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What about adding an harmless slow-moving melee unit that is (relatively) easy to destroy with melee attacks but is quite resistant to ranged attacks, can tank multiple (3?) tower hits and can take down buildings quickly?

It would be made in the siege workshop and would be manned by one recruit (that sometimes eats too ).

Why is this better than the "old" siege weapons already present in TPR?

Well, for once it wouldn't be able to harm soldiers: it is a unit you specifically make and deploy for buildings.
(Please note that civilian buildings can already be disabled with a single melee unit, which is easier and faster to "infiltrate" in the enemy town...)
Also, it would not be ranged: it would be risky to use it, and must destroy the target tower quickly or be destroyed.
It would eat (like all other units in the game do) and would not move around on its own (even though the recruit may not be visible, since he should be taking cover under the ram's shielding).

The only problem I can see at the moment is that, as far as I know, there aren't sprites for this yet.

The battering ram would add a specific counterplay for towers, and make melee units more important during sieges.
Especially mounted units, as they can get in, destroy the ram, and get out before taking too many ranged shots; as an indirect effect, making cavalry more important would also make anti-horse troops better, simply because there would more often be "horse troops".

Any opinion?

Nice and interesting idea
can be implemented

Battering ram is used to destroy gates and there are no gates in KaM, besides this idea sound more like a armoured transporter so I think it would a bit out of place in Kam. Also this might be not so easy to implement as you might think - if you put building (tower) next to each other then there is only one tile of available space between them, the same goes for any "natural" passages, if you want this "unit" to be that small where would the soldiers hide ? If you want to make it bigger then ok, you could probably smash through enemy buildings (like a tank.. or bulldozer) but how exactly will you leave your own city ?

Definitely a very unuseful solution. The perks you gave are really redundant, because if we are making sprites, we could just add a recruit to the siege equipment that is already available. Also, like Nissarin already explained, siege-rams are used for breaching gates or other similar barricades, not buildings. Therefore, original siege machines are still superior to your rams.

Siege rams were used only for gates and walls because in the ancient times nobody wanted to actually destroy cities: they wanted to conquer them, or at most just slaughter the population.

Today (ok, it's more like "yesterday"), though, we use a similar principle to destroy buildings.

The difference with the "original" KaM siege equipment is that it doesn't decimate armies too (in TPR -at least, in the campaign- you could just make 6/8 siege machines and kill everything without problems) and that the ram has to actually take risks: they have to be in the front lines to destroy their defences, and not safely way back in the backlines, happily firing at everything.

As for the ram (if being made so that it occupies 1 tile) being too small to be realistic, neither is realistic the fact that a storehouse that occupies the space of 9 knights can house 30 horses and 300 other wares without problems, or that 4 bowmen occupy as much space as a tower does, but still...

Also, this wasn't a problem in Age of Wonders 1, where the battering ram is as big as melee units...
(And walls are so thin that you wonder why they're not simply crumbling whenever someone sneezes, but shhh... that's another story )
(By the way, AoW1 has some nice sprites for battering rams )
(Now I want to play Age of Wonders. Damn you! )

Not many players knows about this but storehouse actually has very spacious cellar... but seriously if you look at pretty much any strategy game it's basically the same - building and units use different "scale" but they are consistent with each other, so yeah buildings looks kinda small compared to units but still "big enough", units at the other hand may differ in size compared to each other but they still "small enough".