Artillery Tips: Reading Wind and Controlling Flight Time

Updated October 2026

Artillery gives you one blue tank on the left, one red tank on the right, a ridge of random hills between them and a wind gauge in the corner. You win a level by landing a shell on the red tank. If you miss, the red tank fires back, and if it hits you the run is over. The dotted aiming line is generous, but it deliberately leaves out the wind, so every level turns into the same question: how far will the wind push this particular shot? The answer depends far more on how long the shell spends in the air than on how strong the arrow looks, and that is the idea this guide is built around.

How aiming and power work

You can start a drag anywhere on the battlefield. The shell flies in the direction you drag, not the opposite way like a slingshot: drag up and to the right and the shell leaves your tank up and to the right. The length of the drag sets the speed. The whole battlefield is measured in units of 1/360 of the screen width, so it plays the same on every phone; on a typical phone one unit is about one pixel. Power grows until the drag is 160 units long and stops increasing after that, so dragging further only changes the angle. A drag shorter than 14 pixels is cancelled and costs you nothing, which is a handy way to back out of a bad aim.

The dot at the start of your drag changes colour with power: yellow for normal, amber above 70%, red at full strength. While you drag, a dotted line shows the path from your tank's barrel. It runs all the way until it touches the ground or leaves the screen.

Two details about that line matter. First, it ignores wind entirely, on purpose. Second, apart from the wind it is exact: it is worked out with the same small time steps the real shell uses, so in still air the shell follows the dots to the pixel. The enemy counts as hit when your shell passes within 22 units of the centre of its tank, so put the end of the dotted line on the middle of the red tank, not on its edge.

What the wind gauge tells you

Each level rolls a new wind value, picked at random between zero and a maximum that grows with the level. That maximum is 32 on level 1, 80 on level 5, 140 on level 10 and 152 on level 11, and after that it keeps climbing by 6 every level with no ceiling: 206 on level 20, 266 on level 30. Very weak values are rounded down to no wind at all. The gauge shows a green dot when the air is still, an amber arrow for moderate wind, a red arrow once it reaches 60 and a purple arrow from 150, which only happens after level 11. The arrow points the way the shell will be pushed and grows longer with strength.

Wind in this game is a steady sideways acceleration, exactly like gravity but horizontal. That makes its effect easy to estimate. The sideways drift is half the wind value times the flight time squared. A few examples, worked out from that formula:

• Wind 30, one second of flight: about 15 pixels of drift.
• Wind 80, one second: about 40 pixels.
• Wind 150, half a second: about 19 pixels.
• Wind 150, one second: about 75 pixels.
• Wind 150, one and a half seconds: about 169 pixels.

Look at the last three lines together. Tripling the flight time multiplies the drift by nine. The colour of the arrow tells you how hard the wind blows; the shape of your shot decides how much of that you actually feel.

Flight time is the real control

On every phone the two tanks sit about 265 units apart, and the game's gravity is 420 units per second squared. On flat ground there are three very different ways to cover that distance:

• A 45 degree shot needs only about 93 pixels of drag and stays in the air for roughly 1.1 seconds.
• A full-power flat shot at about 10 degrees arrives in under half a second.
• A full-power lob at about 80 degrees hangs for around 2.7 seconds.

In a 150 wind those three shots drift roughly 95, 17 and over 500 pixels respectively. The flat shot almost ignores the wind, which is why it is the strongest option on red-arrow levels. Its weakness is the hills: the terrain can rise or fall by up to 70 units, and a flat shot that clips a ridge is a miss. Use the preview to check: if the dotted line runs into the hill in front of you, raise the angle a little at a time until it clears, and accept a slightly longer flight.

The lob is almost never right. Its long flight makes wind correction a guess. Keep it for the rare hill that blocks every flatter arc.

Correcting for wind step by step

1. Read the arrow's direction and colour before touching the screen.
2. Choose the flattest shot whose dotted line clears the hills and ends on or just in front of the red tank.
3. Estimate the flight time. A flat full-power shot is about half a second; a medium arc is around a second.
4. Work out the drift with the half-wind-times-time-squared rule and shift where the dotted line lands by that much against the arrow. With wind blowing toward the enemy, aim short; blowing toward you, aim long.
5. Release, and watch where the shell actually lands. If you miss and survive, the wind is the same on your next shot, so a measured miss is very good information.

One more warning: your own shell can hit your own tank. Once it has left the area around your barrel it can come back down on you, and that ends the run just like an enemy hit. A shot aimed nearly straight up is the usual way this happens.

The enemy's return fire

After a miss the red tank shows a small red dot for 0.7 seconds and then fires. It does not use a preview. It solves for a shot that reaches you with the wind already counted, starting from a flight time of 1.25 to 1.65 seconds and trying longer ones until it finds an arc that clears the hills, then adds a random error to its launch speed. That error is large early on, shrinks by a fixed amount each level up to level 11 and then keeps shrinking by a tenth every level with no floor. Only on very windy levels, where no arc reaches you cleanly, does its shell still bury itself in the ridge.

We ran the enemy's aiming code many thousands of times. In our simulation its single return shot hit about 20% of the time on level 1, about 30% on level 5, about 63% on level 10, close to 90% on level 13 and over 90% from level 20, and the numbers were the same on a large and a small phone. If the enemy misses, it is your turn again with the same wind and the same hills, so on early levels a miss is cheap and a ranging shot is a reasonable choice. From the low teens on, treat every shot as your last.

Scoring and pacing

Each hit is worth 10 points and moves you to the next level after a short pause, with new hills and new wind. There is no shot clock at all, so use the time. Before each release, check the arrow, pick the flattest safe shape and do the drift sum once. Your best score is saved on your device, and any run that scores can be submitted to the Hall of Fame from the game-over card.

If the screen size changes mid-run, for example when you rotate the phone, the battlefield is redrawn to fit: hills and tanks keep their places and the distance between them, so the shot you were lining up is still the same shot.