Hellcannon

Hellcannon
Overview
ID	wh_main_chs_art_hellcannon
Category	Artillery
Crew size	9
Artillery pieces	1
Recruitment
Tier unit Cost (MP): 1200 (1200) Turns: 2 Upkeep: 300 Weight: Very Heavy Size: Large entity
Statistics
Health: 15828 (3957 per model) Leadership: 70 Speed: 20 Melee Attack: 18 Melee Defence: 14 Charge Bonus: 5 Ammunition: 25
Melee Weapons
Weapon Strength: 28 Base Damage: 21 Armour-Piercing Damage: 7 Melee Interval: 4.3 s Melee Reach: 1
Ranged Weapons
Missile Strength: 378 Base Missile Damage: 72 (72 per volley) Armour-Piercing Missile Damage: 262 (262 per volley) Explosive Damage: 30 Explosive Armour-Piercing Damage: 90 Number of Projectiles: 1 Shots per volley: 1 Reload Time: 12 s Range: 420 Magical Attacks: Yes Take Cover!: Yes
Protection
Armor: 30 (22.5% reduction)
Attributes
Cannot Run: This unit cannot run and will only move at walking pace. Unbreakable: This unit does not suffer any form of leadership loss and will never rout.
Additional Stats
Siege Attacker: This unit can attack gates or walls, allowing you to instantly launch a siege battle without having to wait for siege towers or battering rams to be built. Resilience: This unit is immune to the following types of attrition: Plague of the Crow, Chaos Wastes, Mountain, Chaos corruption, Snow.

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The Hellcannon has a deadly sentience, firing bolts of eldritch fury over great distances.

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Hellcannon is a Warriors of Chaos and Chaos Dwarfs artillery unit introduced in Total War: Warhammer with the Chaos Warriors Race Pack DLC. With the release of Thrones of Decay, they can also be recruited by The Maggot Host through the Tamurkhan’s Chieftains mechanic.

Recruitment

• Warriors of Chaos
  • Activating the Hail of Hellfire gift and recruiting it in the Gifted Units
• Chaos Dwarfs
  • Unlocked with: Grand Manufactory
• The Maggot Host
  • Recruited with: Tamurkhan’s Chieftains

WH1 & WH2

• Warriors of Chaos
  • Unlocked with: Daemonic Forge

Description

Part-Daemon, part-war machine, a Hellcannon is a massive construct of metal that growls and shakes with daemonic sentience. In battle, these arcane engines heave crackling blasts of raw energy that soar through the air into their targets, liquefying anything they touch and sending the survivors insane with fear. Hellcannons are guided by a team of corrupt and sadistic Chaos Dwarfs. These malign warsmiths escort and restrain the Hellcannons into battle, for the Daemons bound within hunger for a banquet of flesh. Such is the Hellcannon's bloodlust that it must be chained to the ground to stop it rampaging towards enemy lines. Even these precautions often prove inadequate, as there is little that can stay a Hellcannon's lust for destruction. The Chaos Dwarfs load their charge by brutally shovelling the bodies of their enemies into the Hellcannon's dire-furnace. Flesh runs like wax as the Daemon-machine's hearth feasts on body and bone. Soon, only the souls of its victims are left, harnessed in the Hellcannon's gullet as crackling bolts of energy that are fired towards the enemy in powerful spasms of malice.

Attributes

• Siege Artillery
• ▲ Armour-Piercing Missiles: The damage of armour-piercing weapons mostly ignores the armour of the target, making them the ideal choice against heavily-armoured enemies. They are often heavier and attack at a slower rate though, making them less efficient against poorly-armoured targets.
• ▲ Doomfire: The Hellcannon transforms the souls of former victims into crackling bolts of energy. Targets hit by this projectile receive a leadership penalty. The daemonic bond between the Hellcannon and its shot also allows minor corrections of the latter's flightpath. When fired in first-person mode, you can control the projectile yourself.
• ▲ Unbreakable: This unit does not suffer any form of leadership loss and will never rout.

Unit Abilities

Active Abilities

• Blooood!
• Boom!

Strategy

A truly unique piece of ordnance, the Hellcannon only has one cannon per unit, but the projectile is homing and does very high AP and magical damage. Even smaller flying units will struggle to evade its fire. So while you will never get the volume of fire that other artillery can deliver, each shot is very likely to hit and do significant damage with terrain collisions being the most common reason for misses. The crew is also for some reason unbreakable and it takes some time and effort to kill them off.

For the Warriors of Chaos, this unit is a must have - having some counter battery fire will help you immensely against those loser ranged armies you'll most commonly be fighting, although it will mean leaving for instance some cavalry in reserve to protect it. The Chaos Dwarfs, with their plethora of artillery, can afford a more nuanced appraisal. Probably the largest thing in its favour within their roster is that it has a separate unit cap, meaning taking it won't limit the number of other war machines you can have. In comparison to the Dreadquake Mortar, the Hellcannon is more accurate and deals magic damage, but doesn't have anything like the same upper limit for carnage and can't be attached to another war machine for extra mobility.

If this unit gets flanked, they won't attempt to run away. Which may benefit and harm this unit at the same time because enemy won't target routing units but, at the same time, while these units are having a melee fight that they cannot win, you can send back your fast units to save them, and they will still remain by the Hellcannon, saving the time walking/running for routed units.

Bug

• The Resilience attribute for this unit doesn't mention Barren wasteland even though it has that resilience, at the very least when playing Chaos Dwarfs.