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 a secondary skill that gives the hero manual control over the Ballista. Basic Artillery provides a 50% chance that attacks from a ballista deal double damage. For advanced Artillery this is a 75% chance and for expert Artillery a 100% chance. Advanced and expert Artillery also allow the ballista to shoot twice per round, instead of once. When a hero with Artillery defends during a siege, the player gains manual control over the arrow towers.
Heroes that specialize in Ballistas:
- 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. A similar argument can be made for expert Offense. 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, though it must be noted that the Ballista is not deployed in such battles.