The three WARDOGS factions

Which WARDOGS faction wins the most?

Green, then red, and blue a long way behind. Joe Brammer, Bulkhead's CEO, said so himself on 17 September: "it's green team who win most of the time, green and red are fairly even.. and that's been the same way since pre-alpha. But blue getting destroyed is definitely a problem with mixed reasons." In faction terms that is MANTICORE on top, VALKYRA level with it, and LONESTAR behind. No fix has been announced.

He did not list the "mixed reasons". These are the ones players give, and none of them is confirmed:

• The map. Spawns are fixed, and PCGamesN reported Brammer pointing to blue's nearest towers sitting on lower ground, and ruling out randomised spawns as the fix. GameRant and players say blue starts in the south, fighting on two fronts at once.
• Who ends up on blue. Experienced players race for red and green, so blue fills with newer players and whoever joined late. The reputation makes itself true.
• The uniform. Players say blue's kit is the easiest to spot, where green's blends into the vegetation.

Which faction should you pick?

For the best odds, green or red. For a group of friends, often blue: it is usually the side with space, so a whole group can get in together, and players on r/WarDogs report that a single large squad that sticks together wins blue matches that a scattered team would lose. Players also say a blue win feels better than most.

How do you get on the same team as your friends?

Join through Steam. There is no party or grouping system yet. Brammer explained why on r/WarDogs: Bulkhead ran out of time before Early Access, and with consoles coming it wants one system that works across platforms rather than a quick fix. In the same reply he added: "a little known fact is if you join via Steam it will usually put you on the same team and in a squad together."

1. One friend joins the server and picks a team on the faction select screen.
2. Everyone else opens their Steam friends list, right-clicks that friend and chooses Join Game.

Players report it works most reliably when the first friend has already deployed and the team has room. On a full server it can drop you back at faction select instead, so pick a server with a few slots free.

Do the WARDOGS factions play differently?

Not by any mechanic Bulkhead has announced. There are no announced faction-specific weapons, vehicles, abilities or traits, and the vendor we recorded, playing one faction, showed nothing faction-specific. Nothing suggests the gap in results above comes from the kit. Still unannounced:

• Whether any vendor item is faction-locked
• Faction-specific vehicles, abilities or passive traits (the game files do hold three faction versions of the M113 spawn APC, which looks cosmetic)
• Whether faction affects the cash economy in any way
• Faction-locked cosmetics or a separate progression track per faction

Why three factions instead of two?

This part is answered, and it is the most important thing about the factions even if they turn out to be mechanically identical.

A two-way fight settles into a front line. A three-way fight cannot — pushing hard on one enemy exposes your flank to the other, so the strongest team is constantly the one everybody else has a reason to shoot. Up to 100 players split across the three sides contest a 2 × 2 km Control Zone, and the first team to 100 points wins.

That dynamic is the reason the third faction exists, and it is covered in more detail on the mechanics page.

What is confirmed, and what is not

The confirmed rows all trace to Bulkhead's TOP QUESTIONS post, with the same descriptions repeated in the onboarding flow of its public community Discord. The unconfirmed rows are unconfirmed because no source exists — not because we have not looked.

The setting these factions imply

Read together, the three descriptions sketch an alternate present rather than a near-future one. A Soviet People's Republic that needs returning to greatness did not dissolve in 1991. A Kingdom of Persia means no 1979 revolution. And the Western entrant is a para-military contractor rather than a national army, which is the detail that makes the other two make sense: this is a war fought by proxies over a 256 km² stretch of Kolchia.

Bulkhead has not published a timeline, a date or any backstory beyond these three descriptions, so everything in the paragraph above is inference from the words it did use. It is not lore we have been given.

Related: how WARDOGS actually works, the Kolchia map, and the weapon categories.