Squads

A pile of trained units sitting in your colony is not an army yet. To do anything on the map, your units have to be organised into squads. A squad is a named group of units with a position and a carrying limit, and it is the only thing in the game that actually moves and fights.

What a squad is

Think of a squad as a container you fill with units and then point at the map. Every squad has two defining properties:

• A position. A squad is always somewhere: parked at your colony, sitting on an outpost, or in transit between two points. Where a squad is determines what it can defend and what it can reach.
• A storage capacity. A squad can only hold so many units. On the Classic ruleset that limit is 30 storage, and different chassis take up different amounts of that space.

You can create more than one squad. Splitting your army into several squads lets you defend home while striking elsewhere, or send waves instead of one all-or-nothing stack.

Filling a squad

Each chassis has a storage cost: Infantry take 1, Vehicles take 2, and Tanks take 3. With 30 storage to spend, a full single-chassis squad is one of:

• 30 Infantry
• 15 Vehicles
• 10 Tanks

Mixed squads are not only allowed, they are usually smarter. Any combination works as long as the storage adds up to 30 or less. A squad of 10 Infantry, 5 Vehicles, and 5 Tanks fills exactly 30 storage and carries three weapon and armor profiles into one fight, which is far harder for an enemy to hard-counter than a pure stack.

Why squads matter

The squad is the unit of action in Realm Conquest. Two rules make this concrete:

• Loose units defend but cannot move. Units that are not assigned to any squad still fight to defend your colony if it is attacked, but they cannot leave it. They contribute nothing offensive and cannot garrison an outpost.
• Only squads travel and fight abroad. Every attack, every outpost capture, every reinforcement to an ally goes out as a squad. If it is not in a squad, it stays home.

So the moment you want to do anything beyond passive home defence, you assign units into a squad and send the squad. Composition matters here too: because a battle resolves against the whole squad at once, the mix of chassis, weapons, and upgrade focuses you load decides how the fight goes before the squad even arrives.

See also

Start with the Military Overview for how squads fit the recruit-move-fight loop, read Movement and Travel for how a squad gets from one place to another, and see Combat for what happens when a squad reaches a hostile target.