Honestly, I always assume it's not Nurglites, because I could never understand why anybody would join Nurgle to begin with. Sometimes this leaves me wrongfooted, when it turns out it's actually fucking Nurglites.
So basically: yes I agree with ReImagined, but possibly because of my own biases against the God of Plagues.
First, Nurglites can have impact far out of proportion to their numbers, because their weapon of choice is bioterrorism.
Second, Nurglites have access to plagues that
make you Nurglite, or strongly predisposed to becoming Nurglite. This is probably a leading transmission vector of Nurgle-worship.
Third, Nurglites can fade into the background level of diseased, deformed, or mutated individuals who live as outcasts in this society. Which is hella problematic from a literary criticism perspective looking at Warhammer, but in-setting it's true... and it means Nurglites can recruit
from those populations. If you're already suffering tertiary-stage syphilis, worshipping a god of disease who makes it
hurt less may not seem so bad.
Eh, it's less a nuclear weapon and more "forces might show up where you aren't expecting them". If you are in fact expecting them, a lot of the punch is lost.
Yes... and no.
Marienburg is modeled after the Dutch, and the ability to use strategic inundations and swampy ground to render terrain impassable to enemy armies was a key part of their defense strategies and ability to resist outsider armies from the High Middle Ages clear up through the Early Modern period.
If the enemy knows your forces can march across a swamp, he's prepared for it.
But if the enemy
finds out your forces can march across a swamp,
before deciding to go to war, when his defenses rely on your inability to march over swamps...
Things get more complicated.
The Empire is running a deterrence-intimidation playbook - "You don't want to play this game."
Even if they do, it... probably doesn't change what'd happen? Marienburg was almost certainly able to force a battle in advantageous terrain last time because the Empire failed to bring enough wizards to compensate for Marienburg's maneuver advantage. This time the Empire would bring enough magical firepower to make any engagement field engagement a foregone conclusion, so I'd expect Marienburg to hunker down behind its walls anyway. /shrug
Yes, but that is also an area where the ability to magically create paths over swamps comes in handy. Even if the paths aren't permanent, they lend themselves to gambits like:
1) Cast MRoW on swamp.
2) Combat engineers rush out and use firm footing of MRoW path to lay down corduroy road or other temporarily measures.
3) Repeat.
News at 11, aggressive imperial power has self justifying narrative for oppressing colony!
I mean, Marienburg isn't really... a colony... in the normal sense of the word? They're perfectly capable of being aggressive and imperialist themselves, too, they're just
weaker so we don't notice as much.
The decision-making class of Marienburg are, and have historically been, no more oppressed by the Empire than the decision-making class of America was oppressed by Britain in the 1700s. Unless you're going to tell me the American Revolution was a deeply righteous anti-colonial undertaking (a shaky proposition), it's hard to sell the actions of the Marienburgers that way.
"Small, with large enemies" isn't the same thing as "unjustly oppressed."
I don't think this is as big a problem for Marienburg as it is for some others, though. Dispel. Marienburg has its own little college of magic, it's much easier to muster mages for the defense of the city than for an offensive campaign, and Rite of Way is very much an all-or-nothing spell where a moment's flickering drops your army in the drink.
True- but having to spread out your magicians to make sure there's one in position to get over there and dispel any attempts to magically establish a bridgehead
before the enemy up and creates one creates its own problems.
Also the noted comments about how this kind of spell has big implications in the 'maneuver' stage of combat before the armies even make contact.
An operation that would usually require an army to conspicuously build or capture boats to cross a river can instead be done almost immediately as long as the enemy isn't
right there, in force (that is to say, with caster support) to contest the river crossing.
A mass of terrain a few miles across that an army would normally be hopelessly incapable of crossing in good order without exhausting itself becomes a mass of terrain an enemy army can cross within an hour or two unless your caster support interferes.
