DaC V5 - Remnants of Angmar 11: Hill Warfare 

Finally caught up.

I say the easiest way to deal with your money problems is to wait for another quest to take Mathelburg, take it and then sell it to the dwarves. Maybe even persuading them to attack Gundabad to ensure that Gundabad gets off your back. After giving the dwarves the excellent target known as Gundabad you should go and call an invasion upon Khazadum and steal it from them which will stop them from getting their and get you a very nice settlement, a bucket of cash, and a weakend Gundabad.

I keep remembering you don’t have the upgraded warg units yet and it hits me how effective low tier cavalry is especially cav-archers.

Bree AI gets the benefit of being mercenary and dunadain... damn 😮

120 turns and no snow trolls! Last Dunedain campaign I saw snow trolls from Angmar within 15 turns. Crazy AI buffs

I think that unreliability is not the main problem of siege weapons here. Actually, performance of your catapult was pretty good. For me, anything more than 100 casualties inflicted in field battle "for free" with siege is ok. You got >200. Yes, you can say they were only gobos, but remember that it doesn't really matter - if you had elite Dunedain army in their place casualties would be only slightly lower, because of lower numbers within a unit. Great advantage of siege weapons is that they one shot almost everyone, quality doesn't matter. And during battles with big armies they will always hit something. Low chance of sniping enemy general for me is not unreliability, it's more of a feature - after all you should not expect to reliably snipe him out every time. If that would be feasible, than all armies would just consist of siege and some infantry for protection. Which, in real history, eventually happened, but with guns, not wooden catapults. Getting 100-200 kills from afar per unit of siege is great, because you get them basically "for free", before any skirmish can happen. So it's nice to have as a starting advantage. Sure, they won't "tank" anything, they will not put 150 hardened bodies in line. But if they remove 100-200 bodies from the enemy before the real fight even starts, that is even better. AI tends to field too many siege however, which creates too many gaps in their regular armies. If these siege weapons cannot be kept at distance, they would not get enough kills after all. The real problem with siege IMO is not reliability, but their super low mobility. This makes them very annoying to micro manage during battle, very hard to react fast to enemy surprise moves and slows your armies down in the strategy map. When you fight at least equally numerous enemy: Having between 1-3 siege units per full stack is good. You can stretch your malee units a bit to cover for such an amount of siege weapons if they provide additional kills for free. If you have more siege than you can run out of units to cover them and they will not get kills needed to win. - if enemy has more siege than attack, don't let it have a good angle - if you have more than defend, enjoy free kills ...unless you are DolAmroth, than just steamroll everything with Knights of Silver Scum and enjoy easiest game ever ;P ...oh, and if you fight Mumakil than army consisted entirely of siege is probably a good idea

May I suggest using a ballista for artillery instead of a catapult since a Ballista actually hits the target.