History Main / SuspiciouslySmallArmy

* ''To Hell and Back'', based on the memoirs of [[Creator/AudieMurphy Audie Murphy]], suffers from this throughout. In particular, the Battle of Anzio is fought between a few dozen extras a side, creating a front line no more than fifty meters long, and the action near Holzwihr (for which Murphy received the Medal of Honor) the number of Germans isn't anywhere near the entire infantry company Murphy fought off.

* ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}'' does this in a big way. Even when robots are fighting for the fate of the universe, or the very fabric of space and time, it's rare to see more than a few dozen fighters involved in any battle. Granted they're on a different planet with only a handful of fighters on each side. The battles on Cybertron are much bigger.

** Space Marine chapters have a maximum of 1000 marines each, and most of their deployments are company sized at best, but they are still sometimes depicted as conquering entire planets by themselves... but in their case, it's [[BadassArmy more intentional]]. Writers more concerned with plausibility usually have Space Marines work as auxiliary units to navy fleets and guard armies, advising generals or sending out small strike teams to disrupt enemy leadership.

** Not the case anymore from ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2'' onwards; engine can handle up to 56,000 units on screen at any one time, while looking jaw-droppingly beautiful at the same time.

** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'' downplays this with the addition of battalions, squadrons of soldiers that can be equipped to a playable character. They provide stat bonuses to the host unit and can execute Gambits, special maneuvers where the entire squad attack the enemy. The majority of combat, however, remains one-on-one, with the troops [[DecapitatedArmy fleeing as soon as the unit leading them falls]].

* ''VideoGame/TelltalesGameOfThrones'' never features more than two dozen combatants, neither on screen nor in dialogue. Just to demonstrate, [[spoiler:no more than twenty Whitehill soldiers are needed to occupy the Forrester's residence of Ironrath. And it takes even fewer Glenmore soldiers to reconquer it.]] It's [[JustifiedTrope justified]] though in that not only are the Houses Forrester, Whitehill and Glenmore ''miniscule'' noble estates under the banners of much more prominent families like Stark and Bolton, but also that many of their 'forces' have either gone off to war, deserted, been slain or taken captive during the very recent Northern Rebellion.
* Despite being one of the most realistic representations of battlefield tactics in the gaming industry, ''VideoGame/TotalWar'' does this, at least in the earlier games. A units standard size in Rome is between 40 and 60 men, and even at the huge unit size of 240 men, armies can't exceed 4,800 men. The actual Roman army, meanwhile, could deploy many tens of thousands of soldiers in single battles. Naturally this is due to graphical limitations, a 10,000-man army would break all but the most advanced computers. Every faction bringing that many or more to the field would make the game impossible to run.
** It's possible to bring that many units onto the field, but you won't be able to command them all. It just requires shoe-horning several 4,800-strong groups into the same corner. It also winds up being [[CurbStompBattle a very short]] [[ZergRush battle.]]
** This is averted in the ''Medieval 2'' expansions, at max unit scale. The number of troops per unit is kept, but the scale of the map has been downsized to cover a smaller area, e.g. the British Isles, the Levant, or Northeastern Europe. As a result, the new army sizes do match pretty closely with historical ones. For example, the various Crusader factions in the the Levantine Crusades campaign can, with some effort, gather ten or so stacks across their territory to get ~30,000-40,000 total troops, which matches modern estimates of total Crusader strength during any of the Crusades covered in the game's timeline. As another example, it's fairly easy to build a single army stack with over 3,000 men as the Teutonic Order in the Baltic Crusades campaign; this was actually at the ''upper limit'' of what the historical Teutonic Order could field for an expeditionary campaign during the campaign's early timeline, as shown by the Battle of Lake Peipus.
** Rome used 80-man units ("centuries") in real life, and 4,800 men is the low-end size of a Roman legion. Of course, most major battles in Roman history involved several; for instance, Julius Caesar commanded twelve legions at the battle of Alesia (which was an under-powered force for the task). At its height the army contained around fifty legions, plus at least as many auxiliaries and cavalry units, but obviously never all deployed at once.
** Not the case anymore from ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2'' onwards; engine can handle up to 56,000 units on screen at any one time, while looking jaw-droppingly beautiful at the same time.
* ''VideoGame/{{Battletech}}'' follows on its namesake's tradition, with your mercenary group never deploying more than a single lance (A group of four[=MechWarriors=] and their respective [=BattleMechs=]) against their targets. This can be changed with mods, however.

* ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' takes this UpToEleven, as its average ArbitraryHeadcountLimit on a large map is around 20 people.
** Some of the games, such as ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance Path of Radiance]]'', ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemElibe Blazing Sword]]'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'', justify this by having the player either control only a small group, or the vanguard of an actual army, with said army doing its own share of fighting offscreen.
** ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemJugdral Genealogy of the Holy War]]'', while not having a headcap, is the most JustForFun/{{egregious}} because of its map size, with single units taking entire regions.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemEchoesShadowsOfValentia'' also has a bad case. Alm is supposed to be leading an army in a war, while Celica is only taking a few friends and mercenaries on a quest. As far as gameplay goes, their forces are the same size. Alm is even shown leading a huge force [[GameplayAndStorySegregation in cutscenes]], but as soon as battle starts it's only a couple dozen of units.
** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'' downplays this with the addition of battalions, squadrons of soldiers that can be equipped to a playable character. They provide stat bonuses to the host unit and can execute Gambits, special maneuvers where the entire squad attack the enemy. The majority of combat, however, remains one-on-one, with the troops [[KeystoneArmy fleeing as soon as the unit leading them falls]].

* In the original ''VideoGame/{{StarCraft|I}}'', Terran campaign mission 9, Tassadar's entire Protoss fleet apparently consists of a couple of bases with dozens of zealots and dragoons. Adressing the huge numbers of units you can control in ''[=StarCraft=]'', ''VideoGame/WarcraftIII'' introduced a maximum number of units you can build that is very low compared to other similar games at the time. You can only supply a maximum of 90 food units (100 in the expansion) for your army, and the most basic combat unit takes up 2 food units and every worker 1. More advanced units can even take up as much as 5 or 7 food units. Combined with the fact that larger armies reduce the amount of gold coming from your mines, this encourages a much faster style of playing the game instead of holing up in your base until you have a massive army. At the same time, the purge of Stratholm and the siege of Dalaran are done by only 20-something attackers. This is at least partially intentional, as [[ArtisticLicense the developers wanted players to focus more on micromanaging individual fighters than on guiding large forces.]] Earlier builds of the game, which were much more RPG than the final game was, had even smaller forces.
* ''VideoGame/StarWarsBattlefront 2''. Other than yourself, every battle you participate in is fought with just 16 troops a side! Somehow, this is still enough to make the battles feel dangerous and full of hundreds of soldiers. Might have something to do with [=AIs=] respawning and you dying every 10 seconds. Averted somewhat in XL mode, at least in comparison to the other game modes. There are more units in XL- 64 units a side.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Patapon}} 1'' and ''2'', the eye count of a patapon army is below 20. In ''Patapon 3'', the army is reduced to 4 warriors and a flag carrier.
* This is averted somewhat in ''[[VideoGame/{{Civilization}} Civilization V]]'', in which each infantry unit consists of several individuals. However, the one-unit-per-hex limitation still results in large battles featuring a few dozen soldiers at most.
* In ''VideoGame/MakaiKingdom'', Zetta's plan to rebuild his powerbase requires him to conquer several entire Netherworlds, using his army of mooks since he can't fight on his own. You can only have eight characters in play on any given map, and you're unlikely to have more than a few dozen in total. Yes, they may be four-digit levels and extremely powerful with proper work (fifth-tier infantry are titled "One man army" and "One woman army" respectively) but eight people make for a very restrained army.
* ''VideoGame/ShatteredUnion'' has players reunite USA with max of 42 units. They are, however, explicitly battalions and divisions of units represented by a single one on the screen. 42 battalions to a combat front isn't that bad, especially since you'd likely be working with relatively low budgets.

* ''VideoGame/AceOfSpades'' also suffers from this quite badly on some of the larger maps, including the default semi-randomly generated one that's supplied with the game. A 64-player server limit is said to be in the works, however.
* ''VideoGame/BrothersInArms'': Re-enacts ''Cole's charge'' from the D-Day campaign with 1 Colonel, 1 Sergeant and 6 Paratroopers. In real life the position they had to attack was assaulted with ''200 men''.
* ''VideoGame/{{ARMA}} Armed Assault 2'' averts this trope to an extent, allowing you to simulate battalion-sized meeting engagements between [[UsefulNotes/YanksWithTanks Cold War-era]] [[RedsWithRockets armies]]... if your PC can handle this without melting your motherboard. The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6TnEyrN55I end results]], however are well worth it.
* In ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChronicles'', the largest number of people the player can command at any given moment is two tanks and eight infantry. ArbitraryHeadcountLimit aside, this is somewhat justified by the player being in charge of only Squad 7, a small militia unit of about sixty-strong at most that focuses more on being a vanguard and specialized strike force, with the rest of the fighting done by other Gallian troops off-screen. A similar justification is in play for ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChroniclesIII'''s limit of nine units max at any given moment, due to the player controlling only a small black-ops squad of about two dozen members at most.
** ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChroniclesII'' only allows six units on the field at once, with the main squad itself numbering only thirty-five-strong at most. In this case, the small scale is justified by the main cast being military cadets who are fighting against rebels instead of an entire empire's army.
** Justified again in ''VideoGame/ValkyriaChronicles4'' as the player controls a Ranger squad, who are a defined as a smaller detachment who independently focus on key objectives. During TheWarSequence early on, the more numerous regular forces are represented by allied units.
* The old DOS strategy game ''Sun Tzu's War Academy'', this is played with. The game limits the number of icons which represent groups of units on the screen at any given time. You can pick how many troops you have in each sprite. You could use this limitation to your advantage by creating a bunch of very weak units thus forcing the AI into using less groups of troops - which could be to your advantage, depending on the level.

* In ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'', the cap on the number of soldiers you can have is 99, which is about two to four platoons. The amount of soldiers you send on missions is 6, at most. Yet the organisation is tasked with stopping an entire global invasion. {{Justified|Trope}} in that X-COM is not really for ''fighting'' the war, but ''winning'' it; the whole point of the organisation is learning and developing ways to fight the aliens, securing key objectives, and subverting the alien's offensives and plans, leaving the real heavy lifting to the traditional military forces. The original ''[[VideoGame/XCOMUFODefense X-COM]]'' was actually a bit more realistic in this regard. You started out with the ability to send up to fourteen soldiers on a mission, and researching a late-game ship design boosted this to 26.
* In ''VideoGame/FableIII'' when the player is tasked with overthrowing their brother, the King of Albion, the entire military of Albion never send more than ten mooks at a time to defend their own capital city.
* ''VideoGame/TheBattleForMiddleEarth'' has about ten soldiers per unit, and you can field maybe twenty individual units, for a total army size of a few hundred guys. The sequel majorly ups the number of soldiers in each infantry unit, but not to the point where even a battle in which both players have hit the ArbitraryHeadcountLimit and fielded nothing but infantry will have more than maybe a few thousand troops between them.
* Like its [[Tabletopgame/BattleTech source material]], the ''Videogame/MechWarrior'' series depicts suspiciously small armies of [[HumongousMecha BattleMechs]] conquering entire planets. In ''Mechwarrior 3'', you are tasked with overthrowing planetary defenders (of which less than a dozen are ever on screen at once) with just three lancemates and a [[BaseOnWheels Mobile Field Base]]. Averted in ''Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries''; while you are limited to 8 battlemechs at once, you are a PrivateMilitaryContractor and are generally tasked to just ruin someone's day by blowing up their stuff, no planetary conquering here.
* ''Videogame/BattleZone1998'' has small armies which is partly justified by [[AlternateHistory the 1960s]] interplanetary war being in space waged with powerful alien technology with [[TheGreatestStoryNeverTold small numbers of soldiers to maintain the coverup]], though the battles seen in-game are significantly smaller than those implied in Grizzly One's CaptainsLog. The largest battle has about a dozen HoverTank combatants, whereas Grizzly One mentions that hundreds of NSDF personnel died in the first engagement with CCA walkers. The sequel significantly increases the maximum amount of units on the field (up to 120 per player), though in practice engagements aren't that much larger.
* ''VideoGame/StrongholdKingdoms'':
** Players can only recruit up to 500 mlitary units per village. Non-combat units take up a chunk of that limit, meaning a village can have a much smaller army than anticipated.

* ''VideoGame/{{Battletech}}'' follows on its namesake's tradition, with your mercenary group never deploying more than a single lance [=four MechWarriors=] against their targets. This can be changed with mods, however.

* ''TabletopGame/BattleTech'' is somewhat (in)famous for the size of the forces that are regularly deployed to invade, seize, and pacify entire ''planets'' in the fiction. Attempts at justification tend to present the vast majority of said planets as {{Planetville}}s; once the attackers have taken the capital and attached spaceport, it's relatively rare for them to also have to worry about being attacked by forces initially stationed somewhere ''else'' on the same world (there usually aren't any) and civilian uprisings either don't occur at all or else inevitably fail when attempted. Various history-changing battles like the Battle of Tukayyid and Operation Bulldog had thousands of vehicles in combat, but the wargame usually limits itself to about a dozen combatants because it [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality turns into a slow, confusing fustercluck with more]] without the use of computer aid.

* The Romulan's invasion force in ''[[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Star Trek TNG]]''. You can imagine the planning meeting - "So that's invading Vulcan, occupying the planet and fending off a probable Federation counter attack. Two thousand men should be plenty."

** Very noticeable with the Resistance in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' and ''Film/TheLastJedi'', which is substantially smaller than the Rebel Alliance ever was, because it is a volunteer force that's largely underfunded. The latter film actually makes this explicit- the Resistance consists of less than four hundred people.

** Some of the games, such as the [[VideoGame/FireEmblemPathOfRadiance Path of Radiance]], ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemElibe Blazing Sword]]'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'', justify this by having the player either control only a small group, or the vanguard of an actual army, with said army doing its own share of fighting offscreen.

** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'' looks to be averting this to a degree, as units are now portrayed as leading small squadrons of soldiers. The majority of the combat still seems to take place between the characters themselves, however, in standard Fire Emblem format.

[[folder:Anime And Manga]]
* ''Anime/MacrossDelta'': Even for a mercenary group, [[PrivateMilitaryContractors Chaos]]'s Ragna branch is absolutely tiny, especially compared to the more advanced and sophisticated [=SMS=] branch we saw in ''Anime/MacrossFrontier''. They operate out of a single warship, on a single planet, with a few squads of new-model fighters. Their pilots have to pull double duty for ground combat and infiltration when the need arises, and the singers also provide tactical support and maintenance. Thanks to the current war, they are low on funds and support from the [=UN=] and make do with what they have.

* UsefulNotes/FidelCastro almost always had [[RefugeInAudacity only 200-300 in his revolutionary band, and in most battles against Batista's army, which numbered 37,000 strong with tanks, artillery, and aircraft,]] he [[AchievementsInIgnorance won almost every battle.]] Note that unlike many tropes like this, this was not mainly an example of a BadassArmy but instead a remarkable example of two forces with almost no appreciation for sound military tactics or strategy blundering all over each other, which Castro won against amazing odds by being slightly smarter and vastly more able to inspire loyalty and dedication. In fact, Batista's troops often either didn't fight or were literally unable to due to lack of supplies. The often forgotten [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escambray_rebellion Escambray rebellion]] against Castro's rule later was in fact ''much larger'' than Castro's own "revolution" (heck, even the exile rebels at the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion Bay of Pigs]] were a larger group), but since the Communist dictatorship wasn't ''as'' incompetent as Batista's (and Castro was supported to the hilt by the Soviets while the Americans left Batista out to dry), that rebellion was steadily crushed over the years and faded into historical obscurity.

* Plutarch claims that, when Tigranes the Great, the king of Armenia, saw the invasion force led by Roman General Lucullus, said "too many to be an embassy, too few to be an army." However, the Romans crushed Tigranes' armies and conquered his kingdom. The veracity of the quote, it should be noted, is doubted but the its existence does make the trope OlderThanFeudalism
* {{Justified}} with the Sapri Expedition, an attempt to topple the Kingdom of Two Sicilies during the UsefulNotes/WarsOfItalianIndependence made by an 'army' of ''twenty-five'': they weren't trying to conquer the place, just to start an insurrection near the capital of Naples that would then do most of the job. This ended in an EpicFail: seeing the pro-Italian unification patriots coming to trying and starting an insurrection, the government warned the people of the coming bandits who had just staged a mass break-out from the jail of Ponza (true: the patriots, aiming to increase their numbers and recover some weapons, attacked Ponza, stole the weapons and tried to free only the political prisoners, but ended up taking with them also the ''many'' common criminals imprisoned there), and sit there watching the ''AngryMob that killed many of the patriots and criminals and captured and delivered to the police the survivors''.
** {{Justified}} also with the ''next'' attempt, as again the idea was to start an insurrection. This time, however, the patriots were smarter: there were a thousand of them (still not many against the Neapolitan army of '''50,000''', but better), everyone had a gun (though them men were often poorly equipped adventurers), they stayed clear of jails, they landed in Sicily proper (as opposed to Naples, that, while the capital, was on continental Italy) where the government wasn't popular at the best of time and in a moment in which the population was even more rebellious than usual, and were led by goddamn' ''Giuseppe Garibaldi'', the most popular Italian of his time and the one man who could have actually start the insurrection in Naples itself by simply showing up and saying "Let's revolt". Garibaldi's small army quickly swelled up thanks to locals and ''defectors from the Sicilian Army'' joining him, and the attempt succeeded. The Sicilians in fact hardly fought him at all. The Neapolitans ''did'', but their generally poor officers combined with half their kingdom basically joining him off the bat and many of their own peasants refusing to support them quickly led to their collapse.

-->'''[[WebVideo/MrPlinkettReviews Mr. Plinkett]]''': The First Order comes off as comically powerful, with [[OffscreenVillainDarkMatter unlimited resources.]] It kinda makes you wonder: why are they even bothering chasing down an elderly lady and her friends, who only have three spaceships? The fuck are they gonna do?

** Very noticeable with the Resistance in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' and ''Film/TheLastJedi'', which is substantially smaller than the Rebel Alliance ever was, because it is a volunteer force that's largely underfunded.

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** Some of the games, such as the [[VideoGame/FireEmblemTellius Tellius duology]], ''[[VideoGame/FireEmblemElibe Blazing Sword]]'' and ''VideoGame/FireEmblemAwakening'', justify this by having the player either control only a small group, or the vanguard of an actual army, with said army doing its own share of fighting offscreen.

[[folder: Real Life ]]

** ''Film/BlackPanther2018'' had a similar issue, with the assembled forces of the Border Tribe and the Jabari Tribe, plus the entirety of Wakanda's air force, being small enough to fit on a couple acres of land. ''Infinity War'' even doubles down on this when Okoye confirms that the Border Tribe's military was more or less wiped out in this film ("And the border tribe?" "Those who are left"), so that really was all they had.

** Very noticeable with the Resistance in ''Film/TheForceAwakens'' and ''Film/TheLastJedi'', which is substantially smaller than the Rebel Alliance ever was. Despite the use of things like a matte painting at the end of ''Film/ANewHope'' to create the appearance of a small army of troops, CGI advances were not used in the new films to make the Resistance seem larger, even though they are fighting a war over the fate of an entire ''galaxy''!

* JustForFun/ZerothLaw: {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d in ThePrologue to Creator/WilliamShakespeare's ''Theatre/HenryV'' in the page quote.

Armies in video games and animation in general don't just get the [[UnitsNotToScale size of their individual soldiers]] wrong. Due to gameplay and graphical limitations, particularly graphical limitations, armies tend to be a lot smaller than they would have been in RealLife. An army that would have numbered in the tens of thousands will number a few hundred or at most a thousand men, and that's for a very big battle.

* In ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'', the PC can recruit soldiers to hold of an invading daedric horde that is about to burrow through from Oblivion and destroy a city. If you do all the necessary sidequests, you wind up with about a dozen mediocre soldiers to fight an equivalent number of monsters.
** ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim'' follows suit, with Ulfric/Tullius delivering his epic speech about the fate of Skyrim at the gates of Solitude/Windhelm, he is attended usually by the Dragonborn and half-a-dozen random Nords.

** Space Marine chapters have a maximum of 1000 marines each, and most of their deployments are company sized at best, but they are still sometimes depicted as conquering entire planets by themselves...but in their case, it's [[BadassArmy more intentional]].

** ''Film/BlackPanther'' had a similar issue, with the assembled forces of the Border Tribe and the Jabari Tribe, plus the entirety of Wakanda's air force, being small enough to fit on a couple acres of land. ''Infinity War'' even doubles down on this when Okoye confirms that the Border Tribe's military was more or less wiped out in this film ("And the border tribe?" "Those who are left"), so that really was all they had.

** ''Film/TheAvengers2012'': No more than a few hundred [[AlienInvasion Chitauri]] are [[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1947pd ever visible on-screen]] in total, even after Loki orders them to "send in the rest." Even when we get a look at their home dimension with the rest of the invasion force, we only see eight additional Leviathans, a few dozen space speeders similar in speed and armament to WW-2 prop planes, and a mothership that is [[https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/loki-and-chitauri-vs-steppenwolf-and-parademons.588681/page-4#post-41651091 not particularly huge]] and couldn't possibly hold more than tens of thousands of additional troops at most. This makes their desire to conquer ''an entire planet'' with hundreds of millions of soldiers quite questionable, and calls into question the capabilities of the worlds that they were already stated to have conquered (one is shown in ''Infinity War''). {{Justified}} by the Other and Loki being ill-informed of Earth's capabilities and small armies being the norm in the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's civilizations, such as the aforementioned Asgardians. They still did manage to lay waste to enough of New York City for [[Series/Daredevil2015 Wilson Fisk]] to turn a profit on reconstruction contracts, which is a small victory.

* The reason Prohibition was almost impossible to enforce in the United States was because the agency meant to enforce it only had 1,500 agents ''nationwide'', many of whom were also easily bought off.

* The High Middle Ages were also somewhat like this. The French under Duke William of Normandy conquered all of England with only 8,000 men, and the Kingdom of England was estimated to have only been able to field 14,000 well-equipped troops across the entirety of the country,[[note]]Given sufficient time to concentrate their forces, which they definitely did not have with the Norwegian Viking invasion having occurred just before William arrived.[[/note]] or 1% of its then-population of 1.5 million. When considering that, 1,000 years earlier, Caesar invaded (and didn't totally conquer) what would become England with nearly 30,000 men, and that 400 years later, more than 50,000 English troops would fight at the Battle of Towton, the armies involved were quite tiny indeed.