You're not fighting for the sake of fighting, you're fighting to conquer, so many battles will be sieges. The good news is that in early game most settlements will at most wooden wall. Just make one battering ram, and here we go. Easy way to win a siege is having missile units and cavalry. Take battering ram and missile units to the gates, and fire at anybody standing next to the gate. Because unlike in a field battle they're not going to charge at you, if you're patient you can empty all your ammo on them and inflict severe loses, no need to hurry with the ram.
Once it's done take your cavalry and charge at everybody. Hopefully there aren't any strong phalanges in the vicinity of the gate now that you peppered them with arrows. Everything else will just rout when charged. It's important to kill them off now, otherwise they'll run towards the town square and reform there. As you go toward the town square just charge on every unit you find on the streets. AI tends not to offer any organized resistance on the streets, so it's going to be an easy kill. You may find some serious resistance in the town square, hopefully by this time you inflicted sufficient damage that it's just a matter of finishing everyone off.
In my experience for settlements without at least stone walls, AI defending army is a hell lot weaker than the same army would be on a field.
It's much much worse if they have stone walls and some missile units to man the walls. Because they're higher and protected by walls they're easily ten times as deadly as your missile units shooting at them. Add to that fire coming from towers, and reinforced games slowing down ramming a lot, and you can lose a quarter of your army before even coming inside.
You can obviously starve them, forcing them to attack you, but that's going to be very slow. Fortunately there's a much better way. First you need at least one hole in the walls. In can be gate opened by your spy, or a sap point, or hole made by your onagers if you already have them (onagers come late in the game, but so do stone walls). Then charge with all your cavalry, the more and heavier the better, and go towards the city center as soon as possible. By not wasting time on the gates and moving all your units at an instant you won't get fired upon that much. If you take the city center the enemy has 3 minutes to take it back or they lose and all die, so they'll have to go off their comfy wall posts and fight on the street, and they really suck at it.
If you make more holes you can choose one that will take you away from the walls as soon as possible, and that's the least defended. If you have some artillery you can even try to shoot at units protecting the hole to make it easier for your cavalry to charge over them. Unfortunately bowmen won't do, as enemy bowmen have better range while on the walls.
If this siege tactic won't work, well starving them is always an option.
I wouldn't depend on city defenses too much. Walls delay the enemy, but you still need enough field army to defeat him. Otherwise he can just starve you off.
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