I'm now of the opinion that either a) gate oil needs to be toned down, or b) the AI needs to be adjusted when attacking stone walls when a spy has opened a door.

I was fighting the Egyptians when a full stack of theirs laid siege to a city I had that had regular stone walls. Apparantly they had a spy in my city because when they attacked, the gates were open. They had built four ladders, and two siege towers. Seeing the gate was opened, they dropped everything and charged en-masse through the gate. I had one unit of phalanx pikemen defending the gate (the rest of my guys were on the walls to repel the towers/ladders).

Well what happened was rather astonishing. More oil came out of the oil drains above the gate than come out of Saudi Arabia on an average day. They lost 1300 soldiers, of which only 500 or so were killed by my guys. My pikemen only had to deal with a few guys at a time, who were usually routing before reaching the pikepoints, as their teammates were roasted alive. I think the pikemen had only a few dozen kills to their name, the rest were the pair of archer units on the walls and the Greek Cavalry that I charged after the fleeing enemies when the "Run for the hills" calls started.

This is rather silly, IMO. Either the oil dumpage needs to be reduced in frequency (I think it was coming out every 5 seconds or so), or the AI needs to ignore gates when assaulting stone walls.

Or, option #3 would be to disable the oil when the gates are left open by spies. Why would a spy sabotage the gates, but leave the oil system in working order? Unless he was a double-agent ... hadn't thought of that ...