PART 1

Ah yes, the wonderful art of using cannons. There really is nothing quite like the cool, clean mountain air being polluted by great bouts of blue smoke from battery upon battery of beautiful brass cannons being fired in perfect discipline.

So, you want to know about cannons then, eh? Well, the first thing you must do then is to take a look at what a cannon really is.

WHAT IT IS

Let’s get it straight right from the start. A miracle-machine it ain’t. A cannon consists of two parts: the piece itself and its crew. I will be concentrating on the mercenary cannon available through the DoW army list (and enough gold) in this article, since it is what most chaos generals make do with, if they ever get the urge to add some artillery to their army and are reluctant to using a monster like the Hellcannon.

The cannon crew consists of three highly trained gunners from the war-like city states of Tilea. They will fight for almost any general, give enough gold, so you should find no quabble with their loyalty. They are possessed of the not-so-impressive Leadership of 7, but that should rarely be a problem for you. They are, in fact, no more than human. And, being humans, they have human Strength and Toughness. This is a big step down from your mighty Chaos Warriors, with their great resilience, and with no armour to speak of, they are left very vulnerable to missile fire. Simple arrow fire from fast cavalry or far-reaching longbows can be devastating to your crew, since they are so few in number.

They get some manner of protection from the piece itself, with the hits being randomised and only hitting the crew one third of the time. Still, two downed crewmen is enough to cripple the effectiveness of your cannon severely. The nimble cannoneers are even more vulnerable to direct damage spells, like magic missiles and pretty much everything in the lore of heavens. Since no to hit roll is required, cannon crewmen tend to go down fairly quick to spells like these, especially with S4 or more.

As such, you should try to protect your cannon from this kind of danger. One way to do this is to assign one of your units to guard duty. Though this is a costly way to go about it, since the guarding unit does nothing but guard the cannon and therefore does not directly affect the battle. The best troops available to chaos generals for this kind of duty is, in my opinion, beast herds. They are reasonably cheap (a minimum sized unit will only cost you 55 pts) and their manoeuvrability enables them to respond to threats from all sides. Still, they could be out there, clearing those woods from the enemy skirmishers that are march blocking your main infantry force…

A cheap way to protect your cannons is to use terrain. Set it up so that enemy units will have a hard time reaching it (on top of a steep hill that counts as rough terrain, top of a tower, in the middle of a marsh, far to the back/sides, etc). Another way is to deploy the cannon between your units, though this only works if you are defending.

The piece itself is a solid lump of metal with T7 and a whole bunch of wounds. The enemy will be hard pressed to actually smash it to pieces and will instead just go after your crew. That is why it is so important to protect them. Look at it this way: your 85 pts artillery piece has T3 and 3 wounds with no armour save. Protection is essential.

WHERE SHALL I PUT IT?

All right, you went out and purchased that cannon. Maybe even two – they get on better in pairs. And now you have come to your deployment phase in your first battle and you are completely stumped as to where you should place them. Should they just end up facing the best enemy unit and hope to shoot them down before the enemy reaches their positions?

Taking into consideration what I wrote above on protection, placing cannons on the flanks of your force is sometimes a good bet, especially if you are defending and the opponent is visibly lacking in fast and manoeuvrable units to take them out. This way, the cannons can shoot flanking fire on the attacker and this will in turn unnerve him and make him move forward at top speed, hopefully making unfavourable decisions as a result of this.

Cannons can also be placed as a sort of “can’t go there” unit. If you plunk down two cannons in front of a nice, open field, you can be sure that your opponent won’t place his chariots or expensive infantry units opposite them. He will be forced to place them elsewhere, and this you can use to your advantage.

The main rule, though, is to get as good a field of fire as possible. Chances are, your cannons will go down in spite of all your meticulous planning and protection. If that is the case, you will want to have gotten as many good shots out of them as possible. Shooting a cannon at a unit of 30 Night goblins or Skaven clanrats is a shot wasted. Shooting it a chariot or a monster is a good shot. Make sure you have enough open lines of sight to be able to take the good shots. We will discuss what separates good shots from bad shots later on, in part 2 (to follow shortly).