Quote Originally Posted by oaty
Heres what I do when the A.I. attacks the smaller force. I withdraw, the larger army maintains the siege and it goes on. No this is'nt gaming the comp either as its the comp not seeing the overall picture.

Heres what the A.I. sees 1000 men besieging 1 side and a few hundred besieging the another side. It sees a small army it can handle so attacks. The A.I. does not see the overall picture it just sees an easy victory.
Well, that sounds great, except all three of my armies (town watch, peasants and assault army) withdrew when the AI beat one of them. I suspect but can't prove that this is because the other two armies were listed as reinforcements but then "didn't arrive in time".
As far as the timer you can DL a mod for the timer, do a search in the dungeon. Theres a chance they will bring back the timer/notimer option with a future patch or recalculate time for a siege.
I think that what is needed is for the time allowed for assaults to vary with city size, with those on huge cities taking something like three times as long as a normal field battle. I don't think the timer/notimer option is really sufficient.
26,000 people in Carthage is not a big problem to deal with. Of course not executing or enslaving upon first conquering it is a lesson well learned. It takes time to convert the city.

Look in the ludus magna forum for topics on better city management and you will see Carthage is managable.
True. I'd already reduced the culture penalty a lot, and it was manageable. The reason I still did it was to boost my Italian cities and regional capitals towards 12000 population.
In my current campaign I was conquering Spain and Parthia at the same time. The key here it takes time and you need to be using a general with good traits especially influence. For each influence a governor has that adds 5 percent loyalty bonus. A 4 influence governor can just about keep any city under control and if I lose it I wait for that uber 8-10 influence general to smash them to pieces. For Carthage find a good general and put him there.
That's a good point. I don't really consider the happiness penalties to be a problem, and I only mentioned it as background in this thread, nothing more.