[Edi]

NTJedi said:

Keep the discussion civil... if you don't understand that's fine. No reason to morph into a troll.

Believe me, I'm far from being a troll here. If I really wanted to flame you, you'd notice it. But perhaps a somewhat harsher tone makes it sink in that people are getting frustrated with the Wall of Dismissal you've erected to bounce everyone's arguments off without addressing the points.

NTJedi said:

The current system has no siege engines... only siege engineers which give a siege bonus.

What part of the argument about a level of abstraction in the portrayal of sieges did you fail to understand? It's been repeated many times.

NTJedi said:
Currently when sieging a castle all units are troops which can melee fight. My suggestion of siege engines adds a new type of troop.... common historical siege units which are different from any current type of unit in the game which results in new strategies.

What new strategies would those be? Spend gold and resources on units that slow your army down to a crawl, cost upkeep and prevent you from moving through a lot of terrains and are only usable part of the time. The rest of the time they would just sit somewhere with their crews dicking around with their thumbs up their ***. They'd also have to be more or less vulnerable to fire (so a fire susceptibility would make them a dicey proposition in addition to the other drawbacks). What exactly is so superior about this?

The reason there are no siege engines like siege towers and battering rams on the field during the battle replay is that the breaching has already been done and what you see is more or less an abstract of what happened in the battle (instead of the actual storming of the walls).

If you absolutely had to have the kind of missile siege engines you're talking about, it could be programmed much like fort defenses are. Each nation gets a number of siege engines based on their fort type or production scale or whatever factor you want to use for determining it (or just use the nation, as is already done with the fort), and they act like a fort defense but on the attacker's side. Of course, to compensate, you'd have to double or triple fort defenses to even things out a bit.

If you want to insist on these siege engines, then the least you could do is come up with some suggestions that are actually implementable without substantially increasing micro, bogging down play and requiring rejiggering all national troop compositions and other elements. If you really want minor fluff like this, then bring an actually sensible proposition to the table.

Edi