WARDOGS: How to Create a Squad

Squads are the backbone of a WARDOGS match. They give you a private voice channel away from proximity chat, they color your teammates gold on the minimap, and they make a 100-player server feel like something you can actually coordinate inside. The catch is that a lot of players go looking for the squad list in the wrong menu.

Quick answer: Press Esc in-match, then click CREATE SQUAD at the top of the squad list. Your new squad appears in the list with you as leader, and you can tap the lock icon to make it invite-only.

Create a squad in WARDOGS (Escape menu steps)

Spawn into a match and press Esc. This is the settings and squad screen, and it is the only place the squad list lives. Tab does something else entirely.

Look at the top of the squad column and click CREATE SQUAD. The game assigns your squad a NATO-style callsign automatically, so you will end up as something like LIMA-1 rather than picking a name yourself.

Squad menu listing squads with the REQUEST TO JOIN button highlighted under Alpha-1 — The squad panel lists every active squad on your faction alongside the create and join controls. Image: Bulkhead

Decide whether the squad stays open. The lock icon next to your squad restricts it to invites only, which keeps random players out of a four-stack that already has a plan. Leave it unlocked if you want the slots filled fast.

Pull your friends in. If they are already on the same faction, they can hit JOIN SQUAD themselves. If the squad is locked, select them from the unassigned players list and send the invite from your side.

Note: pressing Tab opens your inventory and the scoreboard. It is a useful screen, but there is no squad option on it, which is where most of the confusion comes from.

WARDOGS inventory screen with the storage backpack slot highlighted — The Tab screen shows inventory and the scoreboard — no squad controls here. Image: Bulkhead

Join an existing squad or request an invite

You do not have to start your own squad. The same Esc screen lists every squad on your faction — ALPHA-1, BRAVO-1, DELTA-1, ECHO-1 and so on — with a JOIN SQUAD button beside any squad that still has an open slot. One click puts you in.

JOIN SQUAD button highlighted under the BRAVO-1 squad entry in the WARDOGS squad menu — Squads with free slots show a JOIN SQUAD button, like BRAVO-1 here. Image: Bulkhead

Locked squads swap that button for REQUEST TO JOIN. The leader has to approve you, or they can grab your name out of the unassigned players list and invite you directly. If your friend’s squad shows as locked, ask them to do the inviting rather than spamming the request.

What else is on the Escape menu

The squad list shares a screen with most of the match-level controls, which is worth knowing before you click something you did not mean to.

Option	What it does
CREATE SQUAD	Starts a new squad with you as leader
JOIN SQUAD / REQUEST TO JOIN	Enters an open squad, or asks a locked one for entry
LEAVE SQUAD	Drops you back to unassigned
CHANGE TEAM	Switches your faction mid-match, space permitting
LEAVE MATCH / EXIT TO DESKTOP	Ends the session

Fastest way to get friends into the same server and faction

Squads only work within a faction, so the real bottleneck is getting everyone onto the same team on the same server. Staring at the server browser and counting down together works, but there is a quicker route on PC.

Send one person in first. They pick the server from the browser and choose a faction, then wait at HQ.

Have that player press Esc and create the squad immediately, before anyone else queues.

Everyone else opens their Steam friends list, right-clicks that player and joins their game. Done correctly, that drops you into the same server, the same faction and the same squad in one action.

The one thing that breaks this is faction capacity. Each faction carries roughly a third of a 100-player server, so if the team is full when you try to follow someone in, you will land on a different faction and have to use CHANGE TEAM once a slot opens.

How to confirm the squad worked

You do not have to go back into the menu to check. Once you are in a squad, your squadmates turn gold in the world and on the minimap — their arrows are gold rather than the standard team color, and a downed squadmate’s revive icon shows gold instead of green. Everyone else on your faction stays the usual color.

First-person WARDOGS view crossing an industrial yard with the objective marker at 2.8 km — Squad markers and the objective distance sit on the in-match HUD alongside the minimap. Image: Bulkhead

The other tell is voice. WARDOGS runs a local proximity channel and a squad-only channel side by side, so if your callouts are suddenly reaching your friends without broadcasting to whoever is crouched behind the next wall, the squad is live. That separation is most of the reason to bother in the first place — anything sensitive, like a rotation or a flank, belongs in squad chat rather than in the open.

If a squad never forms, it is almost always one of three things: you are on the Tab screen instead of the Escape screen, the squad you are trying to join is locked and needs an invite, or your friend is sitting on a different faction. Fix the faction first, then the menu, and the rest takes about ten seconds.