Quote Originally Posted by screwtype
What might be good is an option to sack your own town before retreating, burning down infrastructure and so on to deprive the enemy of it. A sort of "scorched earth" policy. On the other hand, I don't really think you should ever be able to capture enemy military infrastructure anyway, it just doesn't doesn't make sense, so maybe all such buildings should be eliminated by the game automatically whenever a settlement changes hands.
This is how STW and MTW used to work and believe me, you don't want to back there from an AI point of view. Do you not remember the AI factions knocking each other back into the Stone-age in these two games by repeatedly taking and destroying each other's regions over and over? The human player could better defend their key provinces and this feature wouldn't impact on their empire and so what we had in the end game was chivalric knight based armies vs peasant and spearmen armies.

The method they adopted in Rome was pretty good in this respect, where buildings could be damaged or destroyed, but repairing them took only one turn as opposed to the original time to construct the building from afresh.