I have an idea of making catapults canons, beacuse there are the new ships with canons in them, so that means that they can build canons. So maybe renaming and retexturing the catapult to Canon would be a nice idea. Or maybe making Canon a new defender unit because it can't travel far. What do you think? 🤔
External link →The cannons on the Bombers are still heavily primitive, and not able to be used on land.
The only Polytopians who have figured out cannons are the Ragoo Pirates (Kickoo skin), but even those are super primitive/unreliable
I'm glad to see some official explanation for this discrepancy, but it doesn't work because naval cannons weren't anything special. They were just cannons that happened to be moved onto ships. They weren't specially modified or designed for naval combat or ships; nothing prevented them from working the same on land. Bomber cannons are also very high-tech given their range of 3 squares.
The lore answer is:
The cannons on the boats are large, clunky, and a danger to pretty much everyone, and require a sea-based platform to move them in a way that makes them useful. So, they're too cumbersome and impractical on land right now, until Polytopians can work on the designs. They're very primitive, despite the firepower/range.
The dev answer is:
We don't want to add common gunpowder-based units, such as a cannon on land. The Ragoo get away with it because of the pirate theme and nothing else.
We don't want to add common gunpowder-based units, such as a cannon on land. The Ragoo get away with it because of the pirate theme and nothing else.
I get that! I prefer the medieval/ancient world theme, too. I don't want to see guns in this game (unless a second version set in the modern world is made). It's just that gunpowder cannons on the ships always seemed anachronistic.
That explanation makes enough sense for me. I still wonder why they can't make them smaller, but I'll just accept the primitive technology explanation. After all, the first computers were giant, the size of a room, before people figured out how to miniaturize them. A cannon isn't a computer (their size was developed in reverse order, and the first were much smaller), but I'll still go with it because Polytopia isn't the real world.
Yeah, in the world of Polytopia, cannons wouldn't have enough power unless there was a lot of gunpowder, but more powder means more reinforcement is needed, so they needed to be bigger/over-engineered.
But now they're too bulky for practical use on land, when a catapult would do the trick far simpler.
What about cities? Do they defend themselves with stationary cannons? They wouldn't need to move very far from the smithery. No army can lug around giant cannons with them, but cities don't move, and if Polytopians can transport them onto ships, they can transport them a short distance away to the edges of the city.
So, we've established that the Ragoo cannons are pretty much a danger to everyone, even the crew.
Thats why, despite using gunpowder, they're just as effective as Catapults. They're large, clunky, hard to reposition, cumbersome, loud, and always at risk of exploding, and thus, aren't much better than a catapult.
City defenses don't really have them because they'd be too big for city walls, most likely, and there's too big of risk of collateral damage.
In lore, do ships sometimes get destroyed by their own cannons? How often do they explode? I'm glad this isn't a thing in gameplay.
Not very often. The water-borne platform of a ship can support large, overengineered cannons that can be properly reinforced.
Of course, it makes them slow, but hey, better than nothing.
That's relieving.
So to summarize the main reasons why cannons are only used on ships and not on land (correct me if I'm wrong):
Cannons small and light enough to be transported by armies are too weak to be effective owing to Polytopians' primitive cannon technology
Larger and more powerful cannons are too heavy to be transported over long distances on land, making them only suited for ships, which can carry them more easily
The same cannons are too large to fit on city walls; they're also at risk of exploding, making catapults more reliable as land artillery
I want to thank you for providing so many in-depth and believable reasons. I never expected my question to be answered in so much detail!
Over time, the Polytopians will figure out faster, smaller, lighter cannons, but for now, they're a military curiosity that is only marginally better (if that) than a catapult, which is far more easily used/maneuvered.
And yes, that's right.
But this won't ever happen in gameplay, which is frozen in time.
Yes
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