How does a cannon perform in an endgame with only soldiers left?
These answers restate the rules implemented by our open-source engine, which follows the WXF laws and is regression-tested against the official 110-diagram repetition casebook. Where an answer refers to a specific position, that position lives on the linked reference page, where the build verifies it against the engine before publishing.
Direct answer
Reasonably well, better than the general rule of thumb about fading cannons would suggest. Soldiers are cheap, plentiful screens that an opponent rarely wants to spend a move capturing, so a cannon working alongside its own or the enemy's soldiers can keep finding threats even in a sparse position where advisors and elephants are long gone.
Why soldiers are unusually good screens late on
Removing a soldier screen costs the defender a move for almost no material gain, so they often simply tolerate the cannon's threat rather than spend a tempo dealing with it. That reluctance is exactly what keeps a cannon's value from collapsing the way it does against a truly bare position.
Where the general rule still applies
Once even the soldiers are gone, the same weakness returns in full: a cannon with nothing left to jump cannot check or capture at all. The soldier-heavy endgame is a genuine exception to the cannon's usual late-game decline, not a repeal of it.
Related questions
Is this different from cannon-and-soldier as insufficient material?
Yes, this is about a cannon using any soldiers on the board as screens, not the specific minimum-material case covered in insufficient material.
Does this mean cannons stay strong right to the very end?
No, once the soldiers are also traded off, the usual decline in the cannon's value returns.
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