Wardog Quartermaster

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. Prices in the firing range are not real prices. Everything reads $0 in there. Use it to check weights, ammunition types and what a tool can actually build — never to plan a budget.
5. Everything is half price below level 9. The vendor calls it the New Recruit Discount and prints "EXPIRES: LVL 9" next to it, so you do get warned — but only while you are standing at the vendor. Every price in this tool is the full price; tick the discount box in Kit Bench to see what you actually pay right now. A T-21 listed at $600 rang up at $300 on a live beta stream.
6. 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.
7. A kill does not pay a fixed amount. Across 45 kill events the feed printed $1,500, $1,750 and $2,000 five times each, plus $2,250, $3,000 and $3,500. Nothing in the capture records distance or weapon beside the payout, so the cause is not known.
8. 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.

Unlock fees are the real cost, not the price tag

Read off the vendor's ITEMS tab. This changes how to read every price in this tool.

• A Remote Detonator costs $550. Unlocking it costs $15,000. That is twenty-seven times the item's price, paid once before you may ever buy one. The sticker price is almost irrelevant next to the gate in front of it.
• Budget for unlocks, not for loadouts. Against a measured net of roughly $100–270 a minute, a single $15,000 unlock is an hour or more of profitable play. Deciding which unlocks to buy matters far more than shaving a few hundred off a kit.
• The fee scales with the category. Read off four vendor tabs: gear $5,000, attachments $7,500, loose ammo $10,000, items $15,000. So the cheapest way to widen what you can carry is gear, and ammunition is deliberately expensive to open up — which fits it being gated behind War Dog level as well.
• The ITEMS tab sorts under Launcher, Medical and Building. Prices from the files: M67 Frag $200, C4 $250, IED $300, Enox $450, AT Mine $650 (Support 25 / $75k unlock), Claymore $900 (Recon 22 / $50k unlock), Halligan $1,100 (doors only — not gates), Remote Detonator $550 behind its $15,000 gate. Blast from wardogs.zone: C4 250 / 6 m, IED 300 / 8 m, AT Mine 300 / 7.5 m, Claymore 150 / 3 m (FOB needs ~100 claymores — do not).
• The Remote Detonator needs C4 to be worth anything — it detonates placed charges and does nothing on its own. Two purchases, one capability. It pays Support XP.
• A backpack is a grid, not a slot count, and we have every dimension: Pouch 3×2, Scout 2×4, Field 3×3, Operator and Assault 3×5, Ruck and Gunner 4×6, Arsenal 5×6. That is 6, 8, 9, 15, 24 and 30 cells — and the 8, 15 and 24 seen on screen are exactly Scout, Operator/Assault and Ruck/Gunner. 421 of 536 items carry a footprint too, so the Kit Bench now checks whether a loadout fits. Two corrections live here. This page first called it a slot count, which is the wrong model — wardogs.zone's planner lays out a grid. It then said we had neither pack dimensions nor item shapes, which was also wrong: both are in the data as g/gw/gh, and the check had been looking for fields named slots and cap that are always null. Area is necessary but not sufficient, so over capacity is a definite no and under capacity is a "should fit". Magazine footprints are still missing and are excluded rather than assumed.

Three maps, each running rotations — and the regions they sit in

This is the thing most guides get wrong, including an earlier version of this page.

• A rotation is not a different map. A match runs one rotation, and it decides which trio of spawn towns is live — the terrain underneath does not change. Bakurani runs as Bakurani, Mindori or Tevza; Ozeti as Berlin, Madrid or Paris. The kavkazi label some sources use is the region Bakurani sits in, not a fourth map.
• It is also why Manticore looks like it has two spawns. Chuta belongs to the Bakurani rotation and Liknisi to Mindori. They are never both in play, so a plan built around one is wrong the moment the other is running — pick the rotation on the Map Board before you place anything.
• The Map Board terrain is wardogs.zone tiles (watermark-free stitch at z=3), not the hub plate. The Roads layer is zone’s road overlay; commute pathfind uses the zone surface mask (asphalt / gravel / dirt). You can still drop your own screenshot over the board from the Map Board rail.
• All three maps are 16 km square on a 1 km grid, coordinates in units of 100 m with y increasing north. So a firing solution, a fuel figure or a haul time works out the same wherever you are; only the geometry is per-map.
• More maps are coming, which is why the region is recorded too. Kavkazi, Europe and North America are where these three sit — not alternative names for them. MetaForge serves Bakurani from an API whose record ids are prefixed kavkazi-, which is the region; as other continents arrive, the region is what will group them. Legacy ids (kavkazi, europe, zestafona) are kept so saved plans and share links keep working. Zestafona now carries wardogs.zone northamerica data: 56 zone polygons, 3 towers, Detroit rotation (Austin / Boston / Chicago spawns), garages and deploys, plus published control-zone centres. Same UV×16320 conversion as Ozeti. Death heat now has live pins (plus Tab-map presence anchors); treat the terrain as zone-sourced until more pins densify the board.

Still open (honest gaps)

• Vanguard FOB reload cost — belt 500 / reserve 4,000 measured; supplies-per-reload still null.
• AA / launcher engagement ranges — Map Board rings are planner placeholders; Bulkhead has published none.
• Build time per piece — hammer tier matters; no hits-per-structure or seconds table yet.
• Own artillery mils tables — L81 + SPH use shipped ballistics; third-party mils apps are not re-derived here.
• Kill cash vs zone FAQ — measured kills swing; wardogs.zone posts a clean outside/control/hot formula. Toggle both on Profit Methods.

Fortress and field doctrine, and which of it this tool can check

• A straight wall hides its own foot — Vauban, 1670s. Bastion forts have angled faces for one reason: a straight curtain cannot be observed along its own base, so an attacker pressed against it is invisible and height does not help. A straight Hesco run does exactly this.
  Check it: FOB Bench → Dead ground from where I stand. Rays are cast from your eye; a piece taller than eye level blocks, a shorter one does not. What it does not do is score whether each wall face is overlooked from elsewhere — which is the real bastion test. Bending a wall around yourself raises your dead-ground figure while improving your cover, so do not read a lower percentage as a better fort. Measured here, a straight run gave 34% and the same pieces in two angled faces gave 55%.
  So a second measure was built: how much of your own wall is overlooked from somewhere else — which is the bastion question. Ten identical Hesco blocks, four arrangements, same pieces every time:

  Ten Hesco arranged as	Wall feet overlooked	Dead ground
  A straight curtain	0% Vauban's problem, exactly	31%
  Two angled faces	25%	15%
  Curtain + two flanking towers	48% the historical fix, and the cheapest	34%
  Closed square redoubt	75%	19%

  A straight wall really does score zero — nothing overlooks its own foot. Note the towers make dead ground worse (31→34%) while making flanking far better: the two measures answer different questions and pull against each other, which is why both are shown. The comparison is only fair between layouts built from the same pieces, so this number is deliberately NOT printed next to the templates — a five-piece mortar pit scores 100% simply for barely having walls.
• Put the crest between you and direct fire — Wellington, Waterloo 1815. A reverse slope means the enemy must come over the ridge to see you, and meets you at close range on your terms rather than shelling you at leisure.
  Checkable on Map Board: wardogs.zone DEM on all three maps (Elevation / sniper LOS panel + LOS rail tool). Bakurani still has 286 spot heights for labels; the continuous DEM is what crest LOS uses.
• Minimum range is a hole, not a footnote. Every indirect weapon has one. The mortar cannot drop closer than 132 m and the SPH-2 not inside 780 m, so a gun sited on the objective covers everything except the objective.
  Check it: Map Board → place an L81 Mortar or SPH-2 marker. The covered ground is drawn as a ring with the hole punched out, radii straight off the ballistics table.
• Depth beats a line. Layers that each cost the attacker time — wire, then hedgehogs, then Hesco, then something hard to stand behind — survive a breach that one wall does not.
  Check it: the FOB Bench prices every layer, so you can see what depth actually costs in supplies before you haul any of it.
• Interior lines — Jomini, and Napoleon in practice. A force at the centre can mass against one opponent before the others arrive. Three factions spawning near-equidistant around a 1 km Control Zone is that problem exactly, and whoever holds the middle is the one with the shorter move.
  Partly checkable: the spawn geometry is surveyed; who actually wins the middle is not something this tool can tell you.
• Logistics is the constraint — van Creveld, Supplying War. Campaigns stop when supply stops, not when nerve fails. This tool has been making that argument in numbers without naming it: a Ural hauls two pallets at 79 km/h, a Z20 Lakota moves thirteen at 445.
  Check it: the Logistics tab, which is the whole doctrine as arithmetic.
• Fire along a line, not across it — enfilade. A defender shooting down the length of an approach engages far more attackers per shot than one shooting across it. Angle a wall so the ground in front of the next wall is what you are covering.
  Not checkable here. It needs a model of where attackers come from, and nothing in this tool knows that.
• Indirect fire reveals its own position — the counter-battery clock. The round that lands is also a bearing back to the gun. Shoot and move; a mortar that stays put is a mortar someone else has already ranged.
  Not checkable here, and worth saying because everything else on the Artillery tab is about the shot going out, not about what comes back.

Bakurani, as the full map shows it

Read off the full map in a live match. This is the skeleton of the theatre — not enough to rebuild the Map Board, but enough to plan a deployment.

• The grid runs 1 to 16 on both axes at 1 km a square, so the theatre is roughly 16 by 16 km. The detailed terrain sits in the middle of that, about 12 by 11 km — the outer ring is edge, not playable ground.
• The three factions spawn in a triangle around the centre. Manticore sits west near grid 3,7; Valkyra east near 12,7; Lonestar south near 8,3. The objective sits in the middle, around 8,7.
• Nobody has a shorter walk. The spawns are near enough equidistant from the centre, which matches the measured journey times — a median of about two minutes regardless of faction. If a side is winning it is not because they spawned closer.
• Because Manticore and Valkyra sit opposite each other on the same latitude, the east-west axis is the contested one, and Lonestar approaches from the south into whatever those two have already started.

The map legend, and the request system nobody mentions

Read off the legend (B on the map screen). The middle column is the interesting one — it is a whole communication layer that none of the guides cover.

• You can request Healing, Ammo, Fuel, Repair, Dropoff and Backup, and they appear as markers on everyone's map. That is the missing half of the logistics economy: a driver or pilot does not have to guess who needs supplies, and every one of those requests maps onto something that pays — healing, resupply, refuelling, repairing and transporting are all income lines in this tool.
• If you are playing logistics, the requests are your job queue. Kitting up is where the money goes, so work that pays without spending anything is the whole game, and this is how it finds you. (This used to cite a measured 96% burn rate. That figure has been withdrawn — because it was a sum of every upward tick in a balance read by OCR, and a handful of misreads carried most of it. The point stands on its own; the number did not.)
• Teammate and Squadmate are different icons — blue against orange. Your squad is a subset of your faction, so "more players in the zone" counts every blue marker, not just your own squad.
• DangerPing is separate from Ping, and there are Defend, Follow and Attack markers. There is more tactical communication here than a proximity shout.

Armour: the game may never give you a number

Read off an item tooltip on a live stream. This changes what is worth chasing.

• Armour is described in words, not percentages. The Level 1 Helmet reads "Low Damage Reduction — Protects the Head". There is no number in the tooltip at all. So the "armour reduction per tier" this tool has carried as unmeasured may not exist as a published figure — it is a qualitative ladder, and the only way to a percentage is measuring damage taken yourself.
• Helmet and body armour are separate items in the same ARMOR category, with separate durability bars on the HUD. They deplete independently, so losing one does not mean losing both.
• A Level 1 Helmet weighs 1 kg, body armour 3 kg and a tac-vest 0.82 kg. Against a Lightest band that ends somewhere under 10 kg, armour is most of your weight budget before you have carried a single magazine.
• If you want the real reduction figure, the damage log on B is the only instrument that reaches it. Nothing on a stream can.

Vehicles: speed, fuel and how far they actually go

Read straight off the Vehicle Vendor's stat panel on live beta streams. Range is capacity divided by economy — the figure the vendor does not print, and the one that decides whether you make it back.

• The quad is the efficient one. Two litres a kilometre against four for everything else, and cheapest at $500 — but only 9 km of range and 75 km/h, so it is a shuttle, not a journey.
• Helicopters are four to six times faster than trucks and carry further. The MH-6 at 350 km/h against the Ural at 79 is the whole reason the measured journey times split between about a minute and three or more. Stay under about 50 m AGL and lock-on seekers reportedly cannot track you (AwHkAKqdGRk — caption-only).
• The Z20 Lakota carries thirteen (2 crew + 11 passengers). If a squad is moving together, that is one trip instead of three.
• The vendor also lists counter measures and weaponry per vehicle, which is where the flare systems and the minigun variants are described.

Read by OCR from stat panels, so treat single figures with care: the Ural Defender's top speed read 73 by machine and 79 by eye on the same panel. Ranges above use the eye-checked numbers.

Looting, and what a body is worth

Read off a live looting screen. This is the part of the game the numbers in this tool are really about.

• The game prints a cash value on every body, and on your own kit. A dead player was tagged $1,770 while the man looting him was carrying $4,799. That is not flavour text — it is the number someone weighs before deciding whether you are worth the fight.
• Backpacks differ enormously. We have now seen one at 8 slots and another at 24. The first backpack upgrade is not a small quality-of-life buy, it is a tripling of what you can carry out.
• You loot everything — weapon, optics, helmet, armour, vest, backpack, even the parachute. Going in cheap and leaving in someone else's kit is a real strategy, not a joke.
• F toggles the weight view while looting, so you can see what picking something up will cost you in mobility before you take it. Quick Transfer moves an item without dragging.

The map, and how to drive it

Read off an expanded map on a live beta stream. Note it does not open to the whole theatre — it expands to a circular window around you, so it is a local planning tool rather than a way to survey the match.

• There are two map views and they are scaled differently. The one you get in the field is a circular window around you with 100 m grid squares. The full map screen is square, shows the whole theatre, and its squares are 1 km — sixteen of them on each axis. Do not read a route off one and pace it out with the other.
• The map gives you exact decimal coordinates, and they are in hundreds of metres. A readout of x90.61 means 9,061 m across the theatre — so one whole unit is 100 m and the decimal is metres. Checked on two worlds: on Ozeti a readout of x90.61 / y48.58 sat between the 9 and 10 grid lines and between 4 and 5, which is exactly where 9.06 km and 4.86 km belong.
• The grid labels change with zoom, the readout does not. At full extent the axes are numbered in kilometres (1 to 16). Zoom in and they renumber in hundreds of metres. The x/y readout stays in hundreds of metres throughout, so it is the thing to call over comms — with Mark Coordinate beside it, you can give a position to within a few metres instead of saying "near the big building".
• Because one grid unit is 100 m, that decimal is directly a distance: the gap between x82.64 and x83.64 is exactly one hundred metres.
• The map tints to your faction's colour — red for Valkyra, green for another. Handy when you are watching someone else's footage and need to know whose side you are seeing.
• B toggles the legend. If you cannot tell what an icon means, that is the key.
• N toggles zoom and the scroll wheel zooms freely. X recenters on you, which is what you want after dragging around.
• H toggles the health overlay, and you can ping straight off the map for your squad.

Things that quietly run out

None of these announce themselves. Each one has cost somebody a kit.

• Defibrillators and repair tools run on batteries. Medium battery is $150; high-capacity is $300 behind Career 45. When the charge dies the tool is dead until you fit another — buy spares with the tool, not after. Defibs can also team-kill if you shock the wrong body.
• Parachutes are single use — Basic $100 (uncontrolled) or Sport $1,000 (Career 36, steerable). Deploy with Space; cut with C (bindable). Land or cut and that one is spent.
• You never heal on your own. There is no passive regeneration at all — bandage $200, IFAK $800 (Medic 9, $25k unlock, two full heals), Medical Bag $2,000 (Medic 24, $75k unlock; place it, costs more on self). Field Resuscitator $500 (Medic 2, $10k unlock); Defib $1,600 (Medic 11, needs battery). Adrenaline $250 (Medic 14) for a short unlimited tac sprint. One free Emergency Resuscitator per life.
• Vehicles run dry of both fuel and ammunition. Top up at a base, or carry a gas can from the vendor so you are not walking home.

Field craft that pays for itself

• A magazine and its ammunition are bought separately and assembled. The vendor walks you through it: pick the magazine, pick the ammunition, and it produces a loaded one. On a live beta stream a magazine was $15, a box of 9×19 mm $17, and the loaded result came to $23 at the recruit discount, holding 17 rounds. Buying a magazine alone leaves you with an empty magazine and a warning triangle on your weapon.
• Your backpack shows capacity as slots used over slots total — 4/8 on the stream we read. That is the number the Kit Bench is checking when it warns your kit will not fit.
• Loose ammo is twice the ammunition for the same space. A magazine takes two slots and holds about thirty rounds. Loose ammo also takes two slots and holds forty to eighty, depending on calibre. The suggested load is three loaded magazines — one in the rifle, two in the pack — and one stack of loose to refill them from.
• You can strip magazines you find, including dead players', as long as the calibre matches.
• Do not stock up in the first few days. Everyone else is carrying ammunition and medical kit, and all of it drops. Buy thin and loot.
• Hold out for a revive rather than respawning. Respawning loses the entire kit and you buy it again from scratch. If nobody is coming, put a bounty on yourself — the whole team sees the price you are offering.
• Start a revive even with no revive item, and even if someone else will finish it. The assist pays cash and medic XP either way.
• A vest is quick slots. That is what you are buying. A better vest is more things reachable without opening the pack.
• You can rebuy your last loadout in two clicks at the vendor. Do not rebuild it by hand.
• Press B for the damage log. It lists what hit you and for how much, shot by shot. That is the only instrument any of us has for pinning down armour reduction and real shots-to-kill — check it after a death and you are measuring something nobody has published.
• Bribes go up in $50 steps. The downed screen shows a running total and each press of F1 adds fifty. F gives up, E calls for help.
• Cash lies on the ground. Loose money shows as $50 and $100 markers in the world and on the minimap, free to walk over.
• Tips arrive in small change. Tips seen live were $5, $10, $15 and $20. Pleasant, but nobody is retiring on gratitude — play for the payouts and treat tips as a bonus.

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. The rate moves daily — captions put early seasons around $80–90k a bar and later reads around $200–270k (one HUD ~$266k). When you convert matters.

How to read these figures

Payouts were read by watching the balance change on live streams. Several events often land inside the same second, so a large figure is usually a sum rather than one reward.

• The zone tick hides inside almost everything. Across 264 payouts pooled from six beta streams, the recurring large values were 4,160, 10,160, 30,160 and 50,160 — every one a round number plus the $160 Control Zone tick. Subtract 160 and the real reward is usually obvious.
• $160 came up 121 times and $320 twenty-three times. Those two are as well established as anything here: the Control Zone and Hot Zone ticks.
• Round tens of thousands are tips, not rewards. $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 and $50,000 all appeared, tagged as tips. Streamers tip each other heavily; do not plan your income around it.

What actually pays

• A kill pays $1,500–$3,500 and never the same thing twice. A headshot printed the same amounts an ordinary kill does, not more. wardogs.zone’s Cash & XP calculator models a $300 outside base (×5 Control / ×10 Hot, split you/them) plus 250 role XP, then server-size scaling and repeat-target decay — that formula base sits under the higher totals the feed prints. See ZONE_REWARD_MODEL.
• Killing a vehicle paid $6,250 — the best repeated payout measured.
• Delivering supplies paid $2,500 on every delivery where the amount was legible. It is the only large payout in the game that does not move.
• A team kill costs you $1,800, and $2,700 inside the Hot Zone.
• Standing in the zone pays $160 a cycle, doubled to $320 in the Hot Zone, plus $250 just for arriving.
• Spotting XP is 25 a mark; the feed also prints about $100 on many TARGET SPOTTED ticks (OCR mode). Converting it pays about $800 when the feed settles (XP on the convert varies 75–150).
• Reviving a teammate pays 200 XP; cash swings $300–$900 (bounty on the body). Healing pays 80 XP and almost no cash. Zone model: medical pays by the patient’s zone (Hot revive = 4× open field).
• An artillery kill (mortar / SPH) pays $1,250 floor and 350 XP; Hot Zone prints higher cash.
• Waiting to be revived pays $100. Depositing supplies at a FOB is only $25 / 5 XP — do not confuse it with a truck delivery.
• End of match (zone model): place cash $1,000 / $500 / $250 plus a cut of cash earned in-match (counted up to $100k). Firing a drill pays $2,500; a running magnet pays Hot Zone rates inside.

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 $7,500 (Season 1: was $2,500) and lands with 1,400 build supplies already in it (1,200 before the 18 Aug build).
• Barbed wire is 1 supply, a sandbag wall 11, Hesco 13–19, a gate 69, a bunker 81, a mortar 121, and the Talon anti-air 801.
• Loose packs are $10 for 50 at the vendor; a pallet is 1,800 for $400. A logistics truck carries two pallets, a helicopter one. Drop from under ~90 m or pallets can destroy on impact.
• Emptied crates explode, so do not stand on them.

Running a vehicle

• Press B inside a vehicle to buy ammunition and supplies for it. Emplacement FOB reloads are separate; the vendor also lists boxed 81mm ($600/10) and 20×102mm ($600/10) as inventory ammo for the mortar and Vanguard.
• Rearming is not cheap: countermeasure flares are $750 each and each pack deploys 3 bursts. Stock load on a heli is often only two packs — buy extras before you leave. You cannot dump two packs in quick succession; wait out the first burst.
• Damaged vehicles can be repaired rather than written off. Repair ticks print REPAIRED VEHICLE for 1–5 XP a swing and pocket change; engineering XP is the real pay.
• 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 — a 1.0 km circle (500 m radius), placed at random. It was described here as 2 km² from a marketing figure; the map data says otherwise, and the difference is four times the area. 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.