Defenders bonus on walls a bit much?

[Husar]

My siege towers always burn, every single time. The same with rams.

What battle difficulty are you playing on?
I play on medium since I found that on very hard they were a lot more likely to burn. Maybe I didn't test it for long enough but seemed like chances to burn are affected by battle difficulty.

[Per Ole]

I think I've seen arrows fire (yes, arrows not balistae bolts) from siege towers in my campaigns, but they don't really kill very much (a little, though). However I rarely play sieges, at least not without catapults or the like. It always seems like my things start burning whenever they come into range of towers; I've tried with 3 rams, 4 siege towers, all start burning before they reach the wall (On Hard difficulty)

[SadCat]

In RTW Stone walls and on up will let you have siege towers shoot if you turn it on. Your spear men will have a fire at will button if they are pushing it. Arrows or bolts? Now did not check that close but if it goes through 3 or 4 defenders I think bolts, but that was on epic walls. On stone I never saw it drop more than 1 at a time. Now I am going to pull that disk back out PapaNasty as I jest lost both sieges. SadCat

[Ramses II CP]

If you have to use ladders to attack the enemy walls, you need two ladder teams for each defender unit. Have them land on the wall to either side of the defender and squeeze him between them. Asking your men to fight their way up a ladder and into the middle of an enemy formation is madness, and only appropriate when you have to stop enemy archers from burning your ram and you're willing to sacrifice a ladder team to do it.

The best use for ladders IMHO is in fortress and citadel sieges where ladders can be reused, but siege towers cannot. You need artillery to get a siege tower to a second level wall, and if you have artillery what are the towers for? ;)

[Ulstan]

"My siege towers always burn, every single time. The same with rams."

Build more of them :D If you build one ram and one seige tower, yeah, the defenses will torch them.

If you build 6 seige towers and 3 rams, half of them will make it to the walls and that's all you need.

Yes it will take you more than one turn to build all that stuff, but that's hardly a problem. Maybe it will give the AI a chance to actually provide you with a fight O.o

[d3nn16]

Isn't the siege tower supposed to be protected against fire ?
Wikipedia says:
"Because the towers were wooden and thus flammable, they had to have some non-flammable covering of iron or fresh animal skins"