History Main / SuspiciouslySmallArmy

* An in-universe example occurs in ''Film/{{Gladiator}}'' when the Colosseum stages a historical re-enactment of the Battle of Carthage with a few dozen men. PlayedForLaughs as the announcer presents the barbarian horde and the camera pans to the tiny group in the vast arena.

* ''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.

** 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.

* ''Spoiler/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'': Miriel's military campaign in Middle-earth numbers only 500 men.

* A single platoon-sized unit of 62 French Foreign Legionaries with little more than rifles essentially held up the entire main Mexican army at the Battle of Camarón, inflicting ten times their own losses, even though the Mexicans had thousands of troops with artillery and cavalry.

* Justified in ''VideoGame/{{Tyranny}}'', where expensive, hard-to-work bronze and similarly Bronze Age populations means most nations have a small, elite army and a occasionally a powerful mage as their entire armed forces. The armies of [[EvilOverlord Kyros]] [[TheBadGuyWins conquered]] [[VillainWorld the world]] by averting this with ''iron''. It is heavy and inferior to bronze (steel has not yet been invented), but cheap and so easily mass-produced that Kyros' legions can simply overrun any resistance.

[[folder:Live Action TV]]
* In the ''Literature/{{Sharpe}}'' series, the units involved in the battles tend to be rather small. This isn't a big issue when Sharpe and his riflemen are on some cloak and dagger mission, but in large set-piece battles that historically involved tens of thousands of men on each side (such as Talavera, Salamanca, and especially Waterloo) it's underwhelming. When you know from the books that a French "column" was a brick of soldiers forty or eighty files wide, the sight of fifteen extras in three files is ridiculous, no matter how enthusiastically they chant "Vive l'empereur!"

** The average Federation starship has a crew in excess of 200 people working in a three or four shift rotation; every other race crews similarly sized ships with between 15-40 people, apparently with each crew member being on duty around the clock, most of them don't even seem to have a medic aboard. The standard explanation is that the alien craft are stripped-down warships with much fewer amenities, and don't need the huge scientific and maintenance crew that a Federation ship would carry- just a pilot, a commander, an engineer, a gunner and some grunts. Even so, modern US Navy nuclear submarines, which aren't exactly known for wasting space, require a crew of 14 officers, 18 senior noncoms and 89 enlisted working on a three-shift rotation, and a starship would probably need at least that many, if only to carry out basic maintenance and prevent everyone keeling over with exhaustion. A Klingon crew especially seems to consist of about four or five officers making up the bridge crew, a cook, and a handful of enlisted to perform repairs and occasionally kill things.

* The ''Franchise/StarWars'' Original Trilogy falls sometimes victim to this due to its budget and technical limits. A prime example would be both the Rebel and Imperial fleets in ''Film/ReturnOfTheJedi'' (although hundreds of Imperial ships are shown staying out of the fight in the background). The advent and advancement of realistic CGI in the intervening years negated this problem for the Prequel Trilogy.

* ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' takes this UpToEleven, as its average ArbitraryHeadcountLimit on a large map is around 20 people.

** ''VideoGame/FireEmblemThreeHouses'' zig-zags this trope. On one hand there's 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]]. On the other hand it's the installment in which the player controls by far the smallest army, since by default (unless players go out of their way to recruit all the other students and faculty staff) you get 10-12 playable units depending on the route chosen.

* ''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.

* 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, the Romans needed 30,000 men (four legions plus auxiliaries) to conquer what would later become England, 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. This was a large part of why Europe became so fractured and decentralized in this time; every petty lord could afford a castle or fortify their city to at least some degree, but the large well-drilled and and well-supplied armies needed to take them just didn't exist anymore.

* 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, the Romans needed 30,000 men (four legions plus auxiliaries) to conquer what would later become England, 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.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' goes to some lengths to justify this trope, especially in the earlier editions. The 5e and 6e core rulebooks state that one model of basic troops represents roughly 10 troops of the same type in-universe (large models like dragons and giants implicitly only represent one), and give distance and time scales consistent with that figure (1 inch = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 hour), complete with lines noting that units of 10 models clearly maneuver as if they were much larger formations (because they represent 100+ men) and that real battles are punctuated with long periods of waiting. The fluff, for its part, consistently throws out army figures in-line with the setting's scale and tech level (a FictionalEarth whose civilizations generally vary from medieval to early modern), with most battles taking place between forces in the hundreds to low thousands. A force in the thousands is considered quite large, a force in the tens of thousands is equivalent to the entire muster of a mid-sized state, and a force in the hundreds of thousands is able to threaten a great power or an entire continent. Expansion packs depicting loreful battles that explicitly involved more troops than would be reasonably present un a tabletop game (even with the 1=10 scale applied) have their own workarounds. The most common is dividing said battles into multiple scenarios, with the justification that each scenario was simply a part of the larger engagement. Another is to give one or both sides the ability to respawn slain units to represent more troops being shuffled on to the field, especially if the in-universe environment has a logical bottleneck limiting how many troops can be deployed at a time (e.g. mountain passes).

* ''Film/ToHellAndBack1955'', 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.

* The background writers of ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' are notorious for underestimating the number of soldiers it would take to win a war. Examples include:

* ''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.

** 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.

* 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/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.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' goes to some lengths to justify this trope, especially in the earlier editions. The 5e and 6e core rulebooks state that one model of basic troops represents roughly 10 troops of the same type in-universe (large models like dragons and giants implicitly only represent one), and give distance and time scales consistent with that figure (1 inch = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 hour), complete with lines noting that units of 10 models clearly maneuver as if they were much larger formations (because they represent 100+ men) and that real battles are punctuated with long periods of waiting. The fluff, for its part, consistently throws out army figures in-line with the setting's scale and tech level (an FictionalEarth whose civilizations generally vary from medieval to early modern), with most battles taking place between forces in the hundreds to low thousands. A force in the thousands is considered quite large, a force in the tens of thousands is equivalent to the entire muster of a mid-sized state, and a force in the hundreds of thousands is able to threaten a great power or an entire continent. Expansion packs depicting loreful battles that explicitly involved more troops than would be reasonably present un a tabletop game (even with the 1=10 scale applied) have their own workarounds. The most common is dividing said battles into multiple scenarios, with the justification that each scenario was simply a part of the larger engagement. Another is to give one or both sides the ability to respawn slain units to represent more troops being shuffled on to the field, especially if the in-universe environment has a logical bottleneck limiting how many troops can be deployed at a time (e.g. mountain passes).

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer}}'' goes to some lengths to justify this trope, especially in the earlier editions. The 5e and 6e core rulebooks state that one model of basic troops represents roughly 10 troops of the same type in-universe (large models like dragons and giants implicitly only represent one), and give distance and time scales consistent with that figure (1 inch = 10 yards, 1 turn = 1 hour), complete with lines noting that units of 10 models clearly maneuver as if they were much larger formations (because they represent 100+ men) and that real battles are punctuated with long periods of waiting. The fluff, for its part, consistently throws out army figures in-line with the setting's scale and tech level (an AlternateEarth whose civilizations generally vary from medieval to early modern), with most battles taking place between forces in the hundreds to low thousands. A force in the thousands is considered quite large, a force in the tens of thousands is equivalent to the entire muster of a mid-sized state, and a force in the hundreds of thousands is able to threaten a great power or an entire continent. Expansion packs depicting loreful battles that explicitly involved more troops than would be reasonably present un a tabletop game (even with the 1=10 scale applied) have their own workarounds. The most common is dividing said battles into multiple scenarios, with the justification that each scenario was simply a part of the larger engagement. Another is to give one or both sides the ability to respawn slain units to represent more troops being shuffled on to the field, especially if the in-universe environment has a logical bottleneck limiting how many troops can be deployed at a time (e.g. mountain passes).

* In ''Series/LegendsOfTomorrow'', the episodes showing Savage's army in the future are limited to about a dozen guys at most, which is probably the only reason why a mish-mash of superheroes and {{Badass Normals}} is able to take them down instead of being wiped out in a massed laser barrage. Savage's army is supposed to be overrunning the entire world at this point. Also, in Season 2, Shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu can barely scrape together a few dozen samurai (and ''only'' samurai, no lower-ranking ashigaru at all) to wipe out a small village. How is he supposed to keep all of Japan in line? Then there's the UsefulNotes/AmericanCivilWar, where we see a few dozen Confederate and Union soldiers deciding the fate of the country. Obviously, the show doesn't have much of a budget, and most of that is being used on CGI.

* The 4077 in ''Series/{{MASH}}'', A real MASH unit had, on average, around 200 personnel, including at least 10 medical officers (including a dentist and an anesthesiologist), 12 nurses, 89 enlisted soldiers of assorted medical and non-medical specialties, one Medical Service Corps (MSC) officer, one Warrant Officer and other commissioned officers of assorted specialties. The 4077 had, at most, 70 personnel, an administrative staff consisting of just the CO and his clerk (who doubles as a stretcher-bearer and orderly), four doctors including the CO (it was five in season one, but Spearchucker Jones was [[ChuckCunninghamSyndrome written out without explanation]], or a replacement), a dentist (Painless Pole) who was PutOnABus in the season one finale, and an anesthesiologist (Ugly John) who also [[ChuckCunninghamSyndrome disappears without explanation or replacement]]). After Ugly John's disappearance, regular nurses not trained for it administer the anesthetic, something that isn't even done ''today''. [[note]]Anesthesiologists undergo extensive training to administer the correct dosage based on the patient (an incorrect dose could fail to put the patient under, put them out too long, or kill them). It is not something just anybody can do without training.[[/note]]

* 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.[[note]]The army was also under intense pressure in the cities of Havana and Santiago thanks to urban protestors such as Frank País[[/note]] 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.

* 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.

** ''Film/AvengersInfinityWar'' continues this trend with the "climactic" final battle between Thanos's Outriders and the army of Wakanda. Analyses of the army shots have shown that there were, at most, a few thousand Outriders; note that the Outriders are super-strong but [[TheBerserker borderline non-sapient berserkers]] that [[GlassCannon die to pistol bullets]] and have no strategy other than [[ZergRush running straight at their enemies.]] They're up against an even ''smaller'' number of Wakandans guarding the MacGuffin, [[SchizoTech who are all standing out in the open]] [[HollywoodTactics equipped with spears and no artillery, armored vehicles, or aircraft]]; the Outriders ultimately beat them [[BigDamnHeroes before Thor arrives.]] The result is that the titular ''Infinity War'' for the fate of the universe comes down to a few thousand combatants charging at each other across an open field. Thanos's only forces in the film besides those few thousand Outriders are a four-member QuirkyMiniBossSquad. While that's going on, another battle for the fate of the universe is being fought between Thanos and six other people.[[note]]Spider-Man, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Star-Lord, Drax, Mantis.[[/note]]

** ''Film/ThorRagnarok'' has the "mighty" army of Asgard trying to take on [[OneManArmy Hela]], only to all get slaughtered. There were no more than a few hundred of them in total (though this may be [[JustifiedTrope justified in the fact]] that Asgardians are notoriously long-lived, [[MadeOfIron difficult to kill]], and [[ClarkesThirdLaw have weapon technology so advanced]] that it may as well be magic to the lower realms; in any case, it doesn't help them against good ol' 5.56mm rounds from "Tex-Ass" at the end of the film). Yet after Hela kills these few hundred, not only is Asgard nearly out of soldiers (only a few are visible in the final battle, and they're clearly second-stringers) but it is bereft almost entirely of healthy males of fighting age, as every shot of the Asgardian civilian population afterwards shows nothing but women, children, elderly, and teenagers, with the occasional young man mixed in. This almost constitutes a {{retcon}} of the previous films, since the crowd scenes in ''Thor'' and ''Thor: The Dark World'' clearly depicted Asgard as having a much larger population (and army) than ''Ragnarok'' shows, even if it still was pretty small.

** Potentially not the case in ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2''; the engine can handle up to 56,000 troops on screen at any one time, while looking jaw-droppingly beautiful at the same time. Despite that, the system still restricts the player to twenty units in a single army and forty on each side of a battle. If more than forty units have been brought they come in as existing units are wiped out or flee.

** Not the case anymore from ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2'' onwards; the engine can handle up to 56,000 troops on screen at any one time, while looking jaw-droppingly beautiful at the same time. Despite that, the system still restricts the player to twenty units in a single army and forty on each side of a battle. If more than forty units have been brought they come in as existing units are wiped out or flee.