Siege Warfare and Base Building
One thing that consistently dissapointed me in the unedited game was how irrelevant the fortress and your base defences became against the enemy, with them being torn down in seconds.
Also I never liked the way the resource system both forced you to spam the whole map with farms and made any small map practically unplayable.
Well, all that has been changed.
Base Building
Buildings can now only be constructed within a certain radius of a "Base Centre" object. These base centres include regular fortresses, summoned citadels, and special map buildings (such as the Helms Deep Arcade, Caras galathon and The Morgul Tower).
Also the neutral Inn can be captured and will then be available as a base centre, allowing you to build a forward base without the requirement of building a full fortress.
The distance you can build from the base centre varies from building to building, with a marketplace needing to be close to the centre, and a wall hub or farm being buildable a little further from the centre.
This brings back a little of the feel of BFME1's fixed build plots, while not crippling the AI of BFME2.
Defending your Fortress
Your base will be far more able to resist a siege than it would have been before.
The Fortress, any fortress expansions, and walls, wall hubs and wall expansions can now only be attacked by seige weapons, monsters, special units (Erebor Guardians with Siege hammers) and in a few cases (Rohans defences for example) fire.
Gates will now be the weakest point of your defence, as they will fall to much less damage than the walls themselves. However you will be unable to rely purely on a postern, as you will most defeinetely need to be able to move your own siege weapons around.
Besiegeing the Enemy
The same changes that benefit you on the defence will now make it all the harder to destroy the enemies defences.
To get through the enemies walls you will need to have some kind of siege weapon, be it a battering ram or a troll.
Although, every core-faction will have access to some form of siege equipment.