I tested this by putting 4 bombard towers around a fight of around 45 heavy camels vs around 30 teuton paladins. The average surviving heavy camels without greek fire was 10.16, while the average surviving heavy camels with the new bonus was 8.5.
The problem? The splash damage hits your own units, too.
The difference is ultimately minor either way, but it does seem like an oversight.
In general all the new blast damage units and buildings have been extremely underwhelming
Torsion engines is a nerf because Onagers and BBC have friendly fire
The main difference is siege can be controlled, while bombard towers cannot. You choose when an onager fires, but you can’t do that with bombard towers.
you can choose targets for BBT but you cant put them on no attack stance maybe they are worse in this on case but you are chery picking a very unlikely choosing. first why would you build BBT agianst Teuton going for Paladins? BBT excel agianst low HP and mobility tightly packed units like Arbalest. Also You shouldn’t Mix highly aggressive melee units with splash damage, you don’t mix Shotels with SO then blame torsion engines.
I chose Teuton Paladins because their high armor should maximize the potential benefit of the tech. Many units would take 3-4 splashes to make any difference in the number of hits it takes to kill them, but by having as high of armor as possible, it exaggerates the difference and shows it as it truly is.
Also, BBT are pretty bad against low-hp units; they waste most of their main damage. Against arbs, a BBT does basically no better than a keep, despite doing significantly more damage, because most of that damage is wasted. And that’s even assuming they’re standing still, but even small amounts of movement also pretty dramatically reduces their effectiveness thanks to their slow projectiles.
Perhaps Greek Fire could add some melee damage as well? This would require generic BBTs to receive a base-0 melee damage - but it’s not like a little extra damage against rams would be game-breaking with how badly they underperform.
I am 100% willing to accept BBT dealing melee damage to Rams again if they also do splash damage to friendly units. At least allied units. (I think that was how aoe1 elephants worked)
I think it is a bug and will be fixed later
It would be so much more in theme if the UT would unlock access to the campaign-only “Fire Tower” but a visual trail to the BBT projectiles look pretty cool!