Menace: Squad Leaders Guide

When I first booted up Menace, I assumed it was mostly about the obvious stuff: turn based battles like X-Com. And while all of that is mostly true, it didn’t take long to realize that the most important decisions in the game aren’t made on the battlefield at all. They happen between missions, in menus, while staring at character portraits and stat screens.

Squad leaders sit at the core of Menace. They quietly shape how every operation plays out, how flexible your army feels, and how your campaign evolves. These aren’t disposable units. In this guide, we cover all the mechanics of the Squad Leaders system and a list of all available Squad Leaders in early access.

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At first glance, the game looks like a genre blend — a little XCOM here, a dash of Warhammer 40K grit there;  with flashy mechs and armored vehicles stealing the spotlight. But after a few ops, you realize the real weight of your decisions isn’t in how powerful your weapons are, but who commands them.

In Menace, every squad leader is a named, fully voiced character with a backstory and personality. These folks aren’t interchangeable avatars. They have traits, aspirations, and sometimes outright quirks that make them feel like actual people. Their morale, their performance, and even the way they relate to other leaders influence how your force behaves on and off the battlefield.

What’s more, losing a leader isn’t just a numbers problem. It’s narrative weight. Menace uses permadeath, so if all the troops under a leader die, that leader falls too, and they’re gone for good. That makes every mission feel tense, meaningful, and personal.

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Basics

Every squad in Menace revolves around a single squad leader. They aren’t just a name at the top of the unit card. Their attributes directly define how the entire squad behaves in combat, what equipment they can make good use of, and how expensive they are to deploy.

At the start of a campaign, your squads are fairly barebones. Standard TCR equipment, limited weapon choices, and very few customization options. As you complete operations, loot missions, and interact with black market vendors, that changes fast. The leader you assign determines how well your squad can actually take advantage of all that new gear.

Some leaders naturally excel with mobility and aggressive play. Others are clearly built to anchor a position, suppress enemies, or survive prolonged engagements. The game doesn’t spell this out for you. You have to read the stats and understand what they translate into on the battlefield.

Squad Leaders (or SLs) come in two main types and three tiers: Infantry and Pilot, and 1- to 3-star ratings.Infantry SLs are your frontline commanders. They lead squads of up to eight soldiers and do most of the on-the-ground fighting. Pilots are all about vehicles. They’re the ones driving everything from light transports and jeeps to mechs and heavy tanks.

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Battle Modifiers

The first layer of squad leader stats are the ones that actively apply during missions. These are often overlooked early, but they’re constantly at work once combat starts.

Armor represents how well the squad resists incoming damage. For infantry leaders, this is influenced by equipped armor. For pilot leaders, it’s tied directly to the vehicle they’re commanding.

Detection determines how effectively a squad can spot enemies within their line of sight. A low detection value means ambushes happen more often than you’d like.

Concealment works in the opposite direction. The higher it is, the harder it is for enemies to notice your squad in the first place.

Vision defines how many tiles outward a squad leader can see. This becomes critical on larger maps or in low-visibility conditions.

These modifiers are primarily improved through better armor and specific squad leader perks. You don’t usually increase them directly, but you feel the difference immediately when they change.

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Star Ratings

More stars usually means a stronger Squad Leader, but that doesn’t automatically mean they’re always the right pick.

Without getting too deep into raw stats, there are two numbers that matter a lot here:

• Supply Cost – how much it costs to deploy the SL into a mission before you even add gear
• Promotion Tax – how much extra supply gets added every time you promote them

Take Darby and Carda as an example. Darby’s clearly the stronger leader on paper, but she costs a hefty 40 more supply to bring into a mission. And while a 3-star SL ramps up in power fast, a 1-star can often take three promotions for roughly the same supply cost as a single promotion on a 3-star.

That’s really the core tradeoff the game is pushing. Power versus efficiency. Over time, you’ll naturally start deciding when it’s worth deploying an elite, high-cost squad and when it makes more sense to rely on cheaper leaders who still get the job done.

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Squad Leaders vs Pilots: Two Very Different Roles

One of the first things the game expects you to understand, is the difference between pilots and squad leaders.

There are around 16 squad leaders available in early access, with more planned for the full release, meaning no two campaigns will feel the same.

Pilots are permanently tied to vehicles or walkers. You cannot deploy a pilot without a vehicle, and if that vehicle is destroyed, the pilot is immediately downed along with it. There is no fallback option.

Squad leaders work differently. They command infantry squads made up of up to eight soldiers, referred to as squaddies. These squaddies act as a shared health and damage pool for the unit. As the squad takes damage, individual soldiers are killed, but the leader remains active until every single squaddie is gone. Only once the squad is completely wiped out does the squad leader get downed.

This makes infantry leaders surprisingly durable over the course of a mission, even if their individual stats don’t look impressive at first glance.

You’ll start most campaigns with a handful of leaders — Marines fresh off deployment — but the game also lets you recruit locals, mercenaries, and sometimes even rival faction commanders as you expand your influence in the Wayback system.

What you don’t get is cosmetic customization — leaders come as they are, and you can’t rename them. That’s intentional: part of the game’s narrative design is anchoring you to the people you lead, not the gear they wear.

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Choosing Your Starting Leaders

At the beginning of a new campaign, you get four characters to start with. Pilots are marked with a small tank icon, while infantry squad leaders use a human silhouette.

For a first run pick whoever you like. The leaders you skip at the start aren’t lost forever. You’ll have opportunities to recruit additional pilots and squad leaders later in the campaign, which takes some pressure off that initial selection.

For a clean, stress-free start, go with 3 Infantry SLs and 1 Pilot. Grabbing two pilots early usually isn’t worth it since you won’t have a second vehicle for a while anyway. It’s way easier to recruit another pilot later when you actually need one.

When you’re picking Squad Leaders, keep an eye on their star rating. More stars usually means more power, but it also means a higher price tag. On top of that, every perk you add makes them steadily more expensive thanks to the Promotion Tax, so costs can ramp up fast.

That said, don’t be scared to run 3-stars if they fit your plan. Just aim for a solid balance. Most 1-stars do have some limitations, but each one brings something to the table. If you play to their strengths, they can still pull their weight and be just as effective as 2- or 3-stars in the role they’re meant for.

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Understanding Squad Leader Stats

Every squad leader begins with a defined stat profile.

• Agility determines how many Action Points the leader has
• Weapon Skill converts into accuracy
• Valour affects discipline
• Toughness reduces incoming damage and can be negative
• Vitality determines hit points
• Precision controls critical hit chance
• Positioning improves defense

These attributes are straightforward, but the stats at the bottom of the screen are where things get more interesting.

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Recruiting New Squad Leaders

Recruitment happens between missions through the black market, which you can access from the left-hand menu. This is where all trade goods are listed, including intel dossiers for recruitable pilots and squad leaders. Purchasing a dossier adds a random pilot or squad leader to your hiring pool, but that doesn’t make them immediately usable. To actually activate a new character and make them deployable, you need to spend authority.

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Authority

Authority is a campaign-wide resource earned by completing operations.

High authority provides a discipline bonus to your units in combat. Low authority does the opposite and can even lead to squad leaders getting into altercations with each other. You can leave newly unlocked leaders inactive in your hiring pool and activate them later, once your authority level is high enough to support them.

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Supply Cost and Promotion Tax

Supply cost is the number of supply points a leader requires to be deployed on a mission. On top of that is the promotion tax, which is added for every promotion or perk you give a leader, excluding their starting trait.

Early in the campaign, this doesn’t feel too restrictive. Later on, as gear becomes more expensive and supply limits tighten, these costs start to matter a lot. This forces you to make real trade-offs between fielding elite, heavily promoted leaders or running cheaper leaders with larger squads and simpler gear.

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Growth Potential

One of the most important systems in Menace is growth potential. Every time a character acts in combat, there’s a chance that one of their attributes will increase slightly. How often this happens depends on their growth potential stat.

Marta is a perfect example. She starts with relatively weak base stats and is cheap to deploy, but her growth potential is the highest in the game. Over the course of a long campaign, those weaker stats can steadily improve, turning her into a surprisingly powerful and cost-effective leader.

On top of that, every squad leader can take a perk (New Tricks) that increases growth potential even further.

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Perks, Traits, and Leader Identity

Each squad leader begins with a unique starting trait that no other leader can access. These traits establish a basic role. Darby, for example, can disable enemy special weapons when she attacks. Perks are where squad leaders become specialized. While many leaders share some baseline perks, each one has their own perk tree that pushes them toward specific roles.

Some perks weaken enemy cover bonuses. Others allow squads to pass free action points to allies. Some dramatically increase suppression output. Unlocking perks costs promotion points and increases supply cost, so every choice has consequences.

Skill trees add flexibility. Leaders can specialize into heavy weapons, reconnaissance, mobility-focused assault roles, or support-focused command builds. Some perk combinations naturally reinforce each other, such as heavy weapon perks that remove movement penalties while increasing health.

What’s important to understand is that perk trees are complex. They’re stepping stones toward more specialized builds that define how a leader and their squad operate.

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Promotions, Demotions, and Respec Costs

You earn promotion points by completing missions and spend them to unlock perks.

Undoing those decisions is possible, but expensive. Demotions can only be done in reverse order, and you only recover half of the promotion points you spent. Dismissing a leader entirely follows the same rule. You only recover half of what you invested in them. The system clearly discourages constant respec-ing and rewards careful planning.

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Supply Points, Equipment, and Squad Roles

Every mission in Menace is limited by supply points. Squad leaders contribute to this cap through both their deployment cost and their equipment.

For infantry squads, this usually means balancing a standard weapon shared by the squad with a special weapon carried by the leader. These choices should reinforce the role you’ve built the leader for, whether that’s survivability, mobility, or long-range pressure.

Pilots follow the same philosophy. Different vehicle chassis restrict which weapon types they can use, and those restrictions define how the pilot complements your infantry. A fast strike team works well with an armored personnel carrier but doesn’t function the same way with a basic ATV.

Equipment isn’t a separate system. It’s a reinforcement of your earlier leadership and promotion decisions.

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Every Infantry Squad Leader in Menace

You begin with a small core lineup of Squad Leaders, and the rest are unlocked later through the Black Market. Once fully promoted, each leader has access to a deep pool of perks, letting you specialize them hard or build flexible generalists. Many abilities are shared across leaders, so instead of repeating those every time, this guide focuses on what makes each one distinct and how they naturally slot into a squad.

Darby (★★★)

Darby is all about surgical pressure. Her defining trait, High Value Targets, temporarily disables enemy special weapons, which can completely shut down dangerous units at the right moment. She leans heavily into accuracy stacking, cover denial, and ranged dominance.

Darby excels when she’s allowed to focus fire. Her accuracy ramps up the longer she sticks to the same target, and perks like Sharpshooter, Ambush, and Take Aim push her into a deadly overwatch-style role. She’s also deceptively durable at range thanks to abilities that reward distance and positioning.

If you want a leader who turns careful planning into guaranteed kills, Darby is your pick.

Pike (★★)

Pike is less about personal damage and more about making everyone else better. His standout ability, Taking Command, lets him hand out extra AP to nearby allies, even allowing units that already acted to go again. That alone makes him one of the strongest force multipliers in the game.

He brings morale control, suppression resistance, and team-wide buffs to accuracy and discipline. Pike also never truly breaks; when other squads might flee, his steadiness keeps the line intact.

Pike fits best in squads that rely on coordination and sustained pressure rather than flashy individual plays.

Tech (★★)

Tech is built for momentum. His special trait lets him fire most special weapons without deploying, which completely changes how heavy gear feels in combat. He’s the guy who kicks in the door and starts deleting cover.

With bonuses to explosive damage, grenade range, structure destruction, and rapid special-weapon chaining, Tech thrives when pushing into dense enemy formations. His kit rewards staying aggressive and moving between shots instead of hunkering down.

If your squad plan involves breaking enemy positions fast, Tech is an easy include.

Kody Greifinger (★★★)

Greifinger shines when enemies are healthy, exposed, or isolated. He gets strong damage bonuses against high-HP targets and vehicles, making him an excellent opener in a fight. Once things start dying, his suppression recovery keeps him moving forward instead of slowing down.

He pairs well with grenades and decoys, letting him manipulate enemy positioning before finishing key targets. Greifinger isn’t flashy, but he’s consistent, and consistency matters in longer missions.

Jean Sy (★)

Jean quietly does a lot of work behind the scenes. Her squad pays less supply, finds more loot, and gets more mileage out of accessories. Over time, that economic edge adds up, especially in longer campaigns.

In combat, she’s stubbornly hard to put down. Defensive perks, crit bonuses, and damage reduction when suppressed make her reliable even when things go wrong. She’s a great choice if you value long-term efficiency over raw combat spikes.

The Yaz (★★)

Yaz is built for chaos. He gets stronger as enemies panic, bleeding them over time and punishing anything that wavers or tries to flee. His kit heavily rewards aggressive positioning and staying close to the fight.

Unique perks let him dip in and out of vehicles cheaply, counterattack enemies, and regain AP after kills. Yaz works best when he’s constantly moving, constantly pressuring, and never giving the enemy room to stabilize.

If you like high-risk, high-reward infantry play, Yaz delivers.

Vamplew (★★)

Vamplew thrives on being targeted, thanks to his special “Partir De Rien”. Every attack against him builds pressure, which he can cash in for a massive AP surge. That makes him incredibly hard to ignore and very hard to stop once he’s rolling.

He shrugs off suppression penalties, draws enemy fire with taunts, and punishes exposed enemies with serious damage. Vamplew isn’t subtle, but he doesn’t need to be. He exists to soak up attention and keep pushing.

Sachin (★)

Sachin is the backbone of suppression-based squads. His signature trait massively boosts suppression from squad weapons, letting him lock down entire sections of the battlefield.

He scales with squad size, gaining accuracy and discipline as long as his unit stays intact. On top of that, he can replace fallen squaddies mid-mission, which is huge for attrition-heavy fights.

If your strategy revolves around control rather than burst damage, Sachin is invaluable.

Carda (★)

Carda starts weak and grows stronger the longer a mission drags on. Her accuracy and discipline ramp up every round, rewarding patient play.

She brings healing, extra special weapon uses, and morale buffs that can spread across allied units. Carta works best in squads designed to survive and stabilize rather than rush objectives early.

Lim (★★)

Lim is all about staying in motion. He gets rewarded for moving and shooting in the same turn, throwing back grenades, and chaining actions together.

He clears suppression, gains AP on demand, and thrives in mid-range skirmishes. Lim feels best when you’re constantly repositioning and reacting instead of locking down static firing lines.

Wetterroth (★★)

Wetteroth is built to kill big, dangerous targets. His accuracy and armor penetration bonuses make him especially strong against heavily armored enemies, including bugs and elite units.

He brings traps, guaranteed-hit melee attacks, and powerful finishers that scale with enemy injuries. Wetteroth rewards patience and setup, then ends fights decisively once an opening appears.

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Vehicle Squad Leaders

Vehicles follow similar design logic, but their leaders emphasize mobility, durability, and damage spikes.

Bog (★)

Bog specializes in keeping broken machines running. He can remove major vehicle defects, reduce supply costs, and survive EMP effects better than most.

His standout ability gives a guaranteed critical hit with massive damage and penetration, making him excellent for deleting priority targets when it matters most.

Exconde (★★)

Exconde scales off nearby infantry, gaining accuracy for every allied squad close to him. He’s incredibly hard to cripple, with reduced defect severity and immunity to catastrophic failures.

If you want a vehicle that just refuses to die while supporting the frontline, Exconde is your guy.

Ivey (★)

Ivy’s defining trait is reliability. Her chance to hit can never drop below a baseline, no matter the circumstances. That alone makes her incredibly valuable in bad terrain or against evasive enemies.

She also brings mobility-after-fire perks and strong synergy with marked targets, making her a steady damage dealer across long engagements.

Rewa (★★)

Rewa gets stronger with every kill. Accuracy and discipline stack as enemies fall, turning her into a runaway threat if fights go well.

She excels at aggressive maneuvers like roadkills, drive-bys, and high-risk charges. Rewa rewards bold play and fast victories.

Achilleas (★★★)

Achilleas converts damage taken into AP, meaning the closer he is to death, the harder he fights. He’s built for frontline punishment, with armor penetration bonuses at close range and limits on how much damage he can take in a single hit.

Achilleas is perfect for players who like living on the edge and turning danger into power.

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