Mortar in Sir, We Have an Orc Problem: Knockback, Not Damage

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026 · Newest game update reflected: 2026.08.18.12.05 (18 August 2026). The mortar is the least documented of the seven turrets on this site, and the reason is worth stating up front: almost nobody writes about it, because the thing it does well does not show up as a kill. Its listed damage is respectable and largely beside the point. What you are buying is the ability to push a wave backwards.

The numbers

From the player-measured sheet by the Steam user Mrlazy, self-dated 31 July 2026, as printed on the all turrets page. Two entries deserve a second look. The mortar is the only turret on that table that carries a DPS figure but no range value, so there is no way to compare its reach against the gunner's 300 or the laser's 550. And at 1.4 shots per second it is the slowest-firing turret in the game — slower than the cannon's 2 and far slower than the gunner's 24.

Its 32 DPS sits between the cannon's 34.5 and the tesla coil's 28, which is the trap. On a damage ranking the mortar looks like a power turret, and both the turret roles page and the glossary file it as support.

Knockback is the stat

The turret roles page is direct about what to actually buy it for: enough mortars covering a narrow choke will physically hold that choke shut, forcing the wave through your main damage instead of letting it split around the obstruction. The consequence it draws is a build-economy one rather than a combat one — holding the choke saves you from having to build a second defensive line to cover the split.

Read alongside the orc flow mechanic page, that is the mortar acting directly on the mechanic the rest of this site keeps circling. If orcs behave like a fluid looking for any gap to overflow through, a turret that shoves the leading edge back is not doing damage-per-second work at all; it is narrowing the number of places the fluid can go.

Two documented placements, and they disagree about where

There are only two positional recommendations for the mortar on this site, and they name different parts of the map.

The player John, quoted on the orc flow mechanic page, splits the two burst-support turrets by location: mortars soften the herd at spawn points, flamethrowers do it at chokepoints.

On 5.2, Sulphuric_Glue's first base of fire — at the sideways lip, which is a chokepoint — uses slow grenades to clump the wave, paired flamethrowers across the passage, and then mortars for volume, with a gunner-and-cannon wall behind. That is a mortar at the choke, not at the spawn.

Neither is wrong on its face, and the difference may simply be what each player was using the turret for: John's framing is about softening a crowd before it is shaped, Sulphuric_Glue's is about adding area damage to a cluster the grenades have already bunched. We have no third source that settles which position the knockback is worth more in.

An ambiguity in the 5.2 thread worth flagging

The same 5.2 page quotes jeffk114 on mortars: "That, with enough mortars, should be enough to keep the orcs massing and pushing each other, forcing them going down the center (which is how you die here)." As reproduced on this site, that sentence can be read two ways — as mortars preventing the centre push, or as mortars producing the massing that leads to it — and the surrounding text does not settle which was meant. We are marking it unconfirmed rather than picking a reading, because the two interpretations point at opposite placements.

The "artillery" question

aerouge's 6.1 layout, summarised on the 6.1 page, places artillery in the upper right and lists as a refinement that this artillery should hit before the laser corridor does. No page on this site states which of the seven turrets "artillery" refers to. The mortar is the obvious candidate on a damage-and-blast reading, but obvious is not documented, so we are not claiming it.

What we have not confirmed

Three gaps, all of them real. We have no range figure for the mortar at all. We have no magnitude for the knockback — no distance, no duration, and nothing on whether it scales with tiers, which matters because "enough mortars to hold a choke" is a quantity claim with no quantity attached. And we do not know whether the 28 m blast and the 10 shrapnel pieces apply to every shot or only under some condition; the sheet lists them without qualification. Neither logged patch on the update history page mentions the mortar, and the upgrade grind page records that nobody has published tier data for any turret.

Sources on this site

Stats and the support-turret framing: all turrets. Knockback as the real value: turret roles and glossary. Why pushing a wave back acts on the underlying mechanic, plus John's spawn-point placement: orc flow mechanic. The 5.2 setups and the ambiguous quote: 5.2. The unidentified artillery: 6.1. The DPS comparison against the cleanup turret: tesla coil.