Cannon towers before the discovery of gunpowder

I just noticed that it's possible to have cannon towers (wall defences of a Huge city) before the discovery of gunpowder.

I wonder how those worked? :gah:

Witchcraft, thats why you generals keep getting burned.
You heathen dog.

Are you sure? I just got back from my Sicily Campaign and I couldn't build them before I discovered gun powder. I played with 1 turn = 1 year, so, it took a LONG time before I could get my shiny cannons. ~:)

Yep, I'm sure.

I captured Milan around turn 55, and was able to upgrade it to a huge city 3 turns later.
Since then it has been under siege by Milan and Venice several times, and the cannons destroyed a lot of siege towers & rams :)
(it's turn 72 now, so gunpowder still hasn't been invented)

Ah, there're also cannon towers when you upgrade a fortress to a citadel, that probably caused some confusion :)

I didn't mean those, but the extra wall defences that cities get when you upgrade them to huge cities. They've also got some sort of cannons.

I have seen the same thing. It's called "Ballista towers", but they aren't firing ballista bolts for me; they're firing cannon balls. I'm uncertain if it's because I slightly modded the game: I changed timescale in the descr_strat.txt file from 2 to 1, so it's running 1 year per turn. I've played 80-odd turns so far. If I'd been playing the normal time scale, it would be 1240+ AD. I'm not certain when gunpowder gets discovered, but it's possible the cannon towers are the result of X number of turns passing rather than a certain date passing.

When you fight on the battle map in a city with Cannon towers they fire flaming bolts not Cannon Shells, so they just have an incorrect name.

So, you must have balista towers instead of cannon towers to have the benefits...