D-boy wrote:Without bring all the off screen hibiki riders (which i don't think should count anyway, but that's just me) into this, the general counts so far have it at a rough 2-1 ratio for sentai and riders.
Well, I don't really think they should count either; I was just being silly including them.
So lets settle on all the riders who are named "Kamen Rider ?????" (ignoring other rider-like heroes); and rangers who transform or have a (team)-(colour) designation. That gives the rangers closer to a 3-2 advantage in numbers
D-boy wrote:Now, true there are some sentai that could easily equal one rider (Takeru comes to mind), there are many that don't.
Unfortunately, in the absence of direct 'vs' episodes, its very hard to comparatively assess any characters' strengths.
You can probably put all the 'vs' eps together, and come up with a big list of "Attack X does more damage than attack Y", and "Armour X can withstand Attack Y but not Attack Z" ... but that's not really enough information.
If you wanted to do some kind of simulation (which I think would be kind of fun, though time consuming, to set up ... but then I'm a game theory geek), the best you could probably come up with is a massive list of "Attack X (is/isn't) powerful enough to (damage/demolish/damage) a (bridge/road/building)" ... which then allows you to at least rank the power of certain attacks into classes.
D-boy wrote:More so, with that 2-1, the sentai can't make as strong of a use of their team tactics. Not that they couldn't, it just wouldn't be the all powerful asset some have made it so far.
Teamwork is an advantage, but also a disadvantage.
Most of the rangers' ultimate attacks are "team bazooka" type things. Now, if you assume they're equally matched to start with, then both teams will suffer 10% losses in the same arbitrary time period (lets call it a "turn").
So ... first turn over. Riders are down to 110, rangers down to something like 190. But of those rangers, you've got (*does statistical number crunching*) 19 'full' squadrons, 17 teams with 1-3 members down, and 2 guys standing around wondering where all their friends went.
For the riders, taking out 10% of their numbers means their firepower goes down by 10%.
For the rangers, taking out 10% of the numbers reduces their effective firepower by about 30%.
Even if the diminished rangers manage to give as good as they get in subsequent turns (maybe the emotional boost they get from losing comrades gives them an advantage to compensate), by the end of turn 5 you're looking at about 60 riders remaining, and 1 complete ranger squadron.
Oh ... one more thing occurs to me.
What kind of attack is most useful in a massed battle? I don't think I've ever seen a ranger with an effective AoE. (Not sure if someone already mentioned that, though)
I would be seriously interested in putting together a simulation of all this ... putting together a perl script to model the battle as accurately as possible given known information. If anyone's curious or bored or insane enough to help out, we could go through all the available specials coming up with "Attack X beats object Y" (where object Y might be an enemy or a building), and construct a corpus of known data. Then, sensibly, it would be possible to get a computer model to assign semi-random power levels that fit the known criteria. I'd say that's about the best you can get without introducing preconceptions about whether we *think* an attack should be stronger than another.
... rangers' helmets are mostly shiny and glossy....
