The developer explained the whole infantry model in his announcement of 10 February 2026, and the sentence that matters most is short: “The number of remaining soldiers in the squad does not affect the damage they deal.” A squad reduced to its last man puts out the same damage as a full one. He put it more memorably himself: “the fewer people in a squad, the more fiercely they fight.”
He also gave the reason, and it is worth quoting because it explains a lot about this game’s design: “Because they eat a constant amount of the limit, and I don’t wanna more complex system.” A squad occupies its population cost from the moment it exists to the moment it dies. Charging you full supply for half a squad’s output would be a second accounting system, and he declined to build one.
So the soldier figures on screen are a health bar you can read at a glance, and nothing more. “Infantrymen die in strict sequence regarding the number of hp” — the men vanish in a fixed order as the pool drops, which is why a badly hurt squad still looks like it is fighting properly. It is.
## How many men a squad actually has
⭐ Until 5 September 2026 this page could not tell you, and the omission mattered more than it looked. The demo’s files carry one soldier component per man, and counting them gives the roster:
- Mass infantry: 10 - Brutes: 7 - Riflemen: 5 - Mutant gunners: 4 - Assault squad: 3 · Worms: 3 - Spotters: 2 · AT squad: 2 · Crawlers: 2
⚠️ These are counted rather than read from a labelled field, so they needed a second, independent check before publication. The game supplied it: the Spotters are officially described as “a squad of a sniper and a gunner” — two men, and the count gives exactly two. The Mass infantry is described as “a larger formation of lightly armored riflemen and an infantryman with an anti-tank grenade launcher”, and the count gives ten.
## The exception, now with numbers
The exception is the part to internalise. “The exception is when there is a unique soldier in the squad with his own personal weapons, then if he dies, then his weapons no longer work.” Some squads carry one man whose kit is the squad’s actual job, and the order in which he dies is set per squad.
The developer walked through seven cases, and two of them change how you play. In a rocket squad, “The rocket man in the rocket squad is always the last to die, so the unit will not lose its firing function” — that squad keeps its anti-tank punch to the very end. ⭐ And an AT squad is two men, so “last to die” means the whole squad is one casualty away from being one man with a rocket. It still works, and it still costs the same supply.
But put a rocket man inside a large rifle squad and it inverts: “he may die earlier than the unit, and therefore the squad will lose DPS on tanks at a certain HP mark.” ⭐ The Mass infantry is that squad, and it holds ten men — so the grenadier the description names is one man in ten, and the “certain HP mark” where he goes is somewhere in the middle of a long health bar you cannot read for it. The same soldier, the same weapon, and a completely different failure mode depending on who he stands with.
## Spotters: the fragile half
The other case is the spotter. In the gunner squad the sniper “is the main one, therefore he dies last and the unit does not lose the ability to shoot with a sniper rifle” — but the man beside him with the artillery-guidance kit “dies first, therefore, the squad loses the opportunity to direct artillery fire with his death.”
⭐⭐ And here the count changes the advice completely. A Spotters squad is **two men**. The one who dies first is half the squad — so a Spotters unit that has lost any soldier at all has already stopped being a spotter, while still looking like a live unit with a working rifle. There is no partial state to manage and no threshold to learn: the first casualty is the one that matters, and after it you are paying 2 population for a sniper.
## One line worth more than any statistic
“If you need to refill your squad (for some reason). Just heal the unit.” Healing does not merely restore hit points — it brings the men back. There is no separate reinforcement order to look for. ⭐ And the demo gives you plenty of ways to do it: the Mobile support camp restores 20 points every 0.2 seconds to infantry within 5, the Bunker 25 a second within 15, and the TRM the same over a radius of 15.
Every quotation above is taken word for word from the announcement of 10 February 2026, archived in this repository. The squad sizes are counted from the game files of build 23882143.
Values read from game files · version 23882143