Artillery

Secondary Skills
Air Magic
Archery
Armorer
Artillery
Ballistics
Diplomacy
Eagle Eye
Earth Magic
Estates
Fire Magic
First Aid
Intelligence
Interference
Leadership
Learning
Logistics
Luck
Mysticism
Navigation
Necromancy
Offense
Pathfinding
Resistance
Scholar
Scouting
Sorcery
Tactics
Water Magic
Wisdom

Artillery (HotA)
	Basic Artillery (HotA) : gives control of the ballista, defense towers and the cannon to the hero. The ballista has 50% chance to inflict 2x damage. The cannon inflicts additional damage to fortifications.
	Advanced Artillery (HotA) : gives control of the ballista, defense towers and the cannon to the hero. The ballista has 2 shots with a 75% chance to inflict 2x damage. The cannon inflicts 2x damage and additional damage to fortifications.
	Expert Artillery (HotA) : gives control of the ballista, defense towers and the cannon to the hero. The ballista inflicts double damage and shoots twice. The cannon inflicts triple damage and maximum damage to fortifications.

Artillery
	Basic Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing one shot with a 50% chance to inflict double damage.
	Advanced Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots with a 75% chance to inflict double damage.
	Expert Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots which inflict double damage.

Artillery is a secondary skill that gives the hero manual control over war machine Ballista (or Cannon)  during combat and control over the arrow towers when defending a town during siege. Artillery provides control over the arrow towers also in the original game, even though it's not mentioned in the in-game description of the skill. It's interesting that Ballista is controlled by Artillery secondary skill rather than Ballistics, which is responsible for Catapult.

Effects on ballista:

Basic Artillery provides a 50% chance that ballista inflicts double damage. For Advanced Artillery this is a 75% chance and for Expert Artillery a 100% chance. Advanced and Expert Artillery also enable the ballista to shoot twice in a row, instead of once.

Effects on cannon :

With Basic Artillery or Advanced Artillery the cannon does randomly 1 or 2 points of damage to fortifications. With Expert Artillery the cannon always does 2 points of damage to fortifications. With Advanced Artillery the cannon does double damage and with Expert Artillery triple damage to enemies. As opposed to ballistas, cannons always shoot once.

Heroes with Artillery (basic) as a starting skill:

•   Ignissa the Planeswalker
•   Pasis the Planeswalker
•   Vokial the Death Knight
•   Zubin the Battle Mage

Heroes, having Ballista as a specialty:

•   Torosar the Alchemist

Heroes, having Ballista as a specialty and Artillery as a starting skill:

•   Arlach the Overlord – Basic Artillery
•   Christian the Knight – Basic Artillery
•   Gerwulf the Beastmaster – Basic Artillery
•   Gurnisson the Barbarian – Basic Artillery
•   Pyre the Demoniac – Basic Artillery
•   Ranloo the Death Knight - Basic Artillery
•   Jeremy the Captain - Basic Artillery ^{*Cannon instead of Ballista.}

Chance to get

Out of total 112 for Shadow of Death, and of (112 + Interference chance) for Horn of the Abyss .
Banned skills change the probability.

Town	Class	Chance to learn
Castle	Knight	5
Castle	Cleric	2
Rampart	Ranger	6
Rampart	Druid	1 (lowest)
Tower	Alchemist	4
Tower	Wizard	1 (lowest)
Inferno	Demoniac	5
Inferno	Heretic	4
Necropolis	Death Knight	5
Necropolis	Necromancer	3
Dungeon	Overlord	8 (highest)
Dungeon	Warlock	1 (lowest)
Stronghold	Barbarian	8 (highest)
Stronghold	Battle Mage	4
Fortress	Beastmaster	8 (highest)
Fortress	Witch	1 (lowest)
Conflux	Planeswalker	8 (highest)
Conflux	Elementalist	1 (lowest)
Cove	Captain	5
Cove	Navigator	1 (lowest)
Factory	Mercenary	{{{21}}}
Factory	Artificer	{{{22}}}

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User Commentary

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Artillery is useful if you have access to Ballista, and even better choice would be selecting a hero with this speciality as your "number one", especially on small maps. If the Blacksmith of your home town doesn't produce Ballistas, but you have an opportunity to get it (by capturing a town with Ballista, on the map, or building a Ballista Yard in a Stronghold), Artillery is a good choice. Moreover, it allows you to fully control the town's defense (as sometimes arrow towers kill enemy's least valuable troops, i.e. neither ranged nor flying). High price of a Ballista is "the other side of the medal". A secondary hero may learn Artillery so as to shoot wandering creatures and weak enemy troops, avoiding melee attack and thus decreasing losses. Always learn Artillery if you rely much on Blind spell, as otherwise Ballista may shoot blinded creatures, making them able to fight.

The only redeeming feature of Artillery skill is that while defending a siege, it gives the defending hero control over the arrow tower(s). Sometimes more valuable than the damage of the towers is the chance of defending hero to cast the first spell in each round. Additionally, heroes with Artillery specialty start with a ballista, which can be useful in the combat as the AI sometimes attacks it wasting an otherwise possibly harmful attack on the "free" ballista. However, purchasing a ballista for this purpose is typically purposeless unless the kingdom has plenty of gold to spare.

The problem with Artillery skill is the ballista, which is not only ineffective but also expensive, weak and possible risk factor during combat. An example of the ineffectiveness is that even if the hero has Expert Artillery, Expert Archery, Attack skill value of 20 and the target is within range, the ballista only deals approximately 200 damage against a neutral stack of Archangel. Moreover, the ballista has only 250 health and acts last during the combat round, which means it may be destroyed in battles even before it can inflict any damage at all. Another major disadvantage of ballista is, that in a combat it may provide creatures with breath attack an opportunity to attack troops behind ballista without fear of retaliation. Not to mention the fact, that ballista is not deployed when attacking creature banks or defending against a siege.

When playing on 200% difficulty (eg., the setting usually reserved for competitive games), players start with minimal resources. In this instance, heroes that start with Artillery can be a godsend, especially if your town lacks ranged units by default and you cannot afford to upgrade units during the first few turns. Because of their large pool of hitpoints, you can kite a single flying stack around, out of danger, while the artillery softens the enemy stacks to the point where your stack can one-shot them.

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See also:

• Secondary skills