Please don't nerf rams or buff the bases against them. Rams should be easily countered by all types of melee units and/ or heroes, if they die against the auto defense mechanism of the fortress they are useless.
The point is to mask the rams in with troops who act as a meat-shield. If your doing a ram rush and your sending literally nothing but rams at the opponent, then you're doing it wrong. The melee damage that rams take from units and hero's is fine as is at the moment, the problem is that they do not take enough damage from ranged attacks.
I know that its not very logical that they should be almost immune to arrows/ ranged damage, but it is the only intelligent solution gameplaywise.
In my opinion, this one of the reasons why the ram rush is too effective right now. Rams are not susceptible enough to arrows/ranged attacks. They need to take a little more damage from all types of ranged attacks since it is the primary source of most defensive buildings.
If you get destroyed by ram rushes often you should work on your map awareness and keep a unit of swordsmen or two close to your base to defend yourself. Then it will just be a huge investment on your opponents side without gaining anything.
Map awareness is not really the issue here, and leaving a unit or two of swordsmen will not be sufficient enough since, like I said above, most ram spams are combined with a small/large force to act as a meat-shield.
If your enemy has invested like 4000 to 6000 gold for rams you cant expect to beat that with units for 200...
Mordor and Isengard can easily get 10 rams for around 2100-3000 resources which is more than enough to do enough damage maybe even take out an entire castle that is defended...and who ever said anything about taking out rams with 200 resource units?
But you should notice that your enemies armies are weaker and smaller than they could be and you should be able to get map control AND defend from the rams - let's be honest, they are destroyed really easy if you got some units and the damage they deal wont harm you that much.
If you own the map, then you probably don't really have to worry about a ram spam in the first place. If you don't own the map, then all the enemy has to do is deal with enough of your troops on the battlefield and then rush your fort with rams and the remainder of their army. If the enemy is turtling, then you likely own the map and can simply blast the enemies fort away with catapults. The point is that your argument is pretty weak here.
Isengard can get the defensive Warg Pit though, which is good against Rams.
This is not a valid argument at all in my opinion for the following reasons. One, you're talking about a single faction. Two the defence warg pit is a joke because it consumes a valuable build plot. If it consumed a defensive plot, then this argument may hold a little more weight. This building was more valuable in the free build plot system, but with a set number of plots it is not valuable enough and is the reason why no one ever builds it.
I'm not saying that Isengard shouldn't have to use siege, because yes, Gondor fortresses are hard to take down, so Battering Rams are very useful. But I still don't understand why the defensive structures, whose purpose is to defend your base, can't deal with Rams unless they have Fire Arrows. Yes, the Gondor player should have gotten more Fire Arrow Towers, but that's not a excuse in my opinion for what he had to literally do nothing to siege. Maybe this replay wasn't the best example becuase played could have been better, but there are still some cases of Battering Rams replacing armies.
It's not like it's exclusive to this 1 match. In many 3v3 or 4v4 I play in, there is a case where someone tries to Ram Spam. It's a known problem that has a fairly decent solution in my opinion. Nerfing Rams would not make them useless, just not able to be spammed and successful as they are now.
And I really can't see only bases with Fire Arrows can damage Rams like they do. Shouldn't the other upgraded Towers be able to do the same thing?
I agree with everything Haman has said in this post. I don't think rams should be nerfed into the ground, but making them more susceptible to all kinds of ranged attacks would be the right way to go towards proper balance.