History Main / QuantityVsQuality

->''Quantity has a Quality all its own.''
-->--Attributed to '''UsefulNotes/JosefStalin'''.

* ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire'': The Starks and the Lannisters, respectively. The Starks can only raise small armies, but being from the wild, dangerous Northlands, [[HadToBeSharp they tend to be composed of tough warriors]]. The Lannisters have access to lots of gold mines and this makes the family exceedingly rich and able to support large armies of cheap troops of [[TurnCoat questionable loyalty]]. In the [[Series/GameOfThrones TV series]], the Starks win the majority of their battles except for the first one (which is more of a PyrrhicVictory for the Lannisters; although they defeated the 2000-strong Stark force, they took heavy casualties and it was all a ploy which allowed the Starks to capture one of the family).

* When it comes to the competition between VirtualYoutuber agencies, WebAnimation/{{Nijisanji}} versus WebAnimation/{{Hololive}} is this in spades. Although Nijisanji has the edge in raw numbers of their talents/Livers, them being the biggest Vtuber agency worldwide, Hololive makes up for it with high-quality productions of theirs who constantly racks up hundreds of thousands viewers in their streams and routinely dominates Vtuber charts worldwide. To compare, while Nijisanji only has around 7 Livers (of total 180) with more than 1 million subscribers (Hyakumantenbara Salome being the highest with around 1,700,000 subscribers), Hololive has more than 35 talents (of total 87) who has passed the same milestones, including Gawr Gura who has beaten Kizuna Ai as the most subscribed Vtubers worldwide with whopping 4,400,000 subscribers.

* When it comes to the competition between VirtualYoutuber agencies, WebAnimation/{{Nijisanji}} versus WebAnimation/{{Hololive}} is this in spades. Although Nijisanji has the edge in raw numbers of their talents/Livers, them being the biggest Vtuber agency worldwide, Hololive makes up for it with high-quality productions of their own who constantly dominates Vtuber charts worldwide. To compare, while Nijisanji only has around 7 livers (of total 180 Livers) with more than 1 million subscribers (Hyakumantenbara Salome being the highest with around 1,700,000 subscribers), Hololive has more than 35 talents (of total 87 talents) who has passed the same milestones, including Gawr Gura who has beaten Kizuna Ai as the most subscribed Vtubers worldwide with whopping 4,400,000 subscribers.

* When it comes to the competition between VirtualYoutuber agencies, WebAnimation/{{Nijisanji}} versus WebAnimation/{{Hololive}} is this in spades. Although Nijisanji has the edge in numbers of talents, them being the biggest Vtuber agency worldwide, Hololive makes up for it with high-quality productions of their talents who constantly dominates Vtuber charts worldwide. To compare, while Nijisanji only has around 7 livers (of total 180 Livers) with more than 1 million subscribers (Hyakumantenbara Salome being the highest with around 1,700,000 subscribers), Hololive has more than 35 talents (of total 87 talents) who has passed the same milestones, including Gawr Gura who has beaten Kizuna Ai as the most subscribed Vtubers worldwide with whopping 4,400,000 subscribers.

This has roots in basic resource management and production. Assuming you have a constant supply of resources, the more resources you put into producing a product, the higher quality the product will be in the end. However, as a drawback, the less of the product you will able to produce. You could choose to put fewer resources into producing individual products in order to produce more, but the quality of the products decreases. Trying to make more of a product and make them high-quality at the same time is generally impractical due to resource and time constraints unless you can find a different, more efficient process to produce the products.

->''"Ah... the sound of dying. When it comes to death, quantity is so much more satisfying than quality."''
-->-- '''[[BigBad Fenric]]''', ''Series/DoctorWho'': "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E3TheCurseOfFenric The Curse of Fenric]]"

This has roots in basic resource management and production. Assuming you have a constant supply of resources, the more resources you put into producing a product, the higher quality the product will be in the end. However, as a drawback, the less of the product you will able to produce. You could choose to put fewer resources into producing individual products in order to produce more, but the quality of the products decreases. Trying to make more of a product and make them high-quality at the same time is generally impractical due to resource and time constraints.

* All over the place in ''[[Fanfic/StarWarsVsWarhammer40K Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40K]]''.

* GlassCannon: All the power in the world, but couldn't take a single hit.

* StoneWall: An impenetrable defense is as hard as a diamond.

* DeathOfAThousandCuts: Refers to video game characters who deal relatively small amounts of damage compared to other characters from their game but can deal a larger amount of them. How effective this is depends on the game.

** DeathOfAThousandCuts

* SmartBomb: Use these screen-clearers wisely; you don't get many of them.

* MoreDakka: Firing everything you got, messy, chaotic but hey if they die? They die right?

* SpamAttack: where the solution when shooting at something doesn't work is to shoot even more of it. This one is obviously rooted in quantity, though people characterized by it are rarely portrayed as sympathetic or intelligent. Further subdivided into BeamSpam, MacrossMissileMassacre, MoreDakka, DeathOfAThousandCuts, and RainOfArrows.

* In the short story "Superiority" by Creator/ArthurCClarke, this trope is fully analyzed. Two societies fight one another, [[SuperPrototype one of which uses the newest, most up to date weaponry]]... and [[ObviousBeta fails to conduct adequate testing before deployment]]. As a result, the new inventions [[AwesomeButImpractical have prohibitive logistical requirements]] or [[HoistByHisOwnPetard cause more damage to their own side than to the enemy]]. The other side sticks with tried-and-true technology that reliably works exactly the way that it should, and is much easier and faster to produce than the more advanced version... and they just keep plugging away on the production lines until they have numerical superiority. [[ZergRush Guess which side wins.]]

* GlassCannon: All the power in the world, but couldn't take a single hit.

** The AI also rarely builds more than ''one'' production building of any type, meaning that once an enemy force is sufficiently numerous to defeat their standing forces, they've pretty much won due to massively outnumbering what few units the AI will slowly produce.

* ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline'': In the War of the Underworld, the Human Realm has Quality while the Dark Territory has Quantity. The Dark Territory's armies vastly outnumber that of the human realm, but the humans have the Integrity Knights, elite fighters with special weapons. Of course, the Dark Territory has the Emperor Vecta superaccount(used by [[BigBad Gabriel Miller]]), the dark knight used by [=PoH=] and several powerful leaders, but the heroes have the three goddess superaccounts- Stacia, Solus and Terraria, used by Asuna, Sinon and Suguha, respectively. Both sides start getting outside players involved, with Gabriel getting tens of thousands of American, Korean and Chinese players as {{mook}}s, while the heroes get 2,000 players to convert their high-level ALO accounts.

* In the mainline ''Franchise/FireEmblem'' games, the player is usually outnumbered 2 to 1 or worse. However, the enemies are often weaker than the player's units. Most games have a minimum damage of zero, so a bulky enough unit is effectively invincible no matter how many enemies attack it. Better yet, with enough strength/magic the unit can kill every enemy in one round of combat to open up space for even more enemies to attack it, potentially resulting in the OneManArmy removing half of the enemy's forces in one turn. If defense is low, the unit can resort to dodging instead and achieve the same results. In summary, [[QualityOverQuantity quality often beats quantity]].