How a match works
Three factions, one moving zone, first to 100 points. What the score actually counts, and when to move.
Three factions, one zone
A server holds up to 100 players split three ways: Valkyra shows red, Manticore green and Lonestar blue, about 33 a side. The faction is flavour. All three buy from the same vendors, so your side decides the colour you show on the map and nothing about what you can carry. Sources disagree on whether you can switch faction mid-match; plan on staying where you are put.
You spawn at your faction's HQ, which is a long way from the fighting. HQ has the weapon and vehicle vendors and the deployment board. The objective is a Control Zone about 2 km across, placed at random inside a much larger map (Bakurani is 12 by 12 km). It is not fixed for the match: it shifts, and the ground you are fighting over shifts with it.
How points are scored
On a fixed tick the game counts how many players from each faction are standing inside the Control Zone. The faction with the most bodies takes one point. First to 100 wins. Sources differ on the length of a tick, somewhere between ten and thirty seconds, but the rule is the same: it is a head count, not a kill count. Killing an enemy takes one body out of their count; reviving a downed teammate inside the zone puts one back into yours.
All three scores sit bottom-left under the mini-map, with a bar that fills toward the next tick. If your faction loses players just before the bar fills, another faction takes that point. Matches can run over an hour.
The Hot Zone
Inside the Control Zone is a smaller circle, the Hot Zone. Every player standing in it counts as two for scoring, and zone income pays double there. It moves continuously inside the larger zone, so the fight for it never settles. Ten of yours in the Hot Zone outweigh nineteen of theirs elsewhere in the zone, which is why the heaviest fighting, armour included, ends up there.
Numbered towers stand across the map, each with a terminal on an upper floor. Holding towers gives your faction a way to pull the Hot Zone toward one of them. The sources describe the mechanism differently and none confirms the exact rules, so treat towers as a lever, not a plan.
What earns points, and what pays
| Action | Effect on the count | Pays |
|---|---|---|
| Standing in the Control Zone | One body | About $160 a tick |
| Standing in the Hot Zone | Two bodies | About $320 a tick |
| Reviving a teammate | One body back | $100 to $900 |
| Driving or flying someone in | One body | $300 to $450, plus $500 if they survive the drop |
| Killing an enemy | One fewer of theirs | $1,500 to $2,000 |
Payouts are community-collected by the Handbook and change between patches.
When to rotate
Move when the Hot Zone moves. Sitting in a fortified FOB the zone has left is a slow loss; the Handbook is blunt that turtling never wins, even when the FOB started inside the zone. Watch the Hot Zone marker and the score bar. If your faction is not the one taking ticks, the fix is more bodies in the circle, not more kills at the edge of it.
When you die you go back to HQ, or to your faction's APC once it is unlocked and parked inside the zone. The FOB does not offer a respawn. The trip back is long enough that dying costs time as well as money, so a revive is nearly always worth waiting for. The bleed-out timer is long for exactly that reason.