Since you like to bring your BM career as an example here, I spent over 6 years on leading armies of various sizes. Unlike you, I spent my time both fighting off gangups and besieging cities both small and large. What changed everything was the archer bug fix. They hit harder than the days when Fontan fell with you. Or the days when I besieged Oligarch against Fane. With enough infantry to keep men off of archers, your militias are a lot more cost efficient than before. They are different from melee militia days of old because archers can damage your men long before you can even get near the walls. Either the walls need to be limited to lv3 at most for cities or militias need to be nerfed in one way or another. It is way too easy to defend fortified regions due to various changes over the years. While defenders got stronger, attackers did not. Actually there are less attackers now so even easier to defend.
I've spent most of the past three years focused on siege defence and ranged tactics. With preparation and good planning it's possible to make it very hard for attackers to take a city but unless you're manning your walls with Range 5 SF 100/100/100 an attacker with better ranged forces will wear down your garrison and take your walls. They don't even need more men than you if their range is longer and the weather favourable.
I put this to the test with the siege of Alowca. A defending garrison of Range 4 SF behind lvl 5 walls was decimated by an attacking force of Range 5 SF. It took several days of stalemate battles before the garrison were defeated, but they were defeated. Whilst several realms were involved in the assault, only two of them brought the SF and the number of those was smaller than the number of SF defenders.
I am trying to provide an easier solution until these new features god knows when come. All the things you've mentioned need to be coded from scratch. Also some of them are planned already. Why do we need to unit status even.
Because unit status would be a simple and discrete hook to use. It's already used for evasive to avoid battles. I can't comment on the amount of coding involved to add sieges this way to the existing codebase, though the feature set required would be small. I'd be willing to implement the feature if the Devs think it's a good idea.
