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Mindriven:

If you're talking about when the enemy sits out there and blasts away with missile siege equipment, while the "built in place" siege equipment just stays in place, then you just have to wait awhile. Once the AI has opened up a few sections of your walls it WILL advance with all the equipment. I too find it frustrating at times (as well as an opportunity to charge out with cavalry and kill off the men on the machines!), but I also have faced sieges that were truly memorable, due to how long the whole thing lasted, how pitched it was for a long time before being decided, monstrous casualties on both sides, and occasionally the AI does something unexpected, like send some mobile unit around your flanks when you weren't looking. Or how about when they bring up a catapult you didn't notice and fire a few flaming volleys down a street, killing a hundred of your men at a time! (usually see this when you're the one taking the settlement, which reminds me to use catapults for city defense more often!)

I also enjoy defending my territory, but I think I do it too well, on the strategy map I mean. I often have my most prized cities so well defended the AI will not even consider sieging them once in the entire campaign! For instance with the Italian factions, in the big cities I will have the following units, all fully armor upgraded and weapon upgrade if possible, and with 1-3 experience from "joining" a crusade right before I complete it: 6 Italian Spear Militia, 4 crossbow units or 2 crossbow and 2 arrow (e.g. Venetian Archers), 2 heavy infantry units like Norman Knights or Venetian Heavy Infantry, 1 (Italian) Cavalry Militia or a Famiglia Ducale, 1 Carroccio Standard, 1 Ballista, and of course the governor/general. Also once I can build them I throw in a couple of polearm units, such as Pike Militia or Halberd Militia. When I do this, it is TOO effective, because the AI has NEVER attacked a city of mine defended like that, even though it doesn't show as a "full" stack in the color of the flag thing, and even when the enemy has brought multiple full-stack armies through those lands. I am practically salivating at the opportunity to defend a large city with a force like this, but it has yet to happen!

I ALMOST got the Sicilians to siege Naples which I took from them, but they just put their two stacks right outside the city and just sit there, never sieging!

In reply to the original post:
If you don't build ladders in addition to rams, you are bound to fail in many of your settlement assaults. I personally never build siege towers, they seem to be dowsed in gasoline before use, large rolling columns of conflagration waiting to happen. Also my towers often get demolished by enemy fire from trebuchets. Ladders don't burn, don't break (well, you can order troops to attack them if you want, but it takes forever), and you don't need to open up a section of wall to use them again in the next layer. Probably the only time you should use a tower is when you feel it's absolutely necessary towards your success that your men smash into the enemy on the walls in a cluster of like 30 men at once, instead of getting picked off 3-4 at a time. Even then expect many of your towers to go up like a tinderbox before reaching the walls. This is funny for me since in RTW it was the opposite- I always built towers, never ladders.

Also since I use Retrofit mod, the boiling oil thing means I don't put too much emphasis on the gateway, I focus much more on winning the walls first, then "capturing" the gate, and only then pushing my troops through it.

My preference though is to bring up like 6-8 catapults/trebuchets and destroy every tower in sight, destroy the gateway and gate, and then a few choice sections of wall to penetrate through. Also love bringing down a section of wall that had like a hundred troops standing on it! It is very frustrating how slow siege equipment moves on the campaign map, but totally worth the wait. That or just auto-resolve with overwhelming odds but I hardly ever do that.