The supply truck wins more matches than the marksman. Here is why, and how to be the person driving it.
Most guides to Bohemia Interactive’s Cold War sandbox tell you to walk slowly and use cover. That is true of every milsim and it will not help you. What separates a Reforger match you win from one you spectate is an economy: supplies come out of a handful of generators at a fixed rate, they are spent on spawns and structures and every magazine you draw, and they only reach the front line if somebody physically drives them there. Sitting on top of that economy is a radio map that decides which objectives you are even allowed to seize. This guide is written against the 1.8 stable branch (1.8.0.13, released 3 September 2026), after the 1.6 rework in October 2025 turned Conflict into HQ Commander and introduced MSAR, and after the 1.7 Partisan update in May 2026 made the FIA a playable third faction. Numbers move between patches; the shapes below do not.
Three patches reshaped this game in under a year. If your knowledge predates October 2025, most of it is stale.
Arma Reforger began in May 2022 as a technology preview: two factions, one island, a thin Conflict mode and an engine nobody had shipped a game on yet. Treating it as that game in 2026 will actively mislead you. Three updates in eleven months rebuilt the parts of it you interact with most.
Update 1.6 on 30 October 2025 is the big one. It added the autumn island of Kolguyev, shipped Operation Omega (a five-episode single-player campaign set in 1989 that puts you behind Soviet lines as US special forces), rebuilt Conflict into the HQ Commander structure where bases are deployable rather than fixed objectives, introduced MSAR as a personal equipment allowance separate from team supplies, and made wind affect bullets, rockets and mortars. It also brought in the RPG-22, the RPG-75, mortars and static weapons, M14 and PMN-4 mines, hand flares and deployable sandbags.
Update 1.7 on 28 May 2026, the Partisan update, made the FIA a playable third faction in Conflict on all three islands, overhauled vehicle physics (weights, suspension, torque), added strafing inertia to kill side-to-side spam, slowed sprinting through thick vegetation, added a reconnect queue for the server-full problem, and let a single player unflip a vehicle using a nearby repair truck. Update 1.8 landed on 13 August 2026 and shipped the first iteration of Far Hide, which conceals distant characters lying in grass so a prone soldier stops being a silhouette at 750 metres, gave specialist roles real speed bonuses at their own job, made dying cost 30 rank progression points, and brought the game to the Microsoft Store with Xbox Play Anywhere. The 1.8.0.13 point release on 3 September 2026 is the current stable build on top of it.
The practical result: sprint-strafing wins fewer duels than it did, going prone in a field is finally worth doing, dying is no longer free, and the person who understands supply routing has more influence on the scoreboard than the person with the best aim.
Joining the 128-player Everon Conflict as your first match is the single most common way people bounce off this game.
Missions run roughly 45 to 60 minutes. Do three of these before you touch PvP and you will arrive in Conflict already knowing how to walk, shoot and bandage.
Conflict Montignac (24 recommended, 48 max) is the sensible first PvP scenario: the same systems on a compressed slice of Everon, so the map stops being the hard part.
This is also the best place to learn to fly. Spawn yourself a UH-1H on an empty Game Master session and crash it thirty times where nobody is counting on you.
Supplies are your spawn, your rifle, your relay and your helicopter. Everything competes for the same pool.
Here is the mental model that makes Conflict click. Your faction has one Main Operating Base that produces supplies on a clock: about 200 every five minutes, which is roughly 40 a minute, and only while that base has storage room left. That is the entire baseline income for a side that might have sixty players on it. It is not enough. It was never designed to be enough.
Everything else has to be taken. Harbours and airfields, once captured, receive shipments of 1,000 to 3,000 supplies every ten to fifteen minutes, which is an order of magnitude more than the home base produces. Neutral FIA supply depots sit scattered across the terrain with AI defenders on them and regenerate over time. Civilian caches hide in barns, garages and attics, marked by a wooden sign reading ZASOBOVACI STANICE, and pay out exactly once. Decommissioning a structure or vehicle at a maintenance point refunds part of what it cost.
Then comes the part nobody wants to do: supplies exist at the place they were generated, not where they are needed. A captured harbour full of 7,000 supplies is worthless to a squad fighting twelve kilometres inland until somebody loads a truck and drives it there. That drive is the game. A player who runs three clean logistics rotations in an hour has contributed more than a player with twenty kills, and the scoreboard in the reworked Conflict now partly agrees with that.
| Structure | Supply cost | Build it when |
|---|---|---|
| Small Fuel Supply Point | 50 | Immediately at any position vehicles pass through. The cheapest thing on the list and the reason a returning truck does not have to drive all the way home. |
| Light Vehicle Maintenance Point | 150 | Early at a staging base. Repairs jeeps and trucks, and lets you decommission captured or surplus vehicles for a partial refund. |
| Supply Depot | 175 | First or second build at any base you intend to keep. Holds around 3,000 supplies, which is the difference between a base that can act and one that hoards nothing. |
| Radio Relay | 250 | The moment you take a position beyond your coverage edge. It extends radio range, which unlocks the next objective and the ability to respawn here. Nothing else competes for this slot. |
| Living Quarters | 250 | At your busiest forward base. It halves spawn cost there, so it pays for itself in roughly a dozen respawns and keeps paying for the rest of the match. |
| Field Hospital | 250 | At the base nearest a contested front. Wounded players walking back from a fight recover fully instead of dying to attrition and re-spending on a new loadout. |
| Heavy Vehicle Maintenance Point | 300 | Once armoured vehicles are in play. A BTR-70 sitting on blown tyres is a wasted requisition; a repair point turns it back into a rolling gun. |
| Ammunition Supply Point | 325 | After the relay and the depot. Holds around 2,100 and keeps a forward arsenal usable without a truck run for every magazine. |
| Command Post | 500 | At a base you intend to command from. Expensive for around 1,000 storage, so build it for the command function rather than the capacity. |
| Helipad | 750 | Only when you have a pilot who can actually land. The most expensive common structure in the list and dead weight without someone flying from it. |
Costs shift between patches. Treat this as build priority, not gospel, and read the figure in the build menu before you commit.
Since 1.6 you have a second, personal wallet. Most players discover it by failing to spawn in the loadout they just saved.
You cannot seize a base outside your faction’s radio signal. The coverage map is the real objective map.
Learn Everon’s road network before anything else. Navigation is a skill here, not a minimap.
Missing at 400 metres is usually not aim. It is a sight set to the wrong distance and, since 1.6, a crosswind you did not read.
Eight magazines feels responsible. It is the reason you arrive at the fight winded and lose it.
There is a correct sequence. Doing it out of order wastes the item and drops the patient again inside ten seconds.
The order is tourniquet, bandage, fluids, stim, then pull the tourniquet back off. Every step exists for a reason and the failure mode of each one is specific.
The tourniquet is your fastest intervention and it only slows bleeding: it is a holding action while you get a bandage on, and it cannot go on a head, chest or abdomen wound. It also restricts leg movement and adds weapon sway while it is fitted, which is exactly why you remove it once the limb is bandaged. It is reusable, so leaving it on a stabilised casualty costs you the next one too.
The bandage is the only thing that actually stops bleeding, and it works anywhere on the body. Fluids restore lost blood volume over roughly 90 seconds and does nothing whatsoever about an open wound, so reaching for it before the bleed is sealed is pouring fluid into a leaking bucket. The stim cuts pain and sway and speeds recovery, and over an unconscious casualty it is what wakes them up fastest. A patient with critically low blood, though, may not regain consciousness at all until fluids have started rebuilding volume; the stim alone will not lift them.
No tanks, no jets. The heaviest thing on the field is an armoured car, and the most important thing is a truck.
A pistol, one spare magazine and a shopping list. The 1.7 faction is the most interesting thing in the game and the least forgiving.
Every one of these is common, and every one of them is cheaper to fix than to keep paying for.
Most of what goes wrong in a Reforger match is not a skill gap. It is a small number of repeated decisions that each look reasonable in the moment and cost your side supplies, tempo or a base. The list below is ordered by how much damage each one does over an hour of play, not by how obvious it is.
The single largest one is simply not driving. There is a version of this game where you queue for a rifle slot, walk towards contact, die, respawn, and repeat for two hours while your side slowly loses because no forward base ever has anything in it. If you spend your first hour learning the road network with a full truck, you will understand the map, bank rank and personal allowance faster than anyone shooting, and arrive at the fight rich.