Explainer

How big should a squad be

Squad size looks like a detail of the fiction. It is the single decision that most shapes what a tactics game feels like to play, and the genre has quietly been shrinking it for thirty years.

In X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) the transport that takes your soldiers to a mission, the Skyranger, holds fourteen of them. You can fill it.

In XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, 2012), the remake of that same game, you take four soldiers, and the most you can ever take, after upgrading the facility that allows it, is six.

Same series, same premise, eighteen years apart, and the squad lost two thirds of its size. That decision was not about realism. It is the clearest statement anyone has made about what this genre learned in between.

What each size actually buys

The number is a budget, and what you are spending it on is the player's attention.

One or two. Not a squad. A hero with support, which is a different genre with different rules, and usually a stealth game.
Three. Every unit has to be unique, because there is no redundancy and no spare. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) runs on three mechs and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies, 2018) fields three. A loss at this size is catastrophic, which means the game cannot casually kill anyone.
Four to six. The working range of the genre. Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) uses four. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998), Fallout Tactics (Micro Forte, 2001), Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) and upgraded XCOM all land on six. The player can hold all of them in their head at once, and the squad can split in two and still function.
Eight to fourteen. The old way. You get attrition, redundancy, and a scouting economy where the rookie goes first because the rookie is replaceable. The cost is that a turn takes a long time and the individuals start to blur into a formation.
Twenty or more. No longer tactics. Attention per unit has fallen so low that you are commanding groups, which is a real-time strategy game or a wargame with a different set of pleasures.

Why six keeps winning

Six survives because it sits on several limits at once, and they all happen to agree.

It is about as many portraits as fit across the bottom of a screen without shrinking, which sounds trivial and is not: a unit you cannot see on the interface is a unit you forget to use. It is about as many names as a player will learn without effort. It is enough to carry specialists, so a medic, a sniper and a demolitions expert can exist without any of them being the only one who matters. And it divides neatly into two groups of three, which is the smallest number that makes coordination interesting rather than just fiddly.

Below six the roles collapse into each other. Above six the turn gets long and the player starts moving people in blocks, which is the exact moment the game stops being about individuals.

What the big squad gave up

Shrinking it was not a free improvement, and the genre has been quietly paying for it ever since.

The expendable rookie is gone. Fourteen soldiers made a cheap one worth having, and a cheap one made scouting possible: you send someone ahead to find out what is in the dark, and sometimes that is what they are for. With four, there is no spare, so there is no scouting, so the game has to tell you where the enemy is by other means.

Permanent loss changed character too. When any one of four soldiers dying is a disaster, a death stops being attrition and becomes a reason to reload. The small-squad design made every soldier precious and, by doing so, made the save file far more tempting. The old games could absorb a loss without the player wanting the last ten minutes back.

Real time changes the question

All of the above assumes turns. When the clock runs, the limit is not how long a turn takes, it is how many people a player can re-task in one pause and how much goes wrong while they are doing it.

That ceiling is lower than people expect, which is why Commandos kept to six men and gave each of them a job nobody else could do. The number of units you can meaningfully command in real time is roughly the number of distinct jobs you can keep in mind, and once two units do the same thing, one of them is effectively on autopilot.

Where this leaves RAD Tactics

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished, including this number.

What the history is useful for is knowing what the choice costs. A small squad buys attachment and pays in scouting and attrition. A large one buys both of those back and pays in attention. There is no size that gets everything, and a studio that has not worked out which bill it is paying has not made the decision yet.