Imo just having higher speed so they can run away from mangos would already make them way more viable.
I don’t like ranged Siege countering Siege actually - in general.
We see with the discussion about the houfnice how this can ######## to “unfair” feeling matchups where simple unit comps can dominate whole complex unit rosters. Just cause of an actually quite small difference in stats of the siege both can field. If the houfnice wasn’t so good in countering their BBC or Treb counterparts of the opponents, there wouln’t be an issue with that unit at all.
Question should be raised if not Cavalry, especially heavy Cavalry should get a bonus damage against Siege, so it becomes more of an Option to dive and sacrifice the Cavalry in order to get rid of the Siege even if the Siege is “protected” by a lot of halbs.
I would prefer that over the current Siege vs Siege skirmishes we currently have in a lot of games. (Not that I completely reject Siege v Siege skirmishes. I think they are fun. But it looks currently to me the “diving” aspect with melee units is underrepresented.)
We see it quite nicely in the Magyar Huszar how this can work out.
If someone’s interested I made a topic for a Siege Rework a few years ago. I potentially would make stuff a bit different right now, but I think the general Ideas I proposed back then can still be applied to a Siege rework.
Especially the Mangonels bigger blast radius in exchange for damage output (possibly even bonus against archers) look to me more actual than ever with all this archer evading mangonel stuff we currently have.