40 WARDOGS tips the game doesn't tell you

Controls and UI

1. Practice range first, especially helicopters. Team kills cost $1,500 a head; a crashed Littlebird is a very expensive lesson.
2. Esc → Create or Join opens team chat. No size limit, enemies can't hear it. Proximity voice, they can.
3. Re-buy button, bottom left of the buy screen, rebuys your last kit in one click.
4. On a mounted vehicle weapon, A/D swing fast, mouse for fine aim.
5. Page Up / Page Down adjust zeroing on rifles and DMRs. Pistols can't.
6. As a passenger, right-click the map to place a drop-off request; it appears in your pilot's HUD. Do it just before the AO, it doesn't last long.
7. Hover any shop item to see which XP track it pays into.
8. Two sprints. Tap Shift again while sprinting for combat sprint. Distance and cooldown depend on your weight class; carry enough and you can't do it at all.
9. Rotary aircraft use their own sensitivity and Y-axis inversion (inverted by default). Set them separately from infantry.

Money

1. Buy the free rebreather every life. Revives drop from ~30 s to ~5 s, and a medic can take it off your corpse to revive you faster.
2. Bandage others, not yourself. Buddy-aid pays; self-aid costs.
3. Pilot is the best early income and levels your primary track quickest.
4. Can't fill the chopper? Buy ammo crates, fill them, drop them where the push needs them.
5. Tip your pilot. More than once works.
6. A few minutes into a match a free Huey and an SUV spawn at base for anyone.
7. Buy vehicle ammo before you leave base. Armed vehicles ship nearly empty.
8. Invest in your kit. Spawn-vehicle teleports have a ~10 min cooldown; dying cheap and fast costs travel time.
9. Parachutes are $100. On a $5,000 kit in a heli with no flares left, that's the best money you'll spend. They also work off towers.
10. Two IEDs kill a spawn vehicle ($15,000). One IED kills a FOB ($2,500 + 500 engineering XP).
11. Shoot unarmoured enemy ammo boxes for cash. Friendly ones show a shopping-cart icon on the minimap; leave those.
12. Tag with binoculars. Tagging pays; a teammate killing your tag pays ~$800.
13. Everything is double in the Hot Zone, and kills outside the zone pay far less (artillery tanks excepted, $10,000+).
14. Cosmetic gold bars are cheapest early and mid-season; everyone cashes out before a wipe.
15. Lie on proximity chat. "He's down, all clear" works more often than it should.

Mechanics

1. Firing range levers put armour on the targets. Ten minutes there tells you what kills what; the revolver does 99 to the body in three, so it's a four-shot kill.
2. Armour every life. AP ammo unlocks late for most players, so early season everyone's on flesh rounds: shoot the legs on heavily armoured targets, full damage.
3. A tier-3 hammer unlocks SAM sites, mortars, kamikaze drones and more at your FOB.
4. Ghillie suit blocks the killcam entirely.
5. Downed players wait for revives, sometimes minutes. Reposition after a kill; retaliation is coming.
6. FOB camping usually loses. The consistent winner in every playtest: a group that follows the Hot Zone with medics and keeps everyone alive.
7. Mortars use ammo, drones use mechanical parts, both stored in the FOB they fire from.
8. FOBs can be hacked. ~30 s, loud, then their weapons are yours.
9. Taking a rebreather off a corpse to revive faster is fine; stealing someone's revive is rude.
10. You can drag enemy corpses.
11. Tower codes pull the Hot Zone. Each tower holds one digit; post it in team chat when you hack one.
12. A FOB drill pulls the Hot Zone to your FOB. Slow to build, hungry for fuel, match-winning.
13. Smoke grenades and signal grenades look identical in the shop. Smoke is cover; signal is a thin plume that requests supplies. Check before you buy for a revive.
14. No RPGs from inside a helicopter. Backblast kills or maims everyone aboard, you included, and it counts as team kills.
15. Yes, the defibrillator can kill teammates.
16. Flipped heli at HQ: unflip it and get back in. In the auto-repair zone it repairs itself; elsewhere a wrench fixes it.
17. Attachments are universal: scopes and handguards fit across many weapons.
18. Enemy turned into a backpack = they gave up. The kill sticks.
19. Anything anyone can buy, you can loot off them.

The scoring behind all of this, and why bodies in the zone matter more than kills, is on the Hot Zone page.

FAQ

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