How big the map is, and how little of it is in play

Two numbers do most of the work here: 256 square kilometres of terrain, and a randomised 2 by 2 kilometre Control Zone somewhere inside it. The first number sells the game. The second is the one you fight over.

The published shape of a match

• 256 km² map, 2×2 km zone. Three teams fight over a randomised Control Zone inside a much larger map, and the first team to 100 points wins.
• A smaller Hot Zone moves inside it. Players there count double toward the head count and earn double cash. How scoring works.
• The zone moves between matches. In the studio’s own wording, the variables in zone location and individual player tactics mean no match ever plays out the same. Zone placement is one of the two things it names; the other is the players.
• The setting is Kolchia, with multiple locations and points of interest, and the fight is over a rare resource called PV-1.

All four set out in Steam announcement — TOP QUESTIONS wardogs.com repeats the sentence word for word. The Steam store page does not: its version reads “randomized 2x2km ‘Control Zones’ within larger maps” — plural zones, and no size at all. If you have seen the map given as something other than 256 km², that store sentence is where it comes from.

The studio names the country, not the maps

Kolchia is the only place name in any of it. No map is named in the announcements, on the store page, on wardogs.com or in the level design devlog, and no announcement says how many there are. The names people use come from two fan projects: wardogshub and metaforge both call them Bakurani, Ozeti and Zestafona, and both publish interactive versions with markers.

Two of those names sit a letter away from real places. The level design devlog has the team saying it chose Georgia and went there for reference rather than building a generic Eastern European setting. Bakuriani is a Georgian ski resort; Zestaponi, also transliterated Zestafoni, is a town in Imereti. Which makes the fan names plausible, and still does not make them the studio’s. wardogshub does not even treat all three as the same region: it files Ozeti under Western Europe and Zestafona under a North American theatre.

The two also differ on the detail most people are actually asking about. wardogshub gives all three as 256 km², 16 by 16 kilometres, and says Ozeti joined Bakurani in the second closed beta with the third arriving at or after Early Access. metaforge says all three are playable now, and states 256 km² for Bakurani. If you want a marked map to plan a route or a mortar line, either will do; if you want the map count, neither of them is the studio.

What the size actually means for you

• Distance is a cost. Getting to the zone is why transport pays at all; the vehicles that do it have published prices on the vehicles page and the helicopter page.
• The towers inside the zone are the map feature that moves the game. Three guides describe taking them for a code that pulls the Hot Zone, and they differ on the details: towers and codes sets their readings side by side.
• Only four square kilometres out of 256 are contested at once. The rest is not empty — it is where the driving, the towers, the FOBs and the artillery happen — but the head count that decides the match is taken inside the zone. metaforge makes the same point about its own map page.

Three questions the two sides answer differently