There have been 100s of siege suggestions and ideas to tweak the current system ever since the move away from legacy rams.
In my opinion the current system is fundamentally incentivized towards carebearing, nobody has the time or motivation to siege and there is nothing worth sieging for.
So here is the idea -
Stop trying to make siege be about destruction!
Make it about trolling and pissing people off. Remove the idea of "getting in to a base" completely. Remove the idea of taking down a wall. Remove rams, archery towers, and all that junk, and make it so walls simply cannot be entered by any means unless the claim becomes inactive, then you can just wrecking ball the wall away easily.
Instead, replace siege with a system where the intent is to impede, disrupt, interfere and troll.
The basics of this idea would be that you must build something similar to an altar near the edge of an enemy claim and give it some kind of offering to curse the claim. Most curses would obviously be temporary and lackluster but scale in their expense based on how severe the curse is. Perhaps only the most extreme curses are unlocked when the offering includes scents that belong to a hearthfire that resides on the same claim.
Ideas for curses -
X amount of crops become fallow
animals eat X times as much for X period of time
chicken eggs become infertile
aggressive 0 quality animal spawns on claim near the next person to log in with slightly longer than normal despawning conditions
X amount of trees stunt
growth time of trees or crops pauses for X amount of time
X amount of pavement tiles decay/plowed ground becomes unplowed, terrain is stomped to dirt in creepy cursed patterns
X amount of random smaller building objects like crates, chests, dream catchers take decay hits
the quality of a random item on the claim is decreased by X (I'm thinking like 1-5)
X amount of characters on this claim get temporary debuffs, or even wounds
an animals dies or becomes infertile
I'm sure I could keep coming up with ideas forever.
Like siege there could be some kind of defensive mechanic, maybe people on active claims must build defensive altars and keep making constant offerings to it that can work to dampen curses, in the hopes to avoid getting some of the particularly bad ones.
The other option, ofcourse, being to go outside your walls and try to stop the people who have built the altar and are putting offerings in to it.
Maybe smaller curses could be done from farther away to avoid the idea of patrol bots. Perhaps there is a time gate that comes along with the expense of harsher curses that require the curser to stay at the altar for a certain amount of time for it to work properly.
Perhaps there could even be some total randomness added in to the mechanic, like a random offering could procure a random curse but also curse the curser.
Perhaps the severity or curses or the ability for them to be performed successfully relies on some combination of stats.
Perhaps curses are learned like skills in tiers of severity at the cost of much LP.
Perhaps, alongside altars and counter-altars, there could even be something like totems, like a statue or a skull on a stick that you build in to the ground and curse and it gives off one of these effects in an AOE circle.
If we stop thinking about siege as siege and start thinking about ways we can just bother each other I think we can create something super fucking fun.
Remove the scare of being destroyed and the idea that getting sieged = ragequitting, and just let us piss each other off endlessly with simple, silly and hilarious pranks.