In the game 'Rome: Total War,' whenever you want to take a city for your own faction, you, naturally, lay siege to the town. Most of the weapons you can use to expedite the process make some sense to me, rams, early catapults (in the game referred to as 'onagers' on account of their recoil.) but some give cause for pause. For one, siege towers, which I had never heard of being used before the late middle ages, and even more interestingly, so-called 'sapping points.'
Basically, the idea is that the sapping point is placed in front of some section of the wall, and used to represent some force of yours digging a tunnel under the wall, and burning a large fire to weaken the wall.
Look that logistics of the method mentioned in the game are of little consequence, my question is how the antiquity era waged siege warfare, preferably the methods above, but any other methods that were used in history are certainly a welcome read.
Mining is well-attested. A large chunk of Aeneas Tacticus' handbook on siege warfare deals with the use of mines to sneak troops into the city. Aeneas talks about several tactics to foil mining attempts (my favorite is releasing animals into the tunnels). Aeneas' tunnels though are intended to cover the approach of troops, not take down the wall. Polybius, though, mentions that at the siege of Prinassus Philip tricked the defenders into surrendering by piling up soil around the entrance of his tunnels to make then seem more advanced than they really were, then telling the garrison that the tunnels were under the walls and ready to be fired. So using them to undermine walls was also used.
Towers are also attested extremely early. There are some Assyrian reliefs that show towers find with soldiers approaching the walls of cities, intending to drop then onto the walls. In antiquity though, towers were more usually used to oppose the towers of an enemy wall and fire missiles onto them, not to deploy troops. Demetrius' massive siege tower at Rhodes was used to do this. At Masada the Romans used a tower with a battering ram at the bottom. Aeneas talks about towers as well, mostly presuming them to be missile platforms. But the idea of using them to deploy troops was not unknown.
In any case, RTW's siege mechanics are pretty simplistic. The devices and stratagems used in actual ancient siege are almost innumerable and often vastly more complex. Even the quickest look at Aeneas shows this, and reading the descriptions of actual sieges only reinforces it