With the release of Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, players can now recruit their favorite characters from series like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and Rainbow Six, and use them to create powerful squads and defeat the Umbra agents that are terrorizing the world. This strategy game will take you to many parts of the world as you deal with incidents as they pop up, and you must always be ready to move out at a moment’s notice.

Dramatics aside, Elite Squad is a pretty cool game, offering loads of strategy action and customization options as you unlock new operators and create squads with powerful synergies. As mentioned in our review, you can upgrade your characters and even outfit them with gear to improve their stats. In this sense, even though the combat is mostly automatic, it’s your duty as commander to keep your squad primed and ready for any trouble that pops up.

In this article, we’re going to show you a few tips and tricks to get started in Elite Squad and keep your squad in top shape and easily win every stage.

Upgrade and Equip Your Operators Before Every Round

In Elite Squad, your Skill Rating is very important—it’s the indicator of your squad’s strength. In other words, SR in this game is like your combat power in other similar titles—the higher the number, the stronger you are.

All the levels in this game have a recommended SR, and if you’re below this number, there’s a good chance that you’ll have a hard time completing the level. In this sense, it’s always important to keep your squad fully-upgraded at all times, which is quite easy since you have a handy “Upgrade” prompt in the deployment screen before every mission. This feature allows you to quickly issue upgrades right before jumping into the stage.

There are three main ways to upgrade your operators in Elite Squad:

1. Leveling Up

The easiest way to increase your Skill Rating. It consists of simply paying cash to increase your characters’ levels.

2. Equipping Gear

You can outfit each operator with 4 different pieces of gear that you receive from completing levels. Once you complete a set, you can then consume the gear to increase a character’s skill rank, further boosting their power.

3. Crafting Better Weapons

Each character has a specific weapon that they use in battle. By collecting blueprints, you can craft better weapons for them, increasing their damage, fire rate, and even their magazine size and reload times. This is one of the best upgrades you can give to a character. However, crafting new weapons is quite expensive so only do it for your best operators in the beginning.

Grind Stages for Gear and Cash

One of the things you’ll be doing a lot in the beginning is grinding. Mostly because you need resources and experience. On the one hand, some stages give you cash and specific pieces of gear, which you’ll need for upgrading your operators. However, when it comes to leveling up your characters, you’re limited by your commander level. In other words, your operators can never be a higher level than your commander, which limits their potential greatly.

Play Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad on PC

Play Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad on PC

However, by grinding stages, you not only collect lots of gear and cash, but you also accumulate commander experience. In this sense, if you find yourself stuck on a tough level, or simply want to be stronger in anticipation for an upcoming event, you can grind certain stages.

Automate the Grind With the Macro Recorder

And speaking of grinding, Elite Squad lets you complete certain stages automatically and instantly receive the rewards for doing so. However, before you can auto-complete a level, you first need to beat it with a score of 3 medals. Moreover, even if you have a perfect score, you still need to pay 1 Autowin Token per run, which can be a bit rare if you’re just starting out.

If you’re playing Elite Squad on BlueStacks, however, you can use our Macro Recorder to automate the grind even when you don’t have these rare tokens on hand. Instead, by creating a macro, you can forget about manual grinding and let BlueStacks do all the hard work.

To create a good macro for Elite Squad, follow these easy steps:

1. Go to the mission you want to farm and start the recorder.
2. With the recorder running, enter the mission and complete it to the best of your abilities.
3. After you win, exit to the menu screen, and turn off the recorder.
4. Give your macro a name and assign it a keybinding.

With this macro, you can essentially automate every single stage with the press of a button. Just remember to label your macros correctly so you don’t get them mixed up when you start creating lots of them for different stages.

Do the “A Friend in Need” Event ASAP

After you first finish the tutorial and complete a few levels, you’ll get access to the “Friend in Need” event, which rewards you with a free operator, Isaac Briggs, when you complete the first mission. This operator isn’t quite as strong as the ones you already have, even when you upgrade him to the same level. However, by completing the missions in the event, you’ll obtain extra Intel for Isaac, allowing you to essentially increase his rank for free once you have enough of these.

In this sense, doing the event missions is a good way to gain a powerful operator that you can upgrade from early on. However, these missions can be quite tough if you’re unprepared, so you’ll probably have to grind quite a bit in order to complete them.

Time Your Combat Orders Carefully

While your characters engage, shoot, reload, and use their skills automatically in Elite Squad, you choose when and how to activate your special combat orders. These orders are basically skills that cause special effects in combat that, if used correctly, can often score you an easy win in what would otherwise be a losing battle.

It’s important to read and learn about what each combat order can do in order to use them to maximum effect. For instance, the Air Strike order deals AoE damage centered on the target enemy. In this sense, it’s much more effective when used on crowds instead of single enemies. This skill is particularly effective against medics since these operators usually have to move close to their allies in order to heal them. If you wait until the enemy is weak enough for the medic to try and heal them, you can essentially kill two birds with one well-placed Air Strike.

Similarly, all your other combat orders have different effects that can be much more useful than what their descriptions initially suggest. Read all your skills as they become available and experiment with them in combat for maximum effect.

These are only a few tips and tricks that helped us when getting started in Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad. Feel free to leave your own strategies and suggestions for this awesome game in the section below!