Commentary

Shadow Wolf TJC wrote on Apr 23, 2011:

Seems to me that a fully-upgraded Cannon Fortress has better dps-per-cost than a fully-upgraded Mass Driver. Heck, even if one of these didn't cost $800 less than a Mass Driver, it would still have better dps than a Mass Driver, even if they were attacking units with around 100 kinetic armor. By comparison, the Dragon body, the vehicle body with the best base kinetic and thermal armor values in the game, can only have up to 111 kinetic armor (and 138 thermal armor) with full armor upgrades, which is but a small fraction of what damage a shot from a fully-upgraded Cannon Fortress can do. The high rate-of-fire (almost twice that of a Mass Driver) also allows this to deal more splash damage per second, which makes this better at dealing with swarms of units. The only disadvantages that I see are the amount of upgrades required to get these base defenses at full power compared to Mass Drivers, and their shorter range (14 spaces compared to the Mass Driver's 16-space range), though overall, in my opinion, these make for better base defenses than Mass Drivers due to their higher dps and cheaper costs, especially if you also have some longer-ranged base defenses, such as Missile Fortresses, to take care of whatever enemy units are attacking your Cannon Fortresses from far away.