Artillery
| Artillery | ||
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Basic Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing one shot with a 50% chance to inflict double damage. | |
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Advanced Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots with a 75% chance to inflict double damage. | |
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Expert Artillery: gives control of the ballista to the hero, allowing two shots which inflict double damage. | |
Artillery is one of the 28 secondary skills. It gives the hero manual control over the Ballista, increases its number of shots per round to two at advanced and expert proficiency, and increases the ballista's chance of dealing double base damage. Additionally, it enables the hero to manually control the arrow towers during a siege.
Heroes that specializes in Ballista:
- Christian the Knight
- Torosar the Alchemist
- Pyre the Demoniac
- Arlach the Overlord
- Gurnisson the Barbarian
Comments & debate
Though not the worst skill, Artillery is of limited use, especially later on in the game. As armies grow in size, expert Archery starts providing more bonus damage to the ballista and other ranged units combined than expert Artillery does to only the ballista. For a hero with 23 Attack, this starts occurring when bringing approximately 45 Grand Elves (or an equivalent thereof) to battle. For a hero with 13 attack, this already starts occurring when bringing approximately 20 Grand Elves. Moreover, given that a ballista has only 250 health and acts last during the combat round, it may be destroyed in main battles even before it can inflict any serious damage. Artillery can be quite valuable, however, early on in resource poor maps of impossible difficulty when Gurnisson is used as a main hero. The control that Artillery grants over arrow towers during sieges can also be useful, especially because of the resulting spellcasting initiative.