Maps14 September 20265 min read
WARDOGS maps and modes
Not from a wiki, and not from a trailer. Everything on this page is read directly off the catalogue a WARDOGS server exposes to its admins, which is the most reliable list of what actually exists in the game today. Early Access adds things; when it does, this page follows.
The three maps
WARDOGS ships with three maps. The server’s catalogue lists them by region — Kavkazi, Europe, North America — but the names you see in-game and on the scoreboard are the towns the fight is over:
| In-game name | Server catalogue | Variants |
|---|---|---|
| Bakurani | Kavkazi | Standard, Infantry Only, Hardcore |
| Ozeti | Europe | Standard, Infantry Only, Hardcore |
| Zestafona | North America | Standard, Infantry Only, Hardcore |
The store page describes the setting as the derelict industrial mountains of Eastern Europe — Kolchia, modelled on Georgia — and all three towns sit in it. The catalogue’s “Europe” and “North America” are internal labels, not where the maps are set; the internal codenames for those two zones are Madrid and Detroit, which you will never see in-game.
The zone itself does not always sit in the same place. The server picks a zone position per match from a set defined for each map — on Bakurani we have seen it on the farmland, for instance — so two rounds on the same map can be fought over different ground. Do not learn one route to the hill and assume it is the route.
The mode: King of the Hill
There is one mode, and it is the whole game: up to a hundred players, three factions of up to 33, one control zone. Holding the zone scores, and the server ticks score at a fixed interval — ours is set to every 20 seconds, within the range the game allows. The match ends when a faction reaches the score limit or time runs out.
Three sides is the thing to internalise. Any fight you commit to can be joined by the faction that was not in it, and the team that arrives last often wins the exchange. Map awareness beats raw aim more here than in any two-sided shooter, and the cash economy pays for the unglamorous things — revives, transport, holding the zone — that three-sided fights reward, and the portal’s leaderboard now has an “Earned” board for exactly that.
The three variants
- Standard — the full game: vehicles, the whole loadout catalogue, the cash economy doing its thing.
- Infantry Only — the same map and zone with vehicles out. Fights get closer and more even, and the map plays smaller because nobody is crossing it in a helicopter. A good change of pace late in an evening.
- Hardcore — the less forgiving ruleset. Expect to die faster and to be given less information. If you are new, learn the map on Standard first.
A community server chooses which variants it runs and in what order. Ours rotates through all three maps on the standard King of the Hill, with Infantry Only rounds in the mix, and changes map at the end of every match rather than sitting on one all night.
Time of day and weather
Servers pick from eight lighting presets, and they change how a map plays more than you would expect:
- Day start and day early, clear — low sun, long shadows, good visibility.
- Day early, fog — the one that changes everything. Sightlines collapse, snipers suffer, and the fight moves close.
- Day, clear — the neutral default.
- Day late, clear or grey, and day late, grey with fog — flatter light, less contrast, harder to spot movement at range.
- Day end, clear — the golden-hour one, and the prettiest.
A server can fix one preset or leave it to vary. We leave it to vary, so the same map is a different problem on a foggy morning than at the end of a clear day.
The three factions
Lonestar, Valkyra and Manticore — blue, red and green in-game, and on the scoreboard. BULKHEAD confirmed who they are in February 2026, and it is worth knowing before you pledge: the setting is Kolchia, a fictional stretch of war-torn Eastern Europe, and the thing all three want is PV-1, the resource behind decades of fighting over it.
- Lonestar — the Western para-military heavy hitters, run like a company rather than a country. The only private outfit of the three.
- Valkyra — the Soviet People’s Republic, which in this timeline never dissolved, fighting to return it to the top.
- Manticore — the Kingdom of Persia’s deniable-operations force, from a Persia that never had its 1979 revolution.
No mechanical difference between them has been announced — they differ by allegiance and temperament, not by kit. The game assigns you a faction per match to keep the sides balanced, so you will play all three over time. On the Boet’s World portal you can pledge one anyway; it shows next to your name on the leaderboard, the faction war tallies each side’s kills across every match on our server, and twenty matches for your pledged side earns a badge.
What we have not covered
Deliberately: individual weapons, vehicle stats, and the exact scoring formula. Those are the things that change most in Early Access and the things most guides get wrong by copying an out-of-date list. If it is not on the server’s own catalogue, it is not on this page.