Heavy Cannon
While the regulation pistols and rifles provide adequate firepower against most soft targets, they lack the strength to punch through the thick armour introduced by a number of early terrorist units, like the Cyberdisc and Chryssalid. Enter the cannons - the Heavy Cannon and the Auto-Cannon - two highly versatile man-portable cannons with a selection of shells tipped with armour piercing, high explosive or incendiary warheads. Their versatile ammunition allows their user to switch strategies in the field by simply feeding a different ammunition clip into the cannon.
The Heavy Cannon is heavy as its namesake and lacks the speed of the smaller firearms. It makes up for this by being very powerful. The biggest detriment is its small magazine capacity. It can only carry 6 rounds at a time.
The Heavy Cannon also lacks an automatic firing mode, however it continues to remain more powerful and much more accurate than its weaker but ultimately more popular cousin, the Auto-Cannon. Except for starting out on a new game, when Heavy and Auto-Cannons are the best offense your weak Rookies can afford (aside from the Rocket Launcher), these should be tossed by the wayside later in the game (after a few months or so, when you can walk onto a battlefield with a plasma/laser rifle and rocket launchers). As an added paradox, the explosive rounds actually do less damage than an AP round. AP rounds, however, don't have the benefit of splash damage. Although far from an ideal weapon, some find it useful on higher difficulty levels. On superhuman, for example, it can kill early enemies in one hit, while the Auto Cannon often seems to come up a few hit points short of a kill.
One excellent strategy with both Heavy and Auto-Cannons is to wear Power Suits and arm these weapons with HE shells. As long as you don't get a direct hit from one of your own shells, you will feel absolutely no damage whatsoever when using these weapons in short range combat. This is an excellent combination in any indoor setting such as UFOs or even enemy installations.
This weapon appears in UFO: Enemy Unknown. For the Terror from the Deep equivalent, refer to the Gas Cannon.
Stats
Heavy Cannon:
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AP Clip:
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HE Clip:
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Incendiary Clip:
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Usage notes
The following lists how many times a soldier can fire the gun by shot type continuously in any given round and the remaining percentage of any left over TUs that cannot be spent as a shot.
- Aimed: 1 Shot, 20% Remaining TUs
- Snap: 3 Shots, 1% Remaining TUs
Limitations of incendiary damage
The listed damage using incendiary rounds is misleading. Incendiary rounds do ~6.4 damage on a direct hit. The damage values listed in the UFOpaedia do not determine how powerful an incendiary round deals damage; it only determines how wide an area will be blanketed with flames.
Furthermore soldiers cannot gain any form of experience shooting any weapon loaded with incendiary rounds.
Tips
- Carry a reload or two; you don't have many shots per clip.
- Try to kneel when firing.
- Aimed mode takes extremely long, but is probably the most effective use of ammunition.
- Try to keep your second hand free while using the Heavy Cannon. The accuracy already sucks without having another 20% taken away.
- Until you have Laser Rifles available, there is no better weapon for selectively destroying hard cover than a Heavy Cannon with AP rounds.
