Frigates are different from battleships...
Firstly, a normal cannonball, such as on land, does 1800 damage. This ball has a lot of weight, so it doesn't bounce around much.
A battleship and galleys have this normal cannon....problem is, galleys reload slowly and battleships are expensive (though in the long run, it might help you to save on ammunition). Frigates are cheaper, have a relatively good rate of fire (18th century frigates - faster, fires as fast as a battleship, has the same HP) but their ammunition costs a lot.
Now for frigates - their cannon weight is 30...the thing is, not only do they fire many cannons, the cannons are lighter - they actually split into smaller fragments, the cannon ball rolls around, causing multiple damage, and there are a few hundred of these fragments. Problem is - these fragments have little attack, so against ships or units it might be good who have little cannon defence - but against shipyards when fully upgraded for their defence have 135 defence (which is why Portugese shipyards make good towers ) each fragment does only *1* damage....A howitzer works the same way, devestatlingly. The 3000 power ball can split up into smaller fragments, sometimes doing over 25,000 damage to ships and buildings, since their weight is 3000 (although slow to reload). Which is probably why ketches are so expensive. Yeah, get a ketch. A ketch is a ship with a howitzer on board.
Or use a few galleys to bombard it with 250 power mortars that reload quickly. Or Victorias, which fires 50 cannonballs of 30 in one go, which means 50 multiplied by a few hundred fragments every 10 seconds.
[This message has been edited by Natalinasmpf (edited 07-19-2003 @ 04:57 AM).]