Artillery

Angle. Power. Wind. ×10.

How to play Artillery

  1. Drag away from your tank. The direction you drag is the angle, the distance is the power, and a short dotted arc shows the first stretch of the flight. Let go to fire.
  2. Pick your shell. The rocket blows up the moment it touches something. The bomb bounces off the ground and walls and only goes off when its fuse runs out — bank it round a cliff, or roll it into a hole nothing else can reach.
  3. Check the wind gauge before you commit — a strong crosswind moves the landing point by several tank-lengths, and it changes every turn.
  4. Look for a lit ×2, ×5 or ×10 banner in the sky. Thread your arc through it and the shell splits into that many, flying on as a volley. Big gates are easy and pay little; the ×10 is a narrow target.
  5. Miss? Look at where the crater is. Long means less power or a higher angle; short means the opposite. Two corrections and you should be on target — that's the whole game, and it is exactly what the enemy gunners are doing to you.
  6. The ground is real: shells dig craters, tunnels go through hills, and anything left hanging falls. Cut the pillar under a stone platform and everything standing on it comes down.

A little background

Artillery is one of the oldest ideas in computer games: two guns, one hill, and a fight decided by angle and power. It ran on teletypes in the 1970s, on every home computer of the 1980s as a type-in listing, and became a shareware institution on DOS — the generation that grew up passing one keyboard back and forth for Scorched Earth or Tank Wars, and later Worms and Pocket Tanks, is playing the same game here. (Those are other people's names for it; this is an independent version, not affiliated with any of them.)

What made it last is that a miss is never wasted. The crater tells you exactly how wrong you were, so the second shot is better and the third one usually lands — and by then your opponent has dug themselves into a hole they can't shoot out of. The enemy gunners work the same way, which is why the pressure builds every turn you waste. Play a run of sectors alone, pass the phone at the dinner table, or start a duel and settle it live from two rooms. Free, no ads, no account — everything but the duel works offline.