What is the reason to not include sap points?

[Zenicetus]

I haven't read any comments from CA about this, so we can only guess. It might be that the dev team just didn't have time to implement and test that feature, before the release deadline. Or maybe they just wanted to ramp up the overall difficulty for the attacker. They've done other things to make sieges harder, like changing the dynamics for missile-firing wall towers (you have to clear ALL defenders from anywhere near the tower to shut 'em down), the towers cause more damage to attackers on the walls now, and it seems to me that defenders are more easily setting fire to rams and siege towers, compared to RTW. So maybe they didn't want to give the player an "easy" way to bypass going in the hard way (aside from spies opening gates, which still works).

[PaulTa]

I haven't read any comments from CA about this, so we can only guess. It might be that the dev team just didn't have time to implement and test that feature, before the release deadline. Or maybe they just wanted to ramp up the overall difficulty for the attacker. They've done other things to make sieges harder, like changing the dynamics for missile-firing wall towers (you have to clear ALL defenders from anywhere near the tower to shut 'em down), the towers cause more damage to attackers on the walls now, and it seems to me that defenders are more easily setting fire to rams and siege towers, compared to RTW. So maybe they didn't want to give the player an "easy" way to bypass going in the hard way (aside from spies opening gates, which still works).

No way is it easy to set fire to rams. I've had battles where about five or six full units of archers were firing at the ram at the same time (russia against poland, can't deal with the cavalry swarm!), and I've burned out all but ten or twelve of the guys actually pushing the ram, but no burned ram.

[Patricius]

The chances of enemy siege engines burning seems completely random. Sometimes multiple engines are burnt, sometimes even the ram will not burn, and that with half an army worth of archers firing on it. Sieges are a lot easier if the gate is not forced. This chance element of whether the siege engines can be torched is often, for me, the biggest factor in winning or losing a siege.

[Zenicetus]

No way is it easy to set fire to rams. I've had battles where about five or six full units of archers were firing at the ram at the same time (russia against poland, can't deal with the cavalry swarm!), and I've burned out all but ten or twelve of the guys actually pushing the ram, but no burned ram.

Yeah, I should have made it clear I was talking about the player as attacker. And I agree with Katank that rams seem to burn a lot easier when they're controlled by the player, vs. the player trying to burn an attacker's ram. There might be some bias written into the the code to make it harder for the player in both cases, to compensate for a somewhat weak AI.

[Bijo]

What even further diminishes the chance of setting afire siege equipment, is when your archers aim all the way upwards and not directly. That's when I think "What the F-!"