Cannon Duel is the artillery game in our TwozyGames Originals lineup: two cannons, one hill of destructible ground between them, three hearts each, and fifteen seconds a turn to pick an angle and a power. It looks like a guessing game for about two turns. It is not — every shot is a solvable physics problem, and the terrain you are shooting over changes shape permanently as you play. We wrote the simulation, so this guide can tell you exactly what the game is doing, including what the CPU actually knows.
Power is the shot. Angle almost never is.
This is the single most useful thing to know, and it falls out of the physics rather than being a design choice. Set the barrel on a diagonal — roughly halfway between flat and straight up — and you are sitting on the flattest part of the range curve: a nudge of the barrel from there changes almost nothing. Power is the opposite. It feeds range steeply, and the slider spans everything from a slow lob to a genuinely fast shell. One control barely moves the impact point; the other moves it a lot.
So stop fiddling with the angle. Pick one angle you are comfortable with, keep it, and aim entirely with power. You get one variable to learn instead of two, and it is the variable that actually moves the impact point. When a shot lands short, add a sliver of charge — do not re-aim.
Wind punishes airtime, not distance
Wind is re-rolled at the start of every single turn, so there is no "dialling in" a shot and repeating it. Any shot you memorise is wrong the moment the arrow changes.
More usefully: wind is applied as a constant sideways push for the whole flight, which means the longer the shell is in the air, the further it drifts. A towering lob and a flat rocket can land in the same place with no wind — but on a windy turn the lob gets shoved much harder, because it spent twice as long being pushed. On calm turns, arc freely. On windy turns, flatten out and shoot faster shells. Same landing spot, a fraction of the drift.
You do not need a direct hit
The explosion has a real radius and a cannon is counted as hit if the blast lands anywhere within that radius plus a bit more than half its own body. Practically: landing beside your opponent is a hit. Aim for the ground next to them rather than at them — the ground is a much bigger target and a near miss still takes a heart.
The same rule applies to you, which is why self-hits are real. Fire at a low angle into a ridge sitting directly in front of your own cannon and the blast comes back on you. If a hill is in your face, either go over it or blow it up first — do not scrape it.
Craters are permanent — and they are a weapon
Every explosion carves the ground and the ground never grows back. Cannons settle into whatever is left underneath them, so the battlefield you finish on is nothing like the one you started on. Two things follow.
First, digging out the ridge between you is a legitimate move. If a hill keeps eating your shells, spend a turn flattening it. Once it is gone, flat fast shots become available, and flat fast shots are the ones wind cannot bully.
Second, be careful what you dig near your own cannon. Blast a hole beside yourself and you drop into it, and a cannon sitting in a pit has to clear its own crater wall before it can shoot at anything. That is occasionally useful cover — and more often a self-inflicted problem.
Exactly what the CPU knows
The CPU does not cheat, and knowing what it does and does not have makes it much easier to play against. Before every shot it searches candidate angles and powers by simulating each one against the real terrain — the same ground you see. So it will never fire blindly into a hill it can see.
What it does not have is the wind. Each difficulty believes the arrows only so far: Easy barely accounts for the wind at all, Normal half-believes it, and Hard reads it exactly. That is the difficulty dial. It means Easy is genuinely dangerous to itself on a gusty turn — it will occasionally shell its own position — while Hard is solving the same problem you are, with the same information.
Every difficulty then adds human-style scatter to its solution, and one detail there is worth stealing: Hard has slightly wider power scatter than Normal. That is deliberate. Because angle barely matters near a good solution, angle noise makes almost no difference to where a shell lands — power noise is the only honest way to make a strong opponent miss. It is the same lesson as the first section of this guide, seen from the other side.
Practical turn checklist
Fifteen seconds is plenty if you use it in this order. Read the wind first — direction and strength decide whether this is an arc turn or a flat turn. Keep your angle from last turn unless the terrain has changed shape. Adjust power by how far the last shell was off, and remember that a shot landing short and a shot landing long want opposite, small corrections — bracket the target, then split the difference. Most matches are decided in three to five shots, so a deliberate bracket beats a fast guess almost every time.
Two-player differences
Against another human on the same keyboard the wind stops being a difficulty setting and becomes shared information: you both see the same arrow, so the advantage shifts entirely to whoever brackets faster. Craters matter more too, because a human will absolutely dig a trench and use it. It is the same game with one keyboard — P1 and P2 alternate turns, so unlike our real-time originals there is no input crowding at all.
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