Well i've played enough with different factions to know that there is something amiss with the seige option. To cut right to the point, if you take a full stack army with a 9 star gen and seige a settlment wi th half as many people, and then auto resolve you almost allways win. Your casulties will be anywhere form 20-200ish and thats that. However, i've noticed that EVERY time I play the attacker in a seige, even if i win i loose soooo many men! This is abit odd to me, because the same battles would be won if i had clicked auto resolve with not many casulties. Now i know this revolves around the difficulety you set for the game, but i first noted that on H/H my dismounted fudual knights were geting killed very easily ince they climbed up the ladders or got out of the tower against town milita! Now i can understand attackers geting some sort of penalty, thats fine with me. But when you take a unit in chain mail, sword and sheild and then tell me that "defeat is a distinct possibilty" against town militia, i just dont buy it.
Yes I feel those two problems are something that should be taken care of. Sometimes it gets so ridiculous.

/rant
So I had defeated this crusader army (m/m difficulty) and their 8 star general, also a faction heir, survived and decided to run away. Just to prove it to myself that my archer units suck hard even with 7 to ranged attack, I sent 5 units of desert archers to the general's lone, heavy cav unit that comprised of 9 people including the heroic general himself. The fight ensues after some time and the almost 300 weaklings in rags with clownish and clumsy bows and outfit and what not start firing volleys of toothpicks and wooden splinters, and hurl stones and whatnot, on these brave and heroic men of steel who smile and go 'Let me have it, heathen, har har..'. I moved the time warp slider to x3 and looked on as these brave men survived the rain of toothpicks, getting injured by them a lot, but never dying. Then a couple of them die (finally) to my amazement, with the archers almost out of toothpick missiles now asking each other if the general and his men were wearing that dreaded and fabled, european heavy mail that eastern arrows can just never penetrate no matter what?! *gasp*. That's when the steeley general bellows and makes a heroic charge, judging that the knaves are now full of fear. Running down the archers with their armored warhorses, who, in response, pull out their rusty and dull antique butter knives their mama had told them to take with 'em just in case, having old pride and trust in their horde of numbers. Anyway, after a lot of death and heroic slaughter, the general is left alone with some 80 archers still standing audaciously. The rest having taken each other to the afterlife, with the general's elite personal guard numbering as raisin in the flour of my archers. Little did these 80 men know that the general -was- indeed wearing the legendary heavy plate mail, carrying a special sword of spanish steel gifted to him by a great swordsmith, and that he was so scarred, that no puny knives ever made a slash painful enough to actually hurt him or rend his tough skin of coldworked steel. To make it short, the general kills these 80 or so desert archers alone! Charging into their midst repeatedly and unleashing a blade storm as he rode through each time. These poor bastards having already fired all their obsolete and unblessed toothpicks and having only rusted butter knives and no brains to improvise, gave their lives to their own foolishness.
/rant

Next I send two units of mamluks and press auto resolve and the fleeing enemy general is slain instantly with some mamluk casualities.

After that I reloaded the autosave and sent those same 5 archer units again to the general and click auto resolve and voila! The general is dead with my archers having taken considerable casualities. Now, I wonder what tactics I forgot to use that made Captain Mahmood a superior leader than I am. If I could promote or decorate this man, I would have done so.

The reason why I don't go beyond medium difficulty in battle map. The AI is improved, but also the enemies get huge bonuses to their offensive & defensive stats, which, for now, I'd rather avoid. That is because of the bug which is very noticable during city assaults. When you move all your forces into the flagged area inside enemy settlement, to capture it, you can see packets of the enemy troops killing your soldiers with your soldiers just walking to them blindly sometimes. The individual melee AI (if that even exists) is very sluggish for some reason in closely packed fights such as these. Generals can have largely varied power in a game, but as a thumb rule, if it's your general he WILL eventually die in melee. If it's your archers, and you're playing on hard, they WILL be penalised and made ineffective unless in vast numbers.