Could Sauron have resisted against Ar-Pharazon?

[mindil]

Originally Posted by Victariongreyjoy

For argument sake, let's say the balrog, Smaug and a couple fire-dragons were on his side, together with the olog-hai and uruk-hai, the numenoreans would defeat them in battle regardless?

This is the classic "If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a trolleycar" kind of argument.

Or rather, it's a set of equations with too many unknowns.

How many dragons equal one balrog? How many orcs equal one dragon? Are uruk-hai double a regular orc, or 2.5 times, or 6.33 times one orc?

So now that we've got that sorted out, and we know how many dragons and orcs and so on Sauron had available, we can calculate that Sauron's maximum potential army equals 10**8 orcs, or the equivalent of 10**2.8 dragons.

Great. Now moving on, we have to calculate the Numenorean force. They only had warriors with swords. And they didn't have a humongous population. But we need to be precise, so fortunately, we have unknown-sourced information that Numenor had 4.6 x 10**5 warriors. Now we know that these forces scared the daylights out of all those evil forces, so by definition, 4.6 x 10**5 Numenorean warriors > 10**8 orcs. Doing the math, you get that each warrior equals --- maybe someone else will do the math.

But in any case, each Numenorean was worth a few hundred orcs (even Gondorians were worth over a hundred orcs each), and there were enough of them (as we have seen above) to more than equal the number of orc-equivalents at Sauron's disposal in the form of dragons, balrogs and the rest.

So, based on pure math and reliable equations, you have your answer.

This approach also works with questions like "If there were more lions in the Serengeti, would the elephants have a chance, if there were also more elephants?"

[William Cloud Hicklin]

They only had warriors with swords.

They also had lethal archers, armed with steel bows.

[Zigûr]

I sometimes wonder if the films or other elements of popular culture have caused a tendency to somewhat fetishise the forces of evil, i.e. creating a perception that Sauron/Morgoth had these incredible "living weapons" (balrogs, dragons, olog-hai, etc) and therefore must in some strange way have "deserved" to have won (a bit like the pop-history obsession with German tanks of WW2) and that the free peoples of Middle-earth, especially Men, despite their self-evidently strong track record of victories, were somehow weak and pathetic because they're not "cool" enough or something, i.e. "Men are weak."

EDIT: See also the perception of events in Professor Tolkien's legendarium as being dictated by "power levels" rather than decisions, fate, chance, historical forces etc., as if, say, Sauron put 3000 pts of miniatures on the gaming table and his opponent only had 2000 or similar.