In The Return of the King, Gandalf realizes that Aragorn's decision to use the Palantir to reveal himself to Sauron scared the Dark Lord so much that it actually forced his hand, leading him to send his troops to Minas Tirith much earlier than he had intended. Indeed, the actions of his army appear to be hasty and slapdash.Sauron's servants have no trouble breaking through the Rammas Echor, but stall when they reach the gates of the city itself.
You know that Nazgul that you have to shoot in Minas Tirith-Top of the Wall? I'm wondering if it is possible to kill it. After I beat the game and got everything, I tried to kill it.
Eventually, Grond breaks down the gate, but only one of Sauron's soldiers ever enters the city: The Witch King of Angmar; even he soon withdraws and returns to the fields. Of course, he only left because he was distracted by the arrival of the Rohirrim, and if not for this distraction, others would likely have followed him into Minas Tirith. But the city was well built and fairly well defended, and Sauron's army would have had to wheel Grond up a long, steep ramp, battering down 6 more gates along the way, to win the battle - by no means an easy undertaking.Sieges aren't usually supposed to be over in a day, and when they are relatively brief, it is usually because the attackers are able to swiftly overpower the defenders. The events at Minas Tirith break all these rules. The siege was surprisingly brief, and the defenders quickly defeated a much larger force. This suggests that either Sauron is incompetent or the attack was never intended to be conducted this way, presumably because Sauron was compelled to throw himself into the fight before his preparations were complete.Do we know whether Sauron's initial plans called for a longer, more typical siege, wherein the attacking army essentially surrounds their target and waits for the defending army to either starve or surrender? +1, as always.
But I'm not sure we can say Sauron didn't make any grievous errors, even if the specific events on the battlefield were not hopelessly mismanaged. In a larger sense, everything Sauron does stems from an unfathomably egregious error on his part- he never imagined that anyone would ever dream of destroying the Ring, let alone actually attempt to do so. All his actions are informed by this colossal misstep. And I personally believe that the outcome of the battle was partially the result of Sauron rushing into the fight before he was truly ready to do so.–May 25 '15 at 23:51. Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and.( RotK, Chapter IV: The Siege of Gondor)So a lot of time and effort was put into making siege weapons; clearly Sauron was expecting a siege of some sort.
But given the arrogance he displays in his military strategy at other times, I suspect he was expecting Minas Tirith to fall swiftly before his might. I'm searching for canon backup for this.