new to cannoneers

[honnolea]

Where are they best used on simple adventures?

I fought what usually takes 200 recruits with about 70 losses within Outlaws. So I decided to send 150 recruits, 25 elites and 25 cannon. I lost 50 more recruits than normal. it wasn't the elites, when sending 50 of them I do a bit better in the loss department than just recruits.

Do cannoneers have any value at mid level adventures?

thanks.

[Wimpy]

Check out this link to all adventures:

http://cempire.org/index.php?title=S..._of_Adventures

[Ceruhe]

Cannoneers have a use pretty much everywhere, sometimes more, sometimes less.

If you aren't following a guide (though still handy to know regardless), you should be aware of the stats of your own units as well as the opponents.
Your primary goal is to "take out as many as possible before they can attack" as that will reduce your losses. However, depending on the enemy camp, that may not be viable or only to some extend.
In most cases it will be Cavaly attacking low hp units which have normal speed (bowman, crossbows, dark priests etc etc, there is a bunch), other times it will be normal speed units killing slow speed units, such as cannoneers.
Same speed units cancel each other out, or rather, since they attack at the same time they, will do dmg.

So a really simple example would look something like so...
Your enemy camp has 50 Dogs (5hp/first strike/weakest target), 50 Rangers (10hp/normal speed/cautious) and 100 Thugs (60hp/normal speed, will get attacked before Rangers unless special ability).

Based on this info you know
a) Bringing any kind of Cavalry or Bowman will get chewed up by the dogs right away.
b) Since you are not bringing C to take out their Rangers, they will blast you, meaning you will need to buffer with R to absorb the dmg.
c) Since you are not brining archers yourself, those Thugs will be a slight thorn in the eye with their 60hp, Recruits are too weak, or rather you would need too many. Militia/Soldiers/Elites aren't much better in dishing out the dmg, so canoneers would be handy here, as the dogs, archer and thugs will chew on your recruits before engaging your canoneers.
Since you couldn't eliminate any rangers/thugs before they could attack, your choice is bringing either M/S/E/K to the battle. Since the thugs will slap your face anyway, you might as well just bring the big guns and clear the table with them in the slow round. As a Cannoner will deal at least 60dmg, that's 1 thug dead for each canoneer your bring, making this a better choice than M/S/E due to needing at least 2 units each to take out 1 thug.

What exact numbers you need heavily depends on what kind of general you can bring to the battle.

Another option to reduce the losses would be to send a suicide General to kill the Dogs, leaving only Ranger and Thugs in the camp. Even though that General will die and needs to recover now, this would allow you to bring another General with Cavalry to take out most if not all Rangers before they can attack, meaning you would only need to worry about the Thugs, though in this case you would still option to use Cannons over XB to kill them.



In your example above, I'd think you fought a camp with a boss inside, which has Last Strike (at least all in Outlaws). If you bring R only, they would get to attack that boss before your cannons do, if they kill him, he is dead and all is well. However, if you didn't bring enough "normal speed" units, he may have survived and will get to attack now, meaning your losses will increase, as you missed out on 25 units worth of dmg in the normal round. In this case it would have been better to bring XB, as they attack on normal speed, most likely killing the boss before he gets to attack.

Hope it wasn't too confusing, I sort of trailed off here and there.

[Perwyn]

honnolea, check out this combat simulator. It's a very powerful tool that will help you figure out your best attack options in any adventure. Read the instructions and play around with it to see how it works.

One of it's best features: <1> Fill in the enemy units. <2> Leave your units at 0 & select which general you want to use (200, 250, MMA, etc). <3> Click on submit.

What you'll get is a listing of attacks that will work on that camp. If you click on the column headers it will sort the results in various ways (read the instructions for details). It also includes a "hall of fame" feature which has a number of good uses when figuring out blocks.

Hope this helps. Here's the link. http://settlersonlinesimulator.com/d...fsimulator/en/

[Draconus2004]

Problem 1 of Cannons v. elites/xbows - last strike troops. As the cannon is also a last-strike troop, you lose the advantage of the normal-strike to kill many of the enemy last strike troops
Problem 2 of cannons v. elites - when taking heavy losses that include soldiers, if the enemy has a troop that "hits weakest", it will kill cannons before it kills soldiers. (militia die before cannons v. attack weakest troops).

In cases where the fight was already 1 round, cannons likely will do little good.