty hours across all four leaves you with four shallow, under-equipped line-ups instead of one that works.

Pick on whichever basis you like — the weapons, the fronts, the aesthetics — and commit. You can always start a second nation later, and by then you will know what you are doing.

2. Research an engineer squad early

Engineers build rally points, cover, ammunition boxes and anti-tank obstacles. A forward rally point is the difference between your team re-entering the fight in ten seconds and re-entering it in sixty. It is also the single most useful thing a player with unremarkable aim can contribute, which is exactly the position most new players are in.

Build rally points behind cover rather than as close to the objective as physically possible. A rally point the enemy can see is a rally point that is about to be destroyed, and it takes your team's reinforcements with it.

3. Play the objective, not the scoreboard

Time spent on the capture point earns more than roaming for kills, and it is also the only thing that wins the match. Attackers draw from a shared pool of reinforcement tickets; defenders win by draining it. Every soldier you throw away flanking for a kill you did not need is a ticket your team does not get back.

If you do only one thing differently after reading this page, make it this one.

4. Do not buy anything in your first week

Nothing in Enlisted is locked behind a paywall in the sense of being unreachable by playing. Gold, premium squads and a premium account buy speed and cosmetics, not access. Find out whether the loop suits you before you spend, and be aware that progression rates are the most frequently rebalanced part of the game — what feels slow this month may not next month.

5. Expect the matchmaker to notice what you bring

Matchmaking weighs the strength of the equipment players bring. Rushing up a research tree does not simply make matches easier; it tends to put you in front of better-equipped opposition. Progress because you want the toys, not because you expect an easier ride.

Mistakes we see most often

The one mechanic to understand before anything else

If you read nothing else, read the squad system page. Almost every piece of advice above is a consequence of how squads work, and the game never really explains it.

Sources for the factual claims on this page are listed in the main guide. Balance, progression speed and pricing change between updates; where this page and the game publisher's own current information diverge, the publisher's information prevails.