I don't think we actually need to ramp the pressure up that much - from what I can tell the general pattern is a warboss nabs a little extra orkpower from Zoggrod and then uses that breathing room to snowball by taking from Skarstuf. Looting from Zoggrod alone isn't enough, it's the increase in looting ability gained from that that really makes the difference.
So by attacking Skarstuf ourselves and diminishing the total amount that can be looted, we also diminish the degree to which the balance between the Big Two can be tipped - we don't need to completely take out Skarstuf, we just need to destroy enough of his territory that neither of the Big Two can gain enough to finish the other off. Even just rendering Skarstuf down into a rump Waagh like Zoggrod would probably be enough to keep the orks divided into at least 2 camps.
I mean maybe, but we're planning to keep up the pressure and march further east, deeper into ork territory, as soon as we reasonably can.
So using our strategic weapons (the Mag 2 ritual and the kaiju) to weaken and distract our strong back-field opposition is still desirable. I don't just want them to be divided, I want them to be
weakened, so that when our armies arrive on their frontiers, we don't encounter strong, united, well prepared opposition.
Remember last turn Urdgob beat off two of the Thunder Lizards attacking him, so I don't actually think the current number have him anything close to pinned down.
I figure that if he
only managed to fend off two of them, then he probably had to work pretty hard to stop those two.
My objective here isn't to keep Urdgob entirely pinned in place and crushed by sheer weight of Thunder Lizards, it's just to do enough damage to him and keep his boyz busy enough that he can't casually redirect his entire horde off into some other territory. If he wants to pull together five million or so of the ladz from his backfield and send them to go pillage tornado-wrecked stretches of Worldhamma's territory, more power to him as far as I'm concerned.
As for Zoggrod, he kind of actually can't jump us there's only a small portion of his territory that links up with Skarstuf's and he's already on the backfoot (relatively speaking) with two fronts with the major players. I'm just not concerned about the threat he poses, especially as the lacks the weapons/tools which I judge most dangerous to us (or at least has less of them than the others); air and artillery and gas weapons.
What Zoggrod has is
mobility; he's proto-Speed Kultist. That's not the same kind of threat as the others, but it's still a threat, because it means he can more easily get to places we don't want him to be, or more easily circle around an army faster than we can reposition our forces to counter. And he has twenty-seven million boyz, which is more than enough to make problems if they show up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Also remember that unless he's stupider than I expect, he knows he's in a bad situation. He has to do
something to change the game in order to survive. His realistic options are to swear fealty to one of the other bosses as a nob and hope for the best, or to find a weak direction to advance in, in order to secure territory and/or do something badass and impressive that causes other orks to flock to his banner.
Since he knows perfectly well that his horde is too small to challenge the Big Two, or even Skarstuf, trying to attack
us might just be the thing he needs. He might figure on being able to crash into our flank while we're fighting Skarstuf, chew us up some, and gobble up territory from Skarstuf while Skarstuf is distracted fighting "scaly boyz."
Furthermore, because Skarstuf is highly mobile, he is most likely to be able to go around parts of Worldhamma's territory that are in his way, or to simply drive through them faster than Worldhamma's battered forces (remember that Mag 2) can react. The fact that the corner of land he'd want to cross to get at us is held by another boss won't necessarily stop him.
Anyway, I'm not
that worried about him, but I do care enough about him to put the relatively numerous Legion of Itza on the southern flank of my attack so that
they will be the one he hits first if he does something reckless. And maybe worried enough to sic a Thunder Lizard or two on him.
I mean this is an assumption on its own. Factoring it into our plans even as a hail Mary is the error in my opinion. My point was that we should go into the war fully expecting that our opening salvo will not perform an unlooked for decapitation strike and think and act accordingly.
I already did plan as you describe. It is
possible, in passing, that a nation-devastating Mag 2 ritual focused on a specific single nation-sized target will kill that nation's leader. But literally all my descriptions of the probable results of the ritual have focused on "it's done to disrupt Gardakka."
And fundamentally the power of the ritual is not in the bodies it can kill but in the chaos and disorder it can sow in our enemy. Which ties into my intention with the forces sent into Gardakka's territory - which is not primarily about gaining territory at this stage.
Except that diverting armies to go into Gardakka's territory causes chaos in that territory
by exposing those armies to risk, and by splitting our forces.
I would argue that by the time our forces push through Skarstuf's territory, which is hundreds of kilometers wide, they will have long since lost the element of surprise. Gardakka will be ready to respond, at least on a large enough scale that our forces will get bogged down fighting him, especially if they have to spread out to secure a long supply line reaching back through Skarstuf's territory while Skarstuf's forces are still in the fight.
It's like the spearhead/breakthrough tactics I've been arguing against; the risk of getting encircled deep inside enemy territory is too great. Our forces are too heavily outnumbered by the size of the hordes the enemy can potentially mobilize and throw at us. So we need to make sure that retreat is at least a realistic option at all times, so that we can pull back to buy time and space for our superheavies and slannpower to break up the enemy force... and that means
not trying to drive a spearhead hundreds of kilometers into enemy territory without first securing our flanks at least to the point where organized resistance is impractical.
I don't want a situation where Gardakka's thinking about how many tens of millions of boyz he can pull together to fight us, while our flanks are still dealing with attacks from Skarstuf's jets and battlewagons.
