Standard, armor piercing or flesh: which round to buy

Three rounds, three completely different guns

Every cartridge in WARDOGS comes in standard, armor piercing and flesh. Swapping between them reshapes your gun harder than any attachment will, and it costs less than a foregrip.

We spent most of the alpha buying whatever was cheapest and wondering why some fights felt unwinnable. Here is what each round actually does, using the AK74 because it is the rifle most people are holding.

Read that table twice. Flesh rounds are the best and the worst round in the game depending on one variable you do not control.

Standard: the round you default to

Standard costs $15 for 80 rounds of 5.45. It kills a bare chest in four and a Level 4 chest in eleven, which is a polite way of saying it stops working against heavy armor.

That is fine for most of a match. Early lobbies are full of people in nothing or in a $400 Level 1 vest, and against those two the difference between standard and armor piercing is one shot in your favour.

Buy standard when you are poor and the enemy probably is too.

Armor piercing: the round that holds up

Armor piercing costs $40 for 80. It gives up damage against flesh, so a bare chest goes from four shots to five.

Then look at what happens as armor climbs. Six shots at Level 1, seven at Level 2, eight at Level 3 and eight again at Level 4. Standard walks from six to eleven across the same span. A Level 4 vest is the most expensive piece of protection in the game at $4,000, and against armor piercing it buys three extra shots where against standard it buys five.

If you are only going to make one ammo decision per match, make it this one. You give up a shot against soft targets and you stop ever being the player whose gun does not work.

Flesh: the best round in the game, conditionally

Flesh rounds cost $25 for 80 and double your damage against anything unarmored. Two shots to a bare chest with an AK74. One shot to a bare head.

Then a vest appears and it collapses. Thirteen shots to the chest at Level 1. Eighteen at Level 2. Forty-one at Level 3, by which point you are making noise rather than damage. Plate is the one thing a flesh round is built to lose to, and the heavier the plate the less of the round comes out the other side.

So flesh is a read on the lobby. Early in a match, when nobody has bought plates yet, it is the strongest ammunition available. An hour in, when everyone is in Level 3, it is the worst thing you can load.

The pelvis loophole

Here is the part that makes flesh rounds worth carrying even in an armored lobby.

Every vest below Level 4 covers the torso and nothing else. The pelvis sits just underneath and takes full damage from whatever you are firing, regardless of what they paid for their chest.

Three shots. Through a Level 3 vest that cost them $2,000, because you aimed eight inches lower. That is the single highest-value habit in the game and it is free.

Level 4 closes it. That vest covers the pelvis and the upper arms as well as the torso, which is most of what you can hit, and it is the real reason it costs $4,000.

What we actually buy

• First ten minutes: flesh rounds. Nobody has armor yet and two-shot kills win the opening fights that decide who has money.
• Mid match: armor piercing. Plates are out, your damage holds where everyone else loses two thirds of theirs, and you can still aim low against anyone who skipped the vest.
• Broke: standard, and aim at the pelvis. It is the same five shots whether they are wearing $400 or $2,000.
• Sniping: flesh, always. A Mosin with flesh rounds one-shots a bare chest, and it one-shots the pelvis through every vest up to Level 4.

That last one deserves its own line. The Mosin Nagant costs $4,500 and with flesh rounds loaded it kills in one pelvis hit against Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 armor. There is no counterplay to that except buying the $4,000 vest.

Run any of this yourself in the damage calculator. Set the armor, set the round, and it will show you every hit zone at once.