Montgomery changed his plan before the battle in October 1942

Both the British armor commanders and General Montgomery all started to have doubts about the plan for the upcoming battle. The original plan had great detail about minefield clearance. The concern that was causing doubts was the enemy "concealed anti-tank guns". In the battle, they found that the enemy had a network of anti-tank guns a greater distance behind the front line. The British armor commanders had hard experience from earlier in 1942 where they had large numbers of tanks knocked out by anti-tank guns. The new plan was to attack the enemy infantry divisions, not their armor. The plan was released to successive levels of command as the date for the battle approached. The 9th Australian Division received some six hundred rounds per field gun. The ammunition was moved by night and was stored underground. The British had a fuel container problem. The work-around was to collect the German containers ("Jerry cans") from the infantry units and pass them on to the armor. There was a "cover plan" that was meant to confuse the enemy about the location and date of the attack.

They instituted an air bombing program in September that was similar to what was planned for the real battle. Everything was planned with the aim of confusing the enemy about the time and location of main attack. They had things planned for moving the X Corps armor from the south up to the north, and using dummy tanks at the southern location and at the northern location. They had a dummy pipeline leading to the south. They used dummy vehicles at both the leaving and arriving destinations. They tried to disguise the dummy vehicles from detection from the air. For the X Corps movements through the XXX Corps area required road construction. A great deal of road construction occurred within two days of the battle. For marking routes, tape was pinned to the ground. A feature of the plan was that armor formations were to clear their own paths of mines. They units lacked sufficient engineers, so more were added.

The 9th Australian Division spend time checking the enemy minefields before the battle started. The Australians used guide parties to help ensure that the right people got to the right place in the battle. The Australians also experimented with using light-anti-aircraft guns to fire tracers over the heads of infantry to help guide them. This is based on the account in Vol.III of the Australian Official History.