This thing needs to die. If any of you have played Cossacks: European Wars (and its expansion packs), I'm quite sure you agree with me.
Cossacks is an RTS game. And as any other RTS games, it has a few artillery units. Four, to be exact. One of them is quite expensive, but loads relatively fast and deals good damage, especially in groups. Another has an enormous damage output, but very limited range and loads slowly. The third is close-range only, but deals death to all non-armoured units (basically a seventeenth century shotgun on wheels). These three all have some things in common: They are expensive, there's a build limit of five of them per artillery depot, they are slow, and they take a looooooong time to create.
The fourth is the Mortar, and it has NONE of those limits. It's dead cheap, you can make 45 of them per artillery depot, and takes half a minute to create.
The Mortar has a range three times greater than any other unit in the game (save for its seaborne equivalent), so it can hide in the bushes some few hundred metres away from your base, and it will take you forever to find it. It also spews out a (somewhat inaccurate) shell every second or so. The shells deal little damage to anything they hit, but their side-effect is a shower of splinters flying everywhere upon impact, insta-killing any unit they come across. In other words, the worst harassing unit ever. The enemy can send a single mortar and a small force to defend it, and shell your base from far, far away. They prefer to attack your resource buildings, with splinters also killing your peasants working around them. Counter-fire is pointless, the only unit with a range comparable to a mortar is another mortar, and the probability of hitting a mortar with another mortar is extremely small. You
have to leave your base and counter-attack the enemy mortar with soldiers of your own. An unchecked mortar will slowly, but surely, eat into your base one building at a time. If ten or more mortars are present, the enemy is pretty much guaranteed to destroy parts of your base. Oh, and the AI will spam them, sending one or two over to your base every minute or so.
Think the Trebuchets in AoK were annoying? Me too, but these have six times the range, five times the rate of fire, cost bugger all and require no assembly before use. I've looked for mods to disable this sucker, but with no luck yet.