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"Nothing makes me believe in the genius that went into this title like seeing the square representing a sweaty mass of spearmen tearing apart a pile of attack helicopters. What did they fucking do, jam their rotors with their corpses? Did they form together like Voltron and turn into a thousand foot tall spear and a huge robotic arm? Answer me Meier, you worthless sow!"
In many videogames, especially Turn Based and Real Time Strategy games, if you can hit something with your weapon, you can damage it, however slightly. And if you can damage it, you can defeat it just by hitting it enough times. While most games do try to balance this out by matching up varying armor or attack types, the fact remains that in many games, a few squads worth of infantry can usually kill a main battle tank or destroy an armored bunker using only their rifles. Crippling Overspecialization can make this even worse, if it isn't properly balanced.
Though granted, as the riddle of The Hobbit said of Time: " This thing all things devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel, Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down." So, technically, if you hit anything enough times with anything, the first anything will go apart.
Note that there is some Truth In Television here: by the final years of World War II, infantry units had worked out how to take on tanks even without armor support. Presumably the spearmen attacking helicopters have picked up some black-market rocket-propelled grenades along the way.
Compare Wafer Thin Mint. See also Zerg Rush and Cherry Tapping.
Particularly glaring examples include:
- The Final Fantasy games feature a monster called the Cactuar, which uses an attack called "One Thousand Needles" that deals exactly 1,000 HP damage to your character in really fast 1 HP increments. In some games, there also exists a Jumbo Cactuar, which uses a "Ten Thousand Needles" attack that kills a character outright (since the HP cap in most FF games usually tops out at 9,999).
- Command And Conquer is the classic "Riflemen killing a tank" example, offset by the fact that a tank can usually save itself by running the infantry over. A particularly bad example is found in Yuri's Revenge, where the Hero Unit Boris is capable, when powered up, of killing heavy tanks in two or three bursts of his AK-47.
- One of the add-on packs for Red Alert featured a mission with a Soviet Super Soldier who was ridiculously tough and did twice as much damage to anything he fought as they did to him. This reached an absurd height when you have him take on a battleship and win easily.
- Starcraft is also particularly replete with this, where a few massed infantry are capable of taking down starships.
- At least this isn't possible with Zerglings, if only because they can't attack air units...
- Of course, the purpose of it in Starcraft is to make sure that all units have a purpose throughout the game.
- The Civilization series. In the original game, one lucky roll could allow a warrior with a spear to beat an armored vehicle. Later games in the series expand the rules to make this far more unlikely, but it's still possible.
- In Total Annihilation, a fun but useless attack is to build hundreds of "Fleas" and sic them on the enemy. A more useful attack is the "Peewee rush" in which dozens of Peewees can obliterate a base in mere moments.
- Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door averts this, as damage is small enough that the calculation by subtracting defense from attack (used in some other RP Gs such as Dragon Warrior) is a big deal, and thus attacks that do many weak hits (like Yoshi's stampede) do no damage to enemies with any defense unless their base attack value is boosted.
- Still, each multi-hit does less damage than the previous, but as long as the first one does damage, the rest will also do at least 1 HP worth of damage.
- In Disgaea, certain characters (the Prinnies come to mind) perform multiple weak attacks instead of one regular-powered attack. But when linked into a combo, the attack value of each hit goes up. Put a Prinny at the end of a multi-character combo and watch every hit (and they land about ten) deal a squidload of damage...
- Barring combos, however, the trope is averted; reach a high enough level difference and opponents can no longer harm you — if they even hit you at all.
- An odd version was present in the first War Craft game, where gold mines could be destroyed, though their hp was as high as the game's engine would allow for a unit or structure. This led to interesting sights, such as a group of footmen...hacking...a mine...until it collapsed.
- Not to mention archers attacking mines, or other brick structures.
- Advance Wars has this. In fact, "infantry spam" is a slow-but-effective strategy for succeeding in any ground war.
- To be fair, its more spamming expendable infantry spam to meat-shield artillery. But it's definitely possible to bring down even the heaviest tanks with infantry.
- The word eventually should be in here. It will take a huge amount of infantry to manage it with any tank larger then the base. One can assume that they swarm they tank and shoot the folk inside.
- There's the luck factor, though: In all games, there's Nell the Born Lucky CO, while Black Hole Rising adds Flak, who sometimes does some extra damage (and sometimes less). Dual Strike spices it up even further with Nell's little sister Rachel who's almost as lucky, a Flak clone Jugger, a special ability involving luck, and a general luck factor that gives all units a small chance of dealing extra damage, regardless of CO. These facts considering, a bunch of infantry can actually be quite an effective force.
- The other advantage of an infantry swarm is that, at most, a unit can destroy one other unit per turn (There are ways to attack multiple units, but none of these in any game can actually destroy that unit). Only the most powerful units can one-hit an infantry unit from full health, so it can be quite tricky to fight back the wall, the only problem to using only infantry, as opposed to infantry meat shielding artillery and rockets, is that it takes just as much time and structures to build an infantry as a Mega Tank (Just much more cash). A Mechanized Infantry rush (Mechs can do considerable damage to any land unit if they strike first) is generally more effective (Especially against very large units, where the mech can move up, do a small but notable amount of damage, and get gunned down to make way for more mechs)
- Fire Emblem: Fighting a dragon by slashing it over and over for 1 damage each.
- Fire Emblem is actually a rather good aversion of this, as if you are too weak, you will deal "No Damage." Thus even if you can only deal one hit point, the concept is that you are strong enough to damage whatever you are fighting, if only barely.
- You could play this trope straight in the fourth game. If a unit's attack is lower than than the opponents defense, they'll still do 1 point of damage. Many times has this troper had a Fragile Speedster defeat a Mighty Glacier in the arena this way, with their sword almost always breaking in the process.
- Druids in Dungeons And Dragons have a high level spell called Creeping Doom, which allows the caster to summon one thousand tiny insects that each deal a single point of damage before dying. Unfortunately, by the time you are able to cast it, most monsters you'd want to actually use it on have damage reduction, rendering it a Useless Useful Spell.
- The spell was reworked in the 3.5 edition to simply summon a large amounts of insect swarms (which, due to their pathetic damage, didn't improve matters).
- However it is helpful that swarms are totally immune to most conventional attacks, and are extremely distracting to anyone inside them.
- The effect of creeping doom was a plot point in ''The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters'': it's used to take down the villain Peter Perfect, but when Dirk the Destructive tells Peter's corpse that the spell shouldn't have affected him (He's not "...subject to normal attacks..." which also applies to nearly every character in the story), his skeletal remains jump up and his body reforms, ready to free his comrades and menace the heroes again.
- The original version of the spell lives on as the epic spell Crown of Vermin, which ignores damage reduction.
- Dungeons And Dragons uses this straight as well. When you hit with an attack, you always deal at least one point of damage barring damage reduction, so an epic-level fighter could theoretically be killed by a sufficient amount of pebbles, or even a house cat. Made even worse when you consider that, due to the dexterity bonuses house cats receive, they are an extremely dangerous opponent to Commoners and even first-level characters, killing them at least 50% of the time in a theoretical battle. However, only a very bad (or very humorous) DM wouldn't compensate for this.
- In the original Wing Commander, it was possible for even the weakest fighter to destroy any capital ship if you could shoot it enough times. Later games made large capital ships invulnerable to everything except special "torpedo" missiles.
- Similarly, Descent: Freespace allowed a player's guns to do damage to capital ships — very slowly. Freespace 2 partially averted this trope: Fighter guns could only do a certain amount of damage to capital ships, which had to be killed by either torpedoes or other capital ships.
- The early Playstation game Lone Soldier has the titular beefslab soldier being able to destroy tanks, walls, armoured bunkers and the like with the default infinite ammo-laden Uzi. By spending several minutes firing at anything destructible in the game (and making it flash to make the player aware of it's status of being hurt) a torrent of 9mm bullets could make buildings not only be destroyed but destroyed in a giant plume of flame.
- In the Grand Theft Auto series, punching (with bare hands, no less), kicking and stomping on a car enough times will result in denting, windows breaking, doors and body panels falling off, and eventually, the car exploding. In that order. Never mind that the characters should have bruised, cut and fractured hands doing so - they're perfectly healthy even after punching three trucks to explosion.
- In the Star Wars: X-Wing series, a fighter can kill any capital ship with just its laser blasters, though avoiding the capital ship's own turbolaser turrets is a problem. A fighter's ion guns can disable even a Star Destroyer in a few shots, if the shields are down. Tie Fighter and later installments even allow you to destroy the guns on capital ships. Once you clear away enough guns, you can literally park your fighter beside the ship, put a rubber band around the trigger, and go get coffee while the Star Destroyer or Mon Calamari Cruiser slowly dies.
- In the Star Wars universe, fighters are considered a major threat to capital ships if they use mass-fire tactics with missile weapons. In fairness to the trope, their lasers are usually depicted as too weak to deal any major damage to a capital ship, but the point stands that Rebel fighters were such a threat to Imperial capital ships that a special ship design composed mostly of a hull and a metric buttload of laser cannons, the Lancer-class frigate, was made just to kill fighters.
- In Eve Online, a large enough swarm of completely expendable small ships can destroy a flagship costing the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars.
- Averted in Black & White 2: Unlike other RTS where a single soldier could theoretically tear down a wall by shooting at it with arrows for hours, Black & White 2 makes use of an in-game physics engine to determine if a building crumbles or not.
- In the Pokemon series of games, there is a Game Breaker where a level one Pokemon can easily defeat a level one hundred Pokemon by exploiting some moves and an item. The Focus Sash item allows hits that would normally kill your monster to instead leave it with one hit point remaining if they were at full health. The Endeavor attack when used makes it so that your opponent's hit points go down to the same level that yours are at. The Quick Attack move always strikes first. So, a battle where one player is using this strategy might go: Level one hundred Pokemon uses powerful damaging move, level one Pokemon has one HP left. Level one Pokemon uses Endeavor, level one hundred Pokemon has one HP left. Level one Pokemon uses Quick Attack, level one hundred Pokemon has no HP left. Game, set, match.
- As pictured above, Mahou Sensei Negima references this trope when Negi's inferiority complex causes him to imagine various gaps between himself and, in this case, a small cat. Because a single cat has a mere 0.5 in power to his 500, he reasons that at least 1001 cats working together would easily overpower him.◊
- In Homeworld 2, several ships are built especially to inflict death of a thousand cuts, particularly the bombers and the Vaygr Laser Corvettes. Actually, most small ships can overrun the big guns when given time. Somewhat averted in the sense that some ships do carry enough hull defenses to eventually clear the space of the little ships assailing them.
- In Half Life, you can shoot down helicopters using machine guns. In the Playstation 2-only Expansion Pack Half-Life: Decay, you have to. Half-Life 2 was much more sensible about this.
- You can shoot down a helicopter with a machine gun, but only if you're extremely lucky. Such incidents did happen for example in the Vietnam war.
- Prior to getting the Mega Buster chargeable Arm Cannon, several Mega Man games had a weapon that was no more effective in damage than the normal gun, but had such a fast rate of fire that players would use them exclusively unless they were out of power or not effective against a given enemy. Examples include the Metal Blade (MM2) (aimable) & Needle Cannon (MM3) (full-auto in three round bursts).
- Vulcans in the Battle Network series are probably some form of subversion. They dealt between 10 and 20 damage and hit 3-5 times, which is decent. The trick was that any attack-increasing chip attached to one powers up each bullet. Entire folders were created based on boosting up a Super Vulcan as high as it would go, resulting in a chip with an attack strength of around 150 - times twelve. The same applies to any multiple-hitting chip, actually - Tornado, Twister, and even Bubbleman.
- Model HX in ZX turned out to be a Game Breaker because of this. One of its moves is to create a tornado that sits in once place and attacks 16 times. The final boss was (of course) a One Winged Angel, and its stationary damage point was just asking to be tornado'd to death.
- Real Life example: Metalstorm.
- Averted in Company of Heroes, where no matter how many standard infantry units fire at a tank, the tank will not take any damage. This is highlighted by the fact that ordering a non-antitank equipped infantry unit to attack a tank has them quip a variety of unique phrases. (From the optimistic "We'll distract them at least!" to the pessimistic "Not to disrespect, but are you high?")
- In Joe Abercrombie's Before They Are Hanged, Logen, while explaining what he's done in the past as the feared Bloody-Nine, says he once tried to tear down a wall during a siege with his bare hands. It didn't work, but he didn't stop until one of the defenders dropped a rock on him.
- Averted in Phantasy Star Online. If you have high enough defense, you won't take damage. In such a case, the character uses an animation very similar, though not identical, to the animation for evading a hit.
- In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the Knights of the Round Table charge the French castle with no siege weapons whatsoever. Only Lancelot actually makes it to the wall before the retreat is called. When he does, he slashes at it a few times with his sword, then runs away with everyone else.
- In the Mechwarrior 4 computer game, an effective means of taking down the heaviest mechs is to load another ultra-heavy mech with as many light weapons (AC2s work well due to also having long range, but machine guns will work if range isn't an issue) as you can fit and pouring firepower into the target until it dies. Ironically, the heavy weapons are more effective on light mechs, as the things are often too agile to keep a bead on, but it's usually fairly easy to get them in your sights for the split-second necessary to hit them with a PPC or similar weapon.
- Theoretically averted in Warhammer 40000: Dawn Of War, where the armour types system means that most basic infantry are not supposed to scratch the toughest armour types. In practice, however, Scratch Damage still occurs.
- In the original Halo, it is possible to bring down most Covenant vehicles simply by shooting them enough with small arms and grenades. You can also do this in the later games in the series, though getting enough ammunition to pull this off takes some time, and the enemy vehicles are much better at killing infantrymen.
- In Freelancer, it's not rare to find yourself taking out entire fleets by yourself with just your guns, enough repair supplies, and the will of the Holy Spirit, and this is thanks to each shot dealing at least a little bit of damage. In fact, a popular Self Imposed Challenge in one of the late missions involves destroying 3 battleships, 5 cruisers and 6 gunships.
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