Try building squads and company sized unit stacks to be able to better take the hits.

I havent played long enough in V1.9 to encounter catapults, but the only counter to them are other catapults or Custom Archer units. In V1.8, since I was doing most of the attacking, the Archers would fire first and usually kill the catapults before they had a chance to fire. Even then, I took the cowardly way out a few times ( of reloading a save game ) when losing one of my Dynasty members in the group.

I hope Trebuchets dont show up in V1.10

actually i would REALLY like there to be ballista's.  these would be really good for attacking big creatures(dragons anyone?).

Until we have walls that need to be torn down, siege engines need to be of a variety that are good for targeting monsters and troops. Machines that throw a big rock are for structures, machines that throw something smaller (like a balista bolt) with accuracy or a lot of somethings (bunch of small rocks) that hit a large area are for hitting troops.

Until walls show up as walls in TC, they should make that attacker have to besiege the town for a period of time before assaulting it. Siege engines should reduce this time and go to anti-personel mode in TC.

This is not a good example though, history shows that well defended cities with walls have held out for long periods of time (even into months) forcing the attacker into a long drawn out sieges. Frontal assaults usually fail & those that were successful paid extremely high prices:

siege of Jerusalem 72ad, Siege of constaninople (all of them, 7 or 8), Alesia, Gibralter, Troy (recent research suggest a historical battle did in fact take place). Even early gunpowder was not so easily able to take down strongly defended fortresses (constantinople 1543, malta 1565).

Fortress tech should provided a massive defender advantage, but correspondingly needs to be very expensive in both tech & resource cost. Since this is a fantasy game, perhaps magic could supplement the siege capability somehow .. those teleporting elementals could appear beyond the city walls for example, or flying units could "fly" over them (not that I've seen any flying units).

There should actually be city walls that span the tactical grid & one should be able to position archers on these walls and they should get a "massive" defense bonus, like 200/300% at least. It should be "extremely" difficult for a human to take down an AI city defended by 5/6 archers and a couple of heroes (human should at least lose several units), and it should be "impossible" for an uber human stack to beat an AI uber stack in a fortress. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for is to "soften" up the defense a little at the cost of the attacking force minus heroes who could escape. Of course this is an end-game tech that goes hand-in-hand with catapults. BTW: it should go without saying that the attacker is not able to move from ground to wall square, except for flying or teleporting units.

There's basically a disconnect in this game with fortress tech, I'm just not seeing the fortresses in T.battles.

the cow jumped over the moon....

And the attacker could use earthquakes/tremors, fog to hinder the defendders that are sniping them, not to mention all the mundane siege tactics like sapping (undermining) the wall.

How about ballistas and maybe Cowtapults?

Agreed on the City walls- those really helped AoW, and you could add in a set of spells to deal with them.  (Crash Walls, Regenerate Walls, Levitation, etc)

I knew about that tower but I have never gotten a level 5 city. I usually play to turn 500 or so and I have never gotten a level 5 city. I suppose I am turning out too many units from all my cities and that is keeping the population down. Recently I re-did my Sov so that he has +2 prestiege instead of the base +1 but havn't played wiht him enough to see if I can now get to level 5 in a city. Perhaps that is a strategy I need to "go after" instead of the squads (8 pack of units).

@Fleetnote

According to 1.09 changelog, it's impossible to have a group of catapults, as does dragons and demons. However it seems that the changelog was wrong.

Tips againts catapults: Bring 3 to 4 casters and some fodders (preferably archers, i suggest going for custom kingdom with master archer), if you have items that can make your casters cast 3 spells/ round, give it to them, then cast confusion to all catapults on the field, their atk should become negative value, which means that they'll miss all the time. Then you can have your casters cast haste as many as possible on your archers or your Dragon if u have him (the one from the quest), plus burning sword if you want to boost their atk. Your 8 squad archer should have no trouble reaching 150 atk and your dragon can easily have 300 or more atk, and they act 5 to 10 times/turn depending how many haste you stacked on them. Well, watch them obliterate those catapults easily.

Edit:

Forget about summoning, caste haste, burning blade, or confusion, these spells is the most overpowered tactical spells at the moment, especially haste and confusion.

Why would you take away the one good unit the AI has? unbelievable. The AI is a complete washout in this game, and you would take away the one good unit the AI does have. This is just unbelievable.

I think the AI needs to have much more powerful units. They need to have extreme spellcasters that actually cast that firebally & firestorm spell before the human player does. I would like to see their sovereign actually kill my sovereign. The AI needs much stronger archer unity & even horse or warg archers that can take down their equivalent human couterparts. I would like to see AI stacks "concealed" in this game which I cannot veiw, mated with strong AI units which, at size 8, have a reasonable chance of killing any of my "killer stacks." It would be so cool if I would actually lose a tactical battle that I initiate: 1 out of a 500 times simply doesn't cut it.

Having a "killer" unit is the only good thing the AI has in its arsenal in the game as-is. Not only is this too rare, it should be expanded upon in many ways. And yes, it should target whatever the most valuable opposing unit is, which would be 1) strong spellcasters 2) strong archers 3) other ..