Castle Sieges

[General Malaise]

"Shogun: Total War doesn’t include the battles that arose from siege warfare because
the long, slow business of laying siege to a castle doesn’t make a very exciting game.
Sieges are covered in the strategic game in a straightforward fashion so that you don’t
have to worry about the details. Siege warfare was often neither heroic nor dramatic.
In fact, most of the time it was a fairly squalid affair. If you want to imagine what a
siege would have been like, think the most overcrowded camping holiday you’ve ever
had or heard about, with utterly dreadful food, no toilets, no reliable fresh water,
constant bad weather, no chance to wash for weeks on end and no chance to move
somewhere more interesting. Now add in random bouts of illness (caused by the
food, bad water, bad weather, lack of hygiene and overcrowding) and random
episodes of small-scale violence when the people you are besieging try to kill you or
you try to break in and kill them.

Of course, none of the intricacies (and boredom) of siege warfare mattered on many
occasions.At Osaka in 1615, for example (and at other sieges), the troops inside the
castle left the protection of the walls to fight it out with the enemy on an open
battlefield. Sometimes this was a good move, breaking the siege in one climactic
action. At other times, such as Osaka Castle, it simply meant the defenders were cut
down outside the walls rather than being starved or slaughtered within them." - from STW1's The Way of the Daimyo manual

I hope they remember the above in regards to STW2. The endless siege-fests that were present in Rome on really made the campaign a tiresome chore. It's fine if historical sieges were a large part of warfare, but there's no reason not to abstract and streamline them the way they did in STW1. No matter how fun they make charging or sallying from a castle in any event, it's still going to be dull when if it makes up every battle.