My thoughts (Wall of text)
Give us a siege bench where we craft things used for attack. This centralizes where to build catapult pieces, siege cauldrons. This would also be where you craft the pieces for a battering ram, ballista, grappling hook or whatever items you add. It could basically be a re-skinnef artisan table that uses the same 3 thralls (armorer, carp, blacksmith).
I think the battering ram is a great idea. Give it a low durability that can’t be improved by reinforcement kits. I would start with it doing enough damage to break a basic wooden door in one hit. Whatever the damage, it should have just enough durability to brake a T3 gate, with maybe an extra swing in case you suck at aiming. If you want immersion with it, figure out a way that it has to be activated by multiple players, but that seems like more of a challenge than it’s worth. For an added bonus, make the siege cauldrons attack deplete a quarter of it’s durability if used successfully. Voila, siege cauldrons have a purpose!
To me ballistas should be a dual purpose weapon, based on ammo used. You can load them with standard or explosive shots (since we have that for trebuchets already) or you can craft a special ammo at a T3 Altar to damage avatars. No need to build a separate God killing machine. If they could be aimed like a large bow, they could be used as trebs against the “lollipop” style base. The key is for them to have a flat trajectory, as to me this is what differentiates it from a treb.
With regards to gods, they should definitely do more damage. This could be mitigated by making them more expensive to create the god coin, something like 750 zeal instead of 500. (While your looking at this, can you please balance out the amount of zeal given by priest clothes created at all altars. The Set pieces give way more zeal than other religions) If you want to make them more useful, give all gods a melee and ranged attack (left mouse vs. right mouse click). Mitra can let out a shout similar to the bat demons, Derketo throws a skull, Ymir does a thunder clap with his hands a la the Incredible Hulk, Set could spit venom. JSag could do a stomp as a melee attack. Yog is the only one I’m having trouble with.
I like the grappling hook. One way that you could balance it out is to give it a weight limit or a timer before it expires. Maybe this would only create a balance to them against offline raiding, but it was a thought.
Last thought - can we have a tar orb as opposed to a grease orb, something that creates a patch of stickiness. The purpose of this could be two fold. One, you could use them to slow down a player who walks across it, similar to how a grease orb makes the ground slippery. Second, jars should automatically be able to stick to any affected area, removing the “No contact with ground” and “Terrain conflict” messages that can make them so damn frustrating to place. AND if you threw it to against a wall, this would allow you to place a jar against the side of the wall. This would also allow us to raid bases built on a peak once we climb up there, but there is no ground to place it on. Hell, if we could throw a few on the ground for enough coverage, people could use them for building to fix how difficult altars and maprooms can be to place.