Hojo Hand Mortars are Useless (Almost) - Total War: Shogun 2

There's not much positive to say about this unit. But maybe they're not entirely without merits

[@pasatebo]

since it fires at a high arc, why not see if its useful to kill ranged units stationed on walls during sieges?

[@PerennialSash]

I appreciate how the enemies get sucked back into formation. So anyways, the verdict on hand mortars is that they're sort of like fire rockets (decent returns against cavalry) but worse? I can see them having some use for picking off people doing stand and fight on their general or contributing to the skirmish if you are stuck attacking into a bow monk blob.

[@derrote6508]

Yeah kind of. If you're the attacker and the enemy army tries to take defensive positions, hand mortars can be pretty useful. But if the enemy attacks you, the only way to get value out of hand mortars is to try and snipe their general, because otherwise they don't do enough damage and they're really bad at hitting moving targets. Anyway, never take too many of them into your army. Only if you want to meme or something

[@magni5648]

@@derrote6508So in campaign just build a stack of like 5-10 and let them follow your army around to bomb everything during sieges.

[@octopus8420]

Cool channel! Always love fresh shogun 2 content, your subscriber number 86 :)

[@derrote6508]

Thanks a lot! Shogun 2 is still one of my personal top 5 games of all time. I'll keep playing it and making videos.

[@kettch777]

Hmm. Seems like if these guys were firing from inside a castle with the walls manned by bowmen or even better, matchlocks, that would be absolutely devastating to an attacking force. I could see them taking 50% casualties even before they made it to the wall, or worse, depending on army sizes.

[@sovietcupcakes328]

I will say though, I remember wishing I had some hand mortars during a citadel siege when the walls were too high for my rockets to hit targets behind the wall since I had already degraded their archers.

[@derpinglemon4577]

I used to make a full stack army of hand mortars and fire rocket and walk it up to a weak castle just to watch the defenders to be blown up and get PTSD... I usually run out of ammo before I win so I just retreat and do it again!

[@Kalenz1234]

That's weird. It really should be way more effective against infantry. The only way this makes sense is if each shot has a maximum number of targets it can damage. In that case they would be really good against high quality low quantity units like cav, heroes etc.

[@AbdulHannanAbdulMatheen]

👏😁 Very interesting. I hope there is a mod for artillery in shogun 2

[@chadnorris8257]

You'd think a unit you get so late in the game would decimate everything at range, and need cavalry charges to take down before they wipe out the whole enemy army. Instead it's merely annoying.

[@chavalchavalon6557]

maybe are useful on a siege ...

[@Katyusha94]

A bit late to the party here but for 40 units, an average of 30 kills is pretty decent. These are seige units

[@redanabil8017]

The fact that they need an armory is weird, same thing with Shimazu heavy gunners, why would I want my gunners to have armor instead of accuracy? It just doesn't make sense. Long range artillery units aren't as strong as they seem in this game, especially the hand mortars and the European canons. Fire rockets are meh, I like that split second when the rockets hit and I see units flying before most of them stand up back again.

[@CapitalTeeth]

I think the reason they aim a bit too far ahead, is because these guys are more specialized in dealing with units that are behind walls. And yeah, that isn't an excuse for how shit they are. Just a failure of the devs to design a good unit.

[@xirensixseo]

hand mortars are just general snipers