why the ai being slaughtered in plaza is a good thing

[Slaists]

for one, i think, the timer should be kept for seige battles (the time alotted to each particular attack is discussable though and some extra slack in this regard would be an improvement in my opinion). without the timer, i, as a human player, am tempted to exploit the situation by taking all or most of the walls and annihilate the AI forces using their own castle defenses... with the timer on, i just do not have enough time to accomplish this: the strike has to be surgically precise carrying the wave straight to the city square... and once there, i better have sufficient forces in reserve to keep it clean (even from routing enemy units which rally in the square) for three minutes.

all in all, i like the current system. however, i'd like a tad more time to be able to accomplish more epic seige attacks. as it stands now, the timer seems to set ridiculous time limits which in no way correspond to the engaged army size and wall defenses... i have had attacks in which i have only 20 minutes to take a fully garrisoned huge city and, at other times, i get 45 minutes to batter just a couple hoplite militia units...

as to the central square issue: with the timer on, one just runs out of time to shoot down the square defenders.