Flame Thrower

The Flame Thrower is the Drake's weapon on a gun pad. It pours burning fuel for a full second, a glob every tick sprayed across an arc, and then the nozzle has overheated and needs two seconds to cool before the next pour. What the jet washes over burns for eight seconds after that, under friend and foe alike. The emplacement itself takes nothing from fire, even its own.

It hits harder than any other gun on a pad, 110 damage a second over the whole cycle, on the shortest reach of any of them: five tiles, past the guns of the Wolf, the Bison and the Gator and short of the Mammoth's. It has nothing for aircraft, and like every emplacement it is soft on buildings.

How to use

Put it where the enemy has to come close: a choke, a bridge end, the corner of the base a column has to turn. Beside a Cannon Turret it burns whatever closes on the cannon, and an AA Turret nearby covers the sky it cannot. Keep your own units out of its fire, which burns them exactly as it burns the enemy's. The selection panel counts the nozzle's cooling down and the nozzle glows while it cools; the next pour comes when it is cool. Against one, stand off: the Mammoth, Vipers and artillery all take it apart from outside five tiles.

Trivia

• Flamethrowers were dug into defences as well as mounted on tanks. In 1940 Britain buried barrels of petroleum mixture beside its roads as the "flame fougasse", to be set off into an invading column, and the Red Army dug single-shot FOG flamethrowers into its defensive lines, a design the Germans copied as the Abwehrflammenwerfer 42 for their own. Each of them fired once. The Flame Thrower keeps the idea and gives it a nozzle that fires again once it has cooled.

• Its gun is built like the other emplacements' (the same armoured housing with the side's colour on its front faces), and the two strapped fuel drums on its back are the Drake's.