hi, I'm a bit new to EB but obviously I am wowed by its awesomeness. Anyway, a few things were bugging me about seige equipment:

1) Does anybody find any real use in their strategy for using the stone/arrow throwers? In my experience the arrow throwers are powerful but way too inaccurate, and expensive, to be any use whatosever. Similarly, stone throwers will smash a few guard towers, but why spend tens of thousands to achieve something you could do with a free-of-charge seige tower? Am I missing something? (please note this isn't a complaint, I'm not arguing for the return of vanilla RTW onagers, I'm just curious about how to use these units)

2) Guard towers: the AI seems oblivious to the fact they fire arrows, and will happily march up and down in front of them while half their army gets shot to pieces. Is there any way of weakening/removing the weapons fired by guard towers (thus helping the AI), or is it hardcoded?

3) In vanilla RTW the largest seige towers came with ridiculously powerful rapid-fire ballista weapons. Is it the same in EB? And does that mean that you should avoid building the largest type of stone wall?

4) Is there a formula for approximating starvation death when seiged in a city? I never know how many men I'll lose.

Thankyou for withstanding my barrage of vaguely-related questions.