Most shooters give you two sides. WARDOGS gives you three, and that single change rewrites how every fight works.
Who they are
| Faction | Identity | Colour |
|---|---|---|
| Lonestar | Western private military contractors — the heavy hitters, Texas-tough. A company, not a state. | Blue |
| Valkyra | Soviet loyalist forces, in a timeline where the USSR never dissolved, fighting to restore the Republic. | Red |
| Manticore | The Kingdom of Persia's shadow army, operating out of Tehran in an alternate history without the 1979 revolution. | Green |
Roughly 33 players per faction on a 100-player server.
What actually differs between them
Nothing confirmed. This is the honest answer and it's worth stating plainly, because it's the question everyone asks first.
Bulkhead has never announced faction-specific weapons, vehicles, abilities or stats. The community sites that have looked hardest at it say the same thing: unconfirmed, never stated. Pick the faction whose look you like, or whose side your squad is on — as far as anyone can currently demonstrate, you are not giving up an advantage.
The one visible faction association is cosmetic: each faction has a themed finish for one of the three free starter rifles in the Supporter Edition — the A-91 for Valkyra, the Bushmaster M17S for Lonestar, the KH-2002 for Manticore. Those three rifles are functionally identical to each other (see Weapons), so the association is a skin, not a loadout difference.
Why three sides changes everything
This is the part that actually affects how you play, and it's easy to underestimate:
- You are never safe because you won. Beating the squad in front of you leaves you exposed, low on ammo, and visible to a third faction who watched it happen. The winner of a two-way fight is often just the softest target for whoever arrives next.
- The team not fighting is the team scoring. While two factions grind each other down in the Control Zone, the third can walk in. If you're losing a straight fight, disengaging is frequently better than committing — let the other two spend themselves.
- Map awareness beats gunskill more than usual. Knowing where the other two factions are is worth more than winning any individual duel. This is what your Recon player is for.
- Third-partying is not griefing, it's the design. Expect it, and plan your own fights so you aren't the one being third-partied — fight with an exit, and don't linger over a kill in the open.
Practical advice
- After winning a fight, move or reload immediately — assume you were watched.
- When two factions are visibly committed to each other, that's your window on the objective, not your cue to join in.
- Check faction colours before shooting. Three-way engagements produce far more friendly-fire mistakes than two-way ones, especially at range where a red and a green silhouette look similar.
Sources: wardogshub.gg — Factions, wardogswiki.com — Factions, MetaForge — Best Starter Weapons. Faction identities are confirmed; mechanical differences are explicitly unconfirmed by every source we checked. See Sources & Data Freshness.