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[[ZergRush Back to the main page]].

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!!Examples

* [[TropeNamer Named for]] the Zerg in ''Franchise/StarCraft'', who tend to rely on large swarms of cheap, disposable units. (MemeticMutation follows usage of this term with "Kekeke", the Korean equivalent of "hahaha.")
** As mentioned on the main page, the original meaning in ''VideoGame/{{StarCraft|I}}'' multiplayer was a DoubleSubversion of the modern definition: a "rush" generally involved building a small force that attacked as soon as possible, before the opponent was prepared. Zerglings, the most basic Zerg unit, are cheap, fast, build two at a time, and can be rushed out faster than either of the other two faction's basic units. The strategy therefore relied on getting just a handful of very early units into your opponents base before they had defenses to kill off all their {{Worker Unit}}s, sometimes even bringing your own workers to bolster the attack.
*** As shown in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jen46qkZVNI this infamous video]], once people got better at the game, Zerg eventually became far more susceptible to [[DeathByIrony BEING rushed by the other two races]] than preforming one. Blocking the base entrance off with the first few buildings keeps zerglings from getting in to massacre workers and will generally buy enough time to get units out to shut down early zergling rushes, meaning the strategy is not very popular. In contrast moderate numbers of Marines (the Terran basic unit) and Zealots (the Protoss basic unit) are very good against zerglings and in general somewhat tough for Zerg to deal with without higher tier units, meaning Zerg is usually on the back foot when both sides have early armies comprising of their basic units.
** During the Heart of the Swarm intro cinematic, mass numbers of Terran army forces are shown being easily battered and beaten down by nearly unending waves of Zerg units. The Ultralisk are shown to be nearly immune to anything thrown at them, stomping over Siege Tanks and Vikings, Mutalisks taking out powerful airships such as whole Battlecruiser, and Zerglings overpowering the entirety of the city they invade by sheer number, emphasizing the pointlessness of the Terrans trying to even shoot them down. The final overhead shot just before the Battlecruiser slams into the ground is a shot of thousands of Zerg simply plowing through the city, with the statue of Arcturus Mengsk being knocked right over and smashing into the ground. We also see Kerrigan standing proud atop the fallen statue as hordes of Mutalisks fly by.
** In ''VideoGame/StarcraftII'' Zerg do tend to play into a more modern use of what a "Zerg Rush" looks like. They can expand more quickly and churn out far more WorkerUnit drones than the other races, and their unqiue unit building mechanic allows them to mass up larva then rapidly spawn an entire army at once. The result is that, especially in the mid- to late-game, the Zerg tactics often do involve massive swarm/wave attacks of disposable units, taking advantage of their superior economy and ability to replenish their forces more quickly than the other races to overwhelm their opponents. In fact, in pro-level play, it is up to the other races to hamper the Zerg early on to prevent them from "droning" and running away with an economic lead. While it is not termed a "rush" (which still refers to either an early attack or "rushing" to a specific unit or technology), the effect to the layman makes it look exactly like what the Zerg do in cinematics. Especially Zerglings heavy compositions, since they're small, VERY fast, and are the only [=SC2=] Unit that are somewhat regularly fielded in numbers approaching or even exceeding a hundred. Once these are made into [[ActionBomb Banelings]] things really start heating up too, and can create a great look of the Zerg army "rolling" through the enemy base.
*** Funnily enough the Terran (with their dual build queue option) and Protoss (with their warp-in ability) are both much more likely to use a classic Rush than the boom-y zerg. Zerglings are still the cheapest, fastest unit to get into the opponents base, but walling off your base against Zerg is such a standard process that early zergling attacks are very prone to failure. As a result, expect zerg to be defensive and often on the back foot for the early game, rarely attacking until they already have multiple bases and more advanced tech.
*** In the custom game "Space Battle", each team (up to six members a team) has one capital ship per player. It is generally best to avoid going too deep in enemy territory and the best tactic is use broadsides and to quickly engage and disengage while farming resources and experience off the enemy's fighters. The problem is is that a player can use a cheat to log themselves in more than one slot for the game (which is cheating), but it allows them to control multiple capital ships (it is also possible to control capital ships of players that left the game, but by that point, they are heavily over matched by more upgraded ships). Since the player who does this gets enough resources for each ship like normal, they can just upgrade damage and armor and neglect the generally more important speed upgrades (used for disengaging and farming) and just rush the enemy with three or so more powerful, but slower capital ships. These players tend to get reported for this and any team that uses this in a tournament is disqualified.
*** The single-player campaign in ''VideoGame/StarcraftIIHeartOfTheSwarm'' adds a special ability that can make rushes easier, Zergling Reconstitution respawns ten destroyed Zerglings every 30 seconds for free. And another that lets you spawn ''three'' zerglings per egg at no extra cost, in about two seconds. The other option makes them do more damage and able to jump cliffs.
** An accepted tactic for reinforcing a defending army against a relatively small enemy force (ideally, ones ''without'' splash damage) is to simply pull all your nearby {{Worker Unit}}s off resource duty and have them charge at the enemy. While workers die easily and do little damage on their own, sheer weight of numbers means they can still be used to tank for your more valuable army units, contribute chip damage that can force a retreat, and trip enemies as they try to advance, all while being cheaper and faster to replace as long as you don't lose ''all'' of them.
** Note that, from a lore point of view, this is actually downplayed and has been subject to CharacterExaggeration by fans. While their combatants far outnumber those of the other two races (partly because ''all'' zerg are some type of combatant), there really aren't ''that'' many zerg, and they do have limits on how many losses they can take. The lore booklet that came in the first game's manual lists out all the brood fleets and they vary from thousands to single digit millions of zerg of all types. In ''Wings of Liberty'', the zerg do manage to apply their overwhelming numbers to successfully invade terran space, but this is partly because they invade while it's divided into many feuding powers one of which is in a civil war. Notably, the reason that they ultimately lose is that they overstretch their forces, leaving Char open to a decapitation strike by Valerian and Raynor's fleet. They try to recall reinforcements to Char, but they can't muster them quickly enough. After their leader is taken out the zerg become much less effective due to not being able to coordinate as well, and it's noted at the beginning of ''Heart of the Swarm'' that the Dominion is steadily pushing them back to near-eradication even on Char. ''Legacy of the Void'' continues to downplay the overwhelming nature of their threat; Amon's zerg brood ''does'' swamp Shakuras with nearly two billion zerg (versus probably only a few million protoss soldiers; the whole planet has 194 million people), but Vorazun explicitly says this is an abnormally large attack and that she's never seen so many zerg in one place. Sure enough, when that attacking force gets destroyed [[EarthShatteringKaboom along with Shakuras]] and a similarly large force is incinerated by the purification of Endion, Amon's zerg brood is stated to be severely depleted. Likewise, Kerrigan's swarm took such heavy losses due to a void rift on Ulnar that it needed to sit the rest of the war out. It's also heavily implied that the zerg don't have many population centers outside of Char and Aiur (e.g. the ending slides of ''Legacy'' note that the zerg laid claim to the systems nearest to Char, implying they hadn't already done so), which respectively have ten and five billion zerg as of 2504. In short, the zerg appear overwhelming because the Koprulu sector just isn't that populated compared to a lot of sci fi empires on a similar tech level (only a few hundred million protoss and probably less than twenty billion terrans), and the narrative emphasizes over and over again that they're not actually numberless, despite what their leaders may claim.
* ''VideoGame/AbsentedAgeSquarebound'': Lategame dungeons and the hard versions of the Arcade dungeons have the Monster House mechanic, where a black portal can spawn a massive amount of enemies, who are automatically aggroed onto the party. Together, all these enemies are even more likely than most bosses to defeat careless players.
* ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpires'' series:
** For whatever reason, Anti-Zerg Rushing is particularly common in the [=AoE=] community. Many games are played with a house rule that neither side can attack for some fixed length of time, sometimes ranging up to ''45 minutes.'' It was so popular in the expansion "treaty" mode was introduced, so neither side could attack each other for 10, 20, 30, or 40 minutes depending on what is selected.
** From the original ''VideoGame/{{Age of Empires|I}}'':
*** You can rush with Hittite elephants. Much like real elephants they're hard to get rushing but man, once they start it's hard to get them to stop.
*** The Yamato cavalry rush was another staple of the original game.
*** Plus the late-game Shang villager horde, involving villager-only upgrades that turned them into passable fighting units. When you consider that the Shang had the cheapest villagers in the game...
*** Once the enemy AI runs out of military units, they still have all their Villagers out and about. Unless you've got to killing them, too, or even if you have, and if you attack a critical structure, such as their Town Center, they will often sic every Villager on you. At once.
** From ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresII'':
*** For a dramatic demonstration of this, play with the "aegis" cheat activated. That cheat allows all players to create buildings and units instantly, but may also make the game [[HopelessWar damn near impossible to win]] as your opponents will inevitably send an endless stream of constantly-replenishing units at you.
*** Also, the dominant strategy is to flood out weak and cheap second tier units faster than the enemy, before gradually moving onto stronger units (the "flush").
*** The ExpansionPack ''The Conquerors'' turned the Goths into the undisputed masters of the late-game Zerg Rush amongst all of the game's civilizations. Their unique techs "Anarchy"[[note]]Allows the production of their unique Huskarl unit from the Barracks[[/note]] and "Perfusion"[[note]]Increases the working speed of the Barracks by 100%[[/note]] combined with their cheaper infantry and free Conscript civilization bonuses allows them to quickly churn out swarms of cheap, arrow-resistant infantry that can demolish entire towns (castles and towers included) in a frighteningly short amount of time.
*** The ExpansionPack ''Rise of the Rajas'' for the HD version adds the Malay civilization, whose unique unit, the Karambit Warrior, is a fast but weak melee infantryman that is dirt cheap and takes up only half a population slot. Useless alone or in small groups, but absolutely terrifying in swarms. This also applies to the rest of the units, they have the worst War Elephant out of the 3 Southeast Asian civilizations due to theirs lacking unique upgrades and not having the complete "Blacksmith" cavalry armor upgrade line[[note]]They lack "Chain Barding Armor" and "Plate Barding Armor", the result being them missing +2/+3 armor[[/note]], but are cheaper to produce than others. Likewise they don't have the Champion upgrade for their Militia line, but their unique tech "Forced Levy" replaces their gold cost, turning them into trash units.
** In ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpiresIII'', the Russian light infantry is weak and has low HP, but they're built by tens and are the cheapest units in the game. This also applies to their cavalry, they have Cossacks in place of Hussars which are cheaper and weaker but only occupies 1 population slot.
*** The Chinese, added in the ''Asian Dynasties'' expansion, are built almost entirely around this trope. They don't train individual units: they train "banner armies", groups of around 5-6 units composed of two different unit types (so, light cavalry and heavy infantry, heavy cavalry and hand mortars, etc) who all emerge in bulk. The Chinese also have a higher population cap than other factions, and they can use "migration" cards to instantly recruit a villager from all villages and town centers. Chinese troops are unfortunately usually inferior to their counterparts from the other factions, but hey, who's counting?
*** The Aztecs can pull of an economic rush similar to the Starcraft 2' Zergs. The main choke on economic growth is that villagers are produced one at a time from the town center and the early game limits you to one town center. Native civilizations can task villagers to dance at a fire pit for a variety of effects such as decreased training time for all units, and Aztecs have unique priest units that are twice as effective when dancing. The runaway economic growth from pumping out villagers soon translates into swarms of Coyote Runners and slingers.
* ''VideoGame/AgeOfMythology'':
** The Egyptians are the group with cheap, weak troops that build fast. Throw in a few production speed upgrades and a Meteor god power dropped on a hostile chokepoint, and it's Wall of Slingers time, especially if you go with Ra and use your priests to empower military buildings. Isis boosts population cap and grants economic bonuses. This is very bad for whoever is on the receiving end. And Set has stronger slingers and the ability to summon cheap animals to fight.
** The Norse fit, to a lesser extent. They can make their basic tier-1 warrior unit, the Ulfsark, right from the get-go from the town center. Also, Norse units gain Favour when they fight. These two factors combine to encourage aggressive early-game play; if you play Norse, it's a good idea to attack early and attack often, with lots of Ulfsarks. Doubly so if your patron god is Loki, because then you also get cheap heroes who can summon myth units.
** This trope is [[InvertedTrope inverted]] by the Greeks, who build powerful, specialized and expensive units slowly.
** The ExpansionPack ''The Titans'' features the Automaton myth unit for Leto-worshiping Atlanteans; basically weak, cheap metal soldiers that build quickly and can repair each other once the fighting stops. They can even resurrect their dead within a certain time limit. This can make them extremely effective when attacking isolated towns/armies: overwhelm, repair/resurrect, repeat. They even get an unique tech ("Hephaestus Revenge") that allows them to gain RegeneratingHealth. Lastly, when one dies, the population counter will decrease until the Automaton is resurrected. With enough temples set to automatically make more, you can kill half of the Automaton yourself and have more spawn in the time it takes to resurrect the ones you killed, giving you even more Automaton far beyond what the max population should be. This is used against you in one of the campaign missions. Build Heroes. Lots of them.
** In the same mission mentioned above, the main villain uses Zerg Rush against you by spawning {{Hell Gate}}s. Except the Zerg in this case aren't weak. Not at all.
* Trying to Zerg Rush in ''VideoGame/AgeOfWonders II'' against the CPU opponents is not typically a good idea as the CPU will try to keep construction pace with your own army size. Additionally, the size and strength of the opposing force units is a major factor in the CPU determining what kind of threat and response level it will assume but it focuses heavily on quantity.
** Generally the CPU will reliably fund three or four full stacks of units that stay together and defend its territory based around a Hero unit if given the chance to assemble the forces. This army descending upon you from out the FogOfWar can be quite off-putting.
* ''VideoGame/AllianceOfValiantArms'' has the "infection" and "battlegear begins" game modes, where the players have to fight off armies of {{zombie|Apocalypse}}s and killer robots, both of which use these tactics to try to overwhelm the players.
* In ''{{VideoGame/Aquapazza}}'', Multi and Ma-ryan have specials that summon a rush of robot maids and schoolgirls respectively.
* In ''VideoGame/BackyardMonsters'' you could wait weeks to finally get the highest level non-champion monster and send like 12 in or you can send in 250 of the lowest level guys and watch them wreck crap. The beauty is that you're method of sending monsters in can't actually fire that many at once so you need to do it about three times and if you do the game will crash. So yeah you zerg rushed the base, the catapult, and the game itself
* The Mordor faction in ''VideoGame/TheBattleForMiddleEarth'' is a prime example. Their basic unit is weak but free and comes in large groups. An even more extreme example is the Orc Labourer from the Isengard faction, an unarmoured orc wielding a woodcutter's axe. They each take up 1 command point, in a game where the command point cap is usually 300 ''at the very least''.
* In ''Battle for Middle Earth 2'', Orcs are no longer free, but the Goblin faction's Goblin Soldiers and Archers fill a similar purpose - they are weak, cheap units that can be used to rush the enemy in huge numbers.
** This very much applies to the armies of Mordor (and to a ''slightly'' lesser extent Isengard) in the original novels as well. Sauron is practically the poster boy (poster-Eye?) for the 'plenty more where they came from' school of evil strategy. His Orcs are clumsy, cowardly fighters and only effective in huge numbers, especially against skilled warriors like (most of) the Fellowship.
* In the fighting game ''VideoGame/BlazBlue'' the character Arakune uses a sort of Zerg Rush strategy. God help you if Arakune curses you, because if he does he will summon a MASSIVE horde of bees and other insects to attack you. In fact, ''Continuum Shift'' gives you an Achievement for getting a 70-hit combo with Arakune, called "BEEEEES!!!!"
** He doesn't even have to be on the screen to combo you: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_qLvGwG0lo examples]]. Lots of curse combos last a long time on normal competitive matches.
* This is one of the simpler tactics to build a deck around in ''VideoGame/{{Calculords}}'' -- deploying cheap units ''en masse'' to fill the lanes. Especially useful in this scenario are cards with the Phalanx (deploys one unit in all three lanes) or Squad (deploys 2-4 of the unit in one lane) abilities. This is easily countered by an opponent who has a lot of push cards with armor, however. The enemy commanders Cytosinor and Hate.Bit both employ this tactic -- Cytosinor near-exclusively uses Mutates with high attack power but low HP, and deploys them aggressively and in numbers. Hate.Bit has a huge variety of units, but his most dangerous are the Cosmo Wreckers he deploys every turn: they have just one HP to start, but have the Phalanx ability ([[MyRulesAreNotYourRules only when used by Hate.Bit]]), do extra damage to your base, and race across over half the screen in an unguarded lane.
* In ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOps'', the level "SOG" throws pretty much the entire NVA at you. Endless hordes of AK-armed, respawning Vietnamese soldiers that charge past the Khe Sanh defenses and lob grenades into your trenches. There's a reason it's considered the hardest level in the game.
* This is the basic fighting style of Servbot in VideoGame/MarvelVsCapcom2. His go to strategy is to call in his other Servbots (there are 41 of them) and try to deliver a DeathOfAThousandCuts to his opponent. Sadly, because he's so flimsy and each individual hit is very weak, he's considered a bottom tier.
* The favored tactic of the Mastermind archetype in ''VideoGame/CityOfVillains''. Though it varies depending on level and powerset, the average Mastermind can summon six minions to boss around. On Mastermind-heavy teams, upwards of 40 characters can be running around a map.
* The ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'' games:
** In Civilization III'', the Aztecs are made for this tactic. Their Jaguar Warrior unit is the earliest fast unit in the game, and ''fast units retreat at one health unless fighting other fast units.'' This allows for multi-turn rushes of epic proportions very early in the game. As a bonus, the Aztecs are Militaristic, which means that military buildings (such as Bunkers, which increase the total health of any unit produced in that city) cost half their normal price.
** Also applicable to Civilization II when using the "Fundamentalism" government type - they can produce the "Fanatic" Unit that requires no upkeep or support and any reasonable size city can produce one a turn. If you have twenty cities in ten turns you can throw two hundred of them at your enemy.
** This is Napoleon's favorite strategy when controlled by the AI in ''Civilization V.'' He usually builds up a sizable army made up of weak warriors and archers, then rushes you early on in the game. Because he spent most of his resources on this army, taking down his cities in a counter-attack becomes almost laughably easy if you are able to hold off his initial waves. Montezuma has a more useful variant, where he uses Jaguars, which are far less weak than regular warriors.
*** The Pikemen are already the weak-but-cheap alternative to swordmen, where even discounting their bonus against cavalry they are useful melee fodder since they don't require iron resources to build. The German Landsknecht unique unit has the exact same stats as the Pikeman, but at half the cost.
*** The Mohawk rush became infamous in the multiplayer. In a lot of cases (if the Iroquois player gets lucky with Ancient Ruins) it is undefendable regardless of how well the defending player plays.
** In ''Civilization VI'', Scythia has the ability to spam their unique horse archers at a very fast rate. Meanwhile, Religious Civilizations often like to spam Missionaries and Apostles at players.
*** Barbarians in Civilization VI do that. They send a scout to find a player's city, then the scout goes back to his encampment. After that, They spawn tons of units to rush the player. While they were just TheGoomba in the earlier games of the series, where they attacked one at a time, in VI they become a real threat rather than a mere nuisance because of their new tactics.
* In ''VideoGame/CivilizationBeyondEarth'', this is somewhat the point of the Harmony-exclusive [[MonsterAllies Xeno Swarm]] unit - they're statistically inferior to their counterparts, the Supremacy [[MechaMooks CNDR]] and the Purity [[PoweredArmor Battlesuit]], but they can be produced quickly and upgraded to damage their target if killed. However, it's Supremacy that tends to do this overall, as their robotic units gain combat bonuses if adjacent to each other, representing the units working in conjunction in a tactical network (Harmony units, by contrast, tend to gain combat bonuses if they're isolated from other units).
* In ''VideoGame/ClashOfClans'', a common tactic among players is to create a bunch of cheap units like Barbarians and/or Archers and unleash them all in a huge wave. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails.
* The Brotherhood of Nod in ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquer'' makes use of this at lower tech levels, able to produce huge numbers of cheap, expendable militia troops, as well as light, fast attack bikes, buggies, and tanks. However, while most soldiers fighting for Nod are poorly-trained, poorly-armed rabble, the other end of the spectrum is comprised of a much smaller group of super elites using technology that's often superior in many ways to that of GDI. So the Zerg Rush is just the first part of Nod's one-two punch: wear down and distract the opponent with the Zerg Rush, then send the favored son in the back way to finish the job with mad skills and alien technology.
* The Scrin in ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerTiberiumWars'' can readily spam Disintegrators and buzzers while building an army of tripods in the background. And, since they're actually aliens, they are the real Zerg of this series. And let's not mention the mind-controlling cultists used by Traveler 59.
* In ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert2'', the Soviet Conscripts are pretty much designed for this tactic; Very weak, very cheap, easily spammable. Online multiplayer play saw "tank rushes" as a common tactic, made possible by quickly going for either side's War Factory and churning out the basic tank unit (either Grizzly or Rhino tanks) as soon as possible to rip apart enemy bases before the latter can get up to speed. It got to the point where the expansion ''Yuri's Revenge'' retooled each sides' tech tree specifically to counter the tactic -- the Allied faction, for instance, got the Guardian GI which when deployed uses anti-armor rockets and is uncrushable under tank treads.
* In ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerRedAlert3'''s Uprising standalone pack, this is one of the most popular tactics used when playing several levels in Commander's Challenge mode. Just play as The Empire of the Rising Sun side and send your barrack cores to your enemy base's front gate, build up, then spam your soldiers before your enemy can get its defenses up.
* China, in ''VideoGame/CommandAndConquerGenerals''. Red Guards, the basic infantry, are built two at a time. Troop carriers come with 8 Red Guards free. To further encourage massing, groups of five or more of the same unit in close proximity get a damage bonus.
* In the ''VideoGame/{{Cossacks}}'' series, certain nations have to rely on this to defeat the enemy. For example, Algeria lacks the powerful upgrade to the 18th century, possesses no native gunpowder units, and has a unit roster largely composed of poorly armoured melee units. However, its archer and light infantrymen units are cheap and incredibly quick to create, and so an Algerian player has to rely on these to swarm the enemy and win in the early game.
* The mutants in ''VideoGame/{{Crackdown}} 2'' employ this swarming tactic.
* In ''VideoGame/CryingSuns'', the Kaos-class battleship encourages this playstyle. It has no weapon slots by default and can only have two in total, but it can hold up to sixteen squadrons, can field up to five of them at once, and can redeploy them extremely quickly thanks to the Brutal Deployer auxiliary system. And you will be doing that a lot, because any squadrons you deploy will have only ''one-quarter of its normal maximum hit points''.
* Darwinians, basic Virus units a.k.a. Virii and especially Multiwinians in the ''VideoGame/{{Darwinia}}'' series include such sheer number of units at disposal that they outnumber Zergs at least from eight to one during peak moments.
* ''VideoGame/DawnOfWar'':
** Orks have an upgrade that allows them to get Slugga Boyz (their basic troopers) for free. This is unlocked fairly late in the game, but it allows the Ork player to fully embrace the concept of human wave tactics as wave upon wave of his boyz pour into the enemy base (in [=DoW=] you can have your units set to "auto-recruit", thereby allowing you to command your units without having to micro back to your base for reinforcements. Since Boyz now cost no resources other than head-count, this means a literal green tide).
** Imperial guards have a glitch (or possibly a design feature, as it was never fixed) whereby their morale upgrades increase their health. They can also take grenade launchers. You can have 140 guardsmen with more hit points each than space marines, 50 grenades, and all within the first five minutes of the game. Oh, and [[WeHaveReserves don't worry if they start dying; you have more.]]
* This is the favorite strategy of the enemies in ''VideoGame/DiabloII'' (even for the bigger guys). Think about it: You and up to 7 other guys, up against hundreds of demons. It especially gets nuts when you're up against those bug things, that spawn smaller bug things, from Act 2. There are some structures that spawn enemies, which look like something out of the Zerg Faction.
* Pretty much all the alien and zombie Mooks in ''VideoGame/DesertMoon'' do this. [[TheWarSequence Especially on the final wave of the final level]].
* ''Franchise/{{Disgaea}}'':
** This is blatantly suggested in the tutorial of [[VideoGame/DisgaeaHourOfDarkness the first game]], which says that the best strategy is to rush one unit wildly with your soldiers. This is also an effective strategy for distractions, by sending out weak and useless characters, thus the AI auto targets the weakest link, leaving your main fighter several turns of beating the ever living hell out of the enemy.
** ''VideoGame/Disgaea3AbsenceOfJustice'' makes a reference to this after the first battle of the final chapter. After Mao smothers a Prinny bomb set by the brainwashed [[GoldfishPoopGang Vatos]] and Champloo helps them resist brainwashing relapse, a squad of brainwashed seniors appears to take down the group. The Vatos get a brief CMOA at this point by calling in their relatives for a diversion - ''all two hundred thousand of them''!
---> '''Almaz:''' Heh... when you can't get good help, get more help...\\
'''Sapphire:''' Indeed. Numbers are power. Human wave tactics of this scale can only be called amazing.
** ''VideoGame/Disgaea4APromiseUnforgotten'' features this [[spoiler: in the God ending. So the party is strong enough to crush half a dozen of God's Parts? How about 8 million of them?]]
** In ''VideoGame/Disgaea5AllianceOfVengeance'', Etna's Chaotic Ordina [[LimitBreak Overload]] summons a large number of Prinnies around her, which all take their turn after you end yours. They can inflict DeathOfAThousandCuts to enemies this way, as well as serve as meat shields.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Dodge}}, One square would be easy to, well, dodge. A lot of them them, coming from different directions, however...
* A favorite tactic of [[TheHorde the darkspawn]] in ''VideoGame/DragonAgeOrigins''. Especially pronounced in the run-up to the FinalBattle in [[spoiler:Denerim]], in which many fight scenes will just consist of dozens upon dozens of darkspawn (most of them OneHitPointWonder "grunts") pouring in toward your party from somewhere offscreen.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Duelyst}}'', the Abyssian faction specializes in getting many weak minions onto the field, with cards such as ''Wraithling Swarm'' (summons three 1/1 Wraithlings), ''Horn of the Forsaken'' (summons one Wraithling each time your General deals damage), and ''Gloomchaser'' (Summons a Wraithling to a random adjacent space when summoned).
* This is a desperation tactic sometimes deployed in ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'', if whatever it is that's attacking a player's fort has wiped out the professional military (or turns up before there even ''is'' a professional military..) Dwarves have also been known to mass-stampede onto a battlefield on their own, not to attack, but to [[TooDumbToLive recover the clothing and armor]] of their dead compatriots. And if one of them is killed in plain sight of, let's say, an entire tavern, said dwarves are likely to feel vengeful and try to avenge their dead companion; this will either lead to a bigger massacre or a threat getting buried under an avalanche of fists, boots and [[ImprovisedWeapon drinking mugs]].
** Goblins are also prone to doing this, although given the number of traps the average DF player builds into a fort entrance, it rarely ends well for them.
** When a world's history is being generated, this tends to happen when elves go to war, since the elves are immortal but [[ImmortalProcreationClause still reproduce just as fast as all the other races]], leading to huge armies of elves [[GranolaGirl equipped with wooden armor and wooden weapons]].
** The [[spoiler:demons released by digging too deep]], [[OneManArmy dangerous enough on their own]], come in massive hordes.
** When [[BigCreepyCrawlies giant mosquitoes]] were introduced, they spawned in swarms of hundreds due to a bug, overwhelming the fortress with sheer numbers and killing dwarves and FPS alike. This was quickly patched though.
* ''Videogame/DynastyWarriors'' has any enemy faction full of literal hundreds of faceless mooks with a few slightly stronger champions strewn about, all trying to defeat the one stronger champion player character. Lucky for the player that [[ArtificialStupidity most of the enemy army are complete idiots]] and rarely if ever attack, or else the series would be totally unfair.
* ''Franchise/TheElderScrolls''
** This is a common tactic of [[OurGoblinsAreDifferent Goblins]] and Rieklings, goblin-like inhabitants of [[GrimUpNorth Solstheim]], throughout the series. Both species are rarely found alone, making up for their [[FunSize lack of size]] and adeptness as fighters by attacking in overwhelming numbers.
** The series' [[OurWerebeastsAreDifferent were-creatures]], especially [[OurWerewolvesAreDifferent werewolves]], commonly form packs with were-creatures of the same type. They are known to attack in groups, using numbers to lessen the "glass" part of their GlassCannon status.
** Scamps are the [[TheGoomba weakest]] and [[FunSize smallest]] known form of [[OurDemonsAreDifferent lesser Daedra]] in the series. In addition to serving as low-intelligence servants and messengers, they are used in [[DestroyerDeity Mehrunes Dagon]]'s LegionsOfHell as CannonFodder, and they prefer to attack in large numbers to improve their odds.
** In his "opus", series' recurring character St. Jiub the Eradicator recounts his [[HunterOfMonsters quest to eradicate]] the [[TakeThatScrappy much reviled]] [[GoddamnBats Cliff Racers]] from Vvardenfell. As he was hunting a lone Cliff Racer, it [[ItCanThink led him into a trap]] where hundreds of Cliff Racers suddenly descended upon him. Two days of fighting and hundreds of dead Cliff Racers later, Jiub finally collapsed, exhausted and wounded. He would have died if not for the [[DivineIntervention timely rescue]] of the Dunmeri PhysicalGod Vivec, who was so impressed with Jiub's actions that Vivec declared him to be a saint.
* ''VideoGame/EmpireAtWar'' absolutely adores this trope. Bombers are fairly inexpensive, and have powerful weapons that bypass the enemy's shield. The downside is that they move slowly and only come 3 to a squad. However, since [=EaW=] lets you drop reinforcements right next to your other units, you can drop 12 or 15 bombers essentially right on top of the enemy station in around 3 minutes, usually before the enemy has a chance to upgrade their space station. Even more so in land battles.
* ''VideoGame/EVEOnline'' has this everywhere. In one notable example, bhe big Alliances in player owned space typically like to jump in huge fleets of 300+ ships into other systems when invading, in order to overwhelm the enemy's defenses.
* ''VideoGame/{{Evolva}}''. Seriously, play this game and you'll be amazed at the great amount of numbers of enemies that attack you at the same time ''every single battle''. Sometimes you may enter in combats against ''twenty'' enemies or so.
* ''Franchise/{{Fallout}}'':
** Expect [[AlwaysChaoticEvil Raiders]] to employ this tactic against you by mobbing en masse.
** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'':
*** The [[TheFederation New California Republic]] are prone to this. In a war against the much better equipped and trained Brotherhood of Steel [[note]]as a point of comparison: a NCR Trooper has a semi-automatic rifle ([[AfterTheEnd which may not be in the best nick given the kind of world the Fallout universe is]]), a combat knife and combat fatigues with a metal chestplate and leather shoulder pads; the average Brotherhood Knight has either a laser rifle or a kind of pneumatic sledgehammer, and PoweredArmor is standard but were out numbered 10 to 1 [[/note]], the NCR just threw waves of troopers at their positions and drowned them in bodies. The NCR won the war, by the way. {{Subverted|Trope}} in some cases: [[BadassArmy Rangers]] and [[EliteMooks Heavy Troopers]] are badass, and they have training and equipment to match, and even basic Troopers are more than a match for gangs and raiders so only small squads are needed to deal with them. And then there's...
*** The NCR's enemies, Caesar's Legion, who are even better at it. Many Legion grunts go into battle with nothing but improvised sports gear and crude cleavers. They started from a small tribe that conquered and subjugated their neighbours and in time have grown into a vast horde. Between their overwhelming numbers and sheer fanaticism (NCR Troopers have reported Legionnaires charging machine-gun posts head-on armed only with sharpened sticks and rocks), they have proven the gravest threat the Republic has ever faced.
*** After initiating the Gala event in ''Dead Money'' hundreds of [[DemonicSpiders Ghost People]] come swarming up out of the sewers and maintenance tunnels, armed with spears, home made bombs and bear traps strapped to their fists. Unfortunately their huge numbers are backed up by their immunity to the deadly Cloud that blankets the Sierra Madre and their HealingFactor that brings them back from the dead over and over again unless you dismember or disintegrate them.
* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXI'':
** Over the years, a common phrase for beating endgame monsters is to [="Throw Rangers/Black Mages/Summoners/Melees/=]{{Samurai}}[=/Dark Knights at it."=] Hell, the strategy is named Zerging.
** Many a player can tell a story about the time they range-attacked a weak monster on the other side of an impassable obstacle, only to see the monster go charging off in some random direction... only to appear fifteen minutes later, having finally navigated the zone to find the player, ''and having alerted all its friends that it met along the way''. Twenty floppy little bunny rabbits equals quick death.
** One of the missions in the Crystalline Prophecy expansion involves 30 mandragoras attacking you in waves of about 5 or 6 each. They're comically weak and take an enhanced amount of damage, so it's part zerg rush and part whack-a-mole as the mandragoras die in one hit each. However, if you leave these enemies alone long enough they can Zerg Rush ''you'' by performing a move that takes nearly all of their HP and turns it into about 300ish damage. This attack can be used by the entire crowd in quick succession if you let them, which results in a near-instant and humiliating death on the player's part.
** The mini-expansion which came out after Crystalline Prophecy, A Moogle Kupo d'Etat, features another such battle where a swarm of [[RobotBuddy Cardians]] attack the player. They are exceptionally weak, much like the previous expansion's mandragoras, until you realize that half of the crowd attacking you are in the middle of [[OneHitKill casting some of the most powerful spells in the game]].
* Both your side, and the enemies' side can employ this trope in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXII: Revenant Wings''. If you don't capture a summon gate quickly enough, then often you can end up practically ''wading'' through espers, in order to reach/capture it. On the other hand, if used against a level III esper (provided that most of the other espers have been taken care of), it can be quite helpful.
* After killing [[WakeUpCallBoss Plant Brain]] in ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyIX'', the army of Plant Spiders begin zerging the heroes as the last attempt to capture them when the entire Evil Forest is turning into stone.
* For most ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' games, this is a favored tactic of the AI opponents; they'll typically field armies that are anywhere between twice to four times the size of your party and, unless they're on the defensive, will send units to attack you in large numbers. Players [[DefiedTrope can't do this themselves]] as [[CastOfSnowflakes their units]] are [[{{Permadeath}} non-replenishable]], but they make up for it with better stats, better equipment and the benefit of support relationships, so a properly-leveled party will take little/no damage from the resulting Rush, at least on Normal mode. On Hard or [[HarderThanHard Maniac/Lunatic]] Modes, however... well, [[NintendoHard it is a Nintendo game]].
* ''VideoGame/FridayNightFunkin'': Played for comedy. The hard mode for the tutorial of all things has one in the form of a whole mess of arrows that come right out of nowhere well after the song ends. Hitting some of the notes is enough to get past it, but it ''does'' have the potential to make you fail if you're not ready for it.
* In RTS resource games like ''Frontline Attack War Over Europe'', it's possible to get a high level treasury, set the rendezvous point to the middle of the enemy camp, and buy two dozen tank destroyers, armoured cars and minesweepers (to take out enemy armour, infantry and mines respectively). Result, 30-40 units arriving every three seconds and immediately heading off to the middle of the enemy base, shooting at everything that shoots at them.
* The alien and supernatural forces from ''VideoGame/GaiaAttack4'' attacks in massive droves that totals up to multiple dozens at once, onscreen. Even with the player's default automatic pistols having BottomlessMagazines, attempting to gun them down without being overwhelmed is still a challenge, although it's ''slightly'' easier on 2-player mode.
* ''VideoGame/GalacticCivilizations'': the AI has a soft spot for swarms of fighters and frigates. This tends to work well right up until the largest size of vehicle comes into play, at which point the path from [insert your homeworld] to [insert enemy homeworld] becomes littered with the husks of burning ships.
* And of course there's ''VideoGame/GardenGnomeCarnage'' [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU7Nxy_g75o]] where seeming endless swarms of elves scale the sides of your building in an attempt to... give you presents?
* Opponents in ''VideoGame/GenjuuRyodan'' do this in all maps, with quick capture of mana crystals, summoning as much units as possible (with the occasional elite mooks mixed in) and rushing towards the player's units and castle as quickly as possible.
* Google has a game called Zerg Rush--search the term and little O's will crawl across the page and try to destroy the search results, and you have to click them to defeat them.
* The weapon of choice of the Swarm in ''VideoGame/GratuitousSpaceBattles''. The Swarm's ship hulls are noticeably cheaper than their enemies' ([[HopelessWar which is everyone]]) but consequently their hulls, shields, and armor are also weaker. As a result, the Swarm can put a ''lot'' more ships on the field, especially in high-budget battles.
* ''VideoGame/GrimGrimoire'' - The computer is most certainly NotPlayingFairWithResources and thus can throw near-infinite numbers of, well, pretty much everything--you can even catch it in the act of ''teleporting in more units'' to bolster its numbers. (It's quite a bit harder for you to do the same, though, as most of the time the enemies will have an effective counter for single-unit mass rushing.)
* Used by players in ''VideoGame/GuildWars2'''s World vs. World mode. Large groups of players storming keeps across the map are referred to as "zergs". This terminology has been all but officially adopted by players and developers alike.
* ''VideoGame/GwentTheWitcherCardGame'': Blue Stripes Commandos, which pull all copies of themselves from the deck, and Kaedweni Revenants, who spawn copies of themselves whenever they destroy a unit, in Northern Realms. Arachas Queen Monster decks inevitably flood the board with weak tokens, either as fodder for consume or self-destroy effects or row based buffs like Commander's Horn.
* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'':
** Most skirmishes against the Covenant have you taking on a few squads at a time, each comprising of some Grunts/Jackals backed by a Brute/Elite; however, you will occasionally have sequences where you need to mow down continuous waves of enemies. When the [[GoddamnBats Drones]] show up, they each go down easily and typically carry piss-weak weapons, but show up in really large groups.
** The Flood tends to send in wave after wave of infected (even more annoying from ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}'' onward, as Flood infection forms can revive the combat forms you just put down if their bodies aren't destroyed).
** Promethean Crawlers tend to swarm you en masse.
** Exemplified in Firefight, especially ''VideoGame/Halo3ODST''[='s=] version, while the enemy waves just get getting bigger and bigger until you finally die.
** Lore-wise, the Covenant primarily utilize Grunts like this, sending them in large waves at a time.
** Can be done with basic units in ''VideoGame/HaloWars'', especially Marines.
* The Soviet Union pretty much solely rely on this tactic in ''VideoGame/HeartsOfIronII'', especially in Human-vs-Human games where the Soviets enjoy five years of having to do nothing but build up their Industrial Capacity and then spam infantry/militia. The strategy can even compete against a talented Germany player's blitzkrieg tactics simply because they cannot replace the losses incurred fighting that many units spread over the entire European-Russian area.
* [[DirtyCommunists The Red Star forces]] in ''VideoGame/HeavyWeapon'' love to spam ''obscene'' amounts of bomber planes and helicopters on the player. Too bad for them, the player is a [[OneManArmy One-Tank Army]].
* In the ''VideoGame/{{Homeworld}}'' verse, [[ProudWarriorRaceGuy Vaygr]] strike craft squadrons have more units than their - individually stronger - Hiigaran equivalents. However, the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Kadeshi]] are simply the kings of this trope.
--> ''[a few hundred Swarmers attack the Mothership]''
-->'''Fleet Intelligence:''' [[CaptainObvious The enemy seem to rely heavily on fighter-class units]].
* Played with in ''VideoGame/HorizonZeroDawn'': [[spoiler: the "foot soldiers" of the robot plague that ended the old world were Scarabs(aka Corruptors) - four legged attack bots that, while formidable, can be killed by primitive means such as bows and arrows. That's if you fight just ''one''. But in the old times, NO weapon could prosper against them, because they were replicated at such an ungodly rate that any attack was barely a dent in their numbers.]]
* The ''VideoGame/JaggedAlliance 2'' megamod ''v1.13'' (named after the last official patch being 1.12) by default enables the "Drassen counterattack": if the player's team of mercs, I.M.P. characters (one-time-paid) and/or indigenous recruits take all three sectors of the city of Drassen, a cutscene plays which concludes with the Queen ordering an all-out attack to take the city, since it has both a valuable mine and an airport. In vanilla gameplay or with the option disabled fortunately she doesn't especially besiege the city although she may send several patrols to harass the town, but with the option enabled (as v1.13 by default does), she will instead mass them together -- often at least sixty individual soldiers -- for a simultaneous attack on what's usually three to five tired mercs without prep time and possibly a smattering of militia.
** The game's combat being limited to twenty individual enemy soldiers in-sector at once means that the player's mercs/recruits and militia will only be facing twenty simultaneously, but that simply means that those first two soldiers are ''continually'' replaced with every death, as are their replacements.
* In ''VideoGame/JeffWaynesWarOfTheWorlds'' this is a viable option for both sides. The Humans can quickly research armoured track layers, which require only a basic vehicle factory and are quite quick to build, and just steamroll the Martians with wave after wave of TankGoodness. The Martians can do something similar with the quick-to-build scout machines, although it tends to stall against well-fortified Human sectors. The true Martian zerg rush is more tactical than strategic, utilising massed flying machines to rush a sector's HQ and blow it up (which [[NoOntologicalInertia instantly destroys all other buildings]], neutralising the Humans' traditionally strong base defences) before mopping up any remaining units.
* Emaki ninja enemies from ''VideoGame/JitsuSquad'' seems to favour using their numbers to overwhelm the heroes, since mostof them are rather pathetic fighters. The first stage ends not with a boss battle, but with your heroes caught in an "Emaki Mosh Pit" where you're swarmed by the Emaki from all sides, and need to defeat '''40''' of them to complete the level.
* ''Franchise/KingdomHearts'' has this with TheHeartless. As they're MadeOfEvil and mostly non-sentient, their main 'tactic' appears to be weight of numbers (a rare few have somewhat more advanced 'teamwork'). The [[TheWarSequence section in the second game]] where you have to fight off one thousand {{Mooks}} springs to mind.
** In ''[[VideoGame/KingdomHearts02BirthBySleepAFragmentaryPassage 0.2 - A Fragmentary Passage]]'', two bosses are literally nothing more than a horde of Shadows, the weakest and most common Heartless in the series, moving in unison. The Demon Tower serves as the [[WarmUpBoss first]] [[RecurringBoss and penultimate bosses]] of the Passage, while the Demon Tide serves as the FinalBoss. [[ThatOneBoss They are generally regarded as more difficult than Darksides]].
* This is a commonly used tactic in ''Kingdoms of Camelot'' on Website/{{Facebook}}. The easiest way to take out an enemy city's defenses is with an initial wave of Militiamen, the cheapest, most basic unit of the game. 'Scout bombs' are also used to destroy enemy scouting ability, sending a large wave of scouts to kill the opponent's scouts.
* Crank your Aristocracy, Serfdom, Land and especially your Quantity sliders up in ''[[VideoGame/EuropaUniversalis Europa Universalis 3]]'' and you get this effect. All of these sliders make recruiting regiments cheaper; Land and Quantity also increase your manpower and [[ArbitraryHeadcountLimit forcelimits]] while Quantity also also increases the speed at which your regiments reinforce.
* ''VideoGame/KirbyMassAttack'' is an aptly-named game, to say the least, since Kirby's been spilt into 10 by Necrodus.
* In the ''VideoGame/{{Kohan}}'' games, the Ceyah (Undead) have the Zombie unit. These guys only cost a small amount of goal, have no upkeep cost, and can be made from the start of the game. The only limiting factor is population room. Throw in a Necromancer or a Kohan that can summon the dead, and you are screwed. Oh, did I mention that most of the Undead have damage resistances against ranged attacks? And don't get started with Shadelings. They are like Zombies, but have an upkeep cost of 1 stone per unit and are probably the fastest units in the game.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvugzSQwaso This]] tactic from an ancient version of ''VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends''. Heimerdinger, who can place down turrets as an ability, prevents minions from moving through the middle lane by blocking their path with those turrets. Patched up ages ago; friendly units can freely move through Heimer turrets.
* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead'':
** The first game has this for the regular [[NightOfTheLivingMooks zombies]]. Whether the AI Director summons them or if a player gets vomited on by a Boomer, a huge swarm of zombies will all rush after the team, surround them, and proceed to beat the crap out of them. One Common Infected is barely a nuisance; a swarm of them can mob survivors faster than the survivors can gun them down, and mobs are generally ''the'' most dangerous thing in the game barring maybe a Tank, as getting beaten on by a dozen zombies at once not only depletes your health very quickly but also makes it much harder to deal with Special Infected. In VS mode, infected players may adopt the rush strategy by either having everyone attacking at once or rushing in after a Boomer player does his job.
** ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'' takes things up a notch with "gauntlet crescendos," scripted events where you get ''endlessly'' rushed by hordes of Infected until you reach a saferoom or some kind of switch that makes them stop spawning.
* ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfSpyro'': With the exception of their more elite variants, Apes, Skavengers and Grublins aren't especially powerful and are only rendered threatening by their penchant for swarming Spyro in waves of bodies.
* ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'':
** The Soldiers from ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkToThePast A Link to the Past]]'' live by this tactic to make up for their lack of strength, charging Link and/or the Links en-masse with or without a Chief Soldier.
** ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaSkywardSword'': Ghirahim sets a horde of Bokoblins, Moblins and Stalfos onto you to slow you down from [[spoiler:preventing the resurrection of Demise in the past]]. He also specifically mentions that they are not meant to kill or even stop Link, because they incapable of doing so, and are only useful to slow Link down.
* ''VideoGame/LordsOfTheRealm2'': Since archers are meant to be support units, most battles will utilize this trope. And the sooner you can force the enemy archers into melee combat, the sooner they stop firing on your men, though the same holds true for your archers as well.
* ''VideoGame/MarioAndLuigiBowsersInsideStory'': Parodied when Bowser states that running into people's feet is basically all that {{the Goomba}}s learn in their military academy. He invokes this with the "Goomba Storm" special where he orders Goombas to rush the enemy, though when done right it becomes DeathFromAbove with [[IncendiaryExponent flaming Goombas]].
* ''Franchise/MassEffect'':
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect1'' has several examples:
*** This is the strategy used by the Husks and Thorian Creepers. They're not very effective with it, except on the higher difficulties, however.
*** The final cutscene battle in the game also has [[spoiler:Alliance capital ships doing a Zerg swarm against Sovereign. Despite Sovereign being vastly more powerful than any of the Alliance ships, it's eventually overwhelmed by sheer numbers and destroyed]].
*** The Krogan used this tactic before the genophage, which rendered most of their species unable to reproduce.
*** This is how [[HiveMind geth]] hack as well; as a "platform" will often have over a hundred geth, they can just overload most firewalls.
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'': The Husks are back with force, and in the tight, confined spaces they prefer to attack in, they will overwhelm you in moments unless you make very good use of your crowd-control abilities--even on Normal difficulty. On Insanity, they get armor as well, which severely negates the effectiveness of using knock moves to kill them.
** ''VideoGame/MassEffect3'':
*** Trailers show [[spoiler: hundreds, maybe thousands of Reapers descending on earth. Averted, as Reapers are not cheap and not weak, but still incredibly numerous.]]
*** Conversely, this is the Alliance tactic to win back Earth in the finale -- throw every vessel they, plus the considerable alliances you've spent the game building up, can beg, borrow, or steal to beat the crap out of the Reaper main fleet in an epic battle royale. [[spoiler: If it hadn't been for [[LostSuperweapon the Crucible]], [[CurbstompBattle it would have been a monumentally disastrous defeat]]]].
*** Indeed, this turns out to be the final strategy for the final ground push against [[spoiler: the Reaper transport beam to the Citadel.]] A massive force of troops and armored vehicles rushing into an opening in the enemy defenses, hoping to close the gap before reinforcements arrive. [[spoiler: Harbinger lands right in front of the objective and slaughters the entire force in seconds. Only Shepard and Anderson make it to their goal.]]
*** This is the strategy on ''both'' sides of the geth/quarian war in ''Mass Effect 3''. (The quarian fleet also gets a few knocks in against [[spoiler: a Reaper Destroyer]] this way via [[DeathFromAbove markerlight bombardment]].) The end result, if Shepard is unable to broker peace, is that one side or the other is wiped out to the last ship [[spoiler: and you have to pick which one]].
* ''VideoGame/MasterOfOrion'':
** In the later stages of the first game, the AI ''loves'' to drop tens of thousands of ships on your head. Changes to the later games prevent fleets quite ''that'' large, but the AI does still tend towards believing that quantity has a quality all its own. Which is probably just as well, given [[ArtificialStupidity their ship design philosophies]].
** This is a viable early-game strategy for an Alkari player. Alkari have excellent propulsion research and an innate bonus to ship defence, meaning their small ships will be very difficult to hit. Thus, a swarm of Alkari fighters can make an absolute mess of an enemy who lacks the proper techs to counter them, especially when paired with a swarm of tiny bombers that can level any planetary defences.
* You are obligated to face these several times in the course of ''VideoGame/MechWarrior 4'' and its spinoffs, especially ''Mercenaries''. At least four times in that game, you are swarmed by over a dozen light units all at once, mostly vehicles or light 'Mechs, and they're dangerous enough to be a valid threat even when you have heavy and assault 'Mechs. Getting close to stomp on a vehicle as a OneHitKill is no easy task either, as Myrmidon, Quad Panzer, and Demolisher tanks have enough range and firepower to deal heavy damage, and missile carriers of all kinds can deal DeathOfAThousandCuts. There's even a late-game mission that pits your lance against a swarm of 32 vehicles, with nary a HerdHittingAttack in sight.
** In the TournamentPlay for ''Mechwarrior Living Legends'', various units employed zerg rushing to varying degrees of success. Clan Smoke Jaguar was fond of taking as many cheap close-range LightningBruiser mechs as possible and jamming them down the throat of the enemy, which worked decently in compact maps but they also had a bizarre tendency to take them on maps with engagement distances measured in kilometers, this [[AttackAttackRetreatRetreat usually worked, uh, well]]. Units as a whole generally employed this as the mission timer began to tick down (which generally forced a draw), leading to players charging into combat in an artillery mechs.
* ''VideoGame/MegaManStarForce 3'' has a multi-part minigame in which you try to fend off hundreds of cheap Omega-Xis clones for a certain amount of time. The mechanic is repeated during the endgame, but that's not a Zerg Rush so much as getting rid of random projectiles.
* In ''VideoGame/MetalSlugDefense'', the descriptions for the basic Soldier and the Rebel Infantry advise this strategy, as they cost only 30 AP and have little delay between uses. They're too fragile to be any good fighting with their knives, but perhaps a shower of their grenades could bring good results?
* Some neutral mobs in ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' do this. Wolves, zombified piglins, dolphins and bees will all swarm the player if you attack ''one'' member of their group.
** Cave spiders, to a lesser extent. Since they only spawn from monster spawner blocks, there will be a new one every few seconds, and they won't stop spawning until you destroy the spawner.
* A favored tactic of the Mogeko in ''VideoGame/MogekoCastle''. Most aren't very strong by themselves; however, they prefer chasing Yonaka in massive swarms, forcing her to flee through sheer force of numbers.
* In ''VideoGame/MuramasaTheDemonBlade'', there's a late game mission that's basically a massive army of enemies charging after you endlessly with constantly replacing numbers, with the occasional massive enemy. You need to beat it with both characters to get the final endings.
* Zerg Rushing is fairly common in ''VideoGame/NintendoWars'', including the classic "Mech Rush" tactic and its infantry-and-artillery variant in the [=AW2=] and AW:DS era. Even in situations where foot soldiers are ineffective, it is usually wise to deploy multiple cheap units rather than fewer, stronger ones (copters instead of bombers is a prime example).
** Some [=COs=] have specializations that seem to have been designed with this trope in mind. Colin of the original Advance Wars series is the epitome of it, since his troops are weaker but cheaper. Hachi, Sasha, and Sensei are also particularly capable of using sheer numbers to overwhelm. Andy's supports this indirectly, as his repairs ability help all units a set amount, being more effective when you go for numbers over strength, while Sami actively encourages this tactic as her foot soldiers are stronger, at the expense of most of her other units.
* ''Franchise/MuvLuv'''s BETA use that as their main tactics against the humans, and it usually proves to be very effective, since they outnumber the human forces on Earth at least 20 to 1, the average human pilot does not survive longer than 8 minutes into their first battle, and the BETA have control of the Moon and Mars. Plus it helps that there are [[spoiler: 10^37 to 10^37+10^37x9^10 (It depends on how you interpret what The Superior says)]] BETA in the universe. As one player wrote in a stream of consciousness journal while they played the game for the first time, "[[http://pastebin.com/18gQ2Ruk BETA are zerg. Discuss.]]" And then if that wasn't enough, the BETA are doing rushes with Ultralisk equivalents.
* In ''VideoGame/{{Overlord}}'', your "Minions" are extremely expendable, and quite often, the easiest way to handle any given encounter, is to just keep throwing minions at it 'till it breaks. The sequel ramps it up further, as [[TheEmpire your primary antagonists]] will sometimes deploy their troops in [[CallThatAFormation shield-wall formations]] which are supposed to be unbreakable; you need to either kill the nearby commander or respawning spot, use mount-charges or ''siege weapons''; otherwise, the formation WILL crush your forces. Unless you have a lot of patience, aren't afraid to personally wade hip-deep into a battle you are not likely to survive, and have [[WeHaveReserves a whole lot of extra minion Life Force to spend]].
* ''VideoGame/{{Overwatch}}'' had a special Halloween mode called Junkenstein's Revenge, where four players try to defend a castle door from a swarm of Zomnics (basically, [[EverythingsDeaderWithZombies zombie]] [[NinjaPirateZombieRobot robots]]). One Zomnic by itself is basically just a moving training dummy, moving slowly and ignoring other players in order to reach the door to blow up, slowly enough that the team can deplete its health well before it reaches its target. The danger lies in that the Zomnics attack ''en masse'', requiring all four players to work together to destroy them in time, ''while'' occasionally being pelted by the player-targeting Zombardiers and the four bosses.
* A bug (or so we hope) in ''VideoGame/PanzerGeneral 2'' allowed the Red Army to buy the T-34 tank for free, thereby allowing you to fill the map with them and Zerg Rushing the vile Nazi.
* Basically the entire premise of ''VideoGame/{{Pikmin}}''. The C-stick in the game is used to direct the mass of pikmin following you in a more precise direction, and when facing an enemy, is circled around to rush the entire pack in even faster. There's nothing more satisfying than swarming a tiny little Bulborb with all 100 of your minions from all sides.
* In the FPSMMO ''VideoGame/PlanetSide'' a Zerg rush was usually necessary to effectively wedge the enemy out of a tower. Taking a base was no real pain, requiring a multi angled approach until the enemy could be booted out. Attacking one of the outlying towers however... wave after wave after wave of soldiers holding doors open, having rockets spammed inside before a sizeable group of power-armored infantry could rush the basement where the spawn room was...
** Still popular in the sequel ''VideoGame/PlanetSide 2'', where sheer numbers can often carry a faction to victory in several bases in a row before their opponents can secure a base and hold them off with a really solid defense.
* In the Wild West world of ''VideoGame/PlantsVsZombies2'', there's a type of Zombie called the Chicken Wrangler. Damage him enough and the barbed wire around his body breaks, sending a horde of Zombie Chickens rushing forwards. They might not take much damage (one hit from ''anything'' kills them, so bring that [[ChainLightning Lightning Reed]]), but they're really fast at both moving and eating. Frostbite Caves takes things up a notch with the Weasel Hoarder, which releases a swarm of weasels that are marginally slower than the chickens but don't drop dead if you so much as stare at them too hard.
* ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'' series has Monster Houses, which randomly spawn in later dungeons and will summon a bunch of random enemies from the dungeon once you enter the room.
* ''VideoGame/PokemonRumble Blast'', in one of the types of battle, has you send all your Toy Pokémon (including the one you sent out) to take out a army of Toy Pokémon. Another one has you fight a bunch of Toy Pokémon trying to defeat your 3 Toy Pokémon and defeat the boss.
* You can pull off a Zerg Rush in ''VideoGame/{{Prismata}}'' if the set happens to contain a lot of cheap attacking units.
* The ''VideoGame/QuestForGlory'' series has a few examples, starting with the goblins in the first game. Though you only fight one goblin at a time normally, at the goblin training grounds they attack the hero in greater and greater numbers. [[MookChivalry Though they still line up and wait for the last goblin to be killed before they get their turn,]] with enough goblins they can prolong the fight enough to wear down your stamina, which can still kill you if it runs out in battle. Jackalman do the same thing in the second game, though in the AGD FanRemake they actually avert MookChivalry and gang up on the Hero, having to be kicked away to avoid taking cheap shots from the side and behind.
* ''VideoGame/TheRiftbreaker'' is a real time strategy / tower defense hybrid game that takes a lot of inspiration from ''VideoGame/TheyAreBillions'' and will gladly throw multiple waves of thousands of insectoid enemies at your base at once.
* ''Videogame/RiseOfNations'':
** Terra Cotta Army wonder, a Zerg Rush ''kit,'' basically. Every thirty seconds (initially; it goes up by half a second for every infantry you control), you get a free basic infantry unit. ''Read that again.'' And, once you get the research (wonder?) that makes all timers complete instantly, you can basically send a never ending line of basic infantry trudging across the map towards your enemy. More like a Zerg Irresistible Force.
** Also present in the game are the Chinese race, whose main bonus is instant villagers. Depending on Age, villagers can be upgraded to simple military units. This makes for a semi-effective ''anti'' Zerg Rush tactic, as a Chinese player with adequate resources can spam their city with villagers up to their population cap. Which can mean several ''hundred'' instant soldiers.
** There is also the upgrade "Artificial Intelligence": All units are created instantaneously, regardless of power or cost in resources. (Assuming you can pay, otherwise it doesn't work at all)
* In ''VideoGame/RWBYAmityArena'', there are a number of Normal-ranked units who will act like this, mostly Grimm units like the Baby Death Stalker Swarm. The Epic-ranked Emerald has a special power that creates OneHitPointWonder duplicates that can make this even worse.
* Some of the animals of ''VideoGame/{{Ryzom}}'' are programmed with a "Pack Herd" AI mindset that makes it so that they will rush you if they happen to spot you attacking one of their own kind. The trope also occurs if you happen to wander too close to a pack of aggressive creatures, Goo-infected creatures, aggressive Kitin, or [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs aggressive Goo-infected Kitin]].
* Ex-human mutants from ''VideoGame/SARSearchAndRescue'' appears in increasingly larger numbers late into the game, and will pour in as swarms trying to overwhelm you with numbers.
* ''VideoGame/Section8: Prejudice's'' AI is somewhat prone to doing this at times, especially in Assault games when the defenders go into Sudden Death. Subverted by the fact that they have the exact same stats as the player, although anyone with experience will have far better accuracy than they do. A fun game is to intentionally allow your team to go into Sudden Death and then stand outside your remaining Control Point shouting "THEY SHALL NOT PASS!!!!". The effectiveness of this strategy is debatable, [[RuleOfCool but the awesomeness is undeniable]].
* ''VideoGame/SeriousSam'':
** The game often has [[TheWarSequence moments]] where rather weak Kleer skeletons or Marsh Hoppers can overwhelm the player just by having so many of them at the same time.
** The headless suicide bomber, too. Seeing one appearing over the horizon is amusing. Seeing '''50''' of them [[NightmareFuel coming at once is terrifying]].
* Reason why Egyptians are [[GameBreaker broken]] in ''VideoGame/SevenKingdoms II''. Tactic? Build seat of power that not only increases Egyptian cities' reproduction rate but also allows you to conjure Isis, which give you instant boost to population, then build a few forts around cities and mass-conscript. The fact that Egyptian military units can use ranged attacks at literally level one doesn't help.
* One of the selling point of ''VideoGame/ShiningForce Neo'' is that the game enables over 100 monsters on the screen at the same time. When that actually happens to you, you're doomed.
* In ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'':
** This is the main tactic of the Free Drones, a faction of socialist proletariat who have a distrust for the well-educated upper echelons of society that once oppressed them (and so have a certain DumbIsGood ethos). They feature an industry bonus (the citizenry being made up almost entirely of blue-collar workers) and a research penalty ([[DepartmentOfRedundancyDepartment ...the citizenry being made up almost entirely of blue-collar workers]]), resulting in being able to deploy vast quantities of units but having subpar equipment. The Hive, the only other faction with an innate industry bonus, usually works similarly but to a lesser extent, mainly because they don't have a research penalty. They do have an economy penalty, though, which negatively effects their ability to research.
** Another faction that likes to Zerg Rush is [[ChurchMilitant the Believers]]. They have a bonus to Support under their preferred political system which allows them to field larger armies, combined with a bonus to attack and [[BeliefMakesYouStupid lack of research]] that causes them to have lower-tech units then normal (albeit not exactly weaker so long as they strike first). They can't build as quickly as the Hive or the Drones, but they can maintain a larger army and their bonus to attack is incentive to strike first.
** Another example closer to the TropeNamer is the planet's mind worms, who can and will come rushing out in ridiculous numbers if you're harming the planet in any way, with more joining the fray for every one that dies until you get your stuff together and up your planet rating, go and clean the fungus they come from completely, or simply get your entire land eaten by them. It helps that their MindRape attacks bypass armor.
* In ''VideoGame/TheSimpsonsGame'', this is a tactic used by both the Rigellians and the Krustybots, both of which are much more numerous and much weaker than other enemies. The aliens simply beam in a couple dozen {{Mook}}s at once one or two times per stage, while the bots in the Shadow of the Colossal Donut level spawn continuously in groups of three that are easily dealt with by themselves but can become a threat if their numbers are allowed to build up.
* ''VideoGame/SinsOfTheProphets'', a ''Franchise/{{Halo}}''-based mod for ''VideoGame/SinsOfASolarEmpire'', follows its roots by having the UNSC need to outnumber the Covenant to win, further reinforced by the research topics available allowing it to outproduce the other. The Covenant in contrast follow the classical definition - they need to crush the UNSC fast lest the foe bury them in numbers due to superior industrial-logistical capacity.
* ''{{VideoGame/Sipho}}'': Two of the bosses, Breeding Grounds and Cra'Thanos Clench, rely on a large amount of small enemies to overwhelm the player.
* ''VideoGame/TheSkeleton'': Spooky Scary Skeletons Mode pits you against an army of sword-wielding skeletons.
* In ''VideoGame/SkyShark'', the 99th and final area of the game loop is just after a massive aerial bomber boss and features a surge of enemy fighters and tanks in a final bid to kill the player.
* ''VideoGame/SongsOfConquest'': Loth has access to Rats, which have the lowest recruitment cost, highest maximum stack size, and fastest recruitment rate of all units. Due to these advantages, it's actually considered totally viable to have an entire army of nothing but rats - they'll drop like flies, but you can easily replenish them faster than the enemy can kill them.
* ''VideoGame/Splatoon2'' has the ''Salmon Run'' game mode where four brave inklings have to harvest power and golden eggs and face off against wave after wave of Salmonids with the weak "Chum" being the main backbone of the army. During a Rush, black Chum will charge in huge numbers while being stronger and faster than regular Chum.
* ''VideoGame/{{Spore}}'':
** In pretty much any stage will the AI creatures, tribes, civilizations, and empires launch massive waves of enemies at you. This can be really irritating especially in creature stage, in which at most your pack can contain four other species while a single nest can contain 8-12 creatures (and there's a mod that adds even more).
** Naturally, the best strategy in the tribal and civilization stages is to have sheer numbers over the enemies. This is especially easy to employ during the Civilization stage because land vehicles are rather cheap and sea vehicles only cost some 500 sporebucks more, making building an entire army very easy. Just hope that your that your machines are actually powerful enough to wage a war against a city.
** Enemy empires (including the Grox) have no trouble being able to launch their massive space navies at your colonies.
* The tactic used by the Ur-Quan Dreadnought in ''VideoGame/StarControl'' is to launch a large group of fighters against the enemy ship and if somehow survives finish it off with the Dreadnought's fusion blast. However those fighters have just [[OneHitPointWonder one hit point]], certain ships -such as the Cruiser with its [[PointDefenseless point-defense laser]]- destroy them with more or less ease and/or even outrun them, and since they [[CastFromHitPoints are manned by the Dreadnought's crew]] launching them may suppose to leave a dreadnought dangerously low on crew waiting to be even [[CherryTapping Cherry-tapped]], especially since they've limited fuel and when they spent it before arriving to the [[TheMothership mothership]] they die.
* ''VideoGame/StardewValley'' is a rare non-combat example, with Wheat. The seeds are the cheapest in the game, can be grown for two seasons[[note]]Most crops only survive for one season[[/note]], and only take 4 days to fully mature. They can make for some great quick money when you need to stock up before a season change.
* In ''VideoGame/StarTrekOnline'', Captain Kagran suggests this plan in the mission "Broken Circle" in an attempt to overpower the Iconians in the Herald Dyson Sphere. By the time the mission's over, over 2/3rds of the Fleet is destroyed by this and barely a dent on the Iconians. Save for a dead Iconian.
* ''VideoGame/StarWarsGalacticBattlegrounds'':
** Since most of the differences between forces are in unique units and cosmetic changes, ''anyone'' can do this. It's comparatively easy to sledgehammer a nearby opponent into the ground simply by hurling a swarm of basic troopers and mounted troopers at it. Of course, this can come back to bite you when everyone else upgrades tech levels first and [[CurbstompBattle curbstomps]] you with pummel siege engines and assault mechs.
** The republic however get the ultimate Zerg Rush ability: they can put out troop units a lot faster then everyone else and their Tech tree is meant to send clone troopers to the field (their tech gives you more food and better med droids to keep your men alive). The Rebels only get slightly sturdier troops with decent anti armor to compensate for their lack of Zerg Rushing production, and the Trade Feds have no housing required, but lack the resources to produce soldiers.
* Some players of ''VideoGame/SteelPanthers'' are prone to do this: buying hordes of infantry (as opposed to a good infantry/armor mix), mortars (as opposed to howitzers) and cheap recoilless rifle jeeps (instead of tanks), even in open maps! The newest versions of this game have made spotting harder, which can make this trope more effective.
* ''VideoGame/{{Stellaris}}'':
** The dreaded Corvette Spam -- in general, Corvettes used to be better than everything. Later (around patch 1.5), this developed into ''Naked'' Corvette spam with basic, unupgraded weapons as players realized how technology upgrade costs didn't outweigh sheer numbers. The technology price inefficiency was finally addressed in patch 1.8, making it worthwhile to spam upgraded Corvettes at minimum.
** Zerg Rushes in the original sense of the term - a quick attack before the enemy has had time to build up a navy - are prevented by Spaceports, defensive platforms that all empires start with over their home worlds and which can be built fairly cheaply on other worlds. They're stronger than any navy buildable within the first 20 or so years of the game.
** Empires allowing Slavery can build [[BattleThralls Slave Armies]]. They're about as strong as the basic Assault Army, but at a mere 30 Minerals each, they're the cheapest to build. Yeah, those [[SuperSoldier Gene Warrior Armies]] are certainly worth the 500 minerals it takes to get them... but how will they fare against an enemy that outnumbers them 17 to one?
** Most empires that dip their toes into genetics research will get Clone Armies. Twice the price of Slave Armies (for the still low, low cost of 60 Minerals) but with better combat performance, and most importantly, half the build time, you can pump a ''lot'' of these guys in short time.
** Paradox addressed zerging of both fleets and armies with the Cherryh update. Fleets now have a cap on how many ships they can contain, but since corvettes still cost just a single point and the cap can easily exceed 200, corvette spam is viable as long as the opponent doesn't have weapons with good tracking, and corvette casualties count toward war exhaustion just as much as any other ship type, meaning their losses add up quickly. Army spam became more difficult due to what's called "combat width" -- only a relatively small number of armies can fight simultaneously at any given time; how many exactly depends on planet size. While there's still nothing stopping you from rolling into a star system with hundreds of armies, you won't be able to land them all at once, and defense armies have become one hell of an obstacle thanks to the reworked planetary siege mechanics.
* The Pig AI in ''VideoGame/StrongholdCrusader'' employs this tactic straight off the bat, using all of his starting gold to buy maces, crossbows and leather armor to send a force of Macemen and Crossbowmen to your castle before you have time to set up proper defense.
** A common tactic, that works on every map with small number of AI opponents, is to spend all of your starting gold on assassins and rush the enemy before he has a chance to fortify himself.
* ''VideoGame/StrongholdKingdoms'':
** The go-to tactic for low-level combat is to throw hundreds of Armed Villagers at the weakest castle wall and hope at least one makes it through the end. They're dirt cheap, cost no equipment, and you can have an entire army of them up in just 12 hours. It only loses effectiveness when the enemy has better melee units than you.
** The tactic can be strengthened further by researching "Conscription", which can double the Armed Villager's health. It effectively increases a 400-villager rush into an 800 villager rush based on health alone, with the same short setup time as before.
* Zerg Rushes are a key gameplay element of ''VideoGame/{{Sundered}}''. Regular enemies will never attack the player alone, instead attacking in groups of half a dozen or more. If a siren or a gong suddenly starts ringing, it means that the player is about to encounter a horde of several dozen enemies at once, who may be accompanied by a [[BossInMookClothing Lith’ enemy]]. This trope reaches its zenith in Endless Hordes zones, where new enemies will continuously spawn until you leave the area.
* ''VideoGame/SturmFronTheMutantWar'' have their lowest-level mutant monsters, which are smaller than you, attacking you by the dozens trying to swarm you with numbers throughout the game.
* In ''[[VisualNovel/{{Sunrider}} Sunrider Liberation Day]]'', PACT kicks off the Battle of Cera by throwing ''hundreds of thousands'' of [[AMechByAnyOtherName Ryders]] at the Alliance fleet in order to take out the [[DeflectorShields shield cruisers]] protecting said fleet from PACT’s long-range laser weapons.
* ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosMelee'':
** One of the Event Matches in is called "Super Mario 128", where 128 smaller, weaker Marios swarm the field and you have to defeat every one of them. And just so you get the point of how weak Zerg Rush soldiers can be, these soldiers can be defeated with any attack in one hit. Even Luigi's taunt.
** Anytime in Smash Bros's Classic Mode where you have to fight a team is this. On most difficulties, the opposing clones go down in one hit. Multi-Man modes are this too, as long as you don't play on the dreaded Cruel Melee/Brawl/Smash.
* ''VideoGame/SupremeCommander''
** While there's no particular faction that utilizes this tactic, the scope and scale of the game allows the best fulfillment of this, since the ArbitraryHeadcountLimit is much higher than the usual RTS. One interesting (although ultimately doomed even against poorly placed defenses) strategy is to build 10+ factories with assisting engineers and pointing the freshly made robots and tanks towards the enemy base, sending a constant, never ending stream of units. This tactic can even work if you take the chance to send some siege-breaking units to destroy the front rows of enemy defenses, or use this stream as the distraction for a better localized attack.
** Possible the best thing ever about Sup Com? Artillery rush! That is, building a continuing stream of artillery up to the enemy base and laugh with glee as his outer defenses are shredded to pieces by 50+ small artillery placements. Or better yet, if you can muster the resources, building 5 HEAVY artillery placements 10 Kms away from the enemy base and watch as the base simply vanishes by the 3rd or 4th salvo. Considering you manage to keep such a grand project hidden from your foe.
** And even more impressive one: nuclear missiles rush. It is used by computer players at single-player maps if the difficulty is set to the highest. If you won't take them down early enough, nuclear missile silos are built in tenths resulting in endless caravans of nuclear missiles leading to your base, eventually exhausting your anti-missile defences.
* ''VideoGame/SurvivalCrisisZ'', oh man. Go to act 3 and find a neutral safehouse of level 11. You will never see the end of the mob.
* The coliseum in ''VideoGame/TalesOfVesperia'' uses this trope. You're forced to fight wave after wave of monsters, and it isn't too bad until you start fighting stronger {{Mooks}} that have the ability to stagger you. From there, you'll probably get staggered [[GoddamnBats over and over and over again until you die]]. If this wasn't bad enough, bosses join the rush at set intervals.
* Scout rushes are a frequently-suggested (if rarely-executed with more than 3 Scouts) strategy in ''VideoGame/TeamFortress2''--Scouts can reach the objective before any other class and have twice the capturing power at the cost of lower firepower and health.
** The addition of the Pain Train for the Soldier and Demoman that gives them additional capturing power in exchange for increased vulnerability to bullets may start shifting the {{Metagame}}.
** You can conceivably rush with any class, or any combination of classes, but some are only for comedy.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7wuyJQSM5Q This video]] is a good example of how unsuccessful, yet humorous, a Scout rush would be.
** Conversely, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cvY4ofqkw4 this video]] is an example of how successful, yet still humorous, a Scout rush can be.
** An entire team "One classing" can effectively Zerg rush with almost any class and the right mix of load outs, particularly if they all stick together. Take for example the sniper, you wouldn't think it it would be able to effectively penetrate a teams defenses but most players forget the snipers secondary weapons are some of the best the game. With one out of every four snipers wielding the huntsman and jarate and the rest with [=SMGs=] and their choice of rifle, you pepper the enemy with an ungodly amount of fire that's backed by minicrits. If you all stick together you can even clear a hallway by having everybody pop out from around a corner and no scope fire at once minuteman style.
*** Another effective assault like this is to have a heavy rush. About half should use their mini guns and have sandwiches equipped to heal themselves and their teammates while the other half primarily uses shotguns to spy check and kill anyone who is trying the flank the mini gun wielders.
*** Yet another is take the idea of the double Medic strategy, where one medic Ubers another medic who in turn attacks with the uber saw to gain a quick uber than switch, and apply it to an entire team. Even without the reliance on constant invulnerably, a team of medics can be a deadly force because of their automatic primary weapons and their ability to heal each other, they can effectively form tow to three man fire teams where one medic will shoot while the other (two) heal that one, then trade off when they soak up enough damage.
** Mann vs. Machine mode takes this to its logical conclusion, often sending a dozen or more of the same class at you all at once (and, in true Zerg fashion, it's usually Scouts). On some waves, it even sends ''endless'' hordes of Scout-bots until the main threat is dealt with.
* ''VideoGame/{{Terraria}}'':
** A player can (sort of) create one by using a Battle Potion and Water Candle together during a Blood Moon. All three increase spawn rate and raise the limit of on-screen enemies.
** The Goblin Army event causes more than 100 goblins to spawn on both sides of you and all come after you. They're fairly weak, but there's at least a hundred of them every time they attack and their number goes up with every player that has enough maximum health, up to 12000+ goblins in the PC version with the maximum of 255 players on a single server. Have fun killing warriors from right and left while pelted with arrows and magic from afar. They're quite difficult when they first appear, afterwards they're a joke. The [[ChristmasMode Frost Legion]] works similarly, but they're a LOT tougher. And then you have the Pirate Invasion and the Solar Eclipse monsters in Hardmode... The Pirate Invasion and Martian Madness events are similar, except with gun-toting pirates and ray gun-wielding aliens respectively.
** In the alpha, the slimes had a high spawn rate and would swarm players while they tried to work, making it difficult getting a shelter built. While the slime spawn rate has been toned down, this can still happen on blood moons with the zombies and demon eyes.
** In Hardmode, especially before you get decent equipment, a Blood Moon can become tougher than the normal mode bosses ever were, while the Solar Eclipse can feel like a horde of BossInMookClothing enemies.
** Snowmen too when you use the Snowglobe item.
** At the lower levels of the caves at the current version, it is nearly impossible to get a respite from the hordes of Skeletons, Giant Worms, and Mother Slimes.
** Then in the Underground Jungle you have Hornets which can spawn in swarms of up to 6. At one point the hornets had their health and attack damage balanced out but they remain dangerous en masse.
** Also have fun in the Underworld where Imps never stop spawning, throwing fireballs [[DepthPerplexion through walls]] at you while teleporting all over the place. Then come the [[DemonicSpider bone serpents]]. The spawn rate was mercifully toned down in a patch, but can still be tough at times, although you will no longer regularly have to deal with three simultaneous bone serpents.
** The Underworld includes flaming bats and demons, which will constantly swarm you if you're traveling the "safer" route by grappling along the ceiling.
** Eaters of Souls and their variants in the Corruption spawn in massive numbers, sometimes up to a dozen at once, and charge the player relentlessly. Any low-level player wandering into that area is unlikely to get back out alive.
** The enemies in the dungeon never stop coming. Wizards attack you from random directions, skeleton warriors charge in more than six at a time, and flying skulls can shut off your ability to attack briefly. If that wasn't bad enough, their spawn rate increases as you reach lower and lower depths and if even THAT wasn't enough for you, they all have upgraded versions that appear after defeating Plantera along with OTHER new, unique hardmode dungeon enemies such as the VERY bulky Paladin and the extremely fast Bone Lee. You can tone this down a bit by stealing every water candle in sight, but the spawn rate is still higher than normal.
* ''Videogame/TheyAreBillions'' can, as a whole, be considered as a master class on defending against these. Even the first mission hits you with a couple hundred infected, and one of the game's big selling points is being able to handle many, ''many'' units at once, and they need every last bit of that capacity to throw Infected at your base. Literal thousands of enemies charging at once is basically the platonic ideal of the Zerg Rush, and fending them off is [[NintendoHard as difficult as one can expect]].
* ''VideoGame/TotalAnnihilation'':
** The equivalent tactic is the Flash Rush (or, inevitably, "Flush"): Arm's Flash light tank isn't ''quite'' the fastest or cheapest unit, but for its armor and firepower (dual energy machine guns that provide a slow but steady stream of damage, while also sounding awesomely like the Hyper Blaster from ''VideoGame/QuakeII'': the light laser of Core's equivalent unit, the Instigator, just isn't the same) it is very cost-effective and very brutal en masse. The default AI is vulnerable to rushes of ''any'' Tier 1 offensive unit besides the Commander even at the highest difficulty.
** The Peewee Rush was even more brutally effective, but tended to crash the game due to the sound the Energy Machine Gun (The Peewee's weapon) makes, and the way that MediaNotes/DirectX 5 handles sound.
** In Open Source remake - Spring - most mods still feature flash rush. Peewee rush is usually not as effective though - bigger maps and rebalanced stats mean that it won't reach the target before dying, unless their amount is really big. [=AoE=] units tend to deal with hordes of weak units in seconds, which reduces usefulness of this tactic. Peewees still have a role in the game, but it's not rushing.
* Zerging a strong army with peasants in the ''VideoGame/TotalWar'' series is a viable strategy to wear them down.
** In ''VideoGame/MedievalIITotalWar'', when the Mongols and Timurids arrive, this becomes a ''very'' effective strategy, if only because once they arrive, the invaders have large armies but lack cities or castles to replace their casualties. You, meanwhile, ''can'' replace your losses, so you can just keep hurling armies at them to wear them down.
** This is epitomized in the later ''VideoGame/NapoleonTotalWar'', due to the fact that muskets are deadly whichever way you look at it. Even against cavalry and cannons, a swift advance with full armies of militia will defeat most enemy armies. The only downside is morale, because Militia tend to break easily during combat (this is true for previous games as well), though this can easily be countered by a single expensive (though instantly recruited) general. Also, each militia unit that gains some experience will quickly become as good as inexperienced line infantry - without the exorbitant upkeep cost.
** The Oda clan in the ''VideoGame/ShogunTotalWar'' and ''VideoGame/TotalWarShogun2'' recruit ashigaru (peasant) units cheaper than the other clans, and lend themselves naturally to this kind of playstyle. To add insult to injury, in ''Shogun 2'' their ashigaru also have lower upkeep costs and stronger stats than the other clans' ashigaru. All-ashigaru armies (which you can field a ''lot'' of) is usually a valid tactic for the Oda.
** Hilarious example in ''VideoGame/TotalWarRomeII''. Due to a typo in the game's coding, various sub-saharan African provinces had massive income, which resulted in in non-playable minor sub-saharan African factions being able to recruit and afford massive stacks of cheap levy troops, and then proceeding to steamroll historical powers like Egypt, Carthange, and occasionally even annihilating Rome in campaign mode.
** In ''VideoGame/TotalWarWarhammer'' is this naturally the forte of the Greenskins. Their frontline infantry have little in the way of armour but they have a fairly high attack rating in melee, and they have large unit sizes and are mercifully cheap; not only that but their special "WAAAGH!" mechanic allow computer-controlled Greenskin allied armies to spawn on the map and tear things up if the Warboss' Fightiness meter is high enough. The Vampire Counts also rely a lot on this, as they no ranged units to speak of, not even artillery, so the go-to strategy is to rush up the map and smother the enemy so they're up to their eyeballs in undead (it also helps that their units are also really scary so you can cause a rout pretty quickly if you can envelop an enemy army, and the units they do have - infantry, cavalry, monsters and flying units, tend to be quite strong).
* ''VideoGame/TreasurePlanetBattleAtProcyon'': Purchasing a large number of small, cheap ships (preferably ones with powerful weapons, such as Torpedo Boats and Gunboats) and using them to overwhelm a smaller number of more powerful ships can be a viable strategy in the skirmish mode. The is often done by the AI on open skirmish maps if the Victory Point limit is set to a low amount and the maximum fleet size is set high.
* ''VideoGame/UltimateEpicBattleSimulator'' is practically made for this. Literally millions of attackers with little or no regard for their own lives make possible a strategy that never occurs in RealLife: advancing the width of one body at a time behind a berm or rampart ''of their own dead'', until the defenders are simply drowned in a tsunami of flesh. Endgame for these attacks usually depicts the last defenders at the bottom of a crater of dead as the attackers are tumbling downhill to end up at their feet.
* This "strategy" is why beating early game China in a prolonged war in ''[[VideoGame/VictoriaAnEmpireUnderTheSun Victoria 2]]'' can actually be quite challenging, even for a great power. China starts as a primitive nation, which means their armies consist almost exclusively of pathetically weak irregulars that will be dying in droves vs the proper infantry and artillery of a civilized nation. However, China has ''a lot'' of pathetically weak irregulars at their disposal while most civilized nations are somewhat limited in the number of soldiers they can field prior to properly industrializing, turning any invasion of mainland China into a bloody grind against seemingly endless hordes of Chinese soldiers that slowly whittle away your armies. The fact that warscore gained from battles is capped at 50 and that holding down more than a few occupied provinces for an extended period of time is next to impossible when China has at least ten armies available to retake them for every one you engage in battle, actually enforcing war goals worth much more than 50 warscore is significantly harder than one might expect.
* ''VideoGame/{{Warcraft}}'':
** ''VideoGame/WarcraftIITidesOfDarkness'': It's a common strategy of the Orcs to use a "Grunt Rush" to win battles -- the father of the Zerg Rush. (Unlike ''Starcraft'', you start with only one worker and no buildings. The thought is to build a Town Hall with the gold the game starts you with to get an economy going. Some players, however, build a barracks instead and used whatever gold is left to make basic fighting units and go attack the enemy, who would be lucky to even have a barracks started, much less have any units to defend with.)\\\
Of course, this could only work on High or Medium resources. Those that prefer Low (where you only had enough for the town hall and first farm) had little worries of this sort of all-in. Though, more befitting the trope was producing footmen/grunts heavily out of three barracks and hitting your opponent when they were just starting to get knights/ogres, overwhelming them with the weaker infantry.
** ''VideoGame/WarcraftIIIReignOfChaos'': Undead have an '''exploding''' ZergRush. This is because Necromancers casting "Raise Dead" raise two skeletons from every corpse -- so if you send in a rush of ghouls backed up by a couple of Necromancers set to auto-cast "Raise Dead" the resultant explosion of skeletons from friendly and enemy corpses alike can be very destructive. Before the patch, some Alliance players built a town hall in front of the enemy town, and then swarm the enemy with an endless stream of militia.
** ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'':
*** There is a zerg rush as an encounter in the Zul'Farrak instance.
*** Many instances feature large packs of weak enemies that have to be killed by area of effect-attacks or they simply overwhelm the players. Particularly notable are the ones like the boss encounter in Zul'Farrak where the enemies just spawn when an event is triggered and immediately attack the players.
*** The infamous LeeroyJenkins incident. The dragon eggs in the particular room must be touched to hatch initially, but once they start hatching it usually results in a chain reaction which leads to entirely too many dragon hatchlings all heading towards the party at once....
*** On the Alliance there's the (in)famous Hogger raids. Forty level ones constantly rushing towards perhaps the lowest level elite in the game (level 11) results in some hilarious moments. The Horde does the same with Gamon, though he's not elite.
* ''VideoGame/WarhammerOnline'': Whichever of the two opposing realms (Destruction or Order) outnumbers the other is often accused of using this tactic to win in [=RvR=], using their increased numbers and over abundance of tanks to steamroller the opposition. Trouble is, the tactic often does work if the underpopulated side can't put up a decent melee line to slow them down whilst their ranged take them apart.
* ''VideoGame/WerewolfTheApocalypseEarthblood'': While Endron is experimenting with various approaches of making its goons capable of standing up to a Garou, their go-to approach remains sending in wave after wave of {{Mooks}} in order to use sheer numbers and attrition to wear down the LightningBruiser wolf-man rampaging through their bases.
* ''VideoGame/WorldInConflict'' The first half of the campaign pits you against a Russian force generally 2 to 3 times your size; the first few missions pretty much end up with your forces just buying time for civilians/other troops time to get away and then escape themselves before the Soviets' main force arrives.
* ''VideoGame/WorldOfTanks'': A Zerg Rush is both a viable strategy and a spirited suicide attempt, effectively being a DeathOrGloryAttack for anyone trying it. Either the enemy will be overwhelmed or your team will be shredded as the entrenched tanks fire, sometimes blowing off a track, usually an instant death for the immobilized tank now stuck before the enemy team. A notable example are BT-5 rushes, often in lower level maps where you will always at least see five of these tanks in a crowd speeding their way to enemy lines.
* ''VideoGame/XCOMApocalypse'' has what's called the Hoverbike swarm, where you buy lots of cheap, weak, but highly evasive hoverbikes which you use to absolutely overwhelm attacking {{Flying Saucer}}s. It works very efficiently for most of the game until the aliens start using Dimensional Multi-Bomb Launchers to take out many bikes in one shot.
* ''VideoGame/XCOMEnemyUnknown'': Employed often by EXALT. Unless you have ''seriously'' been neglecting your research, your XCOM troops will possess far superior armour and weapons to any of their operatives. However, between their fanaticism and willingness to sacrifice themselves, they will rush your position all in one go. If you use the right strategy, this most often results in the traitors on the receiving end of a CurbStompBattle, but sometimes this actually works; after all, your squad can only kill so many EXALT CannonFodder per turn before the survivors rush around and flank them.
* ''VideoGame/{{X}}'': The [[AIIsACrapshoot Xenon]] and [[HordeOfAlienLocusts Kha'ak]] tend to use this, swarming their enemies with individually weak fighters. The Kha'ak in particular like to deploy Clusters, a traveling mode Zerg Rush comprised of an M3 fighter and anywhere from five to nearly two dozen M5 scoutships.
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-->''[[VideoGame/LeagueOfLegends Minions have spawned!]]''