Well, from my perspective (single player only) I would answer "yes and no": - Yes: it would have quite some historical references. The resources would go back to gaia. - No: - This would leave no choice to the besieged player wiht a single CC to recover eventually and counter attack.  Also, resources are with the player and not with the building. So, if the besieged player has multiple CC and only one is under siege should he also loose resources? I believe no. We do have a gradual change of ownership of any building that is under siege (surrounded by troops if you tell them to capture instead of destroying it). I believe this models more or less what you had in mind, but nothing happens to the besieged player's resources though. So  - again - from my personal perspective, I regret, but would not be in favour of that proposal.

Indeed, the community is too MP oriented (many times at its own peril) for something like this to fly, and in this case, it's actually understandable. The only way I see this working is for people not to care about wining but ranking, and getting more points when wining with weaker civs, but I just don't see it happening.

Not true. I (and most here are surely better than me) have no problems beating an Aggressive Very Hard AI, and I almost always do it only with infantry, which shows the harder levels need to be even harder. The only problem I've seen is that the easy levels are too hard for newbies.

I guess the best comedy just writes itself!

I think people will understand you because people use misnomers. I'm just saying I think it's confusing to say "turreted" when the ship has no "turrets" (the ship towers), or when troops can only be "turreted" in the part of the wall that has no turrets, and not "turreted" in the actual turrets. The problem is that, as with many other things in this game, the person that called that action "turret" had no idea what that actually meant.   But a small one, ship towers were not really meant to increase range, but to be in a better position to rain missiles on enemy decks (usually they were the same height, with the exception of the quadrireme, which commonly had two levels of oars instead of three).   That is different from the question of your poll. You asked "should being able to put units on the deck of the ship be just a mod, or part of vanilla 0 A.D.?", and my answer is obviously yes, for many reasons, but eventually, not necessarily right now, this has not been properly tested, nor is being yet done with what should be the main purpose in mind: boarding. So these things should start as a mod, and only after quite some fine-tuning, be implemented in vanilla.