Bringing death to your enemies from a distance
The models: The Battle for Skull Pass box set contains a cannon and crew. You can also buy the plastic kit that can be made either into a cannon or an organ gun.
Cannons give you long range fire power that allow you to reach out and damage the enemy from the first turn. Cannons ignore armour saves, are S10 and do D3 wounds. They can also be used to snipe at enemy characters (who will still get a "Look out Sir" if in a unit of 5 or more models) or war machines. The only problem with cannons is your ability to guess ranges and the random factor of the artillery dice.
Many players will use the Rune of Forging on their cannons. This means if a misfire is rolled on the artillery dice, you get to re-roll the artillery dice. It also means that the cannon now counts as a magical weapon and so can harm creatures that can't be hurt by normal weapons.
The models: A metal kit is available for the bolt thrower.
For those of us who can't guess ranges, a Bolt Thrower is a good alternative to a cannon. They also have the advantage that two bolt throwers only take up a single special slot. They use the crews ballistic skill (BS) to hit rather than relying on the player guessing the range or suffering the randomness of the artillery dice. The disadvantage of a bolt thrower is that when fired through the ranks of an enemy unit the first time it fails to wound it has no further effect. Also if firing at an enemy war machine, the hit will be randomised between the war machine (your desired target) and the crew.
Bolt throwers start off cheap in terms of their points cost but can be optioned up to become quite expensive. An engineer is a great upgrade because it increases the BS of the crew and so makes the bolt thrower 33% (at short range) to 50% (at long range) more likely to hit. The engineer can be armed with a brace of pistols or a handgun, so you can use a Thunderer model to represent the engineer. Normally your engineer will be used to aim the bolt thrower rather than fire his personal weaponry (he can do one or the other but not both), but a brace of pistols can be useful for defence if your opponent charges the bolt thrower.
You can upgrade bolt throwers by equipping them with magic runes. These improve the performance of the war machines, and also makes their shots count as magical attacks. This means that you can effect ethereal creatures, and also that you will bypass the ward save of Wood Elves units with the Forest Spirit rule, or Chaos models with the daemonic ward saves.
A Rune of Penetrating is a popular upgrade because it makes the bolt thrower S7, which means that it will kill a chariot with a single hit and also that it is 50% more likely to wound most war machines (which are T7). A bolt thrower with an engineer and a Rune of Penetrating is almost the same points cost as a cannon without any upgrades.
The Rune of Burning is a worthwhile upgrade on a war machine with no other magic runes. The upgrade is only 5 points but it makes the war machine count as a magical attack. The fact that the attacks are flaming is just an added bonus, preventing regeneration saves on Trolls and causing double wounds against flammable creatures.
Remember that you can't use the same combination of runes on any two different models. Thus if you want the Rune of Penetrating on both bolt throwers you can also add the Rune of Burning to one of them to make the upgrades distinct on each war machine.
The models: A metal kit is available for the Grudge Thrower.
The Grudge Thrower is a stone thrower. It is best used against units of ranked up heavily armoured troops. You guess a range of between 12" and 60", and then roll the scatter dice and artillery dice to see how far the shot scatters, and then place the 3" template.
As the scatter dice will give you a direct hit on average 2 times out 6, the Grudge Thrower is potentially more accurate than the cannon which always add a random amount to the distance you guessed. However, with the cannon if you guess incorrectly the bounce may cause it to hit the target anyway, where if you guess incorrectly with the Grudge Thrower you may miss completely.
The Grudge Thrower probably has the highest damage output potential of the 3
special choice war machines for the Dwarfs. It has a tendency to be an all or
nothing machine, either missing completely, or destroying large numbers of
enemy, whereas the Bolt Thrower and Cannon tend to rely more on sustained damage
over a number of turns (chariots excepted).
Its most obvious use is against mass infantry, where its template and scatter
allow it to be most reliable. However with D6 wounds and no armour save, it can
also be an excellent source of damage against multi-wound models or war machines
provided range guessing is accurate.
The first choice for upgrading the Grudge Thrower is the Rune of Accuracy, which
allows a reroll of the scatter dice, increasing accuracy. With a Rune of
Accuracy, the chance of a direct hit on an accurate guess increases from 33%
without the Rune to approximately 50%. A Rune of Penetrating is also excellent,
as it increases the Grudge Throwers base strength to 5 for models under the
template, or strength 10 for models under the centre hole of the template.
(Grudge Thrower comments from chunky04 on WargamerAU)