>>714103752the battle for Minas Tirith is a massive showcase of just how elaborate Sauron's plans were
The movie doesn't highlight it properly but in the book it isn't just one single plan, he has failsafes upon failsafes built into every single thing he does, and given the information available to him, every single one of his plans was plotted perfectly
In the movie the arrival of the Rohirrim is treated as a grand surprise, but in the book Sauron actively planned for that event, the Witch King had a secondary force split off and block the most direct route to Minas Tirith, with a force large enough that even if the forces of Rohan broke through it would delay them enough that they would arrive long after the siege ended
He simply couldn't have accounted for the wild men to set aside their dislike for Gondor and Rohan and guide them through an unknown path, because Sauron himself would have denied it out of spite
But even then, with that bypassed he STILL had a failsafe in the form of the corsairs which if they arrived would have still turned the battle into his favor, and again these corsairs were undone in a way Sauron could not account for what so ever, Aragorn managing to make a supernaturally hard journey to gather the dead men in time to not just lift his blockade but actively commandeer the ships and fill them with enough troops to turn the tide of battle
Also the fact that he frames the siege of Minas Tirith as a siege is again, a brilliant move on Sauron's part, because it tricked Denethor into preparing for a prolonged siege (which mind you in the book he prepares with the utmost competence for, book Denethor is genuinely a good leader), and then upon arrival, he successfully manages to breach Minas Tirith's gate in a ridiculously fast timespan
And even on top of all of this literal divine intervention was necessary to blow away the dark clouds he conjured and to kill the Witch King, which would have likely tipped the scales