Actually, overall I like it.

I just now played a major siege battle against a one province minor with a full roman legion, and had to work really hard to take the town. I built rams to go with the ladders and used my lone balistae unit to knock out a few towers, just as I would have back in patch seven. Then rammed the gates while climbing the walls and suffered a fair few losses in the attempt, but broke through once the gates went down and I could come at the enemy in reasonable force. I thought 'Oh, that was easy, ONWARD!' and zerg-rushed the nearest capture point, which had the first melee units I'd seen in the battle hanging around picking their noses.

Again, I won with a few relatively minor losses, but the capture point did nothing for me other than a moral boost 'in the area' (still unsure on that one). I rounded the corner to go take the victory point and my battle-hardened leginaries suddenly needed new trousers as a screaming horde of celts smashed into us from nowhere. One swift retreat later I actually have to re-assess my plan and spent the next ten minutes capturing towers with testudo triarii to give myself three different angles of attack on the last hill. All covered by at least one tower still, all uphill against melee units with nothing to lose and none of them happy to see me.

WIN! I had taken almost the entire town. Under the previous system the victory timer would be ticking and I'd sit back and relax, or the defender would have suicide-charged me to take one of them back. I STILL had to work hard for my victory despite almost total battlefield dominance. Thats a major improvement if ever there was. In the end it was a victory for me, but over 800 men died for it, and in hindsight most of the defenders on the walls and at the first capture point were garrison units or throwaway javlin men. The real battle started at the victory point when previously it would have all been over before that.

Yes, you could argue those same troops could have held me up at the walls and probably caused a similar number of casualties but if they had I'd have just come back with artillary and bombed them to bits, this way my only option was to kill them face to face exactly where and how they wanted. Much improved over previous versions.

Now it's just a shame the attacking siege AI hasn't seen similar improvements. Managed to kill a full stack and a half stack in one battle over in athens with just the defending (and not great quality) garrison without breaking a sweat, twice.