Cannon

Cannon
	Rank 1	Rank 2	Rank 3
Total Cost	140	310	500
Damage per Shot	215	749	1727
Shots per Second	2.0	1.0	0.567
Range	2.5	3.3	4.1
Damage per Second	430	749	979
DPS per Resource	3.1	2.4	2.0

Overview

• The Cannon is a conventional tower, dealing moderate damage at an alterable rate, it's capable of taking down most kinds of enemies.
• Each rank reached visually grants the tower an additional barrel, has its damage boosted but fire rate decreased. At rank 1, it is fast and weak, while at rank 3, it is slow and strong.
• Cannon is the very first tower, available to the player, from the very beginning.

Notes, tactics & tips

• A combination of rank 1, 2 & 3 Cannons can do decent job vs most enemy types.
• The Cannon is generally considered as not the ideal tower for the heaviest, nor the lightest enemies, and is often replaced by other specified late-game towers like the Focus, ACP & Anti-air.
  • In comparison, the Focus is likely to do ~30% more damage per resource than a Cannon and shines more when there are heavy lumes, that cannot be easily bursted down. However, the Focus needs warming-up and lacks burst damage while having slightly less range than the level 3 Cannon.
  • The ACP is technically unmatched when it comes to medium/heavy crowds, although it tends to shine more if it is boosted by a Range spire.
  • The Anti-air is unmatched when it comes to air lumes, although in many of the maps the flying enemies tend to be a lesser problem than the ground ones.
• Like the other projectile-using towers, the Cannons suffer from random sight obstructions, including other towers, although there are less problems with little towers like Drones & Dispensers and ones with high placing of the shooting part like Violators & Anti-air.
  • Projectile-using towers that suffer from sight obstruction are the Scatter lasers & the ones with targeting system.
• Overcharging the tower grants 3,25 damage per resource (=325 damage per 100 resources). This theoretically means overcharging has 94,1% of the cost efficiency of having two or more level 3 towers of this type, being surpassed only by the Anti-air in this specific ratio.
• Despite of the overall good efficiency of the upgrade and OC (which are partially due to the noticeable range gain), the low attack speed means a need of bigger count of towers to overcome it, e.g. 4x lvl 3 Cannons or 4 lvl 3 + 4 lvl 1-2 ones. It can be sufficiently stacked as numbers of burst towers, similarly to Lightnings & Violators. Even if the Cannons produce a minor obstruction of each other's sight, they tend to be better if they are more, otherwise they can easily get dominated by the Focus & the ACP - the Focus is better at taking down bosses & high-health lumes that require consistent damage, while the ACP deals more damage if there are bigger crowds, although both of these towers work better and shine more if boosted with a Range spire. A sole Cannon or just 2-3 are usually less effective options than having some more.
• Another comparison is with Friendship lasers - they are behind in the terms of range & damage per hit on their own while also trickier, but tend to work somewhat better if close to each other, with same or better overall DPS later on.
• Amp spire correlations
  • A level 1 Amp adds same amount of damage as overcharging a Cannon to more than 3000 damage and makes for a bigger damage gain if being put before the overcharge.
  • A level 2 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging a Cannon to more than 3756 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
  • A lvl 3 Amp adds the same amount of dmg as overcharging the Cannon to above 5079 damage and adding such Amp before further overcharging makes for a bigger damage gain.
  • Overcharging the Amp adds the same amount of damage as overcharging the Cannon to above 16250 dmg and from then on, max dmg gain can be reached by putting equal amounts of resources between them.
  • These correlations are taken into account if the mentioned damage value is reached only via upgrading & overcharging, without Tinkerer, Engineer, Limiter removal, Core-tower synergy or already existing Amp spire. If any of these is in action, it is needed to calculate the damage, gained by pure overcharging/upgrading (or to remove the buffs) to see the real efficiency stats. Note that all these 5 mentioned buffs stack only additively (no multiplications).
• The attack speed of the tower in-game is converted into shots per second this way: One in-game speed unit is 1/60 shots per second and therefore come the calculations: A level 1 Cannon has 120/60 = 2 shots per second, a lvl 2 tower has 60/60 = 1 shots/sec & a lvl 3 tower - 34/60 ~ 0,57 shots/sec.
• Alone by itself, this tower finds use mainly in the Campaign & Easy modes, since with the abundant resources in Survival and increasing health of the lumes there it tends to fall inferior to the lategame towers Focus, ACP, Anti-air & Drone. It still can find some more good use as a support tower that to help with bloating Soakers, but its attack speed is surpassed by many other towers and its range increase require upgrade that leads to lower attack speed, although the tower can be combined with a Range spire.