Phantom Battery

What makes it hard

You are under a counter-battery timer, hunting a battery that is not straightforwardly where the information says it is, while the timer keeps running and the workload per kill is large. Players measured roughly a ninety-second window per enemy killed and, quite reasonably, argued that is not enough time to plot, lay, load and fire.

It is enough — but only if you stop treating the timer as a fixed budget. It is not.

The timer is a resource, not a countdown

The mechanic the mission never explains: landing hits on the phantom battery pauses the counter-battery timer. Those pauses are where the mission is actually played. Reload during them, order supplies during them, request position reports during them, prepare the next reconnaissance flight during them.

Reframed that way, the loop is: buy time by hitting the battery, spend that time preparing the next hit. A run that fails is almost always a run that spent a pause standing still.

A route that works

This sequence comes from a player who posted it in the mission thread. It front-loads every purchase so that no pause is wasted on the console.

1. Buy two AP shells for each barrel at mission start. Before anything else. AP is the round here — no burst radius to worry about and it does its work on a hardened position.
2. Launch reconnaissance immediately, from F1. The flight is in the air while you do everything below, so its results arrive when you need them rather than after.
3. Carry out the engine repair. Get it out of the way before the pressure starts.
4. Trigger the emergency relocation. This is scripted work, not a dodge — do it early and on your own terms.
5. Request two or three position reports to fix where you now are. You cannot draw a firing line from a position you do not know. See finding your own position.
6. Load both barrels: AP plus three charges each. Three charges reaches 15 km, and its elevation shortcut is range in kilometres × 4 — the fastest mental arithmetic on the charge table.
7. Identify the battery on the map and lay both barrels. Two independent elevation levers means both barrels can be set without re-laying the turret.
8. Fire both, then watch for movement reports. The hit buys you the pause.
9. Prepare the next reconnaissance flight during the wait — set up, do not send.
10. When the relocation report arrives, launch the prepared flight immediately, then repeat from step 6.

The alternative: hunt the observers instead

A second school of thought skips the battery early on and goes after the forward observers. Players report that eliminating a spotter pays out close to the cost of an emergency relocation, which makes observers an income source rather than a distraction. Several can be taken in quick succession if you work out all the turret angles first and fire them as a planned sequence rather than re-laying between each.

This is the same principle as the scored version of Counter-Battery: plan the whole volley before the first shot, because sequencing saves more time than accuracy does.

Before you try again

• Recon planes — routing, cost, and staleness
• Shell types — why AP, and when to probe instead
• Ballistic calculator — for the three-charge solutions
• The full mission list