Well, if some small path appears, I agree, although not for a paved road, you could end with some weird street layout if where random units are walking is taken too seriously.

Indeed, but how historical seem to you many of these fortresses, and how much just a product of nostalgic AoE2 cloning? (something that I've seen discussed many times already). I don't think removing them from some civilisations, not only to make it more historically accurate, but to differentiate civilisations more, should necessarily mean to unbalance the game, but that balance should be found in their differences, otherwise it's just "similar vs similar" (agreed that it would take more work). On a somewhat different note: shouldn’t Germans not have stone walls? At least less so than Sparta (which eventually had, but late, and still this doesn't appear in the game).   People are complaining already :P, and will even more when poorly garrisoned ships are stolen like a candy to a baby. Regarding damage distribution, I'd say leave it to the player to decide, by ordering the cards of the units garrisoned (and have some panel somewhere where you can set a default order, to greatly reduce micro). Calculations is something to test, surely in some mod first, and then decide, hard to know beforehand those details, but this is the only simple nice way I see to have siege engines do something that resembles actual siege, and use something more realistic and engaging than capture points (wasn't proposed by me, I just extended the idea to ships).

I entirely agree. Capturing buildings should be difficult but rewarding. And the buildings should be tied to the territory. I find it absurd when someone loses his CC and he destroy every buildings before the capture. A fortress should be also able to create a new territory but smaller than the CC, to have a territorial anchor.  True. We don't want a bland AoE clone. The difficulty behind virtual combat is how to make it good with only calculation because the player would not control which unit are getting the hits. People can get frustrated if the damage are distributed evenly and they would get frustrated as well if we give the damages preferentially to specific types of unit. There is also the issue of calculating the damaged of ranged and mounted units. People will complain.

idle_b_1:  

Millenium A.D. also very nice mod