Counter-Battery

What the mission actually asks

Up to now, targets have waited for you. Here they are guns, they are firing, and they are ranging in on your position while you work. The difficulty is not the arithmetic — it is that the map work now has a clock attached, and the clock is someone else's gunnery.

Two things create every failed run:

1. You cannot find the enemy guns fast enough.
2. You find the first wave, kill it, and then a second wave arrives somewhere you have already looked.

Finding guns that are firing at you

A battery that is shooting is telling you where it is. Work the reports rather than sweeping the map:

• Every field report is a data point. Impact locations, observer bearings and damage reports all constrain where the fire is coming from. Plot them all, even the ones that seem redundant — a second bearing turns a line into a point. See triangulation.
• Route reconnaissance along your uncertainty. A flight photographs a strip, not an area. Lay that strip along the arc where the reports plausibly put the battery, not over your single best guess. Recon plane routing.
• Probe before you commit. When you are down to two or three candidate squares, a non-destructive TEAR round resolves one for a fraction of what another flight costs.

Does moving the NEST help?

Short answer: no, and it is worth knowing before you spend time on it. Players who have tested it report that repositioning does not visibly throw off incoming counter-battery fire, and the developers have said outright that movement was never meant to be a core mechanic. The same goes for the observation and positional units several players have asked about — they do not appear to change the incoming fire.

Treat repositioning as something the mission script asks for, not as a defensive tool. Time spent moving is time not spent finding the guns, and finding the guns is the only thing that stops the shelling.

Working the clock

The time pressure is real, and most of it is self-inflicted. In priority order:

• Keep both barrels working. The gun has two independent elevation levers. Two targets on the same bearing at different ranges can be engaged without re-laying the turret at all.
• Elevation travel is your biggest sink. Sequence targets so consecutive shots need similar elevations. Loading an extra powder charge lowers the required elevation, which can be worth the requisition purely for the seconds it saves on the wheel.
• Traverse with the lever, finish with the wheel. Lever for speed onto the rough bearing, wheel for the last degree. Doing the whole traverse on the wheel is the commonest way to lose thirty seconds you needed.
• Engage long-range targets first. Longer flight time means more of your own work happens while the shell is already on its way.
• Never stand still waiting. If a shell is in the air, you should be plotting the next target, ordering the next flight, or loading.

If the timer freezes and nothing spawns

Several players have hit a state where the counter-battery timer sits still, the field report shows nothing new, and the expected second wave never arrives. The pattern points at mission state not fully resetting on a restart, so the game believes a wave has already spawned. The developers have acknowledged and patched timer bugs affecting mission replays.

If you see it: quit to the main menu and start the operation fresh rather than restarting from inside the mission, and make sure you are on the current build.

The Challenge Mode version

Counter-Battery also exists as a scored challenge, and it is a different problem — you are optimising points rather than surviving. What the leaderboard players do:

• Buy observation, not photography. The consensus is that spending on forward observers returns a guaranteed set of spotted enemies, where the same requisition on a scout plane returns whatever happened to be under the flight path. Guaranteed intel beats a good chance at better intel when you are scoring.
• Buy the entire run before firing a shot. Plan the whole volley, purchase all ammunition up front, then start. Mid-run purchasing costs time you cannot recover.
• Prioritise clusters, supply caches and artillery over isolated targets.
• Read the opening intel and be willing to restart. Scoring depends on the spawn layout. If the initial intel does not show enough high-value targets, a competitive run is not there — restart rather than play it out.

For calibration: experienced players describe 30–40 points as a solid run. If you are scoring in the twenties, the gap is usually purchasing and sequencing, not gunnery.

Before you try again

• Triangulation — plotting reports into positions
• Recon planes — routing a flight, and why photos go stale
• Ballistic calculator — keep it open on a second screen
• The full mission list