How infantry follow orders in Defilade

One medic can finish a stretcher team's job in Defilade. If the other medic is killed, the survivor puts the stretcher down and drags the wounded soldier away. Watch the tanks and you could miss the whole thing. RBGames' modern warfare strategy game is full of these small decisions that soldiers make for themselves, even as you decide where to put the base and which ground to take.

Defilade is an isometric real-time strategy game with base building, supply lines and battlefields you can blow apart. The Steam demo is scheduled for 1 December, followed by PC Early Access on 15 December 2026. Steam lists Windows and macOS, with solo play and both co-op and competitive multiplayer online or over LAN. The detail to look for in December is what happens between giving an order and seeing your troops arrive.

How a squad crosses open ground

You can build your own squads and recall them with the number keys. When a squad pushes into a fight, it can split into two fire teams. One fires to keep the enemy occupied while the other moves up. An automatic formation option lets the squad choose a formation to suit the ground ahead. You still pick the destination and can set waypoints along the route. Attack Move and Secure Area give you different orders for a push and a position you want kept under control.

The kind of cover a soldier reaches shapes what they can do. Infantry can go prone, vault a low obstacle or fire blind around a corner. Trees can do the job too, even after they've fallen. A soldier out in the open can dive as a first-person-view drone comes in. You can see where the squad is headed from the wide view. Zoom in and individual soldiers can be doing different jobs on the same stretch of ground, moving between the objects available to them.

You can make some of that cover yourself. Draw a trench and infantry can fight from the wall or around its bends. Add a machine gun at the edge or build a bunker into the line. Barbed wire slows infantry, tank traps obstruct armour and camouflage nets hide troops from drones. A dug-in tank can keep its turret exposed while sheltering the hull. You can drag to set the direction the tank faces, a useful option when you want the gun covering an approach as your infantry move.

Getting people out

A squad can reach its destination with wounded soldiers. A leg wound can leave a soldier limping until they bandage it, and a revived soldier can limp for a while after getting back up. Medics can lift the wounded out of trenches. There's also a rope rescue for when a conventional rescue fails. A soldier can throw a line from cover and pull the casualty in, which gives the rescue its own reason to pay attention to the nearest wall or ditch.

A knocked-out vehicle can leave you with troops on foot. Crews who bail out of a tank stay with you as soldiers. Infantry can surrender, and prisoners can give up current intelligence when interrogated. You can free your own captured men, too. The outcomes of a skirmish can leave you with people to recover or information to act on, even after the firing has stopped.

What the other commander knows

The opposing AI commander works with the information its troops have gathered. It scouts before committing its force, can withdraw from a losing fight and can return from another direction. It remembers where it has lost soldiers and can adapt to the army you've assembled. Your scouting will have a practical purpose, too. The enemy guards its own trucks and raids yours, so an encounter behind the main line could tell you as much about where to send your next squad as the fight at the front.

RBGames has made manpower finite, giving capture points a role in sustaining your army. On its snow map those points include a village square, a farm and a trench strongpoint, three places with different ground to work with. If you like the idea of healing a squad by fighting for supplies, there's a related decision in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV, where holding supply points can help your team through the next wave. In Defilade, the supply trucks themselves are targets.

There's plenty of hardware to watch, from Apache helicopters to B-52 bombing runs. The closer view is the one that gives Defilade its character. In the demo, try following an infantry squad through one firefight. How far can it get on a single order, and where would you step in? Those are useful things to find out before you take on a whole battlefield and have to decide which squad gets your attention.