[Endoperez]

NTJedi said:

All the way to this point sounds great and logical. With the siege engines actually built and seen it will make the sieging of a castle more realistic. And step #2 is where the unit is created.
--one side note is that in wasteland it should be more difficult in building siege engines.

Your sidenote is reflected by the province's resources.

Why should the siege engines be seen? We can presume they are already built, because we agreed that the siege engineers aren't throwing boulders on their own. I thought we already agreed in that the siege engines won't do any fighting.

May I quote your second post in this thread?

Yes of course they'd be useless on the battlefield... their whole purpose is to storm the castle more quickly. The reason for their appearance on the battlefield is so that people trying to break the siege can destroy siege units.

They wouldn't hurl anything in the battle, would they? And if they aren't in the battle, where else should they show? They aren't actual units with hp, they are tools with which the (unseen) workers bombard the castle walls and the defenders. Unless some kind of siege animation is added, we never see what is done to the castle walls. And siege animations can't be done with two-sprite graphics, and can't be pre-generated when any imaginable and many unimaginable combinations of soldiers and monsters can exist in both the besieging and the defending army. The Siege Engineers have an icon for their Siege Bonus. It is a stnoe-hurling device of some kind IIRC.

NTJedi said:
It's not the engineers which toss the boulder it's the catapult. With this current setup there's no way to target the actual siege engines... you could only target individual units which each make a percentage.

We never see anyone hurling the boulders, so your first point doesn't come up.

Destroying individual catapults would also only make a percentage of the total siege value, into which the units and the other siege engines would still effect. I don't see what you are trying to say with that.

With the current setup, it is possible to try to disable the individual commanders (Siege Engineers, or Catapults) which are most efficient at sieging; if the catapults were units instead, they couldn't be assassinated. Because of this, I think it's better to have the siege engines be commanders instead of units - otherwise it would be harder to try to disable the catapults.
If we make the catapults be commanders, the effect would be exactly the same as changing current Siege Engineers' graphics into that of a squad manning a catapult. That can be done, but it is then only a matter of taste. Illwinter have chosen to have siege engineers instead of catapults.

Also it would make the battles much more interesting to see different catapults from different nations which hurl boulders or diseased animals across the battlefield. Your suggestion does not make this possible.

Again, I thought you mentioned the catapults wouldn't be seen on the battlefield. At least they won't be of any use in the battlefield, and are only there because they have to be with the army. That's exactly what the Siege Engineers do ATM. It seems that you want a Siege Engineer to look like he was a dozen or so catapults, which can be destroyed individually. But what use would that be? The Siege Engineer can always build new catapults, so he has to be killed any way.

Are you sure you don't just want the Siege Engieers' effectiviness be based on time he has used besieging and the resources the province has?