Carronade

Carronade is a Vampire Coast artillery unit in Total War: Warhammer II. Broadside cannons for sinking mortal ships are devastating when used in the field, pulverizing living flesh and solid walls.

Description
Many ships of the Undead fleets are equipped with broadside cannons known as Carronades or ‘smashers’, so named for the quick, splintering work they make of even the toughest ship hulls when brought within range. They first incapacitate their target before the zombie hordes board, murder, and loot according to their master’s will. As they sail off, another round of broadside cannon fire sends the ransacked ship and its blood-soaked decks to a watery grave. Carronades are comparable in size and power to the Great Cannons used in the field by the Empire, capable of causing a similar scale of devastation upon living targets and even reducing solid walls to rubble from afar. As with the armies of the Empire, Undead pirates drag their artillery onto the battlefield, with the hisses and cracks of smaller, handheld black powder weapons commonly preceded by the thundering booms of Carronade fire.

Strategy
Historically carronades were specialized piece of ordnance that fired a higher weight of shot but with a lower powder charge. They were smaller, lighter, and cheaper than cannons that fired the same weight of shot but had a much shorter effective range. This would give a ship a devastating close-range broadside but vulnerable to being picked apart at longer range by an cannon armed opponent that was agile enough to keep its distance. An all carronade frigate could potentially have a broadside with as much weight of shot as a ship-of-the-line armed with cannons.

In WHTW2, they are just cannons by another name. Good for killing high armor and monstrous units at long range, while doing a decent job mowing down infantry. Mortars are strictly better at killing lightly armoured infantry and you should recruit a mixture of the two piece of ordnance that best counters your expected enemy.