WARDOGS Hot Zone: How It Works

How does scoring work?

Three teams fight over one large control zone, a circle roughly 2 by 2 km on the map. The team with more players inside it than the other two scores 1 point every 30 seconds, and the zone takes that team's color. First to 100 points wins.

Your minimap, bottom left, shows each team's points as the large number and their players in the zone as the small number next to the person icon.

What is the Hot Zone?

The control zone stays put for the whole match. What moves is the Hot Zone, a much smaller circle that drifts around inside it. Every player standing in the Hot Zone counts twice for control, so a few players there can out-score a larger group spread thin across the big circle. Standing in it also pays extra cash, double what you earn outside it.

The math is why teams fight over it: ten players inside the Hot Zone score like twenty outside. Win the small circle and you can lose the big one on bodies and still be ahead on points.

Towers: how to steer the Hot Zone

The zone holds 2 to 5 drill towers. They start neutral, and shortly after the match begins you capture one from a console near the top floor. Each tower you hold reveals one digit of a numeric code. Enter the full code at a tower and the Hot Zone relocates toward that tower for a limited period, then you re-enter it to hold it there. The other way to pull it is a FOB drill. Capturing a hostile drill tower now pays $1,500 and 300 XP (it was $750 and 250 XP), so the tower fight pays for itself.

A drill runs on fuel, and Season 2 made it dearer to keep going. It needs 2,000 fuel to start (was 1,500), and each unit of fuel buys 0.03 seconds (was 0.05), so the 2,000 minimum runs 60 seconds. A full 10,000 tank, up from 7,500, lasts 300 seconds at most (was 375), the same as a capturable tower. Pulling the Hot Zone for 10 minutes takes 20,000 fuel, two full tanks, where Season 1 took 12,000. A destroyed rig also takes much longer to replace.

The drill itself, the Hot Zone Magnet, now costs 2,750 build supplies (was 2,250) and pays $2,750 to whoever destroys it.

You do not always need every tower. If you hold three of them you can brute-force the last digit by trial and error at the console, so three captures is often enough to take control of where the Hot Zone sits.

The play: fortify the code tower

Build around the tower where you enter the code. Fortify it first, then enter the code so the Hot Zone lands on ground you already defend. Most of your team then sits inside the double-scoring circle behind cover, and the enemy has to break your position to contest it. Because the Hot Zone doubles every body in it, owning it matters more than the kill count.

The spawn vehicle

When any team reaches 20 points, all three teams get an armored spawn vehicle at base. You can drive it anywhere and your team can spawn on it. If its satellite gets destroyed, spawning stops until someone repairs it. The spawn vehicle guide covers how to drive it, how to disable an enemy one, and what is known about its respawn.