I'm playing Roads of Silk & Iron and ran into a 3.1B area on the upper far right with a mortar. By the time I capture that area, the only adjacent areas to hit have 1.2 and 1.3B (or less), which only removes 300M,or so armies. Less than 10%. What a joke. The mortar is too strongly held and its benefit is practically useless. I find that I am rarely using this feature. Anyone else see any great benefits to this? If the mortar was easier to get and more powerful to use, I would be willing to wait an hour between shots. As it is, I generally collect enough armies in the hour to clear the target outright.

Many have raised this same issues (too much delay, too weak, too low % to hit, too low damage, too hard to get to, most of the time you've cleared the area of the most useful targets in order to get the mortar, etc).

I was hoping the next update was going to buff mortars, but that update has come and gone, and all we got was glowing mortars. But I'm still hopeful for a future update.

2nd example from same map. The 2 mortars in Spain. The one with 65M armies is only useful for hitting the one with 164M. The one with 164M has no useful targets.

Another thought is that putting a mortar on the side of the map cuts off 50% of useful targets. Putting one in a corner (like the 3.1B) cuts off 75% of useful targets. Almost criminal. Really ruins this aspect of the game. Honestly, if the 1.3B area had the mortar, I would have used it twice to knock down the 3.1B area. As it is, useless. Completely.

They are useless and I ignore them completely.

Update 5.16 - The Mortar Meta

The problem with mortars is that territories that host anything usually are more expensive than neighbors without anything on them. This might generally be a good/logical idea, but for mortars that is what (one of the things that) make(s) mortars useless. If you try to hit anything more than one step apart from the mortar, the success rates are getting low pretty fast, and hitting a direct neighbor really only pays off if there is some other territory nearby with something on it, otherwise the territory costs aren't worth shooting at. Given the huge army costs to capture mortars, with JS and a decent hospital level, if you can capture the mortar you usually have enough armies left afterwards that you can take all the direct neighbors immediately, too. So, where is the incentive to use the mortar.

One way to make mortars better is to realize that, in real life, if a mortar shell misses its intended target, it will still cause damage wherever it lands. So, in the game, if you aim at a target say 3 sections away, a % chance of a miss should be the same as a chance of hitting a nearby target. The game could take that into account and decide randomly where the shell hits, based on the percentages, and inflict damage, assuming the territory hasn't already been captured.

I was an early ( and potentially only) defender of mortars. but I'm now with everyone else, mortars are close to useless. on a couple of the hardened levels they were kind of useful/fun, but that's more because they are small but difficult levels.

the only time you should be using a mortar is for that free time warp

Obviously I agree that mortars are too weak at the moment, but I feel that the swinginess of mortars is the biggest issue. Some percentage of the time you get a desired result, and some other percentage of the time the entire investment of time and money was wasted. In a game which is mostly deterministic that feels out of place.

I would advocate instead for mortars to do a known / knowable amount of damage. Whether that is a percentage reduction or a flat amount and how much it adjusts according to distance are all a question of balance. A small amount of randomness in the number of armies destroyed could be kept, but the current massive disparity between the two possible outcomes is not fun.

Agree with you. The disappointment on missing simply outweighs any positive use of them. Especially given the problems we've stated here, not having enough good targets, typically you end up having to choose at the <100% hit chance territories, and misses will happen.

I'd much rather have decreased damage with distance but 100% hit chance than decreased hit % but same damage.