Wardog Quartermaster

Everything below was read off gameplay footage or the game's own files, not guessed. Where something is still unmeasured it says so. If you only take one thing away: the kit you buy matters far less than what you do with it.

Seven things that will cost you before you understand them

1. Your own barbed wire fines you. If a teammate dies on wire you placed, it counts as a team kill and you lose money. Wire is the cheapest thing you can build, which is exactly why people spam it into their own routes.
2. Enemies can hear you. Voice is proximity-based. Anyone nearby is listening, including the people you are hiding from. Squad chat is the only private channel.
3. Your loadout is a bounty on you. Bodies are priced and lootable, and the killer can see what you were worth before deciding to take it. A $9,000 kit is a $9,000 prize.
4. Everything is half price below level 9, and nothing tells you the window is closing. Buy the things you intend to keep while the discount lasts.
5. The free rifles only zero to 100 m. They also take no optic. The "just use the free gun" advice quietly stops working the moment a fight opens past a hundred metres.
6. How you kill matters more than how often. A long-range kill paid $7,500 against $2,750 for an ordinary one. Same trigger pull, nearly three times the money.
7. Spotting pays even when the enemy kills your target. You mark someone, anyone kills them, you get paid. Binoculars cost $75 and earn off other people's fighting.

Money

• You get $10,000 once, for the account. It never refills.
• Cash persists between matches. Dying costs you the gear you bought, not your balance.
• You cannot be locked out. There is always a free rifle to get you moving again.
• Below level 9 the equipment vendor is half price. Buy what you intend to keep while it lasts.
• Unspent cash converts to gold bars at a reset, at a price that moves daily. When you convert matters.

What actually pays

• An ordinary kill is $1,000–2,750. A headshot reached $6,000 and a long-range kill $7,500. How you kill matters more than how often.
• Killing a vehicle paid $9,375 — the best single payout seen.
• Standing in the zone pays $160 a cycle, doubled to $320 in the Hot Zone, plus $250 just for arriving.
• Spotting paid $100–500, and you keep earning when teammates convert your marks.
• Healing a teammate paid $14. Do it because it wins fights, not for the money.

Dying and being revived

• Downed players press F1 to put a bounty on their own body, and set the amount themselves. Watch for bounties — that is where revive money actually comes from.
• You can loot the dead, and the game shows you what a body is worth before you commit.
• Which means your own kit is a bounty on you. A $9,000 loadout is a $9,000 prize for whoever wins the fight.

Shooting

• Health is a flat 100. Unarmoured that is about four chest hits with 5.56, two with 7.62×54.
• Bullet drop is significant and you zero your sights while aiming. A rangefinder is what makes zeroing useful, not a luxury.
• Weapons differ enormously in reach: an AK74 zeroes to 1000 m, a T-21 to 300 m.
• The AK74 at $1,600 beats the M4 at $2,800 on both aim speed and zeroing range. The more expensive rifle is the worse buy.
• Piercing rounds beat armour and do less to flesh. Flesh rounds are the reverse.
• Tanks take three or four good hits, and the rear is weakest.

Building

• An FOB costs $2,500 and lands with 1,200 build supplies already in it.
• Barbed wire is 1 supply, a sandbag wall 11, Hesco 13–19, a gate 69, a bunker 81, a mortar 120, and the Talon anti-air 801.
• A pallet is 1,800 supplies; a logistics truck carries two, a helicopter one.
• Emptied crates explode, so do not stand on them.

Running a vehicle

• Press B inside a vehicle to buy ammunition and supplies for it.
• Rearming is not cheap: countermeasure flares are $750 each.
• Damaged vehicles can be repaired rather than written off, and repairing earns engineering XP.
• Refuel from a station at your FOB, or carry a $150 fuel can and use it at the vehicle's fuel point.
• Transport pays per passenger delivered, so the bigger the airframe the better the earn.

How the zones actually work

• The Control Zone is fixed for the whole round — about 2 km², placed at random. It does not move once the round starts.
• The Hot Zone drifts randomly inside it, and capturing drill codes or building your own drill is how you steer it instead of waiting.
• Whoever has the most players in the zone scores a point every 30 seconds. First to 100 wins.
• A player in the Hot Zone counts as two for that headcount. Ten players in the Hot Zone beat ten in the Control Zone, every time.
• The Hot Zone doubles cash and XP. It is the only place that doubles both at once.

Practise for free

There is a test range where everything costs $0. Fly the helicopters, drive the tanks, fire the launchers, learn the bullet drop — none of it touches your balance. Do your experimenting there rather than with $18,000 of gunship over a live objective.

The bit nobody tells you

Oil feeds drilling towers, and drills move the Hot Zone. Capture drill terminals for digits of a code, or build your own drill, and the doubled-cash ground comes to you. That is the highest-leverage loop in the game and it is the reason to hold oil.

Talking

Voice is proximity only — there is no team-wide channel. Enemies standing near you hear everything, which cuts both ways: you can negotiate, bluff, or talk your way out of a fight, and people do. Squad chat is the private one. Builders can also raise a loudspeaker to project their voice further.

Levelling

Level gates decide what you may buy at all. An assist is 200 XP against a kill's 250, and a spot someone else converts pays 125 on top. Cash rewards the spectacular; XP rewards turning up — except in the Hot Zone, which doubles both. If you want levels and money at once, that is the ground to be standing on.

Do not overspend

A top player with $245,895 banked was fielding an $8,764 kit: a Galil, the cheapest pistol in the game, and binoculars. The binoculars earn off other people's kills. Spend on the thing that generates income, not the thing that looks expensive.