Artillery

Goal of the game

Two cannons face each other on either side of a stretch of terrain. In turn, set the angle and the power of your shot to hit the enemy cannon. Each cannon has 100 hit points; the first one reduced to zero loses the game.

How it works

• The wind changes every turn; its strength and direction are shown at the top of the screen. It pushes the shells, especially on long trajectories.
• Every explosion digs a crater. A cannon whose ground gives way falls and takes fall damage.
• A direct hit deals bonus damage; a nearby explosion also hurts, your own cannon included.

Projectiles

• Shell: unlimited, medium damage.
• Heavy shell (2 per game): big crater, high damage, less sensitive to wind but slower.
• Cluster (2): splits into five small charges at the top of its trajectory.
• Bounce (2): bounces once on the ground before exploding, ideal behind a ridge.

Controls

• Drag anywhere on the screen, pulling backwards like a slingshot: the direction sets the angle, the length sets the power. Release to fire; a gesture that is too short cancels.
• Use the − and + buttons to fine-tune the angle and the power, then "Fire!".
• Keyboard: left and right arrows for the angle, up and down for the power (Shift: bigger step), 1 to 4 for the projectile, Space or Enter to fire.
• The trajectory preview is shorter at higher levels.

About the AI

The trajectory is integrated with a fixed time step (240 steps per second) with gravity and air drag relative to the wind: it is entirely deterministic. The AI uses the same engine in a separate computing thread: it simulates hundreds of shots (angles and powers) for each available projectile, refines the best ones by local search, checks their robustness against its own execution noise and takes into account the damage its own cannon would receive, as well as falls. At low levels it underestimates the wind and aims less well, then corrects from one shot to the next; at Master level its reading of the wind is exact and its error nearly zero.